Blog Without A Name

1.   Sign 1500 pages; mail to Baen no later than October 18 (in process)

2.  October 30:  Essay due at BenBella (in process)

3.  October 19 and 20:  Bangor Book Festival

4.  Somewhere Novemberish at a guess:  proof Necessity’s Child galleys

5. December 10:  Short story due at Baen

6.  Talk about words with Necessity’s Child narrator (which will be easy and fun and probably take no time at all, in the cosmic order of things)

6.  February 15, 2013:  Carousel Sun due at Baen (in process)

7.  February 15-17:  Boskone

8.   May 15:  Carousel Seas due at Baen

9.  July 15:  First of Five (working title) due at Baen

…the above, of course, only elucidates professional obligations.  It’s sorta refreshing not to see “do laundry,”  “vacuum,” “wash dishes,” “do taxes,” “get house ready to sell,” and the like on the list.  On the other hand, it’s not looking like there’s a lot of room for frivolities in that schedule.  Maybe it’s time to trade in the cabana boy for a wife.

So, I’m home and unpacked.

For students of feline behavior, I can report that I was not in the least snubbed.  Scrabble, in fact, ran to me the moment I came in, declaiming loudly.  I believe the gist was something on the order of, “I had to run this entire establishment by myself for a whole month!  You take over now!”

Mozart and Socks were more low-key, but have conspired to keep me pinned down most of the day.

What part of the day was not taken up with various Triumphant Return activities was taken up with bill-paying and the sorting through of paperwork.  Yanno?  I just did a whole month where the only thing my brain had to think about was. . .story, and characters, and what-happens-next; which is apparently my comfort zone.  Arithmetic hurts.

Actually, I used to contend that arithmetic hurt when I was a kid.  Nobody believed me, of course, but I may actually have been telling the truth.

Anyhow — home, and settling in.

Just in case you were worried.

 

. . .because I’ll be on the road on Thursday.

1.  Tom Piccirilli, prolific author in just about every genre you can think of, and that other one, too. . .Tom was last weekend diagnosed with brain cancer, and on Monday underwent extensive surgery to remove a golf-ball sized tumor.  Despite initial optimism, last night, Tom’s wife, Michelle, reported that the battle has only just been joined.  Tom will be receiving chemotherapy and radiation treatments over the next couple weeks, and then. . .

I gather that the insurance situation is about what you’d expect — we’ve talked about creative folks and health insurance before, here — and another colleague provides the information that Michelle is going to have to quit her job in order to take care of Tom.

Tom’s sister-in-law has set up a fundraiser, hopefully to help Michelle and Tom cope with the oncoming tsunami of medical bills.  Here’s your link.  

Please help if you can; and please spread the word.  Thanks.

. . .

2.  Uncle Hugo’s is taking pre-orders for signed copies of the next Liaden book, Necessity’s Child.  Here’s your link.

2a.  Necessity’s Child is a Liaden Universe® novel taking place on the planet Surebleak.  It is NOT the sequel to Dragon Ship.   For an explanation of Why This Is So, please go here.

2b.  Baen recently purchased five Liaden Universe® books, as yet untitled, delivery dates still somewhat fluid, but beginning in 2013.  Those five books are your sequel to Dragon Ship.

You’re welcome.

3.  All fifteen existing Liaden novels are available as audiobooks, right here.    Also downloadable from that page — hour long free samples of the first book in each of the four sequences.

4.  For those looking to read Liaden short stories electronically, Pinbeam Books is your friend!

4a.  For those wishing to read the Liaden novels on the ereader of your choice, every single one of them — all 15! — are available directly from Baen Books, right here

4b.  You’ll want to keep a close eye on that link above, because the Necessity’s Child eArc ought to be making an appearance there in a matter of a few weeks.

5.  Today is the 24th anniversary of the Lee and Miller (with Archie, Arwen, and Brandee) arrival in Maine.  The state has yet to recover.

Here ends your Wednesday Morning Advert & Intelligencer.  Be well, and remember to hug the people you love.

 

Tomorrow, there will be packing, and a farewell walk through town, and another down the beach.  Thursday, will be driving, my Triumphant Return™ to the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory — and unpacking.

So, tonight’s writing represents the last that will be done, on location, for Carousel Sun.

My goal for this small writing adventure was to return home with 60,000 words of Carousel Sun in hand, and I will be taking home 60,852; 40,576 written here, for a smoot over 1800 words a day for 28 writing days.

I was just chatting with Steve, and I said that I’d been writing this one based on the “what happens next” school of plotting.  Since the Carousel books are first-person, they lend themselves far more readily to that sort of approach than, say, a Liaden book.

On the other hand, I can head-hop to my heart’s content in a Liaden book, and for the Carousels, I’m stuck inside Kate’s head.

Each form has its good and its bad…

So, anyway, I’m sad to be going back up-country. . .for a number of reasons — sidewalks, the ocean, a train station right downtown, less than two miles to the ultramodern grocery story, a half-mile walk to the in-town IGA.

On the other hand, I’ll be glad to be back at the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory; I missed Steve and the cats, and the sound of semi-automatic rifles, firing in the gravel pit down the road.

OK, the last one, maybe not so much.

I sort of wonder what individual things I’ll be glad to return to, that get lost in the gestalt of “home.”  I wonder what unexpected things I’ll miss from this apartment, which was arranged for the convenience of someone else.  I suspect I’ll miss the ceiling fans.  A lot.  The upstairs neighbors or the washing machine from hell?  Maybe not.

But mostly, what I’m going to be when I get home?  Is busy.  Really busy.  So I’m glad I had some down-time, too, along with the general productivity.

For those keeping score:

Progress on Carousel Sun
60,852/100,000  OR 60.85% Complete

“Then I won’t cross him,” he said, and turned to go just as the first group of five — four kids and one harassed-looking woman with several ticket books in her hand — walked under the carousel’s cheery roof.

The Great Steel Pier: An Illustrated History of the Old Orchard Ocean Pier, Peter Dow Bachelder
What Angels Fear, C.S. Harris (e)
River Marked, Patricia Briggs (e)
Althea, Madeleine Robins (e)
Heartless, Gail Carriger (e)
Powers, James A. Burton (e)
A Geisha’s Journey, Komomo, photographs by Naoyuki Ogino
Geisha, Liza Dalby
The Kimono of the Geisha-Diva Ichimaru, Barry Till, Michiko Warkentyne, Judith Patt
Partials, Dan Wells
Starters, Lissa Price
A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs (read aloud w/Steve)
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin
From Whence You Came, Laura Anne Gilman (e)
Frederica, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
No Dominion, C.E. Murphy (e)
The Prestige, Christopher Priest
Cuttlefish, Dave Freer
Intruder, C.J. Cherryh (read aloud w/Steve)
Blameless, Gail Carriger (e)
Changeless, Gail Carriger (e)
The Quiet Gentleman, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Unbroken, Rachel Caine
The Talisman Ring, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Sylvester / OR, The Wicked Uncle, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Death and Resurrection, R. A. MacAvoy
The Unknown Ajax, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Black Sheep, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, Diane Duane (e)
The Reluctant Widow, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Friday’s Child, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Dragon Ship manuscript, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (e)
Kim, Rudyard Kipling (e)
Regency Buck, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Pollyanna, Eleanor H. Porter (e)
Chimera, Rob Thurman (e)

 

So I bought a book at the Harmon Museum — yes, yes:  you’re shocked.  The title is: The Great Steel Pier:  An Illustrated History of the Old Orchard Ocean Pier, by Peter Dow Bachelder (1998, Breakwater Press, Ellsworth, Maine).

Items of note so far:  the first carousel — the nameless “German made” carousel — that burned down in 1923, it says here — is claimed to have been “the oldest of its kind in existence,” having been at Old Orchard Beach since 1892.  I’m pretty sure there were other carousels around in 1892 (Just as a for instance, Gustav Dentzel’s dates of production (note:  Gustav Dentzel was a German native) proceed from 1870) so I’m not sure what this “of its kind” business is all about.  O, Good; more research…

The first carousel was, just to clear up my error, replaced by a Dentzel merry-go-round, which subsequently burned in 1969, due to that fuse-box problem we discussed.

Leaving carousels, it seems that Old Orchard has always had trouble pulling together for its own best interest.  The pier idea was first floated by prominent businessman Henry Staples in 1879, but the cost of building such a thing — the first of its kind — was more than the rest of the local business people wanted to commit to, and so the idea was put on hold until 1898.  This allowed other ocean resorts — notably Coney Island and Atlantic City — to construct their steel piers first.

There were also a couple of false starts.  One guy wanted to build a stone pier — get this — over Googins Rocks — but that got killed by the very business people who didn’t want to spend the money on a steel pier, because the stone pier would have been blocks away from their business interests at the core of downtown.

So, anyhow, squabbling and scheming and pearl-clutching aside, the pier did finally get built, and it was a monster — stretching 1800 feet out into the ocean.  The term at that time was “ocean-going pier.”

Cruise ships came down from Portland,  docked at the far end of the pier and unloaded 800 passengers at a go.  There was a little steam train that ran the whole length from the Velvet Hotel, at landside, to the Casino, just short of the cruise ship docking.

And then there’s the schooner Grecian Bend, out of Nova Scotia, bearing a load of plaster rocks (no, I don’t know why) and headed for Boston (maybe there was no plaster in Boston?)  Coming down coast, the schooner developed a leak and the skipper decided to lay over in Portland for repairs.  But the sight of the newly-constructed casino glimpsed through thick fog convinced him he was further south than he actually was, and – long story short, he came aground at Grand Beach, about three-quarters of a mile north of the pier.  Very near, in fact, Temp Headquarters.

Now, here’s the thing about the Grecian Bend:  Her crew had jettisoned cargo in order to try to float her, but she was grounded but good.  The rescue out of Biddeford Pool were able to deploy their surf boat and bring the crew out, but the schooner. . .just sat there.

She was purchased by a junk dealer out of Portland, who determined to refloat her, but that didn’t work out, so. . .

. . .he just left her there – a derelict schooner.  On the beach.  Three-quarters of a mile out from the newest Wonder of the Eastern Seaboard.

Grecian Bend grounded in mid-June.  Over the next few months, just, yanno, sitting there in the sand, with the tide coming in and going out every six hours or so, every day, the schooner “hogged badly” (that means that it bent convexly along its length), and, one would imagine, became buried even deeper in the sand.

Along about Thanksgiving, though, there was a storm.  A very, very bad storm.  A killer storm.  Shipwreck buffs will know it as “The Portland Gale,” which not only killed the steamer Portland, and all of its 191 passengers and crew, but 200 other ships.

The Grecian Bend broke to bits during this storm.  Pieces of it were flung by the furious waves into the yards of the ocean-facing cottages; and a large section of the hull lodged directly alongside the brand new pretty pier, right at the high tide line.

Before the town could do anything about it, on December 4, there was another storm — not as bad; “just” a nor’easter.  The wreck rose on the storm tide and ripped the back (or front-most, depending on how you count) section of the pier, where the casino and the cruise ship dock was located.

The casino was smashed clean off the pier, plunged into the ocean and was delivered onto the beach in a state described by one eyewitness as  “…more completely demolished than if it had been blown up with dynamite.”

And this, children, is why we ought not to leave derelict ships sitting for months on our beach.

 

In yesterday’s blog post, I may have mentioned in passing the Dummy Railroad, which once served Old Orchard Beach, Ocean Park, and Camp Ellis during the summer months.

Jean, the Harmon Museum curator, said that it was called the Dummy Railroad for two reasons, but usually she only told people the first — which was that the local joke was the train was “too dumb” to turn around, and had to back from Camp Ellis to the Old Orchard station on its return trip.  In reality, there wasn’t any room at Camp Ellis to build either a turntable, or lay a loop track so the engine could be “correctly” at the front of the train on the return trip.

The second reason for this particular nickname, the Dummy Railroad, is that the engine was steam-powered and ran so quietly that people couldn’t hear it; that it was, in essence, and compared to, say, the big, noisy engines of the Boston and Maine Railroad, a “dumb” engine.

She then went on to explain that, back in the day, people had used to say of those who had no hearing and who could not vocalize, that they were “deaf and dumb.”  And she added something to the effect that this had been a terrible thing to say.

But…”deaf and dumb” or simply “dumb” had been, back in the day, a technical term — a diagnosis.  Yes, it’s fallen out of favor, and no, we don’t hear it much anymore, except, maybe from grandparents.  But “dumb” means, “can’t talk.”  That’s why we say “dumb animals” — not because animals are stupid.

It gets a little tricky, when technical words from the past collide with our present-day sensibilities, and Jean’s discussion reminded me of the folks in upstate New York who want to abolish all the things called “Kills” in their area, because kill is horrible and bloody and What Are We Teaching Our Children?  It hasn’t seemed to occur to any of those horrified that We Could Be Teaching Our Children that the area was settled by the Dutch and that the Dutch word for “river” or “stream” is “kill.”

So, anyway.

It’s raining, and I have words to write.  I love it when a plan comes together.

 

Yesterday, it was raining, so I thought, “Perfect day to visit the History House!” and up the hill I went to that place.

I walked in, and immediately bumped into Jean, the curator, who was waiting for a couple who had called ahead to make an appointment, because!  The Harmon Museum and Historical Society closes on Labor Day.  Mind you, the sign doesn’t say this, but I am very grateful to the couple who did call ahead for the tour, and graciously allowed me to ride on their coattails.

The Harmon House Museum was given to the Town of Old Orchard Beach by the Harmons, for the use of the Historical Society, so —  it’s a 1920’s cottage.  The front parlor is where the changing exhibits are housed, and the 2012 exhibit was about Ocean Park.  This is where the interest of my benefactors lay, and Jean started the tour in that room.

Now, a word about the tour.  I didn’t want a tour, dernit.  I wanted to look around and ask questions.

By the time we were done, two hours later, I was so very happy to have had the tour.  Not only is the museum a gem of itself, but Jean the curator knows everything.  She came to Old Orchard Beach when she was seven years old; the couple who had made the appointment had summered and then lived in Ocean Park since the early 60s.  Talking to them was like having footnotes to the tour.  It was amazing.

Anyhow, I learned a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff.  I learned that the first carousel to burn down in Old Orchard Beach had been hand-carved by  “a German company” — one of three at that time in the US (not useful not to have the name, but knowing the names of carousel manufacturers is probably a level of geekitude more focused than the broad knowledge base demanded of the curator of the town museum.)

In any case, the second carousel to burn down was the Herschell-Spillman, and that fire, Jean said, sounding just as corked off as if it had happened last week — that fire was “completely avoidable.”  Those of us who are older’n spit remember the fuse boxes with the glass fuses.  And if a fuse blew, you could kind of hold its place by sticking a penny over the contact?  Well, the carousel keeper had just kept adding pennies, and never remembered, or cared to, replace the actual fuses.  So the fire started in the fuse box, nobody noticed and by the time they did, and the fire department was called, the ride was fully engaged.

Let’s see…

I learned that Old Orchard Beach had been favored as a place for planes attempting the transatlantic crossing to take off from because of the nature of the beach, which at that time had been very broad and packed hard with very fine white sand.

I said that I had read of the powdery white sand of the beach, but had considered that PR, because the sand isn’t particularly white on Old Orchard Beach, and is noticeably coarse.

“That’s because of Camp Ellis,” said the woman from Ocean Park. (Camp Ellis is pronounced locally camPELis, just by the way)  Jean agreed.

“Before the Army Corps of Engineers put in the jetty to protect the point, the Saco River and the ocean just sort of. . .met there, and the water action. . .but with the jetty, we get too much sand, and it’s like gravel.  the beach isn’t even as wide as it was when I was growing up here.”

I also learned — I’m going to knock this off pretty soon, honest, and not make you listen to all the stuff I learned, fascinating as it was — I also learned about the Dummy Railroad.  And!  for those who were around for the Surfside*/Surf Avenue discussion, I learned — I love this. . .

There was no Surf Avenue in Old Orchard Beach, but there was, as a convention for the mailman, a “Surf” address.  This was to differentiate the houses that faced onto East/West Grand Avenue, and the houses that faced the beach, or, the surf.  Those houses had sea walls and steps that went down to the beach — no longer visible because the change in the sand distribution has built up the dunes so much.

*deep breath*

OK, I’m done boring y’all with this.  I had fun; I got so much information that I came back to Temp Headquarters and took a nap so my head wouldn’t explode with all the Cool Stuff.

If you’re ever in Old Orchard Beach, go to the Harmon Museum.  Really.  You will not regret it.

Here’s the webpage

Oh, no, wait!  I have to tell you about the grand pianos…

See, during the Big Fire in 1907, when it looked like the whole town was afire, all the tourists and a lot of the residents ran to their homes/hotels and filled steamer trunks with their valuables.  A couple of the hotels even dragged their grand pianos out — and everybody put their stuff on the nice wide beach, believing that this was the place that was safest from the fire.

Which it was.

What they had forgotten in their fright was that. . .the tide comes in.

And it did, and it swept all the loot on the beach out to sea.

And much of it — but not all of it — came back over a period of weeks, in what condition you may imagine, after having been kissed by the sea…

_____________

*Sadly, Jean couldn’t help me with the Surfisde question.  All she had in archives were copies of some old penny postcards advertising the Surfside Resort and Cabins, and a copy of the article from the Port Press that was written when the grounds were closed, and sold the the developer of the Sunspray condos.

River Marked, Patricia Briggs (e)
Althea, Madeleine Robins (e)
Heartless, Gail Carriger (e)
Powers, James A. Burton (e)
A Geisha’s Journey, Komomo, photographs by Naoyuki Ogino
Geisha, Liza Dalby
The Kimono of the Geisha-Diva Ichimaru, Barry Till, Michiko Warkentyne, Judith Patt
Partials, Dan Wells
Starters, Lissa Price
A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs (read aloud w/Steve)
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin
From Whence You Came, Laura Anne Gilman (e)
Frederica, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
No Dominion, C.E. Murphy (e)
The Prestige, Christopher Priest
Cuttlefish, Dave Freer
Intruder, C.J. Cherryh (read aloud w/Steve)
Blameless, Gail Carriger (e)
Changeless, Gail Carriger (e)
The Quiet Gentleman, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Unbroken, Rachel Caine
The Talisman Ring, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Sylvester / OR, The Wicked Uncle, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Death and Resurrection, R. A. MacAvoy
The Unknown Ajax, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Black Sheep, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, Diane Duane (e)
The Reluctant Widow, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Friday’s Child, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Dragon Ship manuscript, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (e)
Kim, Rudyard Kipling (e)
Regency Buck, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Pollyanna, Eleanor H. Porter (e)
Chimera, Rob Thurman (e)