Golson The Strongman

No one thinks bigger than Kevin J. Anderson

In Kevin J. Anderson’s new book Clockwork Angels, we meet Golson, a strongman in a circus.  He pleases his crowds by loading every weight he owns except two onto his barbell, and then lifts the immense load above his head.  But he never adds those last two weights. Instead, they rest off to the side of the stage, bound with a chain and a padlock. 

While he’s far stronger than most everyone else, and feels like he should be able to lift more, Golson is afraid to push himself too hard.  For the last time his mentor tried to beat his personal best, he couldn’t handle the weight.  Instead, he was crushed on stage, while the audience watched.

In the early 1980s, author Piers Anthony experienced a series of excellent three mile runs.  Previously, he had never strung together more than three twenty-two minute runs in a row.  Suddenly, he found himself running faster.  Each thrice-weekly run was under the magical twenty-two minute mark.  As months passed, his speed increased further.  After seven months, he was beneath the twenty-one minute mark. 

Concurrently, Piers Anthony's regimen of Japanese pushups, done on alternate days, decreased in time.  From his normal seventy-five in five minutes, he brought the time down to four minutes-and-seven seconds.  Both remarkable streaks ended when physical pain landed him in the hospital.  Although it turned out that he suffered from nothing more than a kidney stone (mentioned in “Dreaming of Kevin J. Anderson”), I have to wonder: was his body signaling that he had stressed it too far, and he had exceeded the limits of his physical capabilities? 

Like Piers Anthony during the 1980s, Kevin J. Anderson completes several books each year.  How much he pushes against the upper boundaries of his capabilities, or how regularly he exceeds his previous limits, I don’t know.  But I do remember, in his memoir On Writing, that after Stephen King reached each day’s word count goal, he took the rest of the working day off.  He also gave himself time after completing the rough draft for his mind to relax, before he launched into the process of revision.

This week I finished the rough draft of my second dragon novel.  My rational mind tells me I should immediately leap back into the first one, and start revising it, but experience has taught me that when I push my creative muscles too far, they give up, and leave me unable to focus on any writing for a while.  Given how difficult I found it to concentrate this past weekend, I’m listening to experience for the rest of this week.  Hopefully, I’ll be ready to hit the first novel hard next week.  At least that’s the plan.

I was recently shocked to learn that an acquaintance, someone who’s always worked harder than me, had a stroke.  As he's in his twenties, it seems a little too early for that to occur naturally.  Golson’s decision reminds me that, while every day I should do what I can, I cannot do more than I can, for a long period of time, without facing the consequences of excessive physical and mental stress.  In a country where productivity and efficiency seem like gods, his example may strike some as foolish, but to me it seems wise. 

Dragon Dave

Related Dragon Cache entries

Dreaming of Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson Explains the Star Wars Prequels to Me

Star Wars poses no mysteries for the young.

As I mentioned in “How Clone Wars Helped Me Love The Star Wars Prequels,” the prequels didn’t resonate with me the way the original movies did.  At the time I didn’t understand this.  Perhaps I’m just older, and they’re intended for a younger audience, I reasoned.  Perhaps I’m so in love with the original cast that I’m resistant to a new group of characters, I argued.  But there was one fact that was unarguable: the structure of the stories was dramatically different to those of the original trilogy.

The stories in the original trilogy exemplified simple storytelling.  A few key characters pulled you into their world.  The plot of each movie took place over a short period of time, a few days at most.  And each seemed to follow its predecessor smoothly, with little substantive change having taken place in the characters’ lives (or their universe) between the films.  With the prequels, each movie took place over a longer stretch of time.  You met a lot more characters, and many changed substantively between installments.  Each movie dealt not with two competing forces, such as the Rebellion and the Empire, but numerous political and economic factions.  With so many characters and organizations vying for attention, each movie gave me less time to understand them all.  And, unlike in the original trilogy, I didn’t understand many of the types of droids, weapons and technology people used, or how some of the competing factions were structured.

Author Kevin J. Anderson has either written or edited over twenty Star Wars books, so I think it’s safe to view him as an authority on George Lucas’ universe.  At a panel on Transmedia Storytelling at Stan Lee’s Comikaze, he related how the Star Wars prequels didn’t resonate with him as much as the original trilogy.  For an example, he referred to a specific event in “Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.”  After Anakin helps him kill Mace Windu, Chancellor Palpative issues Order 66 to the leaders of his clone army.  To stirring music, we then watch as various Jedi, whether on planets or in space battles, are turned on by their clone troops.  Unlike Yoda and Obi-wan (who survive these attempts on their lives), most of those who die in this event, known as The Great Jedi Purge, were never major characters.  If they sat on the Jedi Council, we were given little reason to care about them.  Others shot down we had never seen before in the movies. 

So, Kevin said, as much as he wanted to be moved by these dramatic moments in the film, he was left unaffected.  The problem, he explained, was that Lucas had chosen to develop all those other characters, and illuminate the other factors I mentioned, in the comic books, role-playing and computer games, and novels that his company put out before (and between, and after) each installment.  Thus, each film represents an iceberg, the most visible part being what we see on screen, with the majority of each story residing beneath the water. 

Each storyteller compiles a backstory for his characters and fictional worlds, and sometimes a story fails because the audience either learns too much, or not enough, about the characters, factions, and events on the page or the screen.  Can such a condemnation be made of the Star Wars prequels?  Was George Lucas’ approach to storytelling in the prequels flawed?  Many of us who are older would argue, “Yes.”  But from the overwhelming popularity of the prequels, particularly among the young, I would suspect not.  The fact is that a person in his thirties, forties, or fifties interprets a story in a different way from a child or a teen.  As much as one would like to go back, and view a story through younger eyes, that is simply impossible.  So, as he did with special effects in the original trilogy, Lucas emerges as an innovator with the prequels, this time with his approach to storytelling.

Through his fiction, his work ethic, and the way he’s remained accessible to his fans, Kevin J. Anderson has given me many reasons to respect him.  Through explaining why the Star Wars prequels never worked for me, he has added one more.  I shall forever be grateful.

Dragon Dave

Related Dragon Cache entries

How Clone Wars Helped Me Love The Star Wars Prequels

The Perils of Transmedia Storytelling in the Original StarWars Trilogy

Related Links

Order 66

On Not Slaughtering A Cow

As mentioned in yesterday's post, recent travel has left me with depleted mental focus and resolve.  While I got some productive work in on my dragon novel this morning, I had to drag myself back to the keyboard this afternoon, and my mind offered up more objections than ideas.  So again, I returned to Yorkshire.  This entry may seem slight to some, but it's what I could write today.  I hope you'll enjoy it.

No cattle in sight.

According to Herriot County, a booklet in the Discovery Guides Heritage Series, the Yorkshire Dales town of Hawes served as Darrowby Cattle Mart in the TV series “All Creatures Great and Small.”  We had planned to visit Hawes, for an entirely different reason, on our first drive through the Dales.  But the road system through the Dales can be confusing to those weaned on the larger and more descriptive traffic signs in the United States, and before we realized it, we had missed the turn.  So it was that we found ourselves visiting Hawes on our return visit to the Yorkshire Dales.

It was a good day to visit, as the town was holding its weekly market day.  Unlike our aborted visit to Leyburn, Hawes offered numerous places to park, many of them for free.  We found a nice place along the road, just outside of town, where I snapped the photograph in yesterday’s post.  Then we walked in and merged with the crowd.

It was easy to see that we weren’t locals.  While many wore T-shirts and shorts, we wore slacks and heavy jackets.  Nor were we tempted by the little white ice cream stand, again unlike many of the locals.  But we soon found ourselves touring the stalls, and seeking out bargains at the temporary stands.  While my wife found several purses she liked, none won her over completely.  I considered a leather wallet, which would better fit British paper currency than my smaller one made for US bills, but decided against it, based upon how little I would use it. 

A close up, so you can better see the white ice cream stand.

Two books called to me.  The first, Tree and Leaf by J.R.R. Tolkien, contained an essay called “On Fairy-Stories” which I’ve long wanted to read.  The second All I Ever Wrote, was a collection of skits by Ronnie Barker.  In the end, concerns about packing space and weight won out.  I could always borrow Tree and Leaf from the library back home.  As for the latter, the only TV series I ever saw the famous British comedian in was “Open All Hours,” which was written by Roy Clarke.  I had no doubt I would enjoy reading his sketches, but as with the Tolkien book, that bedeviling question arose: Did I really need it? 

(I hate you, wretched question!  When will you stop plaguing me?  I ask that, and then I look around at my office, with my double-stuffed bookcases, and boxes and files piled on the floor, and I am forced to concede to the question’s wisdom.  Still, like Paul, just because I suffer from a thorn in my flesh, does not mean I must enjoy the experience!)

We saw no cattle for sale that day, which was for the best, as the management where we were staying would likely have objected had we slaughtered an animal on their front lawn.  Nor could we eat so much meat before we left England.  Besides, I just didn’t feel in a slaughtering-mood.  So we purchased a carton of strawberries instead.  They might still leave red stains on the fingers, but eating them involved less work, and was far kinder to the cows. 

I have a feeling, if I lived on a farm in the Yorkshire Dales, that I might not eat a lot of meat.

Dragon Dave

Related Dragon Cache entries

Hijacked By Cows in the Yorkshire Dales: Part 1

Related Internet Links

On Fairy-Stories by J.R.R. Tolkien

Ronnie Barker

What the Yorkshire Dales Means to Me

Stan Lee’s Comikaze awakened us to aspects of pop culture we were unfamiliar with.  Our explorations of Malibu Creek State Park and Point Dume allowed us to remember what made some of our favorite movies and TV shows so special.  But after two weekends away, I could not set my attention, or focus my willpower, upon any worthwhile task.  Instead, my mind grasped the white flag, and waved it furiously. 

This is not a situation I can allow to continue, for my dragon characters eagerly await their novels’ publication.  So for today, I’m using this post to remember what the Yorkshire Dales means to me.  In doing this, I hope to rebuild my focus and recharge my willpower.  I hope you’ll find reading this worthwhile.

A field outside Hawes.

This was the work of a moment.

An unexpected view, captured forever.

Yet for me, it represents the tranquility of the Yorkshire Dales.

I know that life there is not easy.

I wonder if I could endure all the rain that makes these fields so green, 

as well as the other extremes of weather the locals endure.

I can only imagine the unending duties of the farmers, 

a list that only grows longer, even as they mark off each task completed. 

It’s a mix of feelings, all jumbled together but individual too,

It includes tranquility, serenity, caring, and of course, love.

Yes.  I think love most of all.

For you have to really love what you do, the people you’re doing it for, 

the animals you’re tending, and the land you work, work, work.

You have to love the small businesses you run, the limited options, 

and the community in which you live.

In an age of technology, of industry, of globalization, to willingly cut yourself off 

from so many modern conveniences, so many options, 

so many ways to embrace anonymity, 

and take on so much responsibility, 

suggests a love for a certain way of life. 

I think that’s why the Yorkshire Dales have been preserved as a National Park. 

I think that’s why the area looks so little changed from James Herriot’s day. 

Love, Beauty, and the Yorkshire Dales: the three are synonymous.  

I salute everyone who lives there, and makes it such a special place.

Dragon Dave