Vol. 4, No. 3

Greetings, fellow travelers, and welcome to the third posting of volume four of the Blog.  At the end of last week's posting, I mentioned that this week, we would discuss the process of inaugurating a president.  I will do that.  However, I will also mention some other things.  It may be of interest to everyone or no one.  As long as I say them, I enjoy it.  Now, to start, how to inaugurate a president.
 

This year was unusual in inauguration circles as the oath was administered twice.  It was also administered twice last time, but only because the Chief Justice picked the wrong moment to flub the oath.  This required it being taken again to avoid arguments from still-sore-from-losing Republicans.  This time, it was different.  The Constitution (specifically the 20th Amendment) requires that a president's term of office to be begin on the 20th of January.  This year, that day fell on a Sunday and traditionally, government doesn't run that day out of religious concerns.

This created a historical note of interest a long time ago.  In 1849, Zachary Taylor was due to become the nation's 12th president on March 4th.  However, that day also fell on a Sunday.  Taylor, a fellow of deep religious convictions, refused to swore in on the Sabbath.  His vice president, Millard Fillmore, was also not swore in because in those days, that office meant nothing to no one.  According to legend, the situation left the next-highest man on the totem pole in the position of being president until Taylor could be swore in on Monday.

That man was David Rice Atchison.  Atchison was a soldier and senator.  At the time, he was serving as president pro tempore of the Senate.  To explain his job, he leads the Senate when its real leader, the vice president, is not around.  Anyway, Atchison was in the position of being president from the 24 hours following noon on Sunday, March 4th, when James Polk's term in office ended, to noon the following day.  The story goes that Atchison assembled some friends for a brief cabinet meeting and then retired for the day.  In essence, he slept through most of his presidency.

Atchison later went on to have a town in Kansas named for him.  In turn, a railroad was named for the town, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe.  That railroad is now the BNSF, one of the four largest freight carriers in the country.  Most historians state that Atchison was not, in effect, in charge of the nation for a day.  In fact, his job was over at the same time as Polk.  That doesn't ruin some people who believe that for one day, David Rice Atchison was the real 12th President of the United States.  That would make President Obama president number forty five, not forty four.

Regardless of who was president, the swearing-in of one is a big event.  Even thought this time around, it's a repeat of the same guy, the ability of changing a leader was important to the Founding Fathers.  They had to design this system.  Back in those days, the biggest leader was a king.  A king, once put on the throne, stayed there until he died of old age or other things.  Not wishing to replace one monarch with another, they came up with the office of the Presidency.  So, with that in mind, the very first swearing-in was super big to a nation only a decade old.

George Washington was our first president, so it stands he was the first to sworn in.  That first swearing-in took place at Federal Hall in New York City.  At the time, New York was the capital of the country.  Sometimes it still feels like that's still true.  Anyway, for that first swearing-in, Washington had a Bible fetched from a local Masonry Temple.  It was quickly opened up to the Book of Genesis and the highest legal authority in New York, Robert Livingston, administered the oath of office for the very first time.  Washington, however, ad-libbed the last four words, "So help me God" and that's been part of the oath ever since then.

Moving on from the inauguration, we move to matters of the literary circles.  In Britian this week, they had their first Orwell Day.  Orwell Day lands of the date of passing for literary visionary George Orwell (which is January 21st).  The purpose of the day is to celebrate Orwell's works and his wisdom.  This is coupled with a month-long celebration on the BBC's Radio 4.  The channel plans to air new radio plays based on his works, including the two standing favorites, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Those two books have become literary standards of the world.

Now, I have not read the latter one.  I don't like the unhappy ending.  Call me an uncouth American, but I like my stories to have happy endings.  I have read the former, because it was one of the books I studied in middle school.  I was aware of the fame of the book when we were first given it.  As I read it, we were required to note the political and social issues given within.  I'm sure Orwell himself would have enjoyed our learning, for he was one to let his work speak for themselves.  Those issues have withstood the test of time and continue to be proven over and over again.

George Orwell was, in fact, a non de plume.  His real name was Eric Arthur Blair.  He adopted the name when he began publishing his work.  He didn't wish to embarass his family with his leanings, so a friend sent him names to publish under.  He kept his real name for other work, such as working for the BBC in the 1930s and 1940s.  One of his first popular works was based on his experiences of reporting the Spanish Civil War.  It was at that time that Orwell was exposed to the ideals of communism and socialism.  While he believed in communism a bit, he didn't like those who used it for their own end.

This is one of the subjects expressed in Animal Farm, that the animals start a communist-like society with good intentions.  However, the pigs, as the leaders, soon begin to distort the ideals of their revolution to suit their own ends, even to the point of re-writing the basic laws of the society.  They take advantage of the animals' lack of knowledge by telling them one thing and then doing another.  The basis for the farm's society, the Soviet Union, also began as a revolution of the working class.  However, the Soviet leadership eventually became despotic and ruining the people they were supposed to serve.

As this week's posting draws now to a close, we make note of the ever-changing world we live in.  When I was a kid, the world was a different place.  Of course, we all say that.  However, the way change happens, the world was a different place two years ago.  All the change in the world that has happened since the Blog started.  We've seen dicators fall, governments change hands, fiscals cliffs, debt ceilings, and a close election.  With this Blog, I hope to keep an eye on that change, while offering other things as well.  In conclusion, volume four of the Blog is the seed of volume five.

Join me next week, won't you?
Yours truly, John Maxwell,
Your fellow traveler...  

 

Vol. 4, No. 2

Greetings, fellow travelers, and welcome to the second posting of volume four of the Blog.  Last week, I began a 52-week journey, where I was to post something once a week.  To let you in something, I'm starting on this posting having just finished and scheduled last week's posting.  With that out of the way, I say to you that any word of last week's posting hasn't arrived yet.  If you wish to let me know you've visited, just write a comment below.  You can write anything, even "I was here and I read this".

Now, last week, I was telling the story of how Cy and Conrad, two characters from my current attempt at a book, went through an evolution.  Now, when I left off, it was the summer of 2009.  My first attempts at internet postings, with my MySpace page, had somewhat failed when I discovered that there was an upper limit of what you could post.  I tried to turn my second story, a serial for a webseries called The Quantum Argonauts, from a weekly thing to a daily thing.  However, that didn't work, so I moved on.

I still wanted a future for Cy and Conrad, so I looked around the web for a place to put them.  Finally, I came to this spot... okay, not this spot.  It was my first real blogsite.  It, too, went by the name Quantum Argonauts, and it was still my intention to put Cy and Conrad in sci-fi adventures.  As I readied myself for the next stage, I still was in the dark about blogging.  I thought you had to post it right after you write it.  If I has known of scheduling, I would still be there. 

Of course, I did make a couple of changes to the format of the series.  I went from a serial to a series simple.  The other thing was Cy's last name.  After going by the name Jones since his creation, I changed it to Scott, to better reflect his new parentage.  That was the first sign that Debralee was affecting my work.  You see, my intend with the serial nature of the earlier stories was to parallel the original Doctor Who, which had a serial format for its first 26 years.  With Debralee as Cy's mother, it would seem her sitcom work was changing the pace of things.

Indeed, the only serial left in the new run of stories was the opener, a rehashing of that first story.  I changed the Cy Joneses to Cy Scotts.  I also edited it from a three-parter published on MySpace to a two-parter.  Let me tell you something, that change itself helped the pacing of the story.  The ending of part one and beginning of part two was of a character having a moment in a parallel universe.  By removing that cliffhanger, part one now ended where part two did: with that same character being dragged off to jail for something his counterpart from the other world did.

After rehashing my first story, I proceeded with now the third story with Cy and Conrad.  However, that third story also was different.  After going for a story-within-a-story, the challenge was what tale would be contained within the third story.  I first had a sci-fi mystery set in a parallel universes (for those who are spotting a pattern, that's a thing with me)  Actually, this alternate world was an interesting one.  It was set in a 1975, where rigid airships still flew the skies.  The way it was turning out, I felt I had something.  However, it was not meant to be.

Let me see, the whole reason for the third story to be that way was that Halloween was the publication date.  After a while, I went for a simple werewolf story (another pattern with me), set in my hometown of Buchanan, Michigan.  When I was writing that one, I had the feeling that, in the world of Cy and Conrad, Buchanan was as fictional as their hometown of Hyperion.  That feeling led to somewhat of an loose ending.  I had other stories to tell and needed the time to write them.  I was still in the dark about posting and scheduling said posts.

The following tale, the first one especially written for the blog, was a mystery story.  Here, my new knowledge of Debralee and her career came into play, as well as Cy's past.  To start, Cy had re-discovered an old alter ego of his: Detective Totsi.  That was the first thing I did with Debralee's past.  Next, a pinball machine to be delivered to the station goes missing.  Cy decides to role-play his way into finding said machine.  After a whole adventure, the machine was discovered to be in a truck in the radio station's parking lot.  Not bad for a second blog story.

The next story in the line-up was a sleepwalking tale.  It was the first time I introduced Conrad's sister into the mix.  The sister is another character in my book.  She was actually an import, from another run of stories taking place in my hometown.  I'll share with you that sister.  In the other set of stories, it was my intention to create an split personality with her (yet another pattern with me.  I can't stop myself).  That split personality was always someone of low morals and loose with their sex life.  That was meant to be an opposite to the sister's uptight persona.

In the sleepwalking story, Conrad was the one who was sleepwalking.  The problem here was that, when he sleptwalked, he would rush over to his sister's house.  The reason was that he was gonna take her to the hospital so she could deliver her baby.  The thing was: the sister, name of Darlene, was not pregnant.  In fact, Cy observed that such an act was beyond her thought process.  In the story, Cy remained quite a mysterious figure.  The sleepwalking was an element that ended up in early drafts of the current book.  Holdovers, they're called in the writers' world.

In this first version, Cy offers to place Conrad under hypnosis (pattern again here).  Here, my little research on Debralee at this point came into play.  I had learned that her fiancee had been a victim of the attacks on 9/11.  In the story, Cy had studied hypnosis and had used it on his mother when she began sleepwalking after the attacks.  Under hypnosis, Cy had Conrad re-stage the dream he was having while sleepwalking.  With Darlene helping out, Cy learns that a confusing report about a rape led to the sleepwalking.  With that, Conrad gets cured and life moves on.

As I started on the fifth story, I began to notice how the science fiction element I wanted to include was missing.  Indeed, beyond the rehashed opener, science fiction was totally non-existent.  As summer faded to fall, the stories I was writing for the new webseries had little to no science fiction, beyond the fact that now, Cy and Conrad hosted both their show on science fiction and a weekday morning show.  One of the stories I was writing was a tale where we followed Cy and Conrad as they readied for an edition of their weekend show on sci-fi.

In that story, I remember, Cy had acquired a girlfriend during the adventure with the pinball machine.  Here, the girl, named Joanne, had invited herself and a friend to see the goings-on.  The friend, however, didn't believe Cy was the son of Debralee Scott and he spent the time trying to both prove the truth and prepare for his show, which was a small radio play he had written.  My memory tells me that I ended up combining this story with another day-in-the-life tale I was writing for a full posting.  My troubles was just beginning now.

Writing the first part of this posting stirred memories of another story I wrote during the summer of 2009.  It was the sixth story I wrote for the blog.  It was called "The Melting of the Iceberg".  I remember the title because of what happened as I wrote it.  As I started writing it, my struggles in writing the first five stories were fresh in my mind.  In fact, I was still re-writing them because I wasn't sure if they were good enough or not.  That's the trouble when you lack feedback.  You don't know if you're on the right track or about to go over a cliff.

However, as I was writing it, the words seem to flow with quick secession.  To give you a clue, I measured the stories by page count.  My set average was between 15 and 20 pages.  The first five were hard to get near that length.  I was writing this one when I found, to my surprise, I was somewhat far from the ending and I was 20 pages in.  At that time, reading it over, I realized that I had produced a perfect piece of fiction, one that could hold its head high with other classic works.  That was to me.  It flowed naturally out of me and just worked nicely.

The story itself was as follows.  It was Conrad's sister Darlene's 28th birthday.  However, she was, according to Cy, a human iceberg.  A human iceberg is a person devoid of personality, feelings, and human responses to ideas and situations.  Conrad tried to prove Cy wrong by throwing a surprise party and inviting the closet circle of friends, including station intern Phil and Cy's new girlfriend Joanne.  The party turns out to be a disaster with Darlene ruining any attempt to surprise her and snub Cy's gift to her: a bottle of Jack Daniels Whiskey.

Darlene's cold and ruthless comments about Cy and his mother send him out, ending the party.  That evening, as Cy walks home from the local tavern, he sees Darlene walking toward him.  As he tries to ignore her, she calls out to him, calling him 'Cy'.  It surprises him as she never called that before, always 'Cyrus'.  Cy then finds that Darlene has drank his gift, all of it, and that the whiskey has melted her icy core.  This leads to a night of further drinking.  The next day, he takes Phil to see the new Darlene.  However, he leaves Conrad in the dark as, in Cy's mind, he let her stay frozen all that time.

The next two stories after that proved that this one was perfect, as they proved hard to even decide their content.  The following story went through rewrite after rewrite.  Even I write this, I find it hard to remember what story I planned it to be.  I remember one version was where Cy was coming down with what he called the winter doldrums, which is total boredom due to the season.  I also remember one storyline where another character, a police station janitor named Polly, was a closeted singer.  This lead to Cy proving her talent to the world.

The next one is somewhat clearer in my mind.  It was a delightful tale where Cy, fed up with the blatant commericalism of Christmas announces a boycott on commercials on his show.  This got him in trouble with his boss and Joanne's father, who's a wealthy coffee magnate who advertises on the radio station.  As I wrote that one, the whole saga came to an end.  My inability to write regularly proved to be the major factor.  Also, I still didn't know about scheduling posts and that also proved to be a factor.  However, I had gotten eight stories in.

Not without going over idea after idea.  One idea for the Christmas story was of a homeless man who takes up residence in the station's green room.  I actually wrote out that story after I failed to find more plot with Cy's boycott story.  However, it was never posted, because by the winter of 2009, the series was dead.  This was even after I wrote out the rest of the season in an outline.  I even wrote out two more seasons in said outline before it came to an end.  However, the very makeup of Cy and Conrad's story had changed and continued that way.

I believe it is where this week's posting should end.  I hope you enjoyed this, because further discussion of Cy and Conrad's origins are on hold.  I need to discuss other things, like the upcoming inauguration.  In fact, I've just decided that this will be the subject of my post,  I will talk about the history of making a president official.  Believe me, when and where has changed over time.  In conclusion, this whole mess of a blog is about to get messier.

The third posting of volume four will be published on January 26th, 2013, at 5:15 pm.

Join me, won't you?
Yours truly, John Maxwell.   

Vol. 4, No. 1

Good day, fellow travelers, and welcome to the first posting of volume four of the Blog.  It has been three years since I started this Blog and after all that time, I still have no idea what to do with it.  Luckily, I have a potential solution to my problem.  I've decided to write once a week for the next 52 weeks this year.  Hopefully, by the last posting of the year, I will have made a decision about the Blog.

On the subject of what the Blog is about, that question is still unanswered.  Over the last three years, the Blog has hosted some interesting entries.  From the sorted tale of Conan's battle with NBC (which ended with something I predicted) to brainstorms about a possible television series version of the classic book of multiple personalities Sybil.  We've also hosted the short-lived series "The Life of Oddley"  The most direct explanation for why these posting kicks are short-lived is boredom.

Quite simply, I bore somewhat easily.  I must force myself to continue down the path I start on.  Unfortunately, the lack of interest in the Blog from other people have given me no reason to continue posting beyond a few weeks.  An attempt to create interest through promotion outside the Blog didn't work.  I may go back to such a promotion for the current set-up.  I should state that over the next 52 weeks, the content of this Blog will look like it was written by good ol' Sybil Dorsett herself.

From works of fiction to bits of news to pieces of least interesting trivia, the next 52 weeks show promise.  For those of you who need to know when to expect my dispatches, each of the 52 postings this year will posted on Saturdays at 5:15 pm.  I choose that time and day because one of my favorite television programmes is Doctor Who and for much of its history, that was the time you had to tune in to see the adventures of the Doctor and his companions.  I know that those last couple of sentences were totally the work of a nerd but that's what I am. 

The internet is mainly used and controlled by nerds.  Nerds are responsible for much of what you see and hear on the internet.  Sometimes, the non-nerds will succeed in putting something online that creates worldwide attention and fame.  However, most stuff posted online make no dent in people's lives, besides the bit of trivia that gets repeated to a few friends before said fact escapes the mind.  I know some of the things I'll say here will be of that nature.  I accept it and I will make sure that the facts get an airing of a few days longer than the average fact.

Let me start this week's posting material with a note about my current attempt at a book.  Life in Hyperion has been a work in progress for the last four years.  In an earlier posting, I showed you some of the earliest work featuring characters in the book.  Those beginnings, of characters living out a nerd's science fiction fantasies, are fun to look back at once in a while.  Two of those characters, Cy Scott, then going by the last name Jones, and Conrad Harris, are also the lead characters in this book.  Alas, the story eventually moved away from science fiction.  Why?

Well, as I'd like to say, it all changed when Cy got a mother.  You see, in those early days, Cy Jones was much a character with what I called, more or less, mysterious qualities.  Cy would have skills but you would have no idea where they came from, or where Cy came from.  I wrote one complete story with Cy the way he was.  However, as I started on the second story, my mind had a storm.  To this day, I don't remember the thought process behind it.  All I remember is this: what if Debralee Scott were Cy's mother?  Such a silly question, but what came from it was nothing but silly.

As I began the second story with Cy and Conrad, I put in the notion of Cy's new mother.  Of course, such a fact was placed as one of Cy's mysterious qualities.  It was hinted through the opening pages of the story.  I remember a story scene where, after their boss has fired them for low ratings on their radio show, a job they still hold in my book, Cy took his mother's picture from the wall of said boss' office.  It would seem that I was setting up that Debralee had worked at the radio station.  I knew little about the life of Debralee Scott and that was the first hint that I needed to do research.

Of course, Cy's last name was something that needed to be explained.  That was another mysterious quality Cy had.  In a later scene of the second story, Cy, who had discovered a parallel universe, accessed by a swimming pool he owned (just weird, eh?), decided to run away to the other universe, feeling useless in ours.  To tell his friends, he left a letter before leaving.  In that letter, he revealed his full name: Cyrus Scott Jones.  As I said earlier, I bore easy.  So, my writing of the second story soon ended.  However, Cy had now gained a mother, whose very existence would change things forever.

I think it's time for this posting to come to an end.  I feel that I have occupied enough of your time and now wish to wrap things up.  I will promise you that next week, I will continue my tale of the journey of how Cy and Conrad went from nerd's dream to sitcom life.  That's how I describe the book now, as sitcoms were the inspiration for the current mold of the book.  In conclusion, the next 52 weeks promise to have a lot to say.  Already, this posting has gone a different path than what I started with.  In closing, just sit back and let me tell you things, some you know and some you need to know.

Join me, won't you?
Yours truly, John Maxwell