Samuel Langhorne Clemens

CFN – The Cornwall & Region Writers’ Society held its monthly meeting on Monday night last week. As usual we rotate the facilitator/chairperson and this month it was Winona Van Noy’s turn. Before the meeting the scheduled facilitator usually issues a challenge by email to the members to write a story, poem, song, skit, etc., based on a phrase or picture or whatever strikes their fancy. The authors can then read their creation at the meeting. Basically it is just a way to “facilitate” discussion about writing. Members do not have to do the assignment and they can present another piece they have written, or just sit and listen.

Winona’s challenge this month was taken from a 1906 Webster’s Dictionary:

What is in a word?

This month I am providing you with a list of 21 obscure words. DO NOT LOOK UP THE DEFINITIONS. That’s part of the fun.

 

The challenge is to create your own definition and then use them in the format of your choice i.e. short story, poetry, etc. You determine whether they are a noun, verb, adverb, adjective. Out of the list you must choose a minimum of 7 words……Hmmmm…..I wonder who will be up to completing the assignment using ALL 21 words.

 

So be creative and set limits…….I can say this……no “Nona Novels”. I hope you enjoy it – after all we are writers who love words, right? I will bring the definitions with me that evening.

Here is the list of words complete with definitions. The writers did not have the definitions until the end of the meeting!

1. Antichthon ( an-tich thon ) One of the inhabitants of opposite hemispheres.

2. Azygous ( az y gous ) Having no fellow; not one of a pair; Single; as, the azygous muscle of the Uvula.

3. Downgyved ( down jivd ) Hanging down like the loose cincture of fetters. {Obs & rare} Shakespeare

4. Glauconite ( glau co-nite ) The green mineral which gives the peculiar character to the greensand of chalk and other formations.

5. Grumousness ( gru mous-ness ) A state of being grumous or concreted.

6. Hospitium ( hos-pish i-um ) 1. A monastery where entertainment is also provided. 2. An inn; a hotel.

7. Hotwall ( hot-wall ) A wall constructed with flues for the conducting of heat, to secure or hasten the growth of fruit trees.

8. Puddingtime ( pud ding-time ) 1. The time of dinner, pudding being formerly the dish first eaten. 2. Hence the nick of time; a critical time.

9. Puerperous ( pu-er per-ous ) Bearing children; lying in.

10. Pulicous ( pu li-cous ) Abounding with fleas.

11. Pulk ( pulk ) 1. A coward. 2. A short fat person. 3. A pool or puddle.

12. Videlicet ( vi-del i-cet ) It is easy to see, one may or can see.

13. Vidette ( vi dette ) A mounted sentinel.

14. Viduity ( vi du ity ) Widowhood

15. Vigintivirate ( vi gin-tiv i-rate ) A body of officers of government  consisting of twenty men.

16. Wanger ( wang er ) A pillow for the cheek; a pillow. His bright helm was his wanger. Chaucer

17. Wankle ( wunk l ) Tottering, unsteady. Not to be depended on; weak; unstable.

18. Wanty ( wan ty ) A leather tie or rope; a short wagon-rope; a surcingle or strap of leather used for binding a load upon the back of a beast.

19. Wappened ( wop pnd ) Having been subjected to intercourse; also wearied; fatigued.

20. Zax ( zax ) An instrument for cutting slate.

21. Zounds ( zowndz ) [Contracted from God’s Wounds] An exclamation formerly used as an oath, and an expression of anger or wonder.

Cincture: A belt, a girdle or something worn round the body.

Greensand: A variety of sandstone, usually imperfectly consolidated, consisting largely of green particles of a mineral called Glauconite.

Surcingle: A belt, band or girth, which passes over a saddle, or over

anything laid on a horse’s back to bind it fast.

Grumous: Resembling or containing grume; thick; concreted; clotted; as grumous blood.

Grume: A thick viscid consistence of a fluid; a clot, as of blood

With the permission of the authors I am going to reprinting a couple of the stories. The first one is from Pat Jamieson.

Let me tell you wappened to the azygous, downgyved, pulicious, vigintivirate wanger who wankled his way into sleeping in our village hospitium for over three full days during the puddingtime  after  the great flood of 303.

He was tall and stark, with a great beak of a nose,  dressed in a ragged multicolored cloak, and was carrying an old pulk  tied to his left wrist with a strip of brown leather.  A shiny silver zax was slung over his right shoulder.

Slowly he set down the zax.  Then he carefully opened the pulk and a beam of bright light shone forth from it.  He emptied the  pulk’s contents into his palm.  A beautiful  glauconite  sent out it’s beam of light  into our stunned eyes.

The videlicet of his tale of how he got the rare stone  I cannot vouch for, and I admit to having been  somewhat  vigintivirate myself at the time.  Still, I swear in videlicet,  that when I looked on that wondrous glauconite, I saw two of them sparkling together in his palm. The magic of the glauconite has always been said to cause viduity in the observer of the stone, and all of us of the villagers there swear to this day that there were two stones of equal beauty in the traveller’s hand at that time.

“Zounds”, I said to him.  “Wappened in thy puerperous period, videlicet mind you, to cause you to own such a glauconite?”

I felt myself to be very wanty with grumousness  besides,  but forced myself to hotwall, and gulped another swallow of vigintiverate.

“Well”, he said, as he wobbled the glauconite in his palm before us.  I suffered viduity again as two beams of light struck off two equally beautiful glauconites and into my eyes.  “Have you ever entered a hospitium and found a vidette,  beautiful  water  spraying  up from it’s depths?  Well, that’s what I found in your hospitium.  And in the water I saw two rays of light.  I fished around with my hand  and raised up in my fist  this most beautiful glauconite.”

Well, you can imagine the near riot as  all of us villagers ran to fish for ourselves in that vidette in our hospitium.

By the time we gave up looking and returned,  grumousness and pulicious,  to acuse the stranger of a lack of videlicet, he was gone, and with him the only glauconite that anyone in this village ever found in that wondrous vidette in our village hospitium.

The story travelled widely, and our hospitium  became a popular  stopover  for  travellers  from  as  far away as the great salt sea to the north.

But never again were any rare and wondrous glauconites found inside the spray of it’s fine vidette.

Written by Pat Jamieson, 16 April 2012

The second story tonight is from Winona herself. I think she may have cheated because she already knew what the actual definitions were.

WHAT IS IN A WORD?

Most women of the village generally create a chorus of ‘puddingtime’ to the delight of the children playing among the fields at this hour of the day. There are the few azygous ones or those suffering viduity who simply lie across their window sills or stand on their porches with a small smile or a single tear upon their faces whilst listening to Mother’s Song and basking in the setting sun.

 

As day stretches into twilight the village settles in upon itself to comfortably wait out the blindness of the night. Each and all in this village feel blessed with the comfort of community and a wanger to each bed.

 

 

Father Moon watches; a celestial vedette to the tiny village below. His fullness rises over the water, Father Moon’s power ignites the gluaconite. Dancing green refractions tickle the shore making merry upon the sandstone.

 

As the quiet seeps along the midnight streets, grumousness, the natural constitution of one man, finds him creating with the strange song of the mason’s zax, lulling to sleep those awake whose eyes long to close.

 

One other light burns steadfastly at the farthest end of the village. Double doors of the hospitium are thrown wide open beaming welcoming light out into the darkness, as always offering that which is needed to those in need.

 

A rhythmic pounding reverberates through the ground of the village into each dwelling shattering the peace filled quiet. Horses bearing their riders continue down the main thorough fair toward the far end of the village leaving those who were awakened settling back to sleep knowing they are only passers through seeking respite or refuge.

 

All is well.

 

 

Shrieking screams shatter dreams before quickly silencing themselves upon the hills…

 

Quite well renowned for her baking, her beauty and sweetness as well as her seven breathtaking daughters, the home of the Widow Merry has been grievously set upon…by the horse riders of the night.

 

“The heinousness of the acts is videlicet. No one knows how many of them stole into her house.”

 

“I heard of each man using a wanty on a female, made on to act out his devilishness. Nary one was spared neither the youngest girl nor the widow. All were woppened! The older two had been trussed up but left downgyved for all to see!”

 

“Three of the daughters claim to be sure there was at least one antichthon among the attackers. One of the three girls, the wankle one, was dragged to the orchard where upon the barbarian climbed the largest tree and relieved himself into the hotwall. Only God knows if there be any truth to her tale.”

 

“Zounds such horror! What will happen now?”

 

“No one knows. Be assured the villagers will demand recompense especially if any one of the woman fall to puerperous.”

 

“Those brutes must be hunted and brought forth. When they are found you can be assured there will be more than one pulk among the offending parties.”

 

“I heartily concur however for the nonce we must await the sending for them and their response. When the vigintiverate do arrive, what is to be done will be decided by them at their leisure as is commplace.”

 

At that very moment the pulicous village hound awoke and began to bay. Some village watch hound, his deafened ears allowed him to rest as the dead all through the eventful night.

 

Written by Winona Van Noy ©15/04/2012

As you see we do have some fun at our meetings.

The group is open to all and we meet every third Monday at the Cornwall Public Library at 6:30 PM.

CFN - Who would not want to read a book with the title “2012 Rabbits and the Happy Apocalypse on Shortwave Radio”.  It certainly intrigued me.

Author, Roy Berger, takes what could have been just another ‘end of the world’ theme and turns it into an interesting and socially relevant voyage for the main character, Stanley Brown, as he survives a catastrophic world climate and epidemic disaster.  Stanley has a slightly irreverent view of the world, his life and now the situation he finds himself in.  In some ways it reminded me of my favourite book as a young adult; “The Swiss Family Robinson”.  Stanley is inventive, courageous and optimistic and  with his two dogs sets out to explore the rest of his now much narrower world.  No radio, no television, no telephone, no neighbours; only his dogs for company. Haven’t we all wondered what we would do in such a situation?  He  decides to set off on a trip to seek other humans – if there are any.  He has many adventures and as the author says, it is “a demented hare raising tale”.  As for the rabbits?  Well anyone who has read “Watership Downs” will remember that those cute little bunny rabbits aren’t really all that cute…that’s a clue to what happens to Stanley.

It is far deeper than just a survival manual.  The situations and problems he encounters speak to what we, as a society,  are doing to our world.  So many of the other end of the world scenarios don’t deal with decaying nuclear facilities; containers with chemicals that don’t last forever and eventually  seep out into the waters and the land…with interesting results.   While reading this book, I saw the whole human ‘civilization’ re-creating itself – even the negative aspects – with fascinating outcomes but in a condensed period of time.  All this is told with Stanley’s (Roy Berger) slightly black sense of humour.

Yes, we have all heard of the year 2012 and the conflicting interpretations.  Will it be the end of the world, or the end of the world as we know it or will we all become fully enlightened and rise above it all.  Yes, it coincidentally is also the Year of the Rabbit but I guarantee you that when you wake up on January 1, 2013 you will still find this book an enjoyable read. 

Roy describes himself as living in the legendary artist’s colony of Cornwall, Ontario where the palm trees bloom in the winter and a cool breeze blows in the summer.  Obviously he has a fabulous imagination.

Three different ways to get to the book.  Create Space brings you to the printed book.  Amazon will allow you to buy the Kindle version and Smash Words allows the book for readers on Kobo, Sony, Nook, etc.

www.amazon.com/Rabbits-Happy-Apocalypse-Shortwave-ebook/dp/B005CBFR9G

Www.createspace.com/3650102

www.smashwords.com/view/87885

ISBN #978-0-9877363-1-4

ebook ISBN #978-0-9877-363-0-7 

CFN - ‘The Perfect Mix’, a book of short stories written by local authors and published locally as well. There are 11 authors in all contributing 22 stories ranging in style from mystery and humour to romance.

I had a preview of the book (actually I was editing it) and I have to say that it is very well written and entertaining, but I am a little biased. I am one of the contributing authors. I submitted my story to the publisher, Dean Swift, because I liked the concept and he very wisely selected it to be part of the book. There are a lot of local authors with a couple of short stories that would like to publish but either don’t want to, don’t have the time or don’t know how to write a whole book. Dean has given us a venue to start.

The book launching party will be held on this Saturday, the 29th of October between 1:00 and 4:00 PM at the home of Dean and Linda Swift, 312 Andre Ave., Cornwall.   This launch is open to the public.

Half of the proceeds will go to a charity(s) to be named, and the other half will go to the contributors who wish to participate.    I’d like to match up writers with illustrators and come up with 12 Christmas themed stories which we’d deliver via e-Book in time for the holidays!

You don’t have to live locally to participate, or even in Canada.  You just have to be good!  So if this makes you all tingly and starting to wish for hot cocoa and a fireplace, email us at info@cornwallfreenews.com for the 411.

Let’s make some joy this holiday season!

Jamie Gilcig – Editor – The Cornwall Free News & Seaway Media

Now released on Amazon.com for the Kindle and devices with free Kindle application.  2012 Rabbits and the Happy Apocalypse on Shortwave Radio, is now available in an electronic edition for $2.99, text to speech enabled, 88,000 words, from Amazon.com in Canada, United Kingdom, Germany. Released in the USA. 
E-book  ISSN: 978-09877363-0-7  Paper 978-0-9877363-1-4

There have been many apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic books. The field is turning into a genre. I wanted to write something that wasn’t dismal and horror based. No crazed violence or porn.  It’s hard to top Mad Max, THX-1138 or On The Beach. Those are tall shoulders.  I wondered what a pleasant end of the world story would be like? Could it be tastefully Canadian, could it be a whopper of a story? This book took about four years to write. I think watching geese in the park helped.  Last Man Standing discovers, radio, dogs, travel then nature vs humanity. I suppose, basic themes. Editing from Michel Basilieres and advice from John McFetridge went a long way.

One of the features of electronic books is you can download a ten percent sample for free. When I started writing this novel, the e-book was still an expensive novelty. When I finished, the Kindle had become a reality. For $2.99 it’s like you bought me a beer.

2012:  Rabbits and the Happy Apocalypse on Shortwave Radio, will soon be available on Smashwords for Kobe, B & N, and also print editions. Here is an excerpt. copyright Roy Berger, Cornwall, 2011.
———————————————————————————-

Table of Contents

Chapter One – Liquor, Guns and Dogs

Chapter Two – Nancy Wanderlust Explains Herself

Chapter Three – Motel Skull

Chapter Four – Spiders and Rats as Big as Houses

Chapter Five – Tango Romeo Foxtrot Charlie

Chapter Six - Cheer Across The Land

Chapter Seven – Happy New Year

Chapter Eight – End of the Wold Party

Chapter Nine – Honourable Goats

Chapter Ten – Demented Perversions of Nature

 Mr. Berger has authorized us to release a sample from the book:

Chapter One

Liquor Guns and Dogs

I don’t know much about what really happened but it definitely started off with a little disaster that, in turn, caused a bigger one. By coincidence there were also attacks of sabotage by disgruntled worker intrigues, terrorists, cabals and the great unwashed. Oh, yeah and there was this flu too and on top of that it snowed. It snowed and it didn’t stop snowing. The net, the social safety net, it disappeared. Poof.

My time had come.

I hadn’t opened the store yet. I had a used and rare book store not far from the inner city. Christmas was just a few weeks away. I didn’t know I’d be thinking about shooting my neighbours in the face long before then.

The sky was grey and the snow steady and gentle with big puffy flakes. You didn’t need a magnifying glass to see the crystals.

I did an uneventful and routine day at the store. I entered a stack of books on Amazon. They were leaning into an ashtray on the desk. I insulted two customers. This couple I’d never seen before walked in. The woman looked at the bargain shelf. It had a big sign above it that said, ‘Two For Five Dollars’.

“Are these two for five dollars?” she asked.

I looked at her. I looked at him. “Yes, the two for five dollar books are two for five dollars.”

They caught a tone in my voice. They looked at one another. “It’s a good thing you’re in business for yourself.”

They walked out.

I sold ten bucks worth of kid’s books to a concerned mom. While I was bagging I stuffed in an Agatha Christie and a Huckleberry Finn. This guy came in. He had a car load full of hard cover university text books. They were in perfect condition from 1996. My back hurt looking at them. He kept pointing to the sixty and eighty dollar price tags. We got into an argument about why I didn’t want to buy five boxes of dated text books.

I was tired of paying to store crap no one wanted.

They bring me crap. I had one a few months ago. Her father had died and she was clearing out the estate. She drove up in a station wagon with a forty year run of Reader’s Digest. Then she told me about all the negatives she had put out in the garbage the week before. Her father was a photographer during the second world war and had been assigned to cover the Nuremberg trials. She said the negs were two by two squares. That meant a portrait camera, probably a Rolleiflex or Hassablad I figured. Something for close-ups. She tossed the negs because she figured they couldn’t be developed. In this business you’re not allowed to continually punch people in the face. You ought to be able to but there it is.

The last customer came in at seven thirty, a lady with a preference for Nora Roberts. I forced her to buy a Steinbeck as well. I kept pushing the strong female qualities inherent in The Grapes of Wrath. I closed at ten to nine that night.

I came home. The dogs barked. I cracked open a cold one. I took aim with the cap. It bounced off the lip of the garbage can. I didn’t drink enough. I didn’t like the neighbourhood I was in. It was way easier to push cocaine than Dickens or le Carre. I don’t think it was always that way but it was at the moment. All the homes around here were built in the mid sixties. I’d checked the government statistics about local demographics. Most people stayed in this area their whole lives. We knew better but all the plumbing was put together with lead solder. Everyone was bathing in it and boiling their spaghetti in it for generations. It was a mad house. Just to make it sweet, I knew that seventy percent of the world’s used book stores had recently closed up due to the general illiteracy and internet alternatives. Social cohesion was a losing race slowed by abstract values and chemical additives. We were reaching the tipping point of dumbness.

I always thought that was so odd. Honestly, if drugs had anything to do with fantasy, ten bucks worth of Asimov lasted a lot longer than ten bucks worth of coke.

People preferred taking a chance on lottery tickets to a good old Sherlock Holmes book. “Written for blue collar blockheads just like you but a hundred years ago.” I’d often think. Even if I talked about the seven percent solution, the locals weren’t hip to Holmes and his medicine. They wouldn’t risk three dollars and a couple of evenings. They couldn’t come out of the cold. The screaming, plodding, quiet brilliance of George Smiley had nothing to offer against a pack of smokes and a gram bag of weed. The neighbours preferred to hang themselves in their basements, drink themselves to death and watch their kids take hammers to each other at parties. “You looked at my girl!” Splat. Somehow it made more sense for folks to pay an annual cable fee of four hundred and eighty dollars, having nothing to show for it at the end of the year, then it did to buy hundreds of used books. Their walls could have been filled with heart pounding, head shaking, expostulatory, hair raising, mind blowing, fantastic yarns, potboilers and blow hard autobiographies. I was surrounded by sleepwalkers. I’d loved to have talked with Koestler. If I ever opened another retail business I’d call it, ‘Get Out. We’re Closed.’ At the tail end of the literacy era it was sour grapes by me. It was nice to sip a beer.

I ate dinner and went to bed. During the night a warm front of

air swept up from Texas and slipped between a cold

front of air that had surged in even

faster. It was a northern

arctic front creating a

multi-layered

atmospheric

sandwich

of moisture

and

temperatures.

The snow turned into sloppy cold rain and the streets began to glaze over. At four in the morning there was a thunderclap that woke the whole city. It was a massive sound and we all spoke of it. Weird weather. By six in the morning it was still an hour from sunrise and you could hear the locals scraping their car windshields. Wives and kids left for work and school. People cursed.

I slept in, as was my routine. I dreamt of a long haired woman. Her hair fell into my face. She kissed me on the nose and said, “I fed the dogs.” I pulled the sheets a little closer.

I got up a bit before nine. The snow drifts were glazing over and getting crunchy. I had toast, tea and cigarettes. I turned on the radio.

I picked up the paper. The Montreal Canadians had beat the New York Rangers 3 to 2 last night. I turned the volume up on the radio, fished around for my favorite rock station and reached for the cigarette papers.

I couldn’t tune in a music station. Couldn’t find one. It was all talk. It was all just news. I listened. Airplanes had slammed into the World Trade Center, the Eiffel Tower, the Kremlin and at least two nuclear reactors that were being talked about. A series of dikes had collapsed in Holland. Hoover Dam had blown and Las Vegas was now a memory. The alarm bell was ringing from coast to coast. I sat down and pressed my hands to my head. There was something about New Orleans. Apparently the Chevy had indeed been driven to the levee but it had been abandoned there with an explosive load. The city was rapidly filling up with water. No one would figure out why. I stared at the radio. “Holy smokes!” Someone had finally got mad enough or weird enough. I turned on the TV. There were a lot of live shots from around the world but no answers yet. Very important people looked worried and perspired. Some frustrated high school teacher blew up Charlotte Town, Prince Edward Island by way of the local propane tank complex. There were no commercials. Amateur video were being shown as it became available. Sheets of paper were seen embedded in car doors and telephone poles in the aftermath of explosions.

It was too late to get ready. Too late to panic. I thought of a kid’s game we used to play. ‘Simon says, Freeze.’

The rain came down a little harder and a little colder. The local radio disc jockeys had us at negative 25 Celsius and were cracking a few jokes about it but with plenty of advisory warnings about the wind chill making it feel like negative 41, or, as Bad Pete said, “It’s like negative one million out there. The oil in my car was like molasses this morning. It’s really a good day to wear pants if you have to leave the house this morning, folks. Would you agree, Ted?”

“Keep your pants on. Bring the pets in.” Ted replied.

The upper layer of the atmosphere was warm. By the time the warm rain passed through the lower negative 25 layer it was a second or two from freezing onto what ever it hit. It was quite a phenomenon. Our good friends who lived in the Northern climes of Europe and Russia were being presented with the same stuff. Had the precipitation come down as snow or hail it would have bounced off materials or just lay there on the surface ready to blow over. Ice piled up in thin layers and expanded into thin crevices. That two inch thick layer of ice on a parked car’s roof grew to six inches, then weighed a ton. Car tires looked deflated under the weight.

A week or so earlier at Our Lady’s Hospital a young intern was transferring a 10 milliliter sample of urine from a test vial on Tray A to Tray B. A tiny spot of non-specific virus KG-43 from Tray B splashed onto his latex gloved hand. Who knows where the heck it came from? Someone from out there had it and brought it into the hospital. Someone who was probably still out there.

At the end of his shift Dr. Godfrey only washed and rewashed his hands for four and a half minutes instead of the required six minutes, leaving about ten million spores under a loose cuticle. Then he wiped his nose, put on his coat and boarded the rush hour bus. He took that bus to a subway train to another bus and then climbed up three flights of stairs to his apartment. In all this travel he’d laced hundreds of feet of chrome rails and several yards of hand straps, seat edges and escalator grips with his hand slime, nose slime and mustache slime. All of it acting as a medium for this big surprise mutated virus. Young doctor Godfrey had transferred this nasty quiet little contagious viral bacteria everywhere he went. He would continue to repeat this pattern for as long as he could. Everyone he’d passed it to would work just as hard to do the same. It had a three week gestation period before the symptoms started. Then the mammal host started to cough. Without a host it could live dormant on a door knob for six months. The virus had a real Darwinian lust. It was ready. The host was ready. The conditions were ready. It was just one of those things, maybe.

Godfrey kicked off his shoes and reached for the remote control.

In a long line of professionals that say, “Oops,” he was tired. He rested in bed, slept, woke up in the morning and provided another few million spores to arrest man.

Up on the sixth floor of St. Mary’s Hospital Godfrey continued his internship. In one room lay a coughing, congested Mrs. Beardsley, one of many patients he and the team would attend. She worked in a tobacco shop and her first husband use to work in the asbestos mines up north. The dust was forever getting into everything and you couldn’t even see it most of the time. So I guess with her history, no crime was committed when she wasn’t screened for this KG-43 nonsense. Improper assessments happen and we just hope it won’t be critical. Was it really even improper? So it goes.

In reality she was released with that flu transmitted by Godfrey. No one would know. It was a cold that wouldn’t quit. She would carry it for the three weeks and spread its cells from whatever her dormant position was from there. If you do the math and add in a few airports, retail outlets that might have been heightened by the bustling Christmas traffic, targets for runny noses, more handrails and baskets of door knobs this thing would hit hard. That wouldn’t make it to most newspapers by then due to dying distributors and a rapidly dying staff.

It was a few days before anyone began to claim responsibility for the spectacular and horrifying crashes and simultaneous acts of sabotage. It was lots of groups. Lots of people did it. It was timed and planned and all over the place. There were too many groups with opposing views and the news continued to be confusing and contradictory. There were also retaliations from other groups that wanted to get in on things before there was nothing left to destroy.

The roads got thicker with ice. Major electrical grids were being used to capacity while their lines increasingly sagged under the weight of ice. More than the allowable percentage of transformers fried. Electricity exports were cut. The temperature continued to drop. The warm air kept hitting the cold air at just the right angle and the rain continued to fall in the sub-zero temperature, freezing to whatever it hit first. The trees were something out of an Arthur Rackham illustration of a dark crystal forest. Their limbs were all bare, bent and glistening with clear glass against a grey sky.

It didn’t matter if you saw it coming or not. There are a finite number of power lines coming in to feed any city. The overloaded cables swayed in the wind. After a few days of steady ice buildup the first power line snapped. A series of towers bent sideways like crumpled foil toys and pulled down miles of wire in a chain effect. Then the rolling brown outs started, and then brown outs turned into black outs. It didn’t really matter what might have been on the mind of terrorists in domestic or foreign lands. Maybe a circuit breaker in Montauk, New York got tripped. A relay in Niagara Falls probably burnt out because some squirrel had a lick and a sniff. Someone screwed in an extra light bulb and in a series of totally unbelievable reactions one electrical bridge and generator station after another began shutting down from Ohio to Ottawa and all the way down the east coast. It was as if a bag of monkeys were running the future.

After five days of ice rain most of the lights were out in our neighbourhood. People were being thrown together out of desperation. Strangers knocked at the door looking for shelter. We were served by one failing grid after another. We were also disappointing our cousins to the south with intermittent power. The unrelenting ice rain finally brought down the last power line from the last generating station. This took one week and one inch of ice. The veneer of civilization was at egg shell fragility.

Most people in the cities had gravitated to centrally located public shelters outfitted with portable generators and two rolls of toilet paper. Most cities had wisely prepared eight days of emergency fuel against an eternity. The outside temperature had dragged down another five degrees to negative thirty and the internal temperature of homes without wood or kerosene heaters had dropped below freezing. Apartment buildings were about to be turned into meat lockers.

Bank machines didn’t work. Zero banks opened. Thanks. We experienced immediate deflation, there was next to no cash. People had what they had in their pocket, purse or cookie jar. Bank accounts, safety deposit boxes and electronic money were inaccessible. Credit and Debit cards were useless. Even in my cynicism I was surprised by that. After the San Francisco earthquake at least the Bank of America opened up with card tables on the street to help people out. “Just lazy or just greedy now?” I wondered. If banks could have used mechanical accounting skills cash could have been in circulation.

Buffeted by only pain and duty, line workers continued to labour under war-like conditions to restring cable and clear electrical towers in the middle of frozen forests. They were running up hill against overwhelming odds and stood no chance at all. Nine hundred towers had to be rebuilt. The workers walked through snow that was as high as their hips. The top layer of snow was frozen into knife sharp sheets. In this they pushed and arc welded and zip-cut steel. They had little back up, not enough crew, no roads, no sweet help, no hot coffee and only frozen injuries as a reward. The massive towers were specialized, each many tons of steel and requiring tons more cable to be rolled out in the middle of nowhere and precisely lined up. No one could quit because there was no where to go. Many, so many, would work to death. It was pointless endless work that couldn’t be accomplished and it was urgent. CB radio transmissions and walkie talkies relayed the plight of their families to them. Morale was crushed in hours. They couldn’t accomplish the tasks and worked in frustration.

People stayed in shelters. It became government decree. Authorities were quoted, confirming it. Sustained and continuous coughing ripped people’s lungs out. It spread. Radio and TV continued for as long as it took for their generators to crap out. It wasn’t so bad as long as one was listening to a radio station but then their power supplies were depleted and they would suddenly wink out in the middle of a broadcast leaving a low hiss. Creepy. One minute I knew what was sort of happening and then CHOM 97.7 was off the air. Gone. No CKUT93, so much for the Dikes On Mikes, show. No FM96. CBC Radio one and two turned into Radio Zero. Stare at the wall. Batteries were long sold out. Candles long gone. Cell phones relied on radio towers that were bent in half or twisted into the ground. The internet required electricity and was replaced by nothing. Text messaging was to inscribe the word, “Help,” on a frosted window.

So there we all were. Zillions of us, mainly standing around with our thumbs up our asses or overwhelmed beyond capacity. We were pretty much unprepared and shivering in the dark. The water pumping stations failed after a few days of emergency fuel was expended. I had been a thick headed paranoid bastard and refused rides to the city shelter fearing an - ‘Escape from New York’ - scenario which I was now sure would happen.

I had blocked off all the rooms in the house by stapling up sheets of plastic across hallways to cut down on ventilation. The temperature was kept up to above freezing by burning strings as candle wicks in a pan filled with cooking oil. The room stank like french fries. I didn’t have much food and no way to cook it anyway. Where was I going to get the money to pay a plumber to drain the pipes? They were going to burst soon. I didn’t know anything about draining pipes. What about the hot water tank? The two stupid dogs kept wanting to go outside to do their thing but every time I opened the door for them, we lost warm air.

The outdoor barbecue wasn’t working. The deep freeze had shattered the rubber hose leading from the propane tank to the control panel valve which fed the heating ring. I had another argument with a neighbour, pounding on the door, who wanted me to go to the city shelter. I lost a minute and a half of heat. I stayed with the dogs. There was no provision for either pets or those normally homeless in the city shelters. One issue was about insurance and the other was the smell and so many of the homeless were mentally ill. Pretty much everywhere the smelly and crazy people were pushed outside or not admitted in the first place. It wasn’t law, it was new-found custom. It was ethical because people felt bad doing it.

It was dark, cold and frozen. Our prior knowledge was that geo-political tensions were high and the world looked to have been starting a war. Then the information flow stopped. As the freeze reached deeper into the earth the ground shifted more than was called for in engineering tables. Underground water conduits were exploding from the deep freeze all over, flooding city blocks. Sewer drain pipes plugged up and caved in. Ports and markets were cut off all over the place. I captured the dogs and we hunkered up under the sheets with a portable radio. It got AM, FM and a few shortwave bands. No one was broadcasting.

 

Michael V. Smith’s first novel Cumberland received national acclaim and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca / Books in Canada First Novel Award. Now, eight years later, comes his brand new and highly-anticipated novel, Progress.

“Michael V. Smith’s characters’ stories of love and loss have so much emotional impact that they don’t need embellishment. Sometimes a book creeps up on you. That’s what happens with Cumberland, a novel that starts out as just another day in the bar for middle aged millworker Ernest but soon enters more explosive areas.” —NOW Magazine

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The novel follows Helen, a woman who, after losing her fiancé, is unable to move on with her life. But life itself is moving on around her, literally: the building of a dam is forcing her small town and her family home to relocate.

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The construction project means more than the loss of a home — Helen’s brother, Robbie, who
disappeared without a trace many years earlier, suddenly resurfaces. As he re-enters his sister’s life, he reveals the secret of why he left in the first place: a secret that tore their family apart, and affected Helen’s life in more ways than she ever realized.

Cornwall ON - If you love to write this group is for you if you’re in the Cornwall area.   From novices to the more experienced there’s nothing like being in a room full of creative people to get you going in the right direction.

Here is a blurb from Lorna Foreman whom you can contact for more info.   I’ll be there myself this coming Monday night.

The Cornwall and Regional Writers Society welcomes new people.

The meetings are held once a month on the third Monday of each month (barring holidays) at 6:15PM at the Cornwall Library.    ( Next meeting is Monday, January 17, 6:15 – 8:15)

A small, informal  and enthusiastic group, monthly topics are allocated, serving to push ourselves out of our our normal writing genre and style.

We encourage writers to read anything  they have written (or parts of) and give feedback when requested.

Whether published, unpublished or wanna be published – all are welcome.

Call Lorna Foreman at (613) 933-5265 for further information.

It arrived via UPS in two days. It worked straight out of the box. The Kindle is about the size of a paperback. The provided USB cord easily connects to the computer.  Amazon says there is room on the Kindle for three to four thousand books.

Three weeks and 989 books later, here’s my thoughts.  The Kindle 3 itself, as an object, feels natural and normal with the weight of a small paperback. A lot of thought has gone into the ergonomics and texture of this model making it comfortable to hold with either or both hands. The corners are rounded, the body is slim. The forward and backward page turn buttons are quiet, on either side and change pages in a split second.

Glasses not handy, getting tired? Making the print bigger or smaller, serif or sans serif or changing the space between the lines takes a moment. There are eight letter sizes from about an eighth inch to an inch. You can just as easily adjust line spacing and words per line. Press the font button – select, and the screen does so while half the page is up so you can see the potential change as you set it. The text – that’s what everyone is raving about, is what makes it. It’s a pleasure to read. It’s not a back lit screen.

This e-ink technology is flat black against a pearl white background. The barest light provides enough to read by with no glare or eye strain.  It’s not a technology I can duplicate in my workshop, so I assume it’s UFO back engineered.

I don’t have a cover for it and have been refusing to treat it as a piece of jewelry. I’m hoping it will be as durable as a five dollar coffee mug. I carry it in the outside pocket of my winter coat, so it’s been subject to both pocket debris and negative ten degree temperatures. Hopefully it will withstand the coming impact of a snowflake. I toss it on the couch. At negative ten the page turns begin to slow down.

Such is the drama of life, that my bookshelves became empty.  I downloaded 989 books from mainly four sites. Amazon, Many Books, Project Gutenburg and American Libraries. They all provide books in the public domain at no charge. Librivox has another few million audio books for free too.
Reading Leonardo da Vinci’s  Notebooks on an e-reader is surreal. My use and anticipation of the reader directly revolved around the classics.  All of Darwin, Shakespeare, Plato, Anthony Trollope, Victor Hugo, Jane Austin, Dickens, Wodehouse, Upton Sinclair, W.E.B. Du Bois and Jonathan Swift were swept into my hands in a moment. For filth I included D.H. Lawrence and Emile Zola. I wanted all those and thousands more…Buddy Holly On Ganymede! A recent science fiction give away.  I couldn’t resist. I took all three volumes of The History of Woman’s Suffrage plus a load of Tom Swift – you can’t beat the cost.  Flip back and forth between Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout and Leonardo’s note book. It’s kicks.

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E-readers will be welcomed by the country side and remove one more barrier for those wishing a rural location. For those who don’t live in large urban centers sometimes the choice of used and new bookstores can be slim. For contrast read about the barriers of life in 1881 in, A Lady’s Life On A Farm In Manitoba by Mrs. Cecil Hall

When done reading  put it down. Ignore it. After five minutes it will go into sleep mode.  Pressing the home button reveals your list of titles. It’s ten books a page. Flip index page, click down to a title. Open. Select that title again and it will automatically take you to the last page read. Book mark a page for whatever reason – go to menu, select book mark. It puts a tiny fold on the corner of the page. The cool thing is that bookmarks are saved at the end of the index in a file of other stuff bookmarked, this gives the option to select and go to that passage in the book. Searching by word is fun. Love comes up 106 times in Pride and Prejudice. There is a difference between doing a search with ten books on your Kindle as opposed to nearly a thousand. Now it takes a full minute to do a search. The tiny hard drive spins. It does work and is excellent, as you can flip through the pages of the search and choose to select any page where your word shows  up.

It will download PDF files but they are clumsy to move around the screen.

The Kindle can’t be registered via the USB cord. Registration reguires a Wi-Fi connection. Doing so updates it and actives the collections applications which is like a file for book titles.  I don’t have Wi-Fi at home. Guess what? Cornwall Square – it’s hot. It’s free.

Sit down anywhere and turn on.  My Kindle lit up as I passed through the doors. Once doing so, Amazon had twenty four, free recommendations for me. I may as well pick up groceries. Moments later I downloaded a copy of Alcestis by Euripides with my pound of radishes. I picked up a copy of An Account of Egypt by Herodotus while choosing some eggnog. There was an updated list of best sellers, some free romance books and a list of newspapers. I surfed google for a minute and checked the news while at checkout. It has a web browser and you can check and send e-mail via wireless although again those are tiny buttons.

Remember a science fiction story called, Friends Come In Boxes? Get this. Select, ‘text to voice’ and a computer generated voice, a la Steven Hawking, will read to you. Adjust the volume, slip it under your pillow and absorb Shakespeare, perchance to dream. No kidding. It will speak out your table of contents page, speak out your functions and dictate any of your books from beginning to end.

Start The Complete Shakespeare and you will have company for days. You are free to download audio books as well which will provide a professional voice or an MP3 for background music while you read. There are no treble or bass controls.
There’s a discussion page on Amazon which includes problems like cracked screens, frayed USB cords and machines that continually re-boot. They don’t sound like common problems. The impression I get is that where there is an issue, it’s rectified right away.

Amazon has designed their reader to be Amazon specific so it doesn’t automatically download the other popular format known as E-Pub. Most free book sites provide for Kindle downloads. E-Pub may be had by downloading a program called Calibre. All kinds of little applications are coming out for all the book readers including some word games.

The machine uses power when you prompt it to perform a function like turning a page, search or downloading, otherwise it’s not using much. It’s advertised as needing a recharge once a month. In three weeks of busy use I’ve been prompted twice that the battery was running low. If it runs low, you can still read but not search. It charges via a provided plug adapter. They bragged a little on the battery. The electronic reader lies flat on the table. You don’t have to use a salt shaker to hold the page open. The buttons appear to be honey and garlic sauce resistant.

Using the qwerty style keypad and thumb size five function controller, becomes as familiar as braille. The letter keys are small and clearly not meant for writing a book but fine for entering small amounts of text. The books can be arranged by title, author or how recently downloaded. It comes with two dictionaries (American & English). Checking a word definition is a matter of clicking beside the word. A two line definition appears at the bottom of the page or you can click again and search the dictionary.

If I had any old world doubts about this thing, they were erased after five minutes. The e-reader is so obviously and clearly going to stay. It’s a fabulous medium. I remember paying a hundred bucks for a four function calculator in the seventies, today they are priced in pennies. The book reader will probably show up someday for a dollar with a million books on it  changing how knowledge is passed on.

The rotary press came into widespread commercial use by the 1890′s and a river of books were produced for the mass market. Leather bound volumes, produced a sheet at a time with a single arm press were out of the price reach of most people. Libraries were restricted and few. The rotary press brought in more publishers and allowed a greater field for more authors as the risk of publishing costs were lowered. A hundred and some odd years later, it’s happened again. Authors, publishers, book sellers – everyone involved has to examine this new technology. The current Gutenberg challenge is to have one trillion free books on line, all free, all languages, all the time. Is this another slice of post-modernity?

Book delivery in most cases was a split second to a few seconds. The bible took three minutes. I wasn’t likely to find Sir Richard Burton’s 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights elsewhere for free so I downloaded all 16 volumes of that. Audio books can take ten to twenty minutes to down load. The best literature in the world is in your pocket. Read Babbitt one minute and shift over to The Voyage of The Beagle the next. They should drop these things from the bellies of planes. And when they do, perhaps punks will talk like Plato.

I met Anne on Montreal Road She’s an avid book reader and collector.  She was quick to give me her views.

“How long is that technology going to last? I’m forty one. I would never use it. There’s no feel of paper. It’s not tactile. It’s not a book. A professor isn’t going to accept a foot note from that. Maybe the enlarge print feature would be useful to some. Maybe in places that can’t afford books. But if they can’t afford books, can they even recharge the battery? Is there a wind up model in Canada? We’ll have to see if it catches on. It’s Big Brother technology. Bibliophiles won’t use it. I love books.” She gave it back like a dead rat. “That won’t be around two hundred years from now but a book will. It’s not permanent. It’s not real. It reinforces a particular technology and what if that crashes? What if something happens? Something like the Quebec Ice Storm or a magnetic storm. What then? “

After that conversation I felt unclean and wanted my money refunded. What have I done? What technological vanity have I become party to?

John McFetridge is published by both ECW Press, Harcourt and is vice president of The Canadian Crime Writer’s Association  After the success of Dirty Sweet, Tumbling Dice, Swap and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Toronto crime writer, John McFetridge has just released another book. Terminal Damage is a collection of short stories. He wanted me to buy it on Amazon for 99 cents and tell him about the experience.

“It took two seconds to spend a buck, John.”

Now the collective authors are free to split up the royalties. Which they may very well do, selling one to three books a day for the rest of their lives. What’s a writer to think about that? The writer doesn’t have to contact the publisher’s accountant firm in Florida to remind them that the royalty cheque is six months past due either.

McFetridge said. “You get paid right away. it’s a little trickier to get paid in Canada – you have to get an IRS number or else they withhold 30% of your money and register that. But the payments happen right away. I think we’ve each made about six bucks off Terminal Damage so far, but I’m giving my share to the guy who set it up on Kindle, opened the account and formatted the book.”

“In Canada you can get an ISBN number for the book for free. Most of the-book sales still come from Amazon and you have to set it up separately at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk and the rest of the international sites, but once the file is formatted that’s easy.  Smashwords is another company that covers most of the rest of the e-book world from their own site, Barnes and Noble, iBooks and many other e-book sites, including Kobo in Canada.” He said.

Perhaps, you don’t want to spend a few years shopping your manuscript around to three or four publishers in the hopes that one editor might peer over his glasses and toss you five percent of the sales. Perhaps, you feel like seventy percent of the sales and want to upload it for your adoring fans right now.

Let them accept you with the click of a credit card and publicize it yourself on Amazon, blogs and Smashwords. That’s big. Self actualized big. Now you can publish your own errors with no delay, just like the big boys. Will there be more crappy books? Will people with massive investments in Heidelberg presses get nervous? Will small artsy book publishers come into their own? Is the Gestetner machine truly absolutely dead? Does anyone use the phrase ‘vanity press’ anymore?

Pirates, yes – shameful out of reach book pirates have already shown up with their sordid ripped off wares, providing recent novels on subterranean sites.  They buy the book once, crack the code, violate the copyright and upload it to nefarious sites. That will last until the breath of Norman Mailer, Mickey Spillane or Alice Munro picks up a hot baseball bat and whacks a keyboardist, some off shore midnight dreary.

There’s no downside to it. It’s not a book. It’s a book. It doesn’t replace the book. It’s black and white and read all over. If you don’t have books or want more there are a few million to choose from for free. How about that one hundred year wait for Mark Twain’s biography? Volume One just came out at $39.99 for the hardcover plus delivery or $9.79 on a Kindle in ten seconds. That perennial Yankee just found a new court.  Even if I had spent three grand to buy 989 used books at a couple bucks each, I still couldn’t bring them all on the bus with me. The few hundred feet of shelving might be a problem too. Merry Christmas, Ravendove.
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Roy Berger lives in the legendary artists colony of Cornwall Ontario where the palm trees bloom in the winter and a cool breeze blows in the summer.   Photos courtesy Frank Malenfant