Literature – Page 16 – Into the Woods

Ancient astronomy

An illustration from James Evans’ book on ancient astronomy

I’ve mentioned that the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major is going to involve time travel. The plot requires that I have an understanding of the state of the science of astronomy around 48 B.C. As a source for that, I am reading James Evans’ The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, which was published by the Oxford University Press in 1998. This is a beautiful, well-illustrated, and fairly expensive book. It has left me greatly impressed at just how much the ancients knew.

We generally assume that modern astronomy began with Copernicus and Galileo as the Dark Ages were coming to a close. In 1633, the church convicted Galileo for following Copernicus in saying that earth is not at the center of the universe. But some of the ancient Greek astronomers figured out that the earth moves around the sun, though it was not a mainstream idea in ancient times. Aristotle knew that the earth is a sphere. Heraclides of Pontos, a student of Plato, taught as early as 350 B.C. that the earth rotates and that the stars are fixed. Greek astronomers were able to make pretty good estimates of the size of the earth and moon, though their estimates of the size and distance of the sun were less accurate. The Greeks understood trigonometry. They had a pretty accurate theory of the motion of the planets. Even before the Greeks, the ancient Babylonians were excellent astronomers who made detailed star charts and kept accurate astronomical records. Babylon’s knowledge was passed down to the Greeks. The Greeks built on Babylonian astronomy, especially during the golden years of Alexandria, culminating with Ptolemy’s Almagest around 150 A.D. After Ptolemy, the Dark Ages began in the West, so Ptolemy remained authoritative for hundreds of years.

So, it’s not really true that, to the ancients, the science of astronomy was barely distinguishable from the myths of astrology. They knew a lot.

So how did they use what they knew?

For one, they wanted better calendars. The daily cycle, the lunar cycle, and the annual solar cycle don’t fit together in tidy ratios, so there is no perfect calendar. Our own Gregorian calendar, an antique which is a refinement of the ancients’ Julian calendar, requires all sorts of adjustments including leap seconds and leap years. In its essentials, our calendar today is the Roman calendar, which relied heavily on Greek astronomy.

Astronomy is critical to agriculture — when to plow, when to plant. This remains true today, and I still subscribe to an almanac, as did my grandparents. Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac was a bestseller in the American colonies. People planted by it.

Astronomy also is critical to navigation, surveying, and mapmaking. Ancient sailors knew how to navigate by the stars. One of the reasons I chose Ursa Major as part of a book title was its importance to the ancients. The constellation of Ursa Major is visible for the entire year in most of the northern hemisphere. Ursa Major includes some easily identified “pointer stars” (the Big Dipper) that make it easy to locate the polar star and therefore true north. An ancient sailor who wanted to sail east at night would keep Ursa Major up to his left. We know that the ancient Celts had excellent seafaring skills and excellent ships and that the Celts also used Ursa Major for navigation.

How about astrology? It would be easy enough to accuse the ancients of being superstitious because they tried to use the stars to predict the future and to make generalizations about human nature and human fate. But we moderns are just as guilty, since horoscopes remain important in the lives of lots of people.

It’s easy enough to reproduce the astronomical observations of the ancients with some simple instruments. A gnomon (which is what a sundial is) will allow you to deduce and measure all sorts of information if you trace the sun’s shadow for a year. If you trace the sun’s shadow for a single day, you can very precisely locate true north. If you have a protractor or an astrolabe and measure the angle of the sun above the horizon on the summer solstice, you’ll know your latitude. Looking through tubes attached to a tripod will let you measure an object’s motion from hour to hour. You’ll need some star charts. And if you want to get fancy, you’ll need to brush up on what you learned about tangents, sines, and cosines in trigonometry class.

Even today, with an astrolabe, a watch, and a view of Ursa Major, you could throw away your GPS.

How would you do that? Measuring the angle of Polaris, the north star, above the horizon will tell you your latitude. That’s easy. Longitude is more difficult, and longitude bedeviled the ancients. But if you can determine your local time by getting a precise fix on noon (with the gnomon of a sundial, say, or the shadow of a stick stuck in the ground), and if you know what time it is at some distant place with a known longitude (Greenwich is handy for that), then you can calculate your longitude. At night, you can get a pretty good fix on the time by measuring the position of a known star.

To clarify the concept of longitude, keep in mind that the British navy carried accurate clocks on their ships (chronometers) not because they cared about the local time wherever they might be. Rather, the chronometer always said what time it was back in Greenwich. If you determine your local time from the sun or a star, then the difference between your local time and Greenwich time tells you how far you are east or west of Greenwich. After accurate clocks were available for ships, marine navigation greatly improved. This is why Britain’s Royal Observatory at Greenwich was commissioned by King Charles II in 1675. In the U.S., the Naval Observatory is one of the oldest scientific organizations in the country. The Naval Observatory was responsible for the “master clock” that the navy used for navigation. The observatory still is responsible for the master clock! The time used by GPS satellites is determined by the U.S. Naval Observatory.

But before GPS, if you were a ship at sea carrying Thomas Jefferson from Virginia to Calais, you’d needed a star to figure out the local time. The stars most convenient for that are in Ursa Major.

I like to think of it this way: The stars are still up there, raining information down on us day and night. All we have to do is just look up, and measure.

The theory and practice of the calca

This is not a review of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which was published in 2008 and which I very much enjoyed reading. Rather, this is about the concept of the “calca,” a term created by Stephenson in Anathem.

Stephenson made up a lot of language for Anathem, which is a thousand-page tome about a very erudite order of monks, and he helpfully includes a glossary in the back of the book. This is how he defines calca:

An explanation, definition, or lesson that is instrumental in developing some larger theme, but that has been moved aside from the main body of the dialog and encapsulated in a footnote or appendix.

The monks of Acorn Abbey instantly saw the usefulness of this concept, though we might define it a little differently. Instead of being moved aside from the main body of the dialog, the calca can embedded in the dialogue. The concept of the calca is important to me, because I am highly inclined to write calcas, and I put a considerable amount of research into them.

Calcas can be either magnificent, boring, or somewhere in between, depending on the reader’s interest and the writer’s skill. But one thing is guaranteed. If a reader disagrees with, or is offended by, the content of the calca, then the writer will be accused of sermonizing, pontificating, or speechifying, and a bad review is guaranteed.

For example, here is a link to a very long and erudite review of Anathem with the title “Why Anathem Sucks.” The reviewer says, among other things, “In all of these cases, the math is rushed over in order to get to some speechifying.” Ooof. The reviewer and the writer do not belong to the same school in the philosophy of mathematics.

To my taste as a nerd, calcas are some of the best elements of literature. Isaac Asimov wrote wonderful calcas, which were spoken by his characters as part of the dialogue. The Foundation series would amount to nothing without calcas. Robert Heinlein took some criticism for his fondness for libertarian calcas. Ayn Rand wrote calcas, though of course I see her calcas as sermonizing and pontificating because I disagree with her.

A style of writing that includes calcas is not to everyone’s taste. Many readers would like to just get on with the action. On the other hand, when we like characters in a story, and when we are in accord with the author’s ideas, we generally enjoy a nice conversation with the characters and a calca or two. Yoda is calca-izing, for example, when he says:

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

I’ll leave you with a couple of mean-ass calcas in dialogue from a science fiction writer, Richard K. Morgan:

I have no excuses, least of all for God. Like all tyrants, he is not worthy of the spit you would waste on negotiations. The deal we have is infinitely simpler – I don’t call him to account, and he extends me the same courtesy.

The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here — it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference — the only difference in their eyes — between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people, they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

Time travel? Warp jumps? Let’s go …

My schematic, based on a sketch kindly provided by an alien visitor

For several months now, I have been at work on the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major, which for now I just call Fugue II. I’ll give it a real title later. Fugue II is a much more demanding novel involving much more science fiction. There also is a historical element that is critical to the plot. It has required a great deal of research, most of it in thick tomes published by university presses. I sometimes think that I should include notes and a bibliography with Fugue II, just to show that my radical ideas don’t always come out of thin air.

There will be time travel in Fugue II. This technology belongs to aliens, who will allow earthlings to use it to help get earth out of the nasty predicament that I left earth in at the end of Fugue in Ursa Major. I think I’ll not say just yet where (and to what time) Jake and a few other earthlings will be going. But, when they get there, a deep stack of scholarly tomes will discipline my imagination in describing what they find and what they do. I am completely out of bookshelves, and there are many stacks of books in my room, some of them three feet high.

With our current understanding of physics, is time travel possible? How about faster-than-light travel? The opinions of physicists differ. But, if time travel or warp jumps are possible, then we can say a great deal about the conditions necessary to do it. To try to understand the physics of these conditions, I have relied heavily on Roger Penrose, a mathematician and physicist who is now an emeritus professor at Oxford. I have read a number of Penrose’s books. His mind is simply magnificent. I don’t have the math to truly follow him everywhere he goes, but I get the gist of it. A 10-year-old tome of his (1,100 pages long) has been my guide for the physics involved in the plot of Fugue II. The book is The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.

But back to time travel and warp jumps. As I see it, to travel in time you’d have to be able to control a seriously powerful source of gravity. OK. A black hole could provide that. You’d also have to be able to control a source of negative energy density. Never mind what negative energy density might be. It’s enough to know that you won’t find it in many places. But one place where you will find it (we think) is in the ergosphere of a rotating black hole. If you read the Wikipedia article, you’ll find that it was Penrose himself who first described this, back in 1969. But again, you don’t have to worry too much about the physics. The key point is that rotating black holes generate the forces we need, if time travel and warp jumping are possible.

I’ve left it to the aliens to do the necessary engineering. It involves an enormous piece of machinery — a tubular helix (or spiral) big enough to allow a rotating black hole to pass through it. The travelers go winding through the hollow helix tube while the rotating black hole is passing through the helix. You enter one end of the tube in the here and now, and you come out the other end somewhere or sometime else. The machine can take you back in time, except that it can’t take you back to a time earlier than the time the machine was built. Alas, it cannot take you to the future, because of some complications related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It can, however, return you to the present after you’ve traveled to the past. The same device can be used for interstellar travel with no time tweaking, depending on how you manipulate quantum fields inside the helix. (Don’t ask — it’s an alien proprietary secret.) As a travel machine, it can fling you across space faster than light, depending on how fast the helix is rotating. The axis of the rotating helix (the direction in which it’s pointing) determines the direction in which you jump. And sure, you can jump through the middle of a star or a galaxy if you want, because you went straight from point A to point B in an instant, and you were never at any points in between. But if you fling yourself to some far-off galaxy, take care that you know how you’re going to get back, because you were traveling in an ordinary spaceship, and the jump machinery was left behind.

How did the aliens solve this problem? They made multiple jumps to the same location (always near a suitable black hole), sending along the necessary materials, and built new jump machines at points of interest all over the galaxy and beyond. So space travel involves slower-than-light transport for relatively short distances and a network of those enormous jump machines for faster-than-light interstellar travel.

As I understand the science, I cannot imagine a warp engine that could be built into a space ship. Far too much mass (and therefore gravity) is required, and the gravitational and tidal forces involved are exceedingly dangerous. These forces would rip human beings and machines apart. Therefore, as I see it, a warp engine would be more like a catapult. The catapult would remain where it is, but it would push you and your space ship through a worm hole as long as the travelers and their space ship were far enough away from the tremendous gravitational and tidal forces involved in opening a worm hole.

Faster-than-light travel is a minor element of Fugue II‘s story. It’s a story about people, really. But where the plot involves science (or history), I want all the i’s dotted and all the t’s crossed. I’m a radical and a heretic, but I rarely just make stuff up. What really drives my imagination is dreaming about how we might get out of the awful times we live in, and what we might do about the fact that the wrong people are running the world and have run the world for a long time.

Review: John Twelve Hawks’ Spark

One of these books is a hot read.

John Twelve Hawks’ newest novel Spark was released on Oct. 7, and I actually bought it that week. But I was slammed with election duties during the month of October, so I put the book aside until quiet times returned. This is because I knew that Spark would be a barn burner of a page turner. It was, and I read it in a day and a half. Brilliant writers like John Twelve Hawks don’t really need yet another glowing review, so I’d like to get off onto a sidetrack for a moment — readers.

I have become fascinated with bad reviews, because bad reviews tell writers something that writers need to know. I’ve recently gotten into the habit, both with books I’m about to buy and books I’ve already read, of looking at the most negative reviews that can be found on Amazon. This probably started when Fugue in Ursa Major got its first 3-star, as opposed to 5-star review. I was insulted by the reader/reviewer’s sheer stupidity, and I needed to assure myself that everyone’s books are misunderstood. There’s a rule among writers about never responding to a bad review. But there is no rule that says you can’t respond to bad review of someone else’s book.

Here’s a snippet from the “most helpful” negative review of Spark, which has the headline “Meh.” I’m fixing the reviewer’s multiple typos:

“Honestly, the first half of the book was so dry and boring, I really wasn’t sure I would be able to finish it. … Part of the problem was the bland writing since the protagonist has no feelings, diagnosed with Cotard Syndrome (delusion of being dead) that there is no dimension to him. I really didn’t like him much or even care what was going on.”

Why do people who know (or care) so little about novels, characterization, and storytelling even bother to read? They are stuck inside their own tiny minds, not seeking any sort of expansive experience in a book but rather seeking to have their own smallness affirmed. But any reader with a clue about how stories work knows that, if a writer starts a story with a character who is incapable of affect and who thinks he is dead, then that character is going to undergo some sort of transformation during the course of the story. A good reader also will be alert to what’s between the lines. Maybe the author wants us to think about our feelings and when feelings matter (or don’t matter). Maybe he wants us to think about what’s worth living for, or whether we’ve even alive at all. A good reader also will know that, very often in good stories, characters change during the course of the story, and the nature of that change is an important part of what that story is about. It’s like starting with a hard-hearted character like Ebenezer Scrooge and asking ourselves, “What kind of experiences might change this bitter old man into someone warm and caring?” Thus Charles Dickens gave us A Christmas Carol. What if a clueless reviewer wrote, “I just couldn’t get into this story. The Scrooge character was just so one-dimensional and mean that I couldn’t care about him. So I couldn’t finish this book.”

Bah! Humbug!

If John Twelve Hawks (he’ll almost certainly Google up this review and read it) will forgive me for plugging my own book in a review of Spark, I got a similar comment in a review of Fugue in Ursa Major on the bad-taste book site Goodreads:

“The main character was a basket case unable to form relationships and he is saved. Only a hero that Ayn Rand would love, but I could care less.”

She is talking about my Jake. (Coincidentally, John Twelve Hawks’ main character in Spark also is named Jake.) As a bad reader, she does not understand that if a writer starts a story with a character who is having trouble with relationships, then during the course of the story that character is probably going to learn something about relationships. As for Ayn Rand, the reviewer is so insensitive to the clues that every writer lays between the lines that she can’t detect that I abhor Ayn Rand. I suspect that particular reviewer was blinded by her rigid political agenda. Reading, to her, is about comfort and confirmation in her own tiny world.

But back to Spark and the mystery of John Twelve Hawks. I’ve written about him previously, here, here, and here. He is a master of the hot read. I read him partly to study his style, in particular his action scenes, because I’m not good at writing action scenes. His prose is the kind of prose I like — transparent prose that tells the story without language getting in the way. In fact we’re hardly aware of language at all. His style is very cinematic, which is why I was not surprised that he got a big movie deal for Spark.

What I would love to know is how he learned to write. It can’t be just raw talent (though he has plenty of raw talent), because every writer works from a theory of writing whether he knows it or not. John Twelve Hawks dots all the i’s and crosses all the t’s. Everything is properly foreshadowed. There are no wrong notes. He stays on course for his destination: a ripping good conclusion. By the end, all the many threads of the story have been tied together, and every character has gotten his lines just right and played his role perfectly. It’s a masculine, muscular style that would not work for the kind of stories that I want to tell, but it’s perfect for the stories that John Twelve Hawks tells.

Which brings me to what I think is the most important question we might ask about John Twelve Hawks as a writer. Why does he choose to tell the kind of stories he tells? Having asked that question, I’m not going to try to answer it. Because only writers, not reviewers, can speak to readers on a question that important. But I think it’s much more than wanting to deliver a hot read. And, whatever his purpose is, I’m pretty sure that I wholeheartedly agree with him.

Autographed copies of Fugue in Ursa Major

“Intelligent, mysterious, a perfect book for a movie; loved it!”

In time for the holidays and winter reading, I’m offering autographed copies of Fugue in Ursa Major. The cost is $15.

If you’d like to order a copy, please send an email to fugue@acornabbey.com and include this information:

1. Your name and mailing address

2. Whether you’d like to pay with a check or by PayPal

3. A name (if any) that I should include with the autograph

4. The text of a brief inscription (if any) that you’d like for me to include with the autograph

I will reply to your email with information on where to mail your check or how to pay with PayPal. After I’ve received your payment, I’ll send you the book by U.S. Postal Service priority mail.

The cost of priority mail alone is more than $5, so this is a bargain and doesn’t really earn me much profit. But I thought that loyal blog readers who bought the book in eBook format might also like to have a real copy of the book.

Software review: Scrivener for Macintosh

Scrivener is an application particularly designed for writers. It has templates for fiction, non-fiction, academic work with footnotes, screenplays, etc. It is available for Macintosh, Windows and Linux.

I’m a nerd. I have been using Macintoshes since the 1980s. I use Adobe InDesign for publishing work, and I’m very happy with it. But InDesign isn’t for writing; it’s for setting up typography and page layout in the final steps of publishing. As I prepare to write the sequel to Fugue in Ursa Major (which has the working title Passacaglia in Ursa Major), I simply could not face writing another novel in any of the editors I’ve ever used. I’ve used many editors. I go all the way back to vi and nroff in the early Unix world. Like I said, I’m a nerd.

I started looking for outliners and editors. They all are terrible. I like many of the concepts of programs like BBEdit, because they’re clever and oriented toward streams rather than pages. But BBEdit and other programmer’s editors don’t even support bold and italics, as far as I could tell. I despise Microsoft Word and refuse to use it. I cannot stand software that tries to automate things and that thinks it knows better than I do. In Word, things are always hopping around in unpredictable ways. For every keystroke that Word’s automated features might save you, 9,462 keystrokes are required to clean up the messes it makes. LibreOffice is no better, just because it’s from the Word universe. The chief virtue of LibreOffice is that it’s fully Word compatible, so that one doesn’t have to support Microsoft.

Opting for simplicity and nonviolence, I was about to start the new novel in Macintosh TextEdit, using a TextEdit file as an outline. TextEdit is a simple, bare-bones editor. But then while Googling I came across Scrivener. I could scarcely believe it. There are people on the planet who think like me!

Scrivener is complicated, but that’s fine. I think I’ve figured out an acceptable way to set up the new novel. Scrivener’s corkboard metaphor for outlining threw me a bit, but I think I’m getting a grip on how to set up my outline using a table view of the outline (pictured above). I think I would buy this program for typewriter mode alone. Typewriter mode keeps the cursor at the center of the text block, so that you can always see the context above and below what you’re writing or editing. It drives me absolutely crazy to always be typing at the bottom of the screen. Also, I abhor being forced to type on images of 8.5×11 pages and watching text hop from page to page and get entangled in unneeded and unwanted headers. A novel has nothing to do with pages until the last steps of the publishing process, in InDesign. During the writing process, it’s just a stream of text, and putting the text on pages just gets in the way.

I wrote Fugue in Ursa Major chapter to chapter, but I had already decided that I wanted to structure the new novel as scenes. Scrivener was ahead of me on that. By default, chapters are made up of a sequence of scenes. I also wanted a way to track settings and characters. Scrivener was ahead of me on that. It has templates for tracking characters and scenes, and the text can be tagged if you need to search a long novel for places that involve a particular character or scene.

The concept of compiling is brilliant. Having used software compilers for 30 years, it was instantly clear to me how the concept of compiling is appropriate to a long stream of text. Scrivener’s compile feature will probably scare users who are unfamiliar with the concept. But if you go through the tutorial that comes with Scrivener, compiling will start to make sense.

Scrivener costs $45 for a single-user license. The software was written by a nerd in Truro, Cornwall, because he needed a program like Scrivener to help him write his Ph.D. dissertation.

Julius Caesar against the Gauls

Wikimedia Commons: The Dying Gaul, Roman, circa 200 B.C. The sculpture preceded Julius Caesar by about 150 years and is based on earlier wars with the Celts.

Now that Fugue in Ursa Major has been sent out into the world to seek its fortune, I am already well into the research needed for the sequel. In the sequel, we will use some of the tools of science fiction to probe history, the better to understand how we got to this sorry state and to look for lost ideas that we might do well to recover.

A major turning point in Western Civilization, as I see it — if not the turning point in Western Civilization — was Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, a critical first step in bringing essentially all of western Europe (except for Ireland) under the control of Rome. This insured the near-extermination of the Celtic cultures and prepared the soil for the Roman imperial religion, Christianity. If one believes, as I do, that Western Civilization sucks in pretty much the same ways that imperial Rome sucked, then one must try to understand how we got to the state we’re in. Science fiction is a wonderful way to explore these themes. Good science fiction ought to be carefully grounded in its histories and in its science, and then it is free to ask, in plausible ways: What if?

I have dreaded the work, but one of the sources I needed to digest was written by Julius Caesar himself. It is hundreds of pages long, and it is mostly about boring military strategy. The book is The Gallic War. Caesar describes the conquest of Gaul in his own words. All the military stuff (at least to me) gets old really fast, so I speed-read through that to pick out the parts that contain other nuggets of history. One must be careful here, however, because Caesar was a propagandist. Part of his intention is to glorify himself, to glorify Rome, and to paint the conquered peoples as barbarians to help justify Rome’s treatment of them. The conquest of Gaul (the area of modern France, more or less) was almost a genocide. The language of Gaul became extinct within a couple of hundred years after Caesar’s military conquest. Latin morphed into French.

One thing that greatly impressed me was Caesar’s quoting a speech by a leader of the Celts, Critognatus, at great length. Caesar does this because he wants to show the speech’s “remarkable and abominable cruelty” (singularem et nefariam crudelitatem). Strangely enough, to me, the speech doesn’t sound cruel and abominable at all. It sounds pretty heroic, a cry for help and justice poignant enough to be heard and lamented two thousand years later. This is just an excerpt:

For wherein was that war like this? The Cimbri devastated Gaul, they brought great disaster upon us, yet they departed at length from our borders and sought other countries, leaving us our rights, laws, lands, liberty. But the Romans — what else do they seek or desire than to follow where envy leads, to settle in the lands and states of men whose noble report and martial strength they have learnt, and to bind upon them a perpetual slavery? ‘Tis in no other fashion they have waged wars. And if ye know not what is afoot among distance nations, look now on Gaul close at hand, which has been reduced to a province, with utter change of rights and laws, and crushed beneath the axes in everlasting slavery.”

I hear you, Critognatus.

Note: The translation is by H.J. Edwards and is from the 1917 Harvard edition.

Another note: Whenever I use the phrase, “Western Civilization,” I think of what Mohandas Gandhi said when he was asked what he thought of Western Civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.”

Now available: Fugue in Ursa Major

Fugue in Ursa Major went on sale today. You can buy it in pretty much any format you want — paperback, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, or Apple iBooks.

Here is a link to the Amazon editions.

Peter Rabbit: As of 2014, he belongs to all of us

Beatrix Potter’s work is now in the public domain

Authors write to make a living. Eventually, authors get old and die, but their work lives on. Books, paintings, even movies — all become part of our historical and cultural heritage. Imagine how we’d all lose if someone still held a copyright on Shakespeare’s plays, or Beethoven’s music, or the paintings in the Louvre.

But how long should an author’s heirs be allowed to profit from an author’s work? On that there is no agreement. In past years, it is profit that has been winning, and copyrights have been extended for longer and longer.

This year, the work of artists and writers who died in 1943 came into the public domain. That included the work of Beatrix Potter. Current copyright law in the U.S. keeps copyrights alive for 70 years after the author’s death. Peter Rabbit was first published in 1902, so that means that Peter Rabbit was private property for about 112 years. That’s a long time.

Copyrights were extended again (by the U.S. Congress) as recently as 1998. Mickey Mouse, Gone With the Wind, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue are still private property. Those who opposed copyright extension complained that the intent of the law was to protect lucrative franchises such as Mickey Mouse that corporate owners want to keep locked down.

This is a major conflict in our culture at present — the conflict between private property and “the commons.” For example, owners of beachfront property are in conflict with those who maintain that beaches are a natural resource that belong to all of us. For years and years, defenders of the commons have been losing. This means that a few people are much richer. But the rest of us are poorer.

Why is this on my mind at present? Partly because I wanted to use an excerpt from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay after the title page of Fugue in Ursa Major. I waited too long to check on the rights to Millay’s work, assuming that her work was now in the public domain. I was wrong. A foundation owns the rights to Millay’s work. To avoid any pesky legal risk, I had to apply to the foundation for permission, and I had to include a special credit line on my book’s ISBN page. This held up the publication of Fugue in Ursa Major. If I’m doing the math right, I believe we have to wait seven more years for Millay’s work to enter the public domain.

However, the publication of Fugue in Ursa Major is getting close, and I will be able to keep to the July 14 release date. The revisions are done, the type is set. Everything is in the pipeline. I’ll have much more to say about Fugue in Ursa Major as July 14 approaches.

P.S. If you haven’t seen the 2006 film “Miss Potter,” about the life of Beatrix Potter, I encourage you to put it on your must-see list.

Update on Fugue in Ursa Major

I regret that, several times, I’ve made optimistic projections about when Fugue in Ursa Major will be released for sale. Then I keep missing the targets.

My new target date for release is June 20. I am reasonably confident that, even if I miss that target date, I won’t miss it by far.

The novel is now in its third round of revisions. I am really fortunate to have excellent first readers, and I have taken their suggestions very seriously. With each round of revisions, I think the book has gotten much better. Not only do I have the first readers’ markup on the proof copies to work with, there also have been many discussions around the dinner table, or around the fireplace, with significant quantities of wine consumed in the process. Literary labor is hard, hard work. Literary work also sometimes involves damage to an author’s ego. But I think that serious writers roll with the punches from their first readers and then get to work to make the story better. After all, it’s the reader’s experience that matters, not the writer’s. Not that readers call the shots. But it’s OK to argue.

One of the things that became clear was that Fugue in Ursa Major demands a sequel. The second book of a series must knit nicely with the first, so many of the revisions have involved background and setup for the sequel. A lot of work has gone into thinking about the characters, getting to know them, and getting them right.

Every self-published writer is terrified of not selling many books. I am, of course, developing a marketing plan for Fugue in Ursa Major. I’ve also gone to a good deal of trouble to ensure that the book is published with my own imprint — Acorn Abbey Books — rather than the publisher being listed as not my own Acorn Abbey imprint but instead one of the providers of on-demand printing. The book will be available for sale through Amazon, of course. But bookstores, it seems, don’t like to order books from Amazon. Bookstores will, however, order from small publishers as long as the orders go through their usual channels. So a considerable amount of work was involved in setting up the book for on-demand printing from Ingram, from which bookstores and libraries order books. This area of publishing and book distribution is changing rapidly. But I was in the publishing business for much of my life, so I am better prepared to navigate this terrain than many self-published authors. We shall see. Release day approaches.

In any case, I wanted to let blog readers know that I’m working as hard as I can to get the book out in June.