Tag Archives: David B. Coe

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Writing-Tip Wednesday: “Pitch Inside”

September 30, 2020 David B. Coe

In the mid-1980s, my favorite baseball player on the planet was a young pitcher for the New York Mets named Dwight Gooden. Gooden had a meteoric career that was shortened by injuries and chronic drug abuse. But for the first two and a half years of his career, from the beginning of his rookie season in 1984 to mid-season in 1986, he was one of the best pitchers baseball has ever seen. He was only 20 years old when he entered the league, but already he had outstanding velocity, a monster curveball, pinpoint control, and uncommon poise for a player so young.

Why am I starting a writing-tip post with a discussion of Dwight Gooden? Read on…

At the time of his great success, New York Magazine ran a profile of him and a teammate (an equally young, equally talented, equally troubled outfielder named Darryl Strawberry). In the profile there was a picture of Gooden in uniform and you could see scrawled on the underside of the visor of his baseball cap the words “Pitch inside.”

Pitching inside is, quite often, the best way to get hitters out, particularly if the pitcher in question happens to have great velocity and control. When pitched inside, hitters can’t extend their arms fully and thus can’t generate as much power in their swing. Usually. The problem with pitching inside is that if the pitcher doesn’t have quite enough velocity, or if he misses his intended target by even an inch or two, his offering becomes very hittable, often resulting in massive home runs, or at the very least, crisp base hits.

Pitchers can do okay for a while pitching hitters away, but they become great when they take on that risk and throw the ball inside.

High risk, high reward.

Writers need to take risks as well. We can tell a decent story playing it safe, but we flourish when we take chances, when we explore bold ideas for our stories, or create stunningly original worlds, or develop plots that are destined to surprise and captivate our readers.

The Outlanders, by David B. Coe (jacket art by Romas Kukalis) My first book, Children of Amarid, was a fairly standard epic fantasy, though it had the seeds of more within the nuances of its plot. It was my second novel, though, The Outlanders, that convinced me I could succeed as a writer. The reason was, that second book was different. It introduced a technological, crime-ridden world unlike anything I’d ever tried writing. It created an unusual dynamic among three of my lead characters — two of the characters, who were allies, spoke different languages, and they had to rely on the third for translation. But neither of them trusted that third character.

I struggled with that book far, far more than I had with the first, and I think my struggles were symptomatic of factors that helped the book succeed. It was an ambitious project. It forced me to grow as an artist. Nothing felt familiar or pat, and so the finished product read as something fresh and exciting and innovative. As I say, the first book was fine, but the series won the Crawford Award because of The Outlanders.

It’s easy to advise you to take chances, to push yourself out of your comfort zone. Turning that advice into instruction in the form of concrete steps is more difficult. Every story is different, every project presents its own challenges.

Still, I can say this: It’s easy to grow attached to one particular franchise, one particularly world and set of characters and style of story. Certainly I have written a good deal in the Thieftaker world, and will soon be coming out with new work about Ethan Kaille, Sephira Pryce, et al. The fact is, though, each time I have moved on to a new project, I have tried (admittedly with varying degrees of success) to challenge myself, to force myself to grow.

After the LonTobyn books, I moved to Winds of the Forelands and Blood of the Southlands, which demanded far more sophisticated world building and character work. After those, I turned to Thieftaker, adding historical and mystery elements to my storytelling and limiting my point of view to a single character. I also started working on the Justis Fearsson books, which explored mental health issues and were my first forays into writing in a contemporary setting. Then I took on the Islevale books, time travel/epic fantasies that presented the most difficult plotting issues I’ve ever faced.

We can also challenge ourselves within a particular franchise by shaking up the formula, by changing our approach to plotting, or taking characters and character relationships in new and unexpected directions.

The point is, if we challenge ourselves, if we remind ourselves to “pitch inside,” we will breathe new life into our work, grow as artists, and, likely, have more fun.

Keep writing!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: The Peaceful Transfer of Power

September 28, 2020 David B. Coe

For students of American history, the late eighteenth century is filled with consequential dates and events. The signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the end of the Revolutionary War in 1781, the meeting of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and the ratification of the Constitution in 1788.

The date that marked the true establishment of our American republic, however, did not come until 1800-1801. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, narrowly defeated Federalist President John Adams in a national election. The following March, as spelled out in the fledgling Constitution, Adams and his fellow Federalists voluntarily relinquished power so that their partisan rivals could assume control of the government. This acquiescence to the people’s will, this statement of belief in the greater good, turned the ideal of a democratic republic into reality.

Over the past 220 years, our nation has repeated this ritual literally dozens of times. Democratic-Republicans have given way to Whigs, who have given way to Democrats, who have given way to Republicans, who, in turn, have given way once more to Democrats. And so on. The peaceful transfer of power lies at the very heart of our system of government. Declaring and winning independence was important. Creating a foundational document, flawed though it was, that spelled out how our government would work was crucial.

None of it would have meant a thing, however, if in actual practice America’s election losers refused to accept defeat, to acknowledge the legitimate claim to power of America’s election winners. Only twice in our history, has the peaceful transfer of power not gone as the Founders intended. The first time, in 1860, Republican Abraham Lincoln defeated three other candidates, and the nation went to war with itself. The second time, in 1876, America’s leaders barely avoided a second armed conflict by installing Rutherford B. Hayes over the election’s actual winner, Samuel Tilden. The deal struck by party leaders condemned the American South to more than a century of racial tyranny.

Now, nearly a century and a half later, we face the prospect of a third attempt to undermine the peaceful transfer of power. Donald Trump, knowing that he is deep trouble politically, has refused to say that he will honor the results of this year’s election. He is doing all he can to sow doubt about the integrity of our voting system, particularly mail-in ballots. More ominous, he and his campaign are making overtures to Republican-controlled state legislatures in battleground states, hoping they will appoint electors who support him, regardless of the election’s outcome in those states.

This is unheard of. It is anti-democratic. It is utterly corrupt. It is immoral. Most of all, it poses an existential threat to the continued existence of our nation as we know it. Our Constitutional system, for all its strengths, is completely dependent upon the good faith of all actors involved. The moment one party threatens to ignore the will of the people, to seek power regardless of vote count, the entire structure is revealed as brittle, even fragile. So grave is this threat, that the U.S. Senate, whose 100 members cannot agree on the time of day, much less any sort of policy, on Thursday passed by unanimous consent a resolution reaffirming the importance of the peaceful transfer of power to the integrity and viability of our system of government.

Let’s be clear about a few of things.

First, voting by mail has been going on for decades. It is a reliable, safe practice. Instances of voter fraud in this country are incredibly rare, and that holds for vote-by-mail as well as in-person voting.

Second, there is no difference between the mechanisms used for absentee ballot voting and vote-by-mail. It’s all the same.

Third, as residents of Florida, Donald and Melania Trump will both be voting by mail in that state.

Fourth, Donald Trump expects to lose. A candidate who thinks he’s going to win does not cast doubt on the process. He does not refuse to say that he will accept the results of the election. He does not attempt to enlist partisan allies in a conspiracy to steal power.

Fifth, the greater Joe Biden’s vote total, nationally and in each state, the harder it will be for Trump and his allies to steal the election. This is not the year to vote for a third-party candidate. This is not the year to skip voting altogether. The stakes could not be higher.

I am no fan of Mitt Romney, and this past week he didn’t exactly endear himself to me. But he did say something that is worth paraphrasing. In affirming his own commitment to the peaceful transfer of power, he said that the idea, and ideal, of respecting the people’s voice, of surrendering power to a victorious rival, is what separates us from Belarus, from quasi-democracies and nations that use the rhetoric of liberty to mask dictatorship and authoritarianism.

The United States has honored its commitment to this principle for most of its existence. We cannot allow one man’s ego and insatiable appetite for power and profit to undo more than two centuries of history.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: Crutch Words — Finding Them and Limiting Them

September 23, 2020 David B. Coe

Last week, John Hartness, my good friend and the owner and editor at Falstaff Books, posted on Facebook about something he was seeing while editing manuscripts. Many of his writers were starting too many lines of dialogue with, “So…” As John said in the post, “We do this in real life, and it does sounds realistic, but most of us (myself 100% included) are using it too often, and it doesn’t work as well on the page as it does in real live conversation.”

What I found especially interesting about John’s post was the response to it. Writer after writer (including me) confessed to relying on all sorts of repeating words and phrases — what we in the industry call “crutch words.”

I use “So…” a bit, though not that much. On the other hand, lately my editors and I have noticed that I start way too many lines of dialogue with “Well…” As with “So…” it is something lots of us do in actual conversations, but on the page it becomes intrusive and repetitive.

I have lots of other crutch words, too, but honestly I’m reluctant to share them with you, because I don’t want you looking for them while reading my books and stories. Once you start doing this, it can totally ruin a work of fiction for you.

Suffice it to say, all of us have verbal tics that show up in our prose — words we overuse, approaches to dialogue that occur again and again, mannerisms we give to our characters that repeat themselves throughout our stories. Sometimes they are the result of habit. I know that in my case they often are a product of laziness — I need a gesture or a spoken word, and rather than pausing to come up with something different and unexpected, I throw in a standby. Moreover, even as we work to eliminate some crutches from our writing vocabularies, new ones creep in. (For me, “Well…” didn’t used to be a problem, and I’m not entirely sure when it showed up.)

So how do we deal with this issue?

First, understand that this doesn’t make you a bad writer. All writers from beginners to seasoned professionals grapple with crutch words. Don’t let yours undermine your confidence.

The key, of course, is to identify your wording habits and control them. Beta readers can be enormously helpful in this regard. When you ask people to read your manuscripts, by all means ask them to look for plotting problems, and character inconsistencies, and all the other narrative problems we writers sometimes face. But also ask them to keep an eye out for overused words and phrases. If and when they find some, start a list and keep that list around for future projects.

If you don’t have Beta readers, or don’t want to wait for outside feedback, try reading your books and stories aloud. This is one of those problems that we can gloss over all too easily when reading through a manuscript. But if we read the work out loud, and thus hear the story as well as see it, we are more likely to recognize those annoying repetitions. Again, as we find them, we should add them to our list.

Once we start to develop a bank of overused words, we can use the search function in our word processing software to find all instances of a given word or phrase and look for ways to replace some of the offending passages with something else. Remember, you don’t need to eliminate every “So…” occurrence (or whatever crutch you happen to be looking for at a particular time). The idea is to use the word/phrase in moderation.

How many instances is too many? A good question, and the truth is I don’t have a great answer. I might use as a yardstick one of my completed books, one I believe is well-written, polished, and relatively free of crutch words. If the new book has way more “Well…”s (for instance) than that old one, I assume there’s a problem and I try to fix it. If the numbers in the new book are about the same as, or lower than, the older yardstick, I move on to the next crutch. I will confess that my running list of crutch words/phrases has probably 50 entries. Maybe more. Some I’ve managed to control and eliminate as problems. Others, not so much. And, as I said before, I’m always adding new ones.

Finally, keep in mind that most readers don’t notice our crutches nearly as much as we do, or as a good editor might. Chances are one or two verbal mannerisms are going to sneak by our attempts to limit them and will wind up in the published version of our book. Don’t worry too much about that. Make sure the word is on your list, so you can address the issue in subsequent manuscripts, and then move on.

So, best of luck.

Well, keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: Court Wars

September 21, 2020 David B. Coe

Sometimes I write my Monday posts on Saturday morning. It’s just a convenient time. And so right now I am at my desk, trying to marshal my thoughts, and rein in my emotions.

I am devastated by the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It pains me that her last hours were spent thinking as much about the political chaos that would follow her death as about her family and a momentous life well-lived. Within an hour of her passing, tributes to her stunning career were already being drowned out by the fight over how and when she ought to be replaced. She deserved better.

And so do we, as a nation. I am enraged by the staggering hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell and his Republican colleagues in the Senate. In 2016, after the death of Antonin Scalia, they refused to allow hearings or a vote on Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. It’s too close to the election, they said. The new President, whoever that may be, ought to have the opportunity to fill the vacancy. No, it’s not ideal to leave a seat on the Court open for so long, but this principle is worth the risk. Scalia died in March. His seat remained open for more than a year.

We are now forty-five days from another Presidential election. If the Senate were to follow McConnell’s “rule” on allowing new Presidents to choose a Court nominee, we might have to wait a total of five months. But now Republicans say, There is plenty of time for the current occupant of the White House to select a successor. It would be dangerous to leave the seat open for so long. Fucking unbelievable.

And yet, utterly predictable. Because the real problem is that we have allowed the Court to become completely politicized. The judiciary was designed and intended to be the least political branch of our government. It was supposed to be above politics, the institutional referee between the two elected branches. How far we have fallen from that ideal. Just today, a friend asked me if I could think of any other nation on the planet whose selection of judges was more riven by politics than ours. I couldn’t.

Like everything else in our system of government, in our whole society, all matters pertaining to the courts have become hyper-partisan. It is almost impossible to believe this now, but when Scalia’s nomination came to a Senate vote, he was confirmed 98-0. Ginsberg, as liberal as Scalia was conservative, won confirmation 96-3. I doubt we’ll see another vote like that on a Supreme Court Justice in this century.

Conservatives point to Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful nomination of Robert Bork as the start of the Court’s politicization. They claim that liberal Democrats, opposed to Bork’s ideology, misrepresented his record and vilified him. I remember that fight, which took place during my first semester in graduate school, quite differently. Bork’s very nomination was a provocation. Before becoming a candidate for the Court, Bork was best known as Richard Nixon’s Solicitor General, who, on what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. He did this after Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned in protest rather than carry out Nixon’s order. By the time of his Supreme Court hearings, Bork had long since revealed himself as a man who placed party before country, and as an advocate for unbridled executive power. He had been a villain to the Left for more than a decade. He never should have been nominated.

The fact is, it doesn’t matter who started the trend. It’s here now. And with McConnell’s brazen disregard for Constitutional norms in the case of the Garland nomination, it has been escalated to full-scale political war. If McConnell pushes through a Trump nominee before the election, or during a lame-duck session after it, and if, as polls currently predict, the election brings a Biden victory and a Democratic takeover of the Senate, I expect Democrats to attempt to change the structure of the Court in next year’s Congressional session. The Constitution says nothing about the number of justices who can serve on the Court, and it grants to Congress wide discretion in creating and maintaining all levels of the Federal Judiciary.

The problem with this is, as soon as the Democrats lose control of the Senate, the Republicans can change the composition again. And so on, until the Court becomes a caricature of itself, and one of the bedrock institutions of our republic is destroyed for all time.

One solution would be for Senate Republicans to recognize their own hypocrisy and refuse to vote on a Trump nominee. It would only take four of them, and I wish I believed that among the fifty-three members of the GOP Senate caucus there are four people of integrity. But I don’t.

That leaves few options and little hope for a near-term de-escalation of the Court battles. I am as pessimistic right now about the future of our system of government as I have ever been. Another legacy of this dark era in our history.

And I end this piece as I began it: with regret that the life of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a gender pioneer, a brilliant jurist, a champion for the dispossessed, the disadvantaged, and the downtrodden, should be obscured by ridiculous and unreasonable political machinations.

We should be better than this. I grieve that we are not.

Blogging, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Photo Friday: Three Butterflies

September 18, 2020 David B. Coe

Butterfly season is winding down here in Tennessee. We may get a few fall species before the weather turns cold, but many of the summer regulars are gone now. We had a slow start to our butterfly watching, but in the last few weeks of summer we made up for it. I’ve posted other photos already, here, here, and here.

Today, I offer one more collection of images. The butterfly with the bold eye spots on the wings is a Common Buckeye, one of my favorites. The small yellow one is a Sleepy Orange, and the butterfly with the complex pattern has a name to match: the Variegated Fritillary.

I hope all of you have a wonderful weekend. Stay safe, be kind to one another. See you Monday.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Writing-Tip Wednesday: On Blogging

September 16, 2020 David B. Coe

So, at the risk of going full-on meta, I would like to post today about blogging — the value and costs of maintaining a blog, the secrets of keeping the blog fresh for you and for your readers.

When I got into the writing business, personal and professional websites were just starting to pop up. I remember my editor asking me at one point, shortly before the release of my first novel, if I had a website. He was pleased when I told him I did — some of his writers had been resistant. I also remember people in my little town being more impressed that I had a website than with the fact that I was about to be published for the first time.

“My first book’s about to come out.”

“Nice. Good for you.”

“And I have a website.”

“Oooooohhhhhh!!! You have a website??!!”

Seriously.

A few years later, weblogs became trendy, and my editor, agent, and publicist were all over me to start blogging. Soon everyone had a blog, and drawing attention to any one particular blog proved ever more difficult. But the accepted industry wisdom stated that writers who wanted to be successful, who wanted to develop and keep a substantial fanbase, needed to blog. Putting out books and publicizing them on our websites was no longer enough. Now we needed to generate original content on a regular — some said daily! — basis.

This lasted about until Facebook became the thing late in the first decade of the new millennium. With the advent of social media, blogs started to appear cumbersome, overly formal, and not nearly immediate enough.

And yet today, with the age of social media in full swing and not going anywhere anytime soon, some of the wisdom generated in those early years of web access remain true. A writer can’t survive without a website. And blogging remains a viable way to reach readers.

After allowing my blog to lag for a time, I have recommitted myself to it this year, and I’ve been pleased with the results. I didn’t want to post everyday. That would have been overwhelming and it would have quickly turned blogging into a burden, a commitment I resented. I didn’t want that. But I wanted to generate content, for my readers and for myself. I wanted to have a structured schedule that would keep me on task and that would bring readers to my site on a regular basis. But, I wondered, what should I write about?

Even before Covid-19 and the protests that have swept across the country, I had a sense that this would be a year worth chronicling. The election alone promised to make it such. And so I knew that one day a week, I wanted to have the freedom to write about whatever I chose.

I also was looking forward to a couple of writing events this year (the SAGA conference in early March, and another in August that was cancelled due to the pandemic) and so I thought it would make sense for me to offer writing advice once a week. A lot of my social media followers are launching writing careers of their own. This gave me a chance to pay it forward by helping them.

And finally, I had lamented last year that I didn’t pursue my passion for photography with enough discipline. With my Photo Friday feature, I hoped to force myself to pull out my camera more, to demand of myself that I do this thing I love, and share the results publicly.

I’m glad I did all of it. I have been able to chronicle this remarkable year, for myself and for my readers. I have put together what I think is a nice collection of writing-tip posts. And so far I have a good set of photos for the year. Moreover, traffic at my website has gone up between 100 and 200 percent since 2020 began. Not bad.

So, is blogging for you?

Let me start with this: The most important thing new writers can do to boost their careers is write their stories and books. If your time is limited, if you’re already struggling to find opportunities to work on the material you wish to publish, this might not be the time to start blogging. Concentrate on your writing and on your social media platforms, which ought to be far less time consuming.

I don’t recommend blogging for the sake of blogging. I spend a substantial amount of time on the posts I write, and already I’m thinking about ways I can change things up for next year. I want to keep the experience fresh. As I’ve said, I generate content for my readers, but I also committed to this for myself. I wanted to do it. I’ve enjoyed doing it. But it’s a lot of work. I feel the pressure of having to generate new content for three posts a week. Maintaining the blog in this way has not impacted my fiction writing productivity. Not yet. I can see, though, how it might.

One of the keys to successful blogging is posting something original on a regular and predictable basis. My readers know at this point to expect posts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Anything I offer beyond that is gravy. But I wouldn’t want to miss a day and let down those who follow my posts. If you want to blog, you should find a schedule that works for you. Even if you post only once a week, doing so regularly, and drawing readers’ attention to that weekly post, could be enough to gain some traffic at your site.

And, of course, that is the goal. I want readers to enjoy my posts. But I also want them at my site, where they can explore a bit and learn about my books. This is, among other things, a business venture.

I have also found it helpful to blog thematically. A number of my readers look forward to my writing tips. Others like the photos, and still others tune in for whatever rant I might put up on Mondays. My readers know what to expect, which, I believe, keeps them coming back. And, since I know what’s expected of me for each post, I find the essays easier to write. It’s no coincidence that week in and week out, the Monday posts are the most challenging to craft, because my “topic” for them is relatively amorphous.

In the end, only you can decide if maintaining a regular blog makes sense. Don’t let yourself be pressured into it by others who say you must do it to build an audience. Plenty of authors don’t blog, and many others only do so occasionally. The most important questions to ask yourself are, 1) Do I want to do this? 2) Do I have time to do this without sacrificing my productivity? And 3) Do I have something to say that will keep my readers and me engaged?

Best of luck. And keep writing!

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Welcome J.D. Blackrose! Her PLUCK AND COVER Blog Tour Stops Here Today!

September 15, 2020 David B. Coe

JD Blackrose Author Pic J.D. Blackrose (aka my wonderful friend, Joelle Reizes) is promoting Pluck and Cover, the first of her Zombie Cosmetologist novellas. (Find it on Amazon.) Here is the series description:

Waylon Jenkins has a problem. Well, he’s got a few of them. The ghost of Betsy Ross lives in his house, he’s pretty sure his favorite client is the victim of ongoing domestic violence, and he’s been roped into helping the police investigate a series of murders.

And his penis fell off in the shower this morning. He needs a new one, but none of his friends are willing to donate theirs to the cause.

In case it isn’t obvious by now, Waylon Jenkins is a zombie.

He’s also one of the most highly respected and in-demand makeup artists in Hollywood, and that keeps him busy, no matter how dead he is. But now he needs to find out who’s committing a string of murders, and make sure nobody hurts Mitzi (one name only), one of his most faithful (and famous) clients.

He also needs a new penis.

Pluck & Cover is the first in the Zombie Cosmetologist Novellas, a new series by J.D. Blackrose, author of The Soul Wars and The Devil’s Been Busy.

And here is an excerpt from the first novella! Enjoy!

Pluck and Cover, by JD Blackrose *****

“We have an appointment with Mr. Addington,” Perkins explained, handing over his identification and gesturing to the star pinned to his chest.

“Yes, sir.” The guard took his ID, checked a list, and made a call. The other guard came around to my side and knocked on the glass.

“We’ll need your ID, too, sir.”

“No problem.” I handed over my driver’s license, which was real, although the birth certificate I used to get it was fake, and he took it back to his colleague.

Perkins rolled the window up, calm on the exterior, while they checked us out, but he kept fiddling with the radio. Finally, they returned our identification, handed us each a badge to clip to our clothes, and slipped a placard onto the inside dash that indicated we were guests.

“Leave that on the car when you park, Captain. That way, we won’t suspect a bomb and blow up your car.”

Perkins and I both startled at that.

The guard grinned, or, more accurately, showed us his teeth. “Just kidding.”

“Ha.” That was all Perkins said. I didn’t say anything. We parked in a guest spot right in front of the door, and I checked my makeup in the mirror. It was a nervous tic, and I shouldn’t have done it, given the outside cameras and what the security staff would make of a man powdering his nose.

Perkins didn’t seem to care. He was taking in the surroundings, noting the cameras, the K9 patrol on the far end of the campus, the high fences, and he looked up when a helicopter flew overhead.

“What the fuck are they doing here? Wound care?” he whispered to me as we approached the imposing front doors. “Sure as hell isn’t bandages, antibiotics, and butterfly clips.”

Again, I went with silence.

The armed guards at the front door inspected our badges and waved us through. The man and woman at the desk inside the foyer wore plain clothes, pretending to be receptionists, but I noted the holster bulges under their jackets.

The woman addressed us. “Captain Perkins. Mr. Jenkins. Mr. Addington will see you in his office. Allow me to escort you.”

Perkins and I exchanged glances. Like we were allowing anything. It was obvious that they were calling the shots.

She used a card key to access the elevator and ushered us in, pressing the top floor, which was indicated by a blank white button. All the other buttons had numbers on them and were black. The C-suites ranked anonymity.

The door opened, and a man in a suit greeted us before we could step out.

“Captain Perkins and Mr. Jenkins, welcome. I’m Peter Shunk, Mr. Addington’s executive assistant. Please follow me.”

The elevator door closed behind us with a soft hum. Only way to go was forward, but my discomfort was growing by the minute. I was lucky I didn’t sweat, or it would be dripping down my face. Perkins kept pulling at his cuffs, a sign that even his cool veneer was cracking. He wore his uniform, a tan, crisp button-down, a dark tie with a silver tie clip, his star over his heart, and dark green khaki pants. His duty belt was fully kitted out with his gun on his right hip, extra mags in the back, handcuffs, pepper spray, and a pouch for gloves, as well as other paraphernalia that made him look dangerous and all business.

Peter slipped across the carpet like a well-oiled dinner cart in a five-star hotel, silent and unobtrusive. His steps didn’t even leave footprints in the plush fibers. With his dark slick hair, pointy chin, and mincing walk, he reminded me of a praying mantis waiting for an unsuspecting bug. I comforted myself with the thought that male praying mantises don’t live all that long and often met sad, tragic ends.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: A Planet In Its Death Throes

September 14, 2020 David B. Coe

Pray for the forest, pray to the tree,
Pray for the fish in the deep blue sea.
Pray for yourself and for God’s sake,
Say one for me,
Poor wretched unbeliever.

— James Taylor, “Gaia,” from Hourglass

This is what it looks like when a planet dies

milkovi SF Bay Bridge — The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge under skies turned orange by wildfire smoke. Photo credit: Milkovi, Unsplash

Cataclysmic fires along the American West Coast and the Australian East Coast, in the Amazon and on the Steppe. Once-in-a-millenium events occurring annually. Orange skies over California and the Pacific Northwest.

Storms of unprecedented destructive power striking with unnerving frequency, rendering the term “storm of the century” essentially meaningless.

Deepening cycles of drought and flood. Cities across the world literally being inundated by oceans and seas. Glaciers vanishing faster than even the most aggressive projections told us they would. Coral reefs dying. Species going extinct.

My older brothers turned me on to birdwatching when I was seven years old — a gift that has enriched my life for half a century. And over those same fifty years, North America’s population of birds has declined by nearly 30%. Habitat loss, pesticide use, careless architecture, and, yes, climate change — all have played a role. The result? Three billion fewer birds.

In the spring of 1985, my senior year in college, I took an ecology course for non-majors. It offered a survey of critical environmental issues facing the world, and discussed them in terms history and literature majors could understand. At the time, a scientific consensus had long-since formed around what was called at the time “the Greenhouse Effect,” what we later called global warming, and now global climate change. That was thirty-five years ago.

In 1896, a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius theorized that the unfettered burning of fossil fuels, and the resulting release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, would lead to a warming of the planet. Four years later, in 1901, his colleague, Nils Gustaf Ekholm, coined the term “Greenhouse Effect” to describe the phenomenon. In fairness, Ekholm thought it might be a good thing, as it would stave off future ice ages. But the concept is not a new one.

For decades, global temperatures have been rising to record setting levels, only to be topped the following year. Global temperature records were first kept in a systematic way around 1850. Of the 170 or so years for which figures exist, nineteen of the twenty hottest have occurred since 2000. 2020 is on pace to join the top five.

I am willing to engage on most political and social issues. I enjoy a good discussion, a vigorous debate. There are, though, a few topics on which I will no longer engage. First among them is bigotry of any sort — racism, sexism, homophobia, trans bias, religious bias, etc. Climate denial is a close second. (And this year, Covid denial has joined the list.)

This is no longer theory. It hasn’t been for a long, long time. Climate change is real. Our planet is dying. If we do nothing — if we as a global community continue on the path we’re on now, we will bequeath to our children and grandchildren a burnt husk of what was once earth. Future generations will live in a world that staggers from ecological crisis to ecological crisis, from catastrophe to catastrophe, from flood to drought to famine to pandemic and back again.

We have had ample opportunity to address the issue, and we have squandered one after another. We have absented ourselves from vital global treaties and doubled down on the sort of short-sighted consumerism that got us into this mess in the first place. Like James Taylor in the song quoted at the beginning of this post, I have no faith in our ability to save ourselves. We are a society that cannot bring ourselves to wear cloth masks for the common good. How are we supposed to make the economic transitions necessary to change economic course?

And the tragic thing is, addressing climate change could be a tremendous boon to our standing in the world, to our economic fortunes, to our commitment to education. This is the challenge of our time. It demands bold thinking, new industries, innovation and invention. Implementing the necessary changes would generate hundreds of thousands of jobs, replacing and more the jobs lost in the coal and oil industries. Fitting ecological imperatives to our national love affair with cars and trucks could revitalize the American automotive industry. Does anyone really believe that the internal combustion engine, invented more than a century ago, is the be-all and end-all of technological ingenuity? Of course not.

But we have to have the will to change, the courage to say “Saving our planet for our children is worth whatever sacrifices we might have to make.” And, from what I can see, we don’t.

I wish I could end on a more hopeful note.

November’s election is about more than ending corruption, about more than beating back hate and prejudice, about more than the Supreme Court, about more than taxes and health care and social justice. It is about saving our planet. It is about keeping ourselves from a slow and painful march toward extinction.

Please vote.

David B. Coe, Author of Fantasy

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