A Useful Tool

July 18, 2014July 18, 2014 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Someday, you’re going to be writing a story where you really, honestly need to know the time of sunrise, sunset, or twilight on a particular day in a particular place.

Maybe you’re writing historical fiction, and need to know whether your characters are going to have enough light left in the day to do whatever it is you want them to do.

Maybe you’re writing fantasy or horror, and need to know when your creepy-crawlies can emerge from their coffins or lairs or shadowy pits and go forth to rule the night.

If so, then the U.S. Naval Observatory has a web page for you.

The web page speaks of “civil twilight,” defined as:

the limit at which twilight illumination is sufficient, under good weather conditions, for terrestrial objects to be clearly distinguished; at the beginning of morning civil twilight, or end of evening civil twilight, the horizon is clearly defined and the brightest stars are visible under good atmospheric conditions in the absence of moonlight or other illumination. In the morning before the beginning of civil twilight and in the evening after the end of civil twilight, artificial illumination is normally required to carry on ordinary outdoor activities.

This is the kind of twilight you’ll probably be concerned with. There are two other, more specialized, twilights – nautical twilight is when “the illumination level is such that the horizon is still visible even on a Moonless night, allowing mariners to take reliable star sights for navigational purposes” and astronomical twilight is when “the center of the Sun is geometrically 18 degrees below the horizon.” But unless your protagonist is a navigator or an astronomer – in which case you’ve got more research ahead of you than a quick web page check is going to handle — you probably won’t need either of those.

In the meantime, think good thoughts about the U. S. Navy, figuring these things out so writers don’t have to.

A Couple of Good Things

July 4, 2014July 4, 2014 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The first is a link to an IndieGoGo fundraiser for Hadley Rille Books, a small press specializing in speculative fiction and prioritizing “new voices from women and other historically marginalized points of view” since 2005. They’re raising funds for the expansion necessary to stay competitive in today’s commercial environment.

Rewards at various levels include e-books, hardcover novels, and e-book bundles, manuscript critiques and full-manuscripts edits, tuckerization^† in a novel by a Hadley Rille author, and more.

The second is a link to the on-line archives of Florilegium, the journal of the Canadian Society of Medievalists/Société canadienne des médiévistes, who now have the complete run of their back issues, dating from 1979 onwards, available in digital form. Writers of fantasy and historical fiction set in actual or pseudo-medieval societies would probably have a good time prowling through the articles available.

As usual, the internet is full of wondrous things. Go forth and enjoy.

^†A term from the sf/fantasy community, referring to the inclusion of a person, or the use of the person’s name, in a novel or story, usually as a complimentary in-joke. Opportunities for tuckerization are often offered as prizes in benefit auctions and the like. The term derives from the name of sf writer Wilson Tucker, who pioneered the practice.

Fun Stuff for Word Nuts

May 30, 2014 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

And aren’t we all?

Go over to the Games with Words page and have a jolly good time.

So far, I’ve discovered that I speak American English – big surprise there, right? – and have a large vocabulary. (No surprise there, either.)

Today’s Bit of Amusement

May 20, 2014May 21, 2014 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

A Guardian archive of digested (which is to say, condensed) classics – parody/pastiches by John Crace.

A sample, from the digested version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

The flood had made and the only thing for it was to wait for the turn of tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the germs of empires.

Between us four was the bond of the sea, making us tolerant of each other’s yarns. Which was just as well when Marlow, sitting serenely as a Buddha, began his two hour, Freudian critique of colonialism.

And another couple of choice bits, this time from the digested version of Dickens’s David Copperfield:

“Mr Murdstone and I are now wed, Davey,” said my mother, “so if he wants to give you a good beating then I shall have to let him.”

“Indeed I do,” sneered Mr Murdstone, “for he is a disagreeable boy. And when he has been thrashed sufficiently, he shall be sent to Mr Creakle’s school in London to be thrashed some more.”

***

…the only break in my day was the invitation to take tea with an unattractive clerk by the name of Uriah Heep. “Most ‘umble,” he said. In truth, I did not much care for Heep, finding him a deeply aspirant member of the lower orders, but I bore myself with the dignity expected of distressed gentlefolk and treated him with a patronising contempt disguised as good manners.

There are over a hundred of these gems in the archive. Go have fun.

Nostalgia Lane, in Need of Repaving

May 18, 2014May 18, 2014 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The Fairlee Drive-In movie theatre in Fairlee, Vermont, is holding a Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary to upgrade from 35mm to digital – a vital move if they hope to continue in business, given that the movie industry is rapidly going all-digital. (Paramount has already made the switch.)

This is a drive-in movie theatre that’s been in almost continuous operation since it opened in 1950, and is one of only two drive-ins left in the USA with its own attached motel. Furthermore, their snack stand features hamburgers made from Black Angus cattle raised on the family farm of the theatre owners, as well as other locally-sourced items.

They’ve got some really great rewards for their backers, too: a $200 donation gets a room for two on a Friday night at the drive-in’s motel, plus 2 movie admissions and free burgers and fries and popcorn from the concession stand. For the “go big or stay home” crowd, a $5K donation lets you own the drive in for a night, along with as many of your guests as can fit on their 400-car field, and a $10K or more donation gets the drive-in’s original carbon-arc projector and related equipment, as purchased in 1950 and used at the theatre until 2003.

I have fond memories of going with my parents to the drive-in when I was a kid in Florida, back when vast herds of them covered the plains like the buffalo, and I’d hate to see another one vanish.

Road Books

May 13, 2014May 13, 2014 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

I’ve blogged before about the kind of audiobook that makes good road-trip listening: as I put it at the time, “a book that isn’t so complex you’ll lose track of everything else you’re doing, but with enough stuff going on that you’ll stay alert and not succumb to highway hypnosis.”

Our most recent road book discovery has been the Victorian mystery novels of Wilkie Collins. Not only are they full of interesting characters and incidents, they’re also long and full of enough plotty goodness to beguile a couple of eight or ten hour round trip journeys each. We started out with The Moonstone, which involves (among other things) a mysterious gem stone stolen from the eye of an idol, and have moved on to The Woman in White (which after only about a dozen chapters – out of sixty-two – is already promising us a Bad Baronet.) The former is available for free from Librivox, and in several for-pay versions; the latter is available for free from Lit2Go.

An unexpected (by me, anyhow) bonus: For a Victorian male novelist, Collins does some excellent female characters. He’s definitely better at them than Dickens, whose female characters usually make me want to slap them silly.

Looky Here!

April 13, 2014April 13, 2014 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

It’s National Library Week! And the Oxford University Press is making its on-line resources free this week in honor of the occasion!

(Username and password: libraryweek. Access in the US and Canada only.)

More from the Department of Interesting Stuff

April 7, 2014April 7, 2014 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Here . . . have an article from the LA Times about a pair of stolen paintings – a Gauguin and a Cezanne – that turned out to have spent the last 44 years hanging in the kitchen of a retired Sicilian auto worker “who was unaware of their value” (he apparently picked them up at an auction for the equivalent of $30.)

It’s an interesting tidbit of news, and I’m only inclined to take issue with one statement in it. The Sicilian auto worker in question may have been unaware of the paintings’ monetary worth, but – considering that he kept them in his home while he was working in Turin, and went to the trouble of taking them with him and hanging them up in his kitchen when he retired to Sicily – he was clearly aware of their value. They were pictures he saw, and bought, and kept where he could see them every day, and it was all about him and the paintings, and nothing to do with who might have painted them or how much a collector might say they would bring at auction.

There are some critics out there, I am sure, who would assert that Sicilian Auto Guy wasn’t loving the pictures enough, or in the right way – because there are critics out there who say the same sort of thing about works of literature. But I say that those critics are guilty of snobbery and intellectual arrogance – and I ought to know intellectual arrogance when I see it, because it’s my own second-favorite besetting sin.

(My very favorite is Wrath. But after several decades of hard work, I’ve managed to tamp it down it to “at least I mostly behave myself in public” levels.)

Today’s Bit of Amusement

April 1, 2014April 1, 2014 ~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Found elseweb: The Cowboy Hávamál, or, Old Norse wisdom translated into Wise Old Cowpoke^†. A couple of brief samples:

You’re a goddamned fool
if you think you’ll live forever
just because you won’t fight.
Say nobody ever kills you –
old age is no peach, either.

***

Don’t think you’re the goddamned smartest,
or the toughest, or the best at anything,
and don’t let folks think you are, either.
Otherwise you’ll find out the hard way
that someone is always better.

^†It’s one of the Three Faces of the Action Hero, which are like the Three Faces of the Triple Goddess, only different: The Kid, the Gunslinger, and the Wise Old Cowpoke. They can be seen all in one movie in the first Star Wars film, with Luke and Han and Obi-Wan (aka Old Ben) Kenobi, or serially over time in the television and film career of Clint Eastwood.