2017 in a Nutshell

So as we creep towards the end of 2017, I wanted to summarize a few of the things that happened this year. Which was a lot – partly because a lot of things came to fruition this year that had been in the works for a while.

So, in no particular order:

Court of Twilight was published this fall! This is definitely the final stretch of a years-long process in writing and editing it. The first draft was written in 2013, and the book came out almost exactly four years later. It’s felt very satisfying to be finished with the book and hearing from readers who’ve enjoyed it.

Changeling has a second draft! While it’s still unclear if or when this will actually make its way to readers, I finished the second draft right before Christmas. This was another long-term project; the first draft was written as a National Novel Writing Month project in 2014, and it’s gotten only sporadic attention since.

I worked in Mexico! I was in Baja California Sur in January and February working as a guide on the Sea of Cortez. I saw my first blue whales, and we were running into big pods of dolphins about every week. I saw grey whales on their calving grounds. I skiffed around with playful juvenile sea lions, and saw tropicbirds and blue-footed boobies. And a ton of beautiful sunsets.  And at the end of the month I met up with my friend and amazing co-guide Teresa and traveled around the southern cape hiking, beach camping, and wallowing in natural hot springs. If you get a chance to travel to Baja, I would highly recommend spending time there.

I worked an amazing Alaska season! This was my third Alaska season guiding aboard the Discoverer. The crew on board this year were lovely, and we had a bunch of great trips. Probably the highlight was the week a Japanese tour company chartered the whole boat. They brought five of their own guides and translators, and a bunch of really, really good food. We got to stop at a bear-viewing location that I had never been to before, and watched brown bears fishing for salmon.  And got to watch a group of bubble-net-feeding humpbacks get streaked by an orca pod that charged through right where the humpbacks were trying to get themselves organized…

I wrote a few small things that turned out well! One is an article being published next month. And I wrote the first short story I’ve written in maybe eight years, of which I am super proud, and might be unintentionally hilarious to anyone who’s ever worked at the Glacier Lodge.

I‘m making an ops guide to Southeast Alaska! I journal every day when I’m guiding. Over the past three years, I’ve accumulated a huge amount of notes on the places I’ve visited while tooling around Southeast on a tiny expedition ship. Last spring I started compiling the entries by location, and I’ve ended up with a huge Scrivener file listing over seventy different locations I’ve visited, with info on bushwhacking and paddling routes, landmarks, wildlife sightings, and notes on the history of the area. It’s going to be a great resource for refreshing my memory on these locations as I revisit the sites this summer on various trips. And since most of these sites are bays in the middle of nowhere, (not designated wilderness, but close), there’s very little existing publicly-available documentation on them. (Yes, this is why you should visit Southeast Alaska on the Discoverer, because we know where the cool stuff is…)

I’m done with the requirements for my captain’s license! This is another thing I’ve been working on for a while. I first started working on boats ten years ago, as a deckhand on the Aialik Voyager back in 2007, then spent five years hopping on and off water taxis while working at a lodge that was only accessible by boat. Three years ago I joined my current company, working as a guide on the Discoverer.  At the end of the summer, I finally earned enough sea time to apply for my license. I spent the fall studying, and passed the exams earlier this month.

I worked a few winter kayak trips! I was lucky enough to meet up with a Seward-based kayak company, who was looking for someone to run trips for them in the winter. It’s slow, as it’s winter, and we’ve had a few of the trips turn into winter hikes because the seas were snotty, but it’s been lovely to be able to get out on the water in the off-season. On our trip yesterday, we ate lunch at the base of a 75-foot frozen waterfall, and three juvenile sea lions were following our boats on the way home. Tell me that isn’t an amazing day job? (Of course, the day before, I beached us a half-mile into the paddle, because the wind came up and my novice-paddler clients were getting blown into a giant sandbar. Ran the rest of the trip as a hike. And got frost nip on two toes from walking around on snow in rain boots. This is why guiding is like a giant lottery, and I can never bring myself to stop playing.)

I spent time with my grandmother. This isn’t an entirely happy update; my grandmother passed away in August. But I was able to spent over a month with her in March and April. I came back to see her twice on my breaks from the Discoverer, including just before she passed. If there are two things I can say that will in any way sum up the sort of person she was, it’s this: by the time she died she had happily given away most of the paintings hanging in her house to people she thought would appreciate them, and the day before she passed, she asked me to come over and fix her ceiling fan (which I did, and it was the last time I saw her).

So that was 2017. I hope you're finding some good memories to look back on as we start a new year, and I hope you have many exciting things to look forward to in 2018.

The Real-World Science of Ignoring Gorillas

I want to take some time to talk about a few of the sources that helped to shape my novel, Court of Twilight. One of these  is a well-known cognitive psychology experiment, that's actually mentioned in the book by one of the characters. The experiment is also the titular illusion in the book The Invisible Gorilla, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. Written by two cognitive psychologists, The Invisible Gorilla is an explanation of erroneous assumptions about how our brains work - what the authors refer to as everyday illusions. The researchers discuss the effects these assumptions have on how we perceive our world, and also how we act based on those erroneous perceptions.

The Invisible Gorilla cover image. Credited to ABSODALS/Getty Images

The Invisible Gorilla's cover is striking . A man in a business suit, reading a newspaper, stands obliviously next to a gorilla, who is also reading a newspaper. I think the visual image, as much as anything, was something I remembered when I was mulling over my own ideas for a story about modern-day fairies. Here is an image of something entirely unexpected (for a gorilla) but also something entirely normal (for a person). Aur gorilla is standing next to a rather urbane-looking businessman, who is either completely indifferent to his simian companion, or else completely unaware of him.

If you’re not familiar with the titular experiment, I would highly recommend you experience it for yourself. There’s a link to it here, at the Invisible Gorilla website.

No, go ahead, I’ll still be here when you get back.

Got it? Pretty cool. To summarize, the video shows two teams of players passing a basketball back and forth. The viewer is asked to watch the video, and keep track of the number of passes made by the players wearing white, while ignoring the passes made by the players wearing black. After watching the videos, the researchers ask the viewer how many passes they counted. And then, the researchers ask if the viewer saw anything unusual in the video – such as an actor in a gorilla costume walking through the middle of the players?

Although the gorilla is clearly visible in the video – it turns and thumps its chest at the camera, no less - about half of viewers fail to see it. The authors refer to this phenomenon as inattentional blindness. The brain, when concentrating on a task, shunts its attention to that task to such a degree that it starts ignoring everything irrelevant to that task - even things that are unusual, notable, and significant. Something else that Chabris and Simons note is that many people, when told that they did, in fact, ignore a gorilla walking through the middle of a basketball game, react with shock. Some study participants even went so far as to accuse the researchers of tampering with the tape, so certain were they that there hadn’t been a gorilla in the video they’d seen.

It’s a startling experiment – I was certainly surprised when I saw the video, posted on a friend’s Facebook page several years ago. And no, I did not see the gorilla either – which was probably a good thing, because I don’t know if I would have remembered the video if I hadn’t been one of the people on whom this rather suprising illusion worked. The illusion is startling mainly because we’re not used to distrusting the accuracy of our perceptions. Our brains, we’d like to think, present us with an accurate and infallible view of the world – with no omissions, paraphrases, or edits. When we do happen upon an instance where our brain’s editing, filtering, and paraphrasing mechanisms are revealed, it feels like a cheat. Like we’re getting the Cliff Notes version of reality, instead of the real thing.

When looking for a way to ground a traditional feature of fairies into a modern setting, using a beefed-up version of inattentional blindness seemed ideal. It gave me a way to ground the trows’ magical abilities (or liabilities) within a framework that had a real basis in psychology. I hope that the mention of inattentional blindness in Court of Twilight might also provoke some readers to learn more about the cognitive illusions discussed in The Invisible Gorilla. As Chabris and Simon say in the introduction to their book “When you finish this book, you will be able to glimpse the man behind the curtain and some of the tiny gears and pulleys that govern your thoughts and beliefs… Ultimately, seeing through the veils that distort how we perceive ourselves and the world will connect you – for perhaps the first time – with reality.”

The Invisible Gorilla is available for purchase here.  More information on Chabris and Simons' experiments on everyday cognitive illusions can be found on their website, The Invisible Gorilla.com.

So it has been a ridiculously long time since I’ve added any content to my blog. I do have an excuse, of sorts - I wrote a novel, which has recently been published by a small SciFi/Fantasy publisher out of Washington, DC. Which means that for over a year now, getting that book edited and out the door has been the main focus for what writing time I have outside of guiding gigs. I am ridiculously happy with how the book turned out (I have a marvelous editor, and the folks at Parvus have been lovely to work with) and if you are at all into fantasy books, I’d encourage you to check it out via any of the links to the right, or through whatever bookstore you’d like. (And if you like it please leave a review - those are hugely helpful in helping connect Court of Twilight with readers who might enjoy it).

Court of Twilight is, for all intents and purposes, a a story of a girl who goes looking for her missing flatmate - and ends up finding an entire society of hidden beings living in Dublin, under the unsuspecting noses of most of the city’s inhabitants. It’s a story about isolation, friendship and family, and whether being a hero is still a good thing to be if you’re risking yourself for someone you don’t know all that well. Ideas that ended up in Court of Twilight came from all over the map. (It was written all over the map as well - the idea that became the novel started in New Zealand, the first draft was written almost two years later in North Carolina and West Virginia, and was finished and revised in Alaska. And some of the editing was done in the linen storage locker of a boat in Mexico.)

One idea I had for this blog was to briefly touch on a few of the elements that went into the novel - where the idea came from, why I thought it was appealing, and how I incorporated it into the story. In as non-spoilerey a way as possible, hopefully. And for the first topic -well, let’s say there is a reason why two of the three characters pictured on Court of Twilight’s front cover are translucent.

I’ve heard writing described as writers are fashioning the books that they themselves want to read - or would have wanted to read as children, if they’re writing for a younger crowd. Writers are our own book’s first audience. If we want to write something that’s meaningful to other people, it first has to be meaningful to us. I also think  this applies to writers who are trying to add scary or unsettling elements into their books. If a writer is going to write something unsettling - it has to be unsettling to the writer, first.

I have been frightened by invisible thing since I was a kid. It didn’t matter what it was, I was always much less frightened of monsters that I could see and give a name to than to anything that remained unseen and undefinable. The best example is in the TV shows that scared the daylights out of me as a kid.  One was the classic Star Trek episode Devil in the Dark. In the episode, Kirk and Spock are trapped in a mine, trying to evade an apparently murderous alien life form made of rock, and also trying to repair a sabotaged nuclear reactor that’s only hours away from exploding. Perhaps, compared to current CGI monsters, the rock alien the Horta looks more comical than dangerous. But at seven years old it sure scared the dickens out of me. I remember being afraid to go to sleep because I was certain that the alien (who actually turns out to be a sympathetic character by the end of the episode) was going to tunnel through my bedroom wall and eat me. Hidden in the rock, it could travel anywhere - and you wouldn’t know until it was too late.

I also watched a lot of old-school Doctor Who - mostly the Tom Baker years - back when the only way to get ahold of such things was through battered VHS tapes ordered from obscure branches of the county library system. One of my favorite episodes was the Pyramids of Mars. The episode features mind control, killer robots disguised as mummies, and trapped evil alien entities posing as Egyptian Gods. But to me, the scariest thing I remember about the episode was actually a force field.

Just that. Not the mummies or the explosions, the villainous Sutek or the archaeologist he’s possessed. The force field. Because traditional monsters, you can run from those. You can fight them, or outwit them, or negotiate with them, or any of the other things that Doctor Who and his companions did so well on screen. But it’s hard to do any of that when you can’t even see what it is you’re supposed to be fighting. It’s less like fighting an enemy, and more like a force of nature. Something you can’t see, or hear, or touch. Something that constrains your options, locks you in, and isn’t interested in having any sort of gloating conversations while your hero is stalling for time. It just is. You can’t fight it, you can only withstand it or work around it. And it’s an idea that I think has popped up in many of the characters - good and bad - that populate Court of Twilight.

Sound intriguing? I hope so. I'll be posting a little more about some of other elements that ended up in the novel - from Irish and Scottish folklore, to psychological theories about what we pay attention to and why - in the coming weeks.