Worlds Enough and Time

by Nancy

The poet Andrew Marvell coined that phrase, "worlds enough and time," in the poem "To His Coy Mistress," in which the narrator urges the lady to join him in seizing their pleasures like "amorous birds of prey." I admit I had to look up the phrase to see where it came from and was surprised by the context. I've often heard it but not applied to affairs of the heart. It often strikes me in places like Michaels. Or Home Depot. Or Idea Island. I can wander around any of those places for hours.

I'm not skilled at crafts, as many of the banditas are. I have about as much experience with a glue gun as with a howitzer, which is to say none, and the thought of handling either makes me vaguely nervous. At least with the hotwitzer, I could presumably blow up something. Maybe even whatever I was trying to hit. The glue gun, I fear, would result only in a mess. Still, I'm happy to wander the aisles of Michaels. When I take the boy there to buy material for school projects, I drift through the store admiring colored paper and silk flowers and fake gemstones and canvases and paints and frames and think what pretty things could be made with them. By someone else.

I last visited Michaels to buy cellophane wrap and a basket for the Lair's offering in the RWA raffle. They had no baskets that were both large and pretty. I called Cassondra since she had volunteered to take what I found and arrange the various contributions in an artistic and appealing manner, as Beth did last year.

"Try the storage boxes," she said.

"They're all tiny," I told her.

"No, no, in another part of the store. Look in keepsakes."

Between me and the keepsakes section were lots of fake flowers, pretty vases, jewelry kits, etc., all very appealing. I'm sure Cassondra learned way more than she cared to know about that particular store's offerings. I did eventually find the boxes, but we decided they weren't big enough. The pubbed banditas have many, many books among them and contributed quite a few to the raffle. (For those who care, I eventually found a suitable basket at Tuesday Morning, which did not have project supplies but did have bargains, always appealing to those of us of Scots-Irish descent.)

There's just so much potential in Michaels. It ignites my imagination. I can just see those lovely craft projects all finished, gracing a sideboard or a bookcase in our house. Only my awareness of the steps between vision and completion, and of my ineptness therewith, restrains me.

Someday, when I have worlds enough and time, I'm going to become good at crafts. I am. It would be very satisfying. In junior high and high school, I made a lot of my clothes, and I loved doing it. Fabric stores were every bit as enthralling as Michaels, and I knew what I was doing with the sewing thing. I could set in a sleeve and make a zipper lie flat. The last garment I made was a bridesmaid dress with ruffles at neck and hem, eight yards of fabric in the skirt, and a sheer overdress. It was pretty, it turned out well, if I do say so, and I was proud to wear it down the aisle.

Of course, I used to say I was going to become a really good cook someday, and then I married the dh, who not only already was a really good cook but enjoyed it. He still does. I do not enjoy it. Unless it's baking and chocolate is involved (and the Evil Soft Ball Stage is not).

Then there's Home Depot, another wellspring of imagination-igniting potential. I'm pretty decent with a saw, a hammer, and a tape measure. I know how to use a level. My father had only daughters, and he saw no reason we should not assist with his various projects. Plus I love the opportunities for redecorating, the idea of replacing, say, the cheapo sink unit in the boy's bathroom with something nicer (but still prefab since none of us has the skills to make such a thing). Budget's the issue there, rather than time, but we'll get to it one of these days. We've put home improvements on hold in favor of tuition, but that bathroom's at least going to be painted before he leaves home.

Then there's Idea Island, the place writer brains go when a story idea strikes. I have more ideas than I have time to write. Lots of writers do. Believe it or not, I even have some ideas that do not involving anything blowing up. But I have to step back from them, write down just enough to preserve them, and keep my focus, or I'd never get anything done.

Yet those ideas tend to spin a web at idle moments--when I'm washing dishes or folding laundry or waiting in a checkout line. And some of them pop up again, insistently, when I'm stuck on the wip. And sometimes they fit. Those are truly great moments. Like putting on, for the first time, a finished garment you've made. Or finishing the clasp on a necklace you've created (I imagine) or driving the last nail into something you've built.

I would love to do all those things. Had I but worlds enough and time.

What would you learn to do (or return to doing) if you had worlds enough and time?

Writing on the wild side or... Where do you come up with this stuff?

by Tawny

I'm so jazzed to welcome one of our favorite authors, Pamela Palmer, back to the Lair. Today's she's hanging out with us and talking about that ever-exciting topic that keeps all writer's going hmmm... Imaginations. I know, you can't wait to hear what she has to say (okay, read what she has to say) so without further ado... Here's Pam!!!

All fiction writers have imaginations, big imaginations, or we’d never come up with the stories we do. We’re the ones walking around with the voices in our heads. But these big imaginations can take different forms. I think all novelists love the quesiton ‘what if?’ But not every writer looks at a plane in the sky and wonders, “What if it exploded?” or “What if it just disappeared? Or morphed into an alien spacecraft?”

I think those of us who write speculative fiction (paranormal/sci-fi/fantasy) tend to have brains that serve up the strangest what-if questions. What if that dude in front of me in the check-out line were to suddenly shift into a jaguar? What if I could suck the life out of someone with the touch of my hand? What if I were immortal? All three of these questions came to me at one point or another in the creation of my latest Feral Warriors shape-shifter novel, RAPTURE UNTAMED, which hits stores Tuesday (June 29th). It’s the story of a pair of immortals -- a jaguar shifter with a ripping bad attitude, and a non-shifter who has a secret -- a forbidden ability that could make her a danger even to the Feral Warriors. The shifter, Jag, is the last male on earth she could ever trust. And, ultimately, the only one who can save her soul.

So, where does this stuff come from? Honestly, I wish I could give you the secret. I think we’re born with brains that serve up the surreal. When my son was four, he woke up one morning filled with the memory of a dream -- a dream about a magic ring with incredible power. His detailed explanation of the workings of this ring took a solid ten minutes and made eerily logical sense. Yes, he enjoyed books and he watched t.v., but I read the books to him, and was almost always nearby when the t.v. was on. I’d have known if he’d heard about this ring somewhere. He hadn’t. It was the creation of a four-year-old’s imagination. How does a brain that young come up with something that intricate, something that doesn’t exist? It amazed me at the time, and it still does.

Do non-writers dream like this? I don’t know. You tell me. My son has no desire to be a writer, but I’m convinced he has the imagination for it if he ever changes his mind. And I absolutely dream crazy, exciting, high-action dreams along with the more mundane and frustrating I’m-late-but-I-can’t-remember-how-to-get-there dreams.

What if I could shove my hand through that table...without breaking it? What if the Dupont Circle fountain in D.C. was a gate into the fairy world? What if I could see the future? The questions come almost fast as I can type them. There’s a fine line between weirdly creative and crazy, trust me. So where do these ideas come from? The best I can figure, they’re all a function of some weird quirk of the brain. If there’s a cure, I don’t want it! If it weren’t for the strange paths my mind wanders, I wouldn’t be able to tell the stories I love.

Do you dream? Do you remember your dreams? And if you do, are they strange or pretty normal (for dreams)?

In celebration of the release of RAPTURE UNTAMED (in three days!), I’m giving away three signed copies of the first book in the Feral Warriors series, DESIRE UNTAMED, one each to three random commenters.

Sweet dreams!

The Vision Thing

by Nancy

An article in the newspaper reminded me that tomorrow, July 20, is the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. I remember seeing Neil Armstrong step down onto the surface of our planet's nearest neighbor. Even then, with my scifi geekdom in the budding stage, I thought this was way cool. And what took us there was vision. Imagination. The ability to see beyond "can't" to "could" and then "is." A wonderful book about the power of vision to transform one's life is October Sky by Homer Hickam, which became the moving film Rocket Boys, starring Jake Gillenhaal and Chris Cooper. The New York Times quoted Frank Borman as saying that if the moon landing had been more about vision and less about rocks, the space program might've made great strides in the interim. That's probably debatable, but for me, it was always about the vision thing.


Last night, RWA honored its RITA and GH finalists, writers whose visions touched the hearts of judges. They saw what characters "could" be and do, who mined the human potential for love and turned the ore into stories of triumph over emotional pain. As I write this, a week before you'll read it, I don't know who the winners are (will be? were?). On behalf of all the banditas, however, I congratulate them and the finalists. Not everyone can win, but everyone can sell and ascend the bestseller lists, and I wish all of you the best of luck.

The space program and the awards ceremony each resulted from careful planning and a lot of effort, albeit of different types. Sometimes, though, "stuff happens," as the saying goes, and leads to amazing results.




One example of such serendipity is the career of Greg Mortenson. His memoir, Three Cups of Tea, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for two and a half years. I attribute this success to the vision of positive change the book offers.


An experienced mountaineer, Mortenson set out to climb K2 in the Himalayas as a memorial to his deceased sister. His climb ended prematurely when a companion developed altitude sickness. Mortenson and another man carried him down the mountain, a trek that left Mortenson in rough shape as well. Disoriented and sick, he wandered away from his group and stumbled into a remote village in Pakistan. The people there took him in, fed him, and put him to bed. When he recovered, they showed him around their village. One of the things he saw was a circle of village children in a field, doing their lessons together--outside because they had no school and together because they had no teacher. And he realized building a school for these children would be a much better memorial to his sister than climbing a mountain.

Getting the school built did turn out to be a steep climb. No one with influence had ever heard of him, and raising money proved to be very difficult. But he did succeed in building the school, for girls as well as boys. As the building neared completion, people from a neighboring village arrived to ask if he'd build a school for them, too. One school led to another and another until building schools in that part of the world became his life's work. A failed effort to climb a mountain led to a vision of what could be and a step forward for some of the world's poorest people.

Two hundred thirty-three years ago, a handful of men in Philadelphia dared to challenge the world's greatest empire and most powerful navy. As Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, they "brought forth a new nation, one founded in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." As a society, we don't always live up to that ideal, but it's out there as a model, something for us to strive toward. A vision. Granted, those early patriots had help from France, which never missed a chance to bedevil England in those days, but the vision was theirs, and it was so powerful that a French marquis (Lafayette), a German baron (von Steuben), and a Polish count (Pulaski) sailed over to help lead the army. It remains so powerful that Independence Hall is a World Heritage site and people from all over the planet come to see it.



Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the other women at Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848 had a vision of women controlling their own earnings, making their own decisions as to whether to work outside the home and, most important, helping to choose their nation's leaders. That same vision propelled Martin Luther King's efforts for racial equality and shaped his stirring "I Have a Dream" speech, one of the jewels of American rhetoric. As a result, African Americans count as "whole" people instead of 2/3 in the census, and all Americans of legal age can vote.





Vision doesn't just apply to national affairs but to entertainment and daily life as well. Imagination and science together gave us refrigerators and vacuum cleaners and artificial joints, among other things. An electronics salesman from Germany, Hugo Gernsbeck, was among the first to imagine television. Gernsbeck believed science would produce a utopian world. In his 1920s electronics catalogues, he featured various products and wrote commentaries on their potential. He coined the term "scienti-fiction," which became "science fiction," and helped create fandom via his magazine Amazing Stories. The SFWA Hugo award is named for him. Amazing Stories was most popular among geeky boys, possibly including two kids from Cleveland, Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. And if you're a true geek, you know that Siegel and Shuster created Superman and spawned a comic book genre beloved by millions around the globe.

Walt Disney looked at the potential for electronics differently, applying it to sound recording and animated movies. He believed in it so strongly that he sold his car to pay for re-recording the sound on his landmark cartoon, Steamboat Willie. A visit to Coney Island, which was then declining in popularity, convinced him there was an appetite for rides and imaginative entertainment, especially if delivered by cheerful staff in a clean environment, and he shared Gernsbeck's belief in technology as a way to deliver a better life. Exhibits in Tomorrowland still explore that possibility.

Those exhibits rely on computer technology, which owes many of its advances to two geeky kids who rose from obscurity to become gurus of the computer world--Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple. We can argue about evil empires and overpriced gadgets, but vision carried both of these men to the top of their field and provides convenience (along with occasional bewilderment and frustration) to millions of people.

Another business icon frequently mocked is Martha Stewart. We the homemaking-challenged don't relate very well to Martha but can still admire her talent. She realized there was a market for ways to make life easier or prettier or tastier and built an empire showing people how to create gorgeous lifestyles. She offered a vision of a nicer, more comfortable life that many people loved. Everyone now marketing homemaking product lines, magazines, and cookbooks is following in Martha's footsteps.

Also mocked despite booming business is romance fiction. If you've watched some of the YouTube videos about romance succeeding in the economic downturn, you may have shared my desire to send a really muscular, well-armed hero or kick-ass heroine to have a word or two with the TV people. But not everyone sees romance as something to apologize for. In 1980, 37 writers shared a vision about romance and came together to form an organization supporting a genre the world at large dissed. And still does. In Houston, Texas, Romance Writers of America was born. And here we all are, as the saying goes, in or trying to be in the business of romance.

Two business owners from Ohio achieved something that changed the way people travel. At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright doggedly pursued a vision dating back to Da Vinci and beyond, the idea that human beings might fly. One December day in 1903, their glider "slipped the surly bonds of Earth," as RCAF Flight Officer James Gillespie Magee expressed it, for 12 seconds. Aviation was born. Climbing the hill to the Wright Brothers memorial requires fighting high winds all the way. Sand blows from the beach and the dunes, a stinging bombardment at times. The National Park Service site is a great place to fly a kite if the opportunity arises, just FYI. Dealing with that wind demonstrates why the Wrights found Kitty Hawk so suitable for gliders.

North Carolina and Ohio battle over who can legitimately claim to be "first in flight" and "birthplace of aviation," as our license plates state, with Ohioans noting that the flight took place at Kitty Hawk but a lot of the groundwork was done in Dayton, at the Wrights' bicycle shop. There's a replica of the 1903 glider at Kitty Hawk, but the original is in the Smithsonian. I hope to see it between the time I write this and you read it. Pieces of wood and fabric from the original plane went to the moon with the Apollo 11 astronauts.

And that little factoid brings this blog full circle. What visionaries do you admire? Who looked beyond "don't" and "can't" to "could" and then to "is?"

I'm traveling today and hope to be home mid-to-late afternoon. So be please don't think I'm ignoring your comments. I promise I'll respond as soon as I can. I'm giving away a package of books, which I can't name because I don't have them at the time I'm writing this, from RWA to one commenter today.

Makers of Imaginary Realms

by Nancy Northcott

"Get your head out of the clouds."
"Where were you--Mars?"
"Act like you have some sense."

Have you ever heard the above applied to you or someone in your vicinity? Usually a dreamer? A reader or writer? Readers tend to be thinkers and, at times, dreamers. Writers tend to be both. Sometimes the people around us don't get it, which can make for difficult moments. Yet the realms of our choice remain attractive havens.

During the last month, three people died who shaped very different imaginary realms. All left lasting imprints in the worlds they shaped. Most familiar to romance readers, of course, will be the wonderful Phyllis A. Whitney. Most of us probably met her through her young adult novels, but she also wrote adult and juvenile mysteries. Whitney was honored with a special nod to her body of work at last year's Romance Writers of America national conference in Dallas. She was a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America for lifetime achievement. Her website, http://www.phyllisawhitney.com/, notes that her books were published in more than thirty countries. Last year, her 1956 novel about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, The Trembling Hills, was reprinted as a classic in the Hodder Great Reads line in the United Kingdom. Two of her other novels, Daughter of the Stars and The Singing Stones, were recently reissued, and Amazon.com lists several of her books as available.

According to the obituary in the New York Times, Whitney's last novel,Amethyst Dreams, was published in 1997, when she was 94. A quick check of the paper's archive reveals that she had numerous titles on the paperback bestseller lists. Whitney lived to the grand age of 104.

Way back in 1974, two friends found a way to turn the perceived weaknesses of dreaming and imagination into strengths and to create a community of the imagination. They made these traits not only acceptable but the currency of the realm in a kingdom called Dungeons and Dragons. Their names were Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Gygax died last month. I'm not a gamer, so we won't be exploring that in much detail, but I am a dreamer, a reader, and a writer. So I'd like to take a minute and tip my hat to Mr. Gygax's memory.

All of us have particular kinds of imaginary realms we prefer. I like knights and dragons and swords and spaceships and women who take the driver's seat. Any combination or version of the above is acceptable. Maybe that's because I grew up in a culture that put women on television mainly to assist or to be rescued by the hero. Even poor Wonder Woman often needed saving by Steve Trevor. At the same time, I consumed a steady diet of Superman and Batman and Doom Patrol and King Arthur and Greek mythology (I wanted to be an archaeologist until I found out they dug up bones--I know, Suz and Joan, I'm a wimp--but that's for another day).

In Gary Gygax's realm, from what I understand, the dwarf or the thief or the poverty-stricken wanderer stands as good a chance of being the hero as the knight or the king does. It's an open realm, embracing all comers. How could geeks and nerds not love it? In Sharyn McCrumb's wonderful novel about fandom, Bimbos of the Death Sun, her protagonist uses a D and D game to force a murderer to reveal himself.

The New York Times obituary of Gygax, on March 5, called Dungeons and Dragons "a bridge between the noninteractive world of books and films and the exploding interactive video game industry." The article goes on to quote Gygax as saying the value of the game lay not in victory or defeat but in the imaginative experience. In a column in the New York Times on March 9, Adam Rogers credits Gygax with laying the foundation for all modern gaming. Online games apparently (as I said, I'm no expert) use the principles created for D and D. The popularity of gaming, along with fantasy, science fiction, and adventure stories, is a tribue, I think, to the power of imagination. Gary Gygax left behind thousands of people who may not know his name but know his work and its offshoots in depth. Many loving them fanatically. That isn't a bad legacy.

Finally, I sadly noted the passing last week of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. While he's best known as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, his achievements ranged far wider. According to the Clarke Foundation website, http://www.clarkefoundation.org/, his first short story, "Rescue Party," appeared in Astounding Science in 1946. He wrote numerous other short stories, novels, and nonfiction articles and books. He is credited with the idea for communication satellites. According to the obituary in The New York Times, geosynchronous positioning of satellites has been designated a "Clarke Orbit" by the International Astrononical Union.

I heard Clarke speak my senior year in high school, at a convocation sponsored by a local television station. All of us trooped into the auditorium expecting to hear about 2001. Instead, he talked about the role of science in the world and the development of the communications satellite. I was hooked. I went out and bought all of his fiction I could find. I still remember a poignant story called "The Star," about a Jesuit priest on an exploratory mission that finds the remains of a civilization destroyed by a supernova. His calculations reveal that the exploding star was visible on Earth as the Star of Bethlehem.

Clarke's interests weren't confined to space and its technology. He also explored the oceans. Dolphins figure prominently in a couple of his novels. In his autobiography, The View From Serendip, he discusses moving to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), where he spent the remainder of his life, for the diving. According to the Times obituary, diving was the closest he could come to the weightlessness of space. My favorite saying of his, one quoted in that obituary, was "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Magic experiences were what he gave his legion of readers. In 1998, he received a knighthood in recognition of his many accomplishments.

In their different ways, Phyllis A. Whitney, Gary Gygax, and Sir Arthur C. Clarke created imaginary worlds that gave dreamers a haven. Perhaps even more important is the fact that playing in those havens stimulated the imaginations of so many people who went on to create imaginary realms of their own, realms where dreaming is a noble vocation that keeps the world in motion.

What's your favorite imaginary haven? Has one ever spurred your creativity?

Has there ever been anyone in your life who didn't "get" it? How did you deal with that?


We're still celebrating Golden Heart and RITA finalists in the lair today. Bandita GH finalists are Susan Seyfarth with TWO manuscripts in Contemporary Single Title, The Princess Project and Money, Honey, and KJ Howe in Romantic Suspense with One Shot, Two Kills. Our buddy Doglady also finaled in the GH with Lost in Love in Regency Historical. In the RITA, our Anna Campbell took TWO of the slots in Regency Historical with Claiming the Courtesan and Untouched. Yesterday's blogger, Maureen Child, finaled in the RITA novella category with Christmas Cravings. Yay, all! Your manuscripts wowed five judges, and that's no mean feat.

If I've missed anyone, please sing out. We want to celebrate everyone's achievements in this banner week.