A Startling Chain of Events

I bought my wife an espresso machine for her birthday. That seems like such a simple thing, but that's how it all started. Doesn't that sound ominous? It all started with the espresso machine...

So, anyway, I bought my wife an espresso machine. I thought it was just a simple thing. Not that an espresso machine is a simple thing, but it's a thing she's always wanted. Sort of. Actually, the thing she's always wanted is more complicated than that and has more to do with the actual coffee than the machine, but that will be for another post. For simplicity, we'll just say that she's wanted an espresso machine for a long time, and we finally got to the appropriate time for that to happen. So I bought her one.

She didn't know where we were going to put it... Oh, yes, I told her about it ahead of time, because I wanted to make sure I got something she would like and that would do the things she wanted it to do, so we looked for it together. Lots of research. She likes research, though. Anyway, she didn't know where we were going to put it, so I spent the day it arrived rearranging and clearing counter space so that it would have a place to be.

This is the place that I made for it to go. Sort of. There was actually a bread machine in the corner there that the espresso machine initially sat next to. As you can see, neither thing is there now. Now, it's just a big naked spot. Of course, we haven't really had much counter space in our tiny kitchen, so the big naked spot has been good. But how did the naked spot happen?

This is where it gets... interesting. Yeah, let's say "interesting." See, once we had the espresso machine and it was set up and everything was working fine, my wife informed me of two things:
1. We were going to be painting one of our walls.
2. We had to buy a thing to put the espresso machine on.

To the left is the color of the rest of the room and the color the "blue" wall used to be (the color of the "blue" wall is actually Mexecali Turquoise); to the right is the new color of the accent wall. The red thing is the thing that goes under the espresso machine. Here, you can see it better:

And here's the whole thing:

The wire mesh is part of, well, I'll call it an art project, because that's what it is, an art project for art, which is mostly non-existent at this point. We're not all the way finished.

So the espresso machine led to
1. Painting a wall, which involved testing colors and all of that jazz.
2. Buying a thing from IKEA, where I had never been before. Neither had my wife. There will be a post on that trip.
3. Building the thing that came from IKEA which, again, was more complicated than you would think, because we modified it.
4. Several trips to Home Depot, both for the modifications to the thing and for the materials for the art project.
5. There will also be a lamp project in order to replace the ugly reading lamp you see there on the end of the thing.
6. And who knows what else...

All because I gave my wife an espresso machine.

But, well, you know, if you give a mouse a cookie...

Oh, and hey! The coffee is great! It's totally a thing now. Every morning. Yeah, I'll explain some other time.

Epitaph (a book review post)

When I was a kid, before I discovered dinosaurs (which I did at the age of four), the very first thing I wanted to be was a cowboy. My grandfather had cows on his farm, so I figured that made him a cowboy, and that's what I wanted to be. Imagine my surprise when I got to my American history class in high school and learned that the term "cowboy" became popularized and associated with the west because of a band of rustlers operating in Arizona in the 1880s know as the Cow Boys. Yeah, you heard me; the Cow Boys were the bad guys.

Interestingly enough, it was these same Cow Boys who would create the enduring legacy of Wyatt Earp and, by extension, Doc Holliday. Wyatt Earp, who was possibly the ultimate frontier lawman... right up until he wasn't.

Of course, there are those who would argue that he was never a lawman, just an outlaw posing as one, but, mostly, those are the outlaws who accused him of that. Or men like Johnny Behan, and we know Behan was crooked, so it makes his accusations a little less believable.

At any rate, Epitaph is not really a book about Wyatt Earp. Which is not to say that it's not a book about Wyatt Earp, because it is. Mostly, though, it's about the conditions that lead up the shootout that was not actually at the O.K. Corral and the fallout after it. The enduring legacy it created.

The temptation, here, is to get into the history of it, but that's in the book. To say that Mary Doria Russell is a meticulous researcher is probably an understatement. We'll say instead that I trust her research. And, sure, I'm biased and, sure, this is historical fiction, but I believe the facts are mostly in place and the suppositions logically follow from the facts.

That said, it's Russell's ability to allow the reader to walk along with her characters that is her greatest asset. And that's where her research really shows, I think. She writes as if she knows these people, as if she spent time with them, as witnessed these things herself. It creates a completely believable world.

Basically, I can't recommend this book or Russell more highly. And, although this is a companion piece to Doc, Doc is not required reading; Epitaph is not a sequel.

Whether you think Wyatt Earp walked with the angels or the demons (and it's not unreasonable to suspect either considering that he was never shot; even when his clothes ended up full of bullet holes, he never received a wound), this book is worth reading for the insight on the situation. The incident "at" the O.K. Corral formed a view of the Old West that has never been shaken, one of showdowns and street fights that never really existed. And maybe that's okay, because it's the legends we look up to and aspire to be. Parts of me still want to be a cowboy.

The Road to Fiction (an IWM post)

I was asked an interesting question recently. I like interesting questions; they make you think. Well, they make me think. I don't actually know about you. I don't actually even know if you do think, because so many people don't, though I like to think that if you're reading this blog then you're a thinker, so we'll just go with that.

Anyway...

The question was, "How do you write fiction?" Let me clarify that. I get the question, "How do you write?" a lot, but I've never had the question, "How do you write fiction?" Her contention was that writing non-fiction is easy; it just requires a bit of research and putting it together in a way that's easy for the reader to take in. But she didn't know how to go about writing fiction.

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I'm sure at least some of you have guessed that you need to hop over to Indie Writers Monthly to find out where "The Road to Fiction" leads.