Walking and writing

I walked around the town center this evening. It doesn't take long. It's a small town.

From the quay I can see our house, in the hill, on the other side of the bay, the house that we rented when we lived here. It was a nice place to live. The view was fantastic. In the summer we had sun in the backyard for 23 hours a day. It just dropped behind the mountain peaks for little a while. I took the picture in May two years ago, from our backyard, right after midnight.

It was great to live here, and I would be happy to move back some time. The summer was fantastic. I liked the dark winter too, with the northern light. It's not that dark. The sun is completely gone for only eight weeks. Then it rapidly becomes lighter.

Now I'm sitting in my hotel, writing on my so-called novel. I've written 550 words to night. That's not very impressive, is it? I have to speed up >:)

Winter is coming

I'm back in the north. I haven't been here since June.

I took an early flight this morning. First, one hour on a big jet. Then another half an hour in a small propeller plane. Before take off they moved some passengers to the back seats, to redistribute weight, and stabilize the plane. That's normal, they often do that on Six Flags Airlines.

The trees have dropped their leaves. The birch forest is gray, with spots of flaming red from the berries of the rowan trees in between. The mountains are white, but in town there's less than an inch of snow. Right now it's snowing outside.

Winter is just around the corner. Great!

I don't have my commute apartment here anymore. Now I'm sitting in a down-town hotel, writing on my so-called novel ... sorry guys, I have some fun work to do >:)

Super yachts and communists

Last week, when we were in Nice, down on Cote de Azur, I picked up the September issue of the free monthly magazine “That’s Nice”. On page 8, there was an article with this headiline:

"Super yachts are back on the shopping list"

Here are some highlights from the article (I inserted the conversion sfrom meters to feet):

"When the global financial crisis hit, the luxury yachting industry took a major blow ... Yachts are once again the must have toys of high society... 108 super yachts - yachts over 24m (80 feet) - were sold between January and June this year... And it’s the sale of really big yachts - 50 to 70 meters (160 to 230 feet) – that have seen the most dramatic rise... It appears the endless supply of cash is back and perhaps the big business people aren’t feeling too bad this year about lashing out on luxury goods..."

Personally, if I had enough money to buy a super yacht, I would feel better if I bought just a regular yacht, for instance a 2nd-hand 44-feet Princess at $400.000, and gave the excess money to the Salvation Army.

My first thought, when I read that article, was that these business-idiots didn’t learn a damn thing during the financial crisis in 2008. But maye that’s what they did? They learnt that the next time the stock market and banking system breaks down, the US president, and the EU leaders will save their asses once again. In the mean time, let the party go on, in Nice, Cannes and Monaco and other crazy places.

Last Saturday, in downtown Nice, I happened to observe a big demonstration coming down Avenue Jean Medicine. It was a protest against the French government, and their proposed changes in the retirement system, organized by the French Communist Party and the workers unions. The news in TV said it was 10.000 people participating, the organizers claimed it was 30.000.

It was great to see this big demonstration. In a place where people have super yachts on the shopping list, they definitely need a strong communist party to keep things in balance.

Magret de canard

Fall is the time to fly south, when it’s cold and dark and rainy in the north, before the snow drapes the hills and mountains in white and the skiing starts. Last week we went down to the French Riviera for a few days, my old lady and I.

We explored the narrow streets and alleys of old Nice, had lunch with rose wine on Place Massena. We hiked around Cap Ferrat, and visited the old castle with the Picasso Museum in Antibes.

It’s pleasant to stay in southern France, and it’s always entertaining to watch the Frenchmen, when they’re riding scooters with designer suits and tie, and when they play boule in the parks, arguing intensively about who wins.

In the fall, when the days are warm and evenings are chill, the Frenchmen are never too warm and never really cold. They’re always something in between. When they’re half-cold, they carry a yellow or read wool sweater over the back, with arms tied loosely around the neck. When they’re three-quarters-cold, they hang a jacket over the shoulders, but without putting the arms in. That’s the way the French do it, no one but the French. To me it only looks awkward, and I have to smile every time I see it.

Then there is the food and the wine. In France you get the most hyped food, stuff that tastes like shit and costs a fortune, for instance frog legs and snails and duck liver. But there is delicious dishes too, like magret de canard (steak of duck), with orange gravy, or with honey and pepper gravy.

And I read some good books of course. This was my read:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Teriible story, great prose.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Great story from Afghanistan.

Hungry as Hell

You won't imagine what happened yesterday!

I was out traveling again, just a day trip to the south. I was up at 5:30 am to get on the morning plane, and came back home at 7 pm, tired and hungry as Hell. I hadn't eaten since noon.

But my old lady refused me to eat. She was preparing for a gathering with her friends, and had all kinds of obscure dishes spread all over the kitchen. She said I would just mess up everything if a made a couple of sandwiches. Crazy isn't it?

I just had to be patient, but it paid off in the end, when the salmon rolls were served ... and finally, the oyster >:)

Where were you on 9/11?

September 2001.

I was attending a geophysics conference in San Antonio. Monday 10. September I had an oral presentation, with approximately 50-100 people in the audience, and 3 or 4 questions from the floor after my twenty-minute presentation. The world was normal.

The day after, I had a poster presentation, at 8:30 in the morning. I was very disappointed that no one showed up. It was a somewhat special subject, something about non-linear waves (similar to the breaking waves on the beach), but it couldn't be that bad?

After my scheduled presentation time, I went out to the big exhibition hall were the geophysical contractors run their software demos. Big crowds were gathered around the computer screens, all of them displaying the CNN broadcast.

There was a big discussion about what to do with the conference; proceed or cancel? In the end, they decided to skip all the social events, and run the technical program as planned. All the participants from Europe, Asia and South America would be stuck in San Antonio anyway. And those who lived within driving distance could not get rental cars.

When the conference ended, it was impossible to get on a plane back to Europe. So we decided to take it easy and drive around in Texas for a while. We went down to Big Bend National Park, to Austin, and the strange "German" town Fredericksburg (where a friend of mine took the picture above, outside a mall).

In Del Rio, we crossed the bridge over Rio Grande, to look around and to buy some Cuban cigars on the Mexican side. The border police told us it was no problem to get back, with our Western Europe passports. After a couple of hours, we returned to USA, smoking happily on our cigars. But when the border police found that one of my friends had three visa to Iran and one to Libya in his passport, Hell broke loose ... we spent the night in the police station.

Where were you on 9/11? The day the world turned crazy ...

Burning the Koran

I read in the news about a minister who wants to burn the Koran. I think that's a very stupid and childish thing to do. There are Muslims around the world who burn stuff, like American and Israeli flags, Salman Rushdie's book and sometimes the Bible.

There are many things in Islamic theory and practice that should be, and need to be debated and criticized; womens rights, sharia laws, violent attacks as response to critique. But burning the Koran means that we step down to the same low level of primitive outrageous action. Burning books is just a stupid thing to do.

I bought the Koran some time ago (and wrote a blogpost about it). I'm not gonna burn my copy. I rather read it. How about you?

Rewriting the beginning

It's week end. Yeah!

Almost no work to be done the next two days. Finally, I've got some time to write. I'm working on my so-called novel. The plot is lined up, mostly, and finally I've got names for all the characters. I had a cool name for my protagonist, but it was damn difficult to invent good names for the rest. The San Antonio Rotary Club helped me solve the problem.

All the characters (except the protagonist and his family) have real names taken from the member list of the San Antonio Rotary Club (don't tell them if you know anyone in that club). About half of them even have the same occupation.

I've been reading a lot of great writer blogs, and think I start to get a grasp on the show vs tell issue. Now I'm rewriting the beginning, for the third time. I hope it's improving. I've even got a dead body on the first page, a bicycle accident, apparently ... >:Z

The manuscript has become a big mess. I decided to write in English, but swap to Winterlandic whenever I run out of vocabulary, to avoid loosing my line of thoughts. Right now I have about four chapters of a bilingual novel >:)))

Do you know any agents that deal with that kind of stuff?