Phaze Doubt

I had intended to present the Master Game Grid layout here, so that interested readers could see exactly how every game was derived from the assorted grids and subgrids. But when I checked, I discovered no Master Grid. Oops! Two things, actually three, had happened. Years back I had worked out the full grid, and spent three hours one morning perfecting its details—then made an error on the computer that wiped out everything. I was never able to re-create it as I had had it. I can get very upset by such things, and I labor to see that they happen only once. Then I changed from CP/M to MS-DOS, and got everything set up—and a hard disk crash took it out. Later I changed computers, and my old one glitched. In sum, I couldn’t get anything that might have been salvaged. I was dependent on prior printouts. But I had also moved to a new house, and my back papers were buried somewhere in the refuse, where we are slowly cleaning up a decade’s worth of neglect. Eventually we’ll find those printouts, under a pile of other manuscripts. But I had a novel to do now. Which meant I had to do it without the Master Grid. Aarrgh!

Ah, now you understand. I faked it. This will be no news for reviewers, who have been privy to the fact that I faked any ability as a writer from the outset of my career. But I am sorry that I was unable to provide the Master Grid; it was my pride.

I try to benefit from anything that happens. Sometimes it’s a struggle. I received a letter from a reader, Ben Mays, who said that his play group would be putting on a show in my county at such and such a date. I hate to take time off from writing to sleep, let alone for anything else, but I do have an interest in drama. I acted in college, and while I’m sure I was not a great actor, it benefited me by helping me to abolish stage fright and teaching me how to make myself heard by an audience when there was no mike. I support the arts, and acting is one of them. So I made myself to go the play.

It was a disaster. Oh, the play was all right, I’m sure; it was Red Fox/Second Hanging, and was of the kind where stage and costuming are minimal. In fact there were only three actors, all male, covering perhaps a dozen parts. They changed parts almost in midsentence, going from scene to scene without pause. It started as a dialogue with the audience and worked seemingly by accident into the content of the play, but was actually highly integrated. It was a story of backwoods Kentucky, corruption and law enforcement and odd histories. The whole thing was the kind that you don’t see on mass market television, and yes, I think it’s great that small groups maintain the tradition and bring this sort of art to communities like ours. Attendance was free, even.

So what’s my gripe? Well, I was dead center in the audience, and the acoustics were such that the sound came at me from left and right, overlapped and garbled, and I could barely make out one word in ten. It was like watching TV with the sound turned down, or with interference that made the sound unintelligible: you can’t get much of the sense of it, but do have a glimpse of what you are missing. I suffered about two hours of that, thinking how I could have been home working on this novel instead. What a waste! Others heard it, and there was a standing ovation at the conclusion, which I didn’t join, because it would have been hypocrisy; I don’t do something just to conform. If only I hadn’t been stuck in that dead spot.

After the play I located Ben Mays and explained why I couldn’t say anything about the play. He said that that is a problem in some theaters, and wondered why I hadn’t moved to a better spot. Well, I should have, but I hadn’t realized how big a difference location can make; I might have made a scene by moving, only to be in a worse spot. He also said that they had it on video cassette. Oh, okay. He sent me the catalog, and I ordered that and some records and audio tapes while I was at it. As I said, I support the enterprise, and one good way to support it is to buy their productions.

At this writing I haven’t listened to any of it, because I have to assemble my new record and cassette tape players and I was determined to finish this novel before taking a break for anything else. But the material has had an effect on me, because one of the records, Heartdance, put out by a group called Song of the Wood, has a beautiful wraparound cover painting showing monstrous stone musical instruments cracking and being overgrown at a shoreline, as if some giant left them there millennia ago, and a girl dancing at the top of the fifty-foot-high hammered dulcimer. Beyond is a bucolic countryside, a village hamlet, and a distant castle on a hill. That picture fascinates me. In fact it set my fevered brain working, and I may use that as the setting for a future novel. Girl tunes in to the music of the ancient gods and dances to it, there at their ruins, and life stirs in the great old instruments that none alive can play, and—