Author: Scott Nagele

Learned from Jules Verne: A successful hero knows when to cry

/ Scott Nagele / 3 Comments

Michael Strogoff by Jules Verne is a 19th century adventure novel. It’s less well-known than Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea or A Journey to the Center of the Earth, but I liked it better. I don’t remember much about those novels.

Michael Strogoff is a special courier for the Czar. The Tartar hordes are invading Siberia, and the Czar needs to get a message to Irkutsk warning of a traitor plotting to sabotage that city’s defenses.

The Czar's man in Irkutsk.

The Czar’s man in Irkutsk.

Michael Strogoff would be a typical adventure, with its prerequisite, larger-than-life hero, except for two characteristics. First, it made me root for a Czar and his military forces. I’m no expert on Russia, but I have a notion Czars where not the most sympathetic characters. Nor does the image of Cossack cavalry inspire me with warm fuzzies.

Second, Michael Strogoff is not your typical action hero. In my youth I read 24 Tarzan novels, and I don’t recall Tarzan ever shedding a tear. Mr. Verne never comes right out and admits Michael was crying, but there was clearly something in his eye when he was under duress at the hands of his enemies.

Here’s the situation: the Tartars have captured Michael and his mother. They might decide to do some bad stuff to his mom at any moment. Meanwhile, they are going to make Michael go blind, which, I guess, is what Tartars do sometimes. They pass a red-hot blade before Michael’s eyes, in the Tartar custom of blinding prisoners.

In the tradition of bad guys everywhere, the Tartars grossly underestimate the hero and eventually let him go (because he’s helpless, right?). The blinded Michael, and some girl he hooks up with, struggle across the steppe just in time to save Irkutsk. There, Michael kills the traitor in a sword fight. That’s right, a sword fight. How is blind Michael able to do this? Guess what? Michael’s not blind! He never was.

Everybody (except the reader) is shocked to discover this. Even his girlfriend, who led him across versts and versts (old Russian kilometers) of countryside, was hoodwinked by his blindness scam. It’s anybody’s guess why he couldn’t let her know, in a private moment, he wasn’t really blind. Maybe he was using her pity to coax back rubs out of her.

Anyway, here is the inspirational reason Michael was able to escape being blinded by the hot blade passed over his eyes: he was crying at the time. Mr. Verne doesn’t use the word crying; that might be unbecoming a classic hero. Michael was upset with worry about what the Tartars might do to his mom (they ended up letting her run free too) and there was just a little layer of water covering his eyes when the hot blade passed by. This little bit of water insulated his optic nerves from the heat, or something like that. Consult Dr. Verne for the technical explanation.

Paging Dr. Verne.

Paging Dr. Verne.

This series of events is a great comfort to me, because if Tartars ever come after me with a red-hot blade, I guarantee, even lacking endangered relatives, I will be bawling my eyes out. My optic nerves will remain cool and calm under my pool of tears. I just have to make sure to walk into some stuff afterward so they’ll think the procedure a success and let me go.

Even if he didn’t cry us a river, Michael certainly got teary-eyed. I’d have preferred it if he saved his vision through some more clever means, and then, after wreaking his terrible wrath upon the Tartars, took a moment to get misty-eyed about his poor mama. I don’t mind heroes having a sensitive side, but I don’t like them to cry their way out of trouble; toddlers shouldn’t even be allowed to do that. I want great heroes of literature to hold their tears until some serious bad-guy ass has been kicked. Is that too much to ask?

I shouldn’t make too much of the crying. I did enjoy the adventure. Besides, if shedding a few tears would have helped me defend Irkutsk, when I played Risk as a boy, I would have let them flow in a heartbeat.

Where did our love go, follower #31?

/ Scott Nagele / 20 Comments

I lost a Goodreads follower. Even though I’ve never been quite sure what the relationship between Goodreads authors and their followers is supposed to be, I feel a little sad about this. Sure, I didn’t really know that person; but I still feel rejected. The disappearance of their tiny thumbnail image from my Author Dashboard leaves a little, square hole in my life.

As far as I can tell Goodreads followers see pretty much the same side of you as Goodreads friends do, except they are not necessarily people you know.

For the longest time, I had one follower. Then, one day, I noticed I had a dozen. From there my group slowly grew until I had 31 followers. How I got this many followers I don’t know, but I naturally chalked it up to my snowballing popularity. Who knows? Someday I might hit 40, and from there the sky’s the limit.

Yesterday I noticed my followers numbered only 30. Somebody made the conscious decision to stop following me, and like a jilted lover, a part of me longs to know why. Why did you leave me? What could I have done differently to keep your love? – or in this case, your passing interest.

I don’t think I did anything offensive. I did rate The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with four stars. Was that not enough stars? Too many? Now, I fear I’ll never know what drove my 31st follower away.

How did I end up in a love triangle (technically a triacontakaitrigon) with Sir Arthur and 31 others?

How did I end up in a love triangle triacontakaitrigon with Sir Arthur and 31 others? It’s his bedroom eyes, isn’t it?

Aside from the personal rejection, I’m left to contemplate what this contraction means for my long, but mostly secret career as a writer. Has my popularity peaked? Did 31 followers represent the Golden Age of my appeal? Will they all begin to trickle away now, leaving me clutching at withered laurels as I struggle to regain my renown? I can see it on my headstone:

When this is the height of your fame, they don't even bother with your name, because who cares?

When this is the height of your fame, they don’t even bother with your name, because who cares?

I suppose I’ll never know why I was kicked to the curb. I’m left to piece together speculative theories. The most plausible is that one of the 18-26 people who are following me by accident, ever since they clicked the button next to the button they intended to click, took the unlikely step of auditing the list of authors they are following. Finding no justification for my name on their list, they took immediate corrective action, this time taking care about who they unclicked.

Either that or one of the 6-12 people who followed me as a lark during a carefree, and possibly drunken, moment of web surfing, decided to begin taking their online decisions more seriously and eliminate all their irresponsible Internet relationships.

Either way, it was clearly a mistake. It has now been fixed. Follower 31 and I have gone our separate ways. It’s probably best for everyone involved, with the exception of me. What happens when the other 30 get word that there is a way out of this mess?

 

How do I know I’m close to being nearly famous? Because the Internet says so (and the Internet never lies).

/ Scott Nagele / 2 Comments

A funny thing happened while I was Googling myself. What, you don’t Google yourself? Whatever. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I keep track of myself online, because well, really, who else is going to do it?

Anyway, the results were pretty standard stuff: links to my blogs, links to my books on Amazon, the web site that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about me (or a guy with a very similar name) for a small fee, and a link to my senior picture in the 1985 St. Johnsville Central High Yearbook.

If he had only known about Wikipedia back then, he would have dressed for success.

If he had only known about Wikipedia back then, he would have dressed for success.

There was a link to Berkeley Fiction Review (BFR). They published one of my stories about 10 years ago, so that made sense.

Then there was a link to the BFR Wikipedia page. Why, I wondered, would a search of my name bring up BFR on Wikipedia? I clicked it.

I scanned the page of information about the whys and wherefores of Berkeley Fiction Review. There, in the middle of the page, was my name, listed with about 40 others under the heading, “Notable contributors.” I am on the same list as Charles Bukowski. I confess, I don’t recognize most of the other names on the list, but they must be of some minor renown, as the majority of them have links to their own Wikipedia pages.

I don’t have my own Wikipedia page, but at the rate I’m going, I figure if I keep Googling myself, one will eventually show up for my troubles. And then I’ll be “big time.”

Who knew old Issue 27 would supply a notable contributor to ranks?

Who knew old Number 27 would supply a notable contributor to ranks?

I understand users are allowed to edit Wikipedia entries, but I promise I had nothing to do with putting my name down as a notable contributor. For one thing, I’d be too afraid of crashing the entire Wikipedia empire to attempt making  an edit.

Worse, what if they had a way to trace it and found out I was the one who put my own name on a list of nearly famous writers? That’d be awkward.

I don’t know how I got on the list of “Notable contributors,” but I sure am tickled to be there. I thought about adding a signature line to emails I send that says: “Scott Nagele, Notable contributor,” but then a wave of humility (perhaps it was envy) swept over me. After all, I was one of the minority whose name showed in plain, black font, not one of the specials in the inviting, blue, “link to my personal Wikipedia page” font. My static, disconnected name leads nowhere.

Still, among the many hundreds of BFR contributors over the years who are not notable enough to merit their own Wikipedia entries, I must be among the 20 most notable.  Either that, or somebody just picked a few random names from a past issue in order to fill the holes in the list of blue-fonters. Either way, I’m mentioned on Wikipedia. So how ‘bout them apples?

 

Edgar Rice Burroughs and making pulp fiction classic

/ Scott Nagele / 2 Comments

Classic is a subjective term. Tarzan of the Apes is included in some classic libraries and excluded from others. None of the 100+ other Edgar Rice Burroughs novels is mentioned in any discussion of classics.

But they are classics to me. Even as a child, I recognized their flaws, but I didn’t care. Burroughs took me to Africa and Mars. Even more, he helped me learn to love to read. To me that makes him a classic writer.

ERB’s books followed common plot arcs: Hero meets Damsel. They are indifferent toward each other. Damsel, unmindful of what meeting the hero in the beginning of an adventure story portends, is careless in her personal security. She is kidnapped by slave traders, or some other impolite group.

Hero flies to Damsel’s aid, not out of any personal regard for her, but because a hero wants employment for his skills. Hero rescues Damsel. They talk a bit more and each comes to the unwilling conclusion that the other has cute dimples or some such endearing trait. Things seem to have turned in a good direction.

Edgar Rice Burroughs - the first author I couldn't put down.

Edgar Rice Burroughs – the first author I couldn’t put down.

Yet, there is trouble brewing. The villains have not yet been brought to justice (i.e. killed in self-defense) and we are only halfway through the book. Tragedy strikes when Hero says something innocuous that is misinterpreted as an insult by Damsel. She storms off, leading Hero to conclude such a mercurial woman isn’t worth his affections, her cute dimples notwithstanding.

This emotional rollercoastering causes Hero to lose focus, allowing the slave traders to capture both. The bad guys intend to croak Hero, while proceeding to auction Damsel to the highest bidder, if the rogue leader can keep his grotesque hands off of her until then. He’s noticed her dimples too, and realizing how mercurial she is, he’s really hot for her.

Hero and Damsel are taken in different directions — he to a gruesome death, she to be ogled by a horrid specimen of humanity, who somehow can’t actually bring himself to touch her, but is upon the point of doing so at every moment. Her torture is magnified by knowing Hero is probably dead by now, and realizing she didn’t actually hate him that much when he was alive. In fact, had it not been for his uncouth behavior . . .

Her hopeless eyes are a big turn-on to the villain. They give him the juice he needs to finally come at her with his filthy, greasy hands. His bulbous nose and his brown teeth, together with the smell of animal fat on his unwashed body, cause Damsel to scream exactly once before closing out the chapter by fainting dead away.

While all this foreplay is going on, Hero is brought to the apparatus necessary for the imaginative killing of heroes that is ever being conceived, yet never actually executed, by bad dudes in the arts. Hero quickly assesses and demonstrates the flaws of the lethal apparatus to his captors by killing them all with its safety defects.

Hero flies to the succor (again) of the insufferable Damsel. Though he may give a passing thought to her dimples, he races to her aid for reasons truly noble. It is, after all, more heroic to rescue somebody he doesn’t like, dimples or not.

Hero interrupts the impending outrage just as things are about to progress to where they cannot be allowed to go in the early 20th century. Though Hero takes no pleasure in dispensing death, the lust-crazed fiend will accept no resolution less than giving complete satisfaction to the incensed reader. But he will not die before advising Damsel that she has misinterpreted Hero’s words toward her.

Content at providing closure, the villain breathes his last. Hero and Damsel realize the foolishness of letting a misunderstanding come between them, and they kiss, with no tongues.

I eagerly followed this plot every time. Maybe I was just young and callow, but that doesn’t matter. I was entertained and my imagination was sparked. It kept me reading. That’s what matters.