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On the ipod: Black Hawk Down Soundtrack
In the backpack: American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips

Frank Herbert will probably never be topped. He wrapped up conflicts of resource so tightly in his Dune series that I doubt you can get a better Mideast Oil allegory going. I’ll stick to religious conflict but there is definitely some interesting details to our modern resource conflicts.
I’ve read a lot of history in the pursuit of one of my BAs, most of it ancient, so I’m used to dense books but Kevin Phillips weaves so much information into his writing that I’m having a hard time following all of his information leads while keeping pace with his point.
He made a brief appearance on Bill Maher’s show a week or two back and impressed me enough that I wanted to read his book. A few chapters in, I’m finding that he does a great job of tracking our relationship to oil, the most important resource of our time, back through the years. He ties this to religious beliefs in our country and the Middle East, which led me back to Dune.
We move from one resource to another in our history. Sometimes these are realworld items: gold, water or land. Sometimes they are less tangible concepts, with concrete effect, such as feudal power.
I’m thinking a lot about sub-motivations in my characters lately and the concepts that define their ends. Political safety and privacy are a large root of many actions in the Dioscuri series. The fear of exposure definitely has my sneakiest character working it as hard as she can to keep the truth under wraps. For her the only resource she’s hoarding are secrets. She’s set against the main character of book two, Prodigal, whose main resource is freedom. The third main character is starting to define his resource as knowledge. These are pretty broad intangibles, distilled down for each character to work with but it doesn’t hurt to think about how they’ll deal with local, realworld, resources either. The world they inhabit lives on grain and for that control of land is an important goal. It’s been a motivation for war in their recent history and it’s a motivator intrigue in their present. All these motivations are starting to come together, conflict and if I’m doing my job right , explode in a fantastic but believable manner.

So Germany is tomorrow and it’s looking rather cold. I finally replaced my long wool coat and while it’s not the full on blanket my Ralph Lauren was, it should still provide me with some warmth and a sense of cloak in the streets of Trier.
I’m the most excited for the first leg of the trip. Worms looks like it’s going to be the best of everything I want though I’m also afraid I may just stay forever in the antiquities on Museum Island in Berlin. There are some definite pieces there that should help my research on the Dioscuri though my mentor, Dr. Miller has warned me that the Germans weren’t too careful with the preservation of the early marbles they acquired.
All of that aside, I won’t be taking my laptop for once and instead will be switching back to pen and notebook for two weeks. I don’t get a lot of productive writing accomplished when I travel: just larger ideas that take time to filter down into the work so I’m not too concerned about going low tech for a bit.
I wanted to have the next Hraefn/Kinos sections online before I left but I feel like they still need a bit of editing.

She had a great voice and brought a lot of insight. My friend Alfred Utton introduced me to her some years ago when he was completing his Literary Criticism capstone class. I hate to know that such a unique talent won’t be inspiring us any longer. At 58, she died far too soon. I got the news from Broadsheet on Salon but followed scifi.com’s reference to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. site:

http://www.sfwa.org/news/2006/obutler.htm

If you haven’t read Parable of the Talents, now is a good time:

http://www.tatteredcover.com/NASApp/store/Product;jsessionid=aBoBxA3sw_K6?s=showproduct&isbn=0446675784

or:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446675784/sr=8-1/qid=1141073638/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-6390233-3776714?%5Fencoding=UTF8

It’s been a long two years since I left the country and I’m ready for the break. Now that I’ve finished Neophyte and have started the submissions and agent queries, I feel like a head-clearing trip before I dive into the publishing challenge is in order.

It all starts in Trier, which sounds like a great blend of classical ruin (Roman baths) and medieval fortifications. The transition from ancient history to medieval and the effect it had on the larger population is a real point of interest to me right now as I seem to create worlds that have gone through that shift and are living in the bones of whatever kingdom or hegemony came before.

I’m also anxious to see the reconstruction in Dresden and the Museum Island in Berlin. I bought some German language lessons and uploaded them to my ipod. Hopefully, by the time I land I’ll be able to do more than order coffee though that’s really all I need.