Letter to "Time" Magazine

Letters to the Editor

Time Magazine

New York, NY

Dear sirs:

I read with great interest your article on bankrupt cities and counties ("The Broken States of America," June 28, 2010). Here in Dallas we are cutting library hours by half and closing public pools at the height of summer, putting police officers on furlough days and laying off maintenance workers--and Texas is actually doing better than most states. The summer's other big stories - the Tea Party movement, the oil spill in the Gulf, Federal government spending and the national debt - are inextricably linked. It's obvious that we Americans are demanding a lifestyle that we are unwilling to pay for. In plain economic terms, this is insanity. Which will it be? Top notch services, a first-class military and police force, energy independence and a sturdy infrastructure, or low taxes, low taxes and low taxes? Everything, including "cheap oil," has a price.

Very truly yours,

Jennifer P. Jonsson

Dallas, TX

A Series Of Brilliant Observations About The Big Oil Spill.

By Jen (by God.)

Item: People who found President Obama's speech annoying were clearly expecting him to tell them what they wanted to hear, instead of the truth. We can handle anything from our politicians except maybe honesty.

Item: BP's coughing-up of $20 billion strikes me as some kind of a cop-out. If I were BP, I'd have said to hell with it, hired me the meanest, baddest pack of lawyers I could have laid my hands on and fought every lawsuit tooth and nail to the bitter end. I mean, it's not like my reputation would suffer or anything, and I'm sure my insurance company has long since bailed on me.

Item: Unfortunately that assumes I have $20 billion with which to fuck around, and I do not.

Item: Everybody who's clamoring for the government to seize control of the cleanup and throw BP off the job: Er, wait a minute. Aren't you the same bunch waving signs that say, "Government Hands Off My Medicare"?

On second thought, scratch that last one.

Item: The rig Deepwater Horizon was built by a South Korean company, owned by a Marshall Islands company and leased to BP, a British company, and the silly thing sits in international waters. So I'm still trying to figure out how the United States has any jurisdiction over it whatsoever.

Item: When a wind turbine or a solar panel springs a leak, it doesn't foul coastlines on four states and kill thousands of birds. I'm just sayin'.

Item: Yes, President Obama said it better. But were you listening? Noooo....

Item: Drilling for oil, a combustible substance, at extreme pressure, one mile beneath the surface of the ocean and under a layer of highly explosive frozen methane crystals; what could possibly go wrong?

Item: If we'd started working on the whole clean energy thing back in 1977 when President Jimmy Carter (another politician who had an annoying habit of telling the truth all the time, except maybe about the swimming rabbit, and that might have been simple heatstroke) first proposed it, we might not be in this mess.

Item: Yes, I am old enough to remember President Carter. Get over it.

Item: Of course, we could always wait another thirty or forty years and see what happens. But remember, if our kids get pissed at us, they can always cut off our Social Security.

Item: And for those of you who say we can't afford it, how many more times can we afford to clean up a spill of this size? I'm just sayin'. Y'all have a good night, now.

Mini-Post: The Wasteline Test

Writer alert! Check out this web site. It's called The Wasteline Test, created by genius Helen Sword of New Zealand. If you write in English and you can cut and paste a sample, this is a nifty tool to figure out how many wasted words you may be using. The software scans your sample for be-words, adverbs, adjectives, abstract nouns, prepositional phrases and words like It, This, Am, There - that you generally don't need. (Oops. Adverb.) For the record, Mindbender came out "Fit & Trim," the second highest category. Woot! No Accounting for Taste clocked in at "Needs Toning", mainly because of my use of It, This, Am, There - I was Flabby in that category but Lean in everything else. Anyway, check it out.

Spooky New Orleans Experiences, Part Two

Playing in the background: "Dammerschein" by Deuter

For all intents and purposes there's about a seven-year gap in my adult life between about 1999 and 2004. I won't go into all of the whys and wherefores but let's just say I got very, very sick around then and quit doing everything that didn't involve immediate survival. Like, say, going to work every day. True nervous breakdowns, in case you did not know this, are the province of the very rich and the very poor. The rich can just check into a hospital until it passes (or more likely, be very sick in their own homes with lots of servants around to clean up the mess.) The very poor can wander around on the streets being completely insane and no one bats an eye. But us middle class schlubs just have to soldier on somehow.

So I kept going to work every day because I had to, but I quit karate, quit the bagpipe band that I loved, quit writing for the most part. It was not a happy time to be me. Things got better in 2001, then got worse all at once when 9/11 happened, my mother in law died, someone I had tremendous respect for killed himself and a guy who sang in my church choir suddenly died, all within about eight weeks. Another not very happy time to be me. Then, again, things got gradually better and this time I stayed marginally sane.

I bring this up because the last writer's conference I attended, prior to Pen to Press, was in 1999, in San Diego. I can't remember what it was called. And just to show you how very sick I was getting, a literary agent gave me his card there and told me to call him--not just send in some pages or something but actually call him, which does not happen--and I never did it. I can't even remember his name now. Whoever you are, I humbly apologize.

Back to New Orleans, though. What goes on at these writer's conferences, you ask. Well, at this one there was a lot of classroom instruction. What about, you ask. Well, about what you'd expect. Plot. Characterization. Pacing. Tension. All the things that make a novel a novel. How to construct a good scene. It was basically a master class in how to write commercial fiction for publication. And strange things happened to my head while all this was going on. In a way, I knew all this stuff, but in another way I didn't know any of this stuff. It all clicked into place like a firmly struck E-chord with a mild buzz of resonator.

Here's the best analogy I can come up with, and it's not very good. A million years ago I went to music school. (No, really, I did.) Part of the curriculum was music theory. In case you don't know what music theory is, it's the inner workings of music; what makes it sound the way it does, the mathematical constructions that go into chording and melody, and how composers of the past used different constructions different ways to get different sounds. Ferexample: When a piece of music is about to end, you know it. You can feel the unresolved tension in the air, in a manner of speaking, and when it settles into the final chord, there's a sense of release, a kind of "Aaah." Especially if the piece has been 45 minutes long, which some of them are.

In music theory, this is called a IV-V-I progression, which is to say, the usual sounds that you will hear at the end of your usual piece of music are the IV, V and I chords, in that order. There are about a million different ways to do IV, V and I chords--the flute can have the low voice, say, and the trumpet the high voice, or they could be broken up into an arpeggio, or sustained, or--whatever--but the chords themselves don't change. They're still made up of the same notes. You hear them, you know them, and you expect that this is The End.

Take "Cats in the Cradle," for example. "The boy was just like me, yeah, the boy was just like me." This is your classic IV-V-I progression, times two, with a little twist; the song's in mixolydian mode instead of ionian mode. I don't really wanna go into the difference between modes, though, so let's just take my word for it and say that the phrase has kind of a dark feel to it, a somberness that you wouldn't expect at the end of a tune. The somberness fits the words perfectly; it's kind of haunting and, on occasion, makes me cry, especially if it catches me unawares.

Well, in music theory class, the professor spelled it all out for us, using "Cats in the Cradle" as his example. This is a IV-V-I progression, this is mixolydian mode, this is why the phrase sounds the way it does and evokes the feeling that it does. He probably did it a lot more artfully than I did just now, but on some level it completely clicked with me. I got it. Suddenly it wasn't just a somber phrase that made me cry. Suddenly it made perfect scientific sense. The phrase was constructed in a certain way for a certain reason and it wasn't magical anymore. And while it was totally cool that I got it, in a way it was sad. Because the magic was gone. Or was it?

Anyway, that's what these Pen to Press classroom instruction sessions were like (Ha! You didn't think I was going to get back to the point, did you? Fooled you!) I kept having moments where I got it. Oh, I'd think, and then I'd think, I knew that, and then I'd think, But I didn't really know that, it was just kind of magical and now it's scientific.

So is the magic gone? Yes and no. Writing is work. Writing is not magical. But sometimes it is.

Spooky New Orleans Experiences, Part One

Playing in the background: The soft hum of the refrigerator

Let's face it, there were a lot of spooky experiences in New Orleans. New Orleans is kind of a spooky place. These are just the highlights. Lowlights? Whatever. Considering that I was a stranger far from home, wandering around by myself, attending a for-Godsake writer's conference when I have trouble just saying the word writer out loud in a context that applies to me, having to talk about writing practically 24/7 for four days, and we're lucky I didn't have a major meltdown and maybe more than one. The meds must be working. But, anyway, the first New Orleans spooky experience. This one was pretty darn.

For starters, F. Paul Wilson was one of my instructors. If you don't know who he is, shame on you. Go check out The Tomb or any of the other Repairman Jack novels, for starters. Then move on to the serious horror (The Keep is still my fave; Nazis and vampires, what could possibly go wrong?) and maybe investigate some of the sci-fi thereafter. F. Paul was a Big Deal when I was a kid. I rank him right up there with Big Steve, and having him as a writing instructor was kind of like an amateur painter getting a master class with Pablo Picasso. I mean, never mind all the cool things you might learn; can you manage to get through the class without hyperventilating, spilling paint, or accidentally sticking the paintbrush up your nose? Okay, I exaggerate a tiny bit. But not a lot.

Then I started meeting some of the other students, most of which were cool beyond cool. One of them, JulieAnne, was from Utah. This in itself is not significant except that I used to live in Utah. In fact I lived there for about ten forgettable years, or rather I try to forget them but I still wake up screaming about them once in a while. It's not that I had an unhappy childhood exactly - married parents, Norman Rockwell home, a nice sheen of Fine for all the world to see and admire - but Salt Lake City in the 1970s was absolute hell for a cute li'l queer bipolar chick who never once thought of lying about her religion in order to work and play better with others.

(Interjection here: It's not like that anymore. The Mormon influence is still undeniable but I had a girlfriend in Salt Lake for a while in the 1990s and it's really changed--however much certain factions might not like it.)

So I mentioned to JulieAnne that I had lived in Utah and she asked me where I went to high school. I moved before high school but I'd gone to Bonneville Junior High. So had she. What year, she asked. I told her. We were there at the same time, she said. She told me her name then. I said I remembered her being a cheerleader. She asked me what I'd thought of it. I said I hadn't had a very easy time of it, culminating in the time two girls in the locker room poured hair spray down my back and set me on fire. Her head about snapped around. And she said, "You were the chick who got set on fire?!"

Well, knock me over with a feather. No one ever believes me when I tell them that story. My own parents didn't believe me, even if it was the reason they decided to send me to a Catholic high school the following year. Which never happened because we moved. Which is a shame. I've always thought I'd have made a great Catholic. And nuns. I just adore nuns.

(Yes, I realize that I didn't tell that story very well. And that some of you have just dropped your computers and said something along the lines of, "Set on fire?" And the answer is, "Yeah. Set on fire." And again, I realize I'm not telling this story very well. So sue me.)

Back to F. Paul for a second. This guy wasn't just my teacher, he had dinner with me (well, me and several others), hung around after class and took questions, and just in general was classy in a way few people who have Made It ever are to those of us who Want To Get There. So I mentioned to him that it turned out JulieAnne and I had gone to the same junior high school. He thought that was a very spooky coincidence. I said, "Yeah, like something out of an F. Paul Wilson novel." He said, "Hmm, it must mean something."

Well, I dunno what it means. But it certainly was spooky.

Live from New Orleans at Pen To Press Writers Retreat

Hi all! I’ve been in New Orleans for three days now, having possibly the best time ever as a writer and meeting all kinds of cool people. I’m at the Pen to Press Writers Retreat and staying with my friend Marcia Wall, who is cool beyond cool for letting me stay with her for free in her French Quarter walkup. (I’m paying for it with my thighs, though. She lives on the third floor and the stairs are steep.)

What can I say about this thing? First of all, if you’re even slightly interested, GO. Yeah, you have to apply and get accepted and all that, but I’ve learned more about writing COMMERCIAL FICTION, FOR PUBLICATION, than I ever did in my four years of college. See, writing commercial fiction is an entirely different animal from writing papers for ENG 405, Advanced Composition, which is the kind of class where most of us learned how to write. There are rules. Even if you know the rules (which I did, mostly, but not all of them) there are certain fine points you’ve probably missed along the way. This is like a master class in writing commercial fiction. If you’re doing something wrong, the teachers are going to find it and help you fix it. That’s worth every cent this cost me, which was, by the way, plenty.

It’s a little like the difference between going to law school, or at least as I understand the going-of to law school, versus going to paralegal school. I’ve never been to law school but I’ve lived with three different law students at various times. They tell me that in law school, they hand you a bunch of cases about A Concept. They then expect you to wade through these hundreds of pages of material and find out A. what concept you’re supposed to be looking for in the first place, which for me would be the big hurdle, and B. the rights and wrongs of that concept. For example: Here are a bunch of cases about contracts. A. The concept I’m looking for must be due consideration, and B. Due consideration means anything that would induce a reasonable person to enter into the contract.

This is why I never went to law school. (Well, that and not having $90 grand in my back pocket.) Paralegal school is better. In paralegal school, they just flat-out tell you “Hey, due consideration means anything that would induce a reasonable person to enter into the contract, and here’s a bunch of cases where they discuss that.” In short, it’s exactly backward, and a far easier way to learn about the law, if you ask me.

(By the way, if I’m wrong about the definition of due consideration, feel free to correct me. I’m sitting at a gyro café on Royal Street not far from the Hotel Monteleone and kind of in a world of my own, so concepts legal are not lighting up my brain the way they would normally. One of my instructors, Hank Schwaeble, is an attorney, though. Legal jokes have been flying around all week.)

This is a lot like that. Writers often hear, “Omit needless words” as the first commandment of writing commercial fiction. Rarely does anyone get to “how.” We spent the whole first day on “how.” Don’t use attributions other than “said.” Better yet, don’t use attributions at all. Don’t use backstory. Don’t use adverbs. And on and on. I can probably drop my word count by a good ten grand using some of this stuff – not, mind you, that I’m stupid enough to drop my estimate to the agents I’ll be meeting on Friday.

Oh my God, I’m meeting agents on Friday. EEP!! I’m very nervous. But then, I’ve survived three days of having F. Paul Wilson as one of my instructors, and that’s gotta be the equivalent of, like, an aspiring artist getting painting lessons from Picasso. Just not painting my nose by accident has been a victory. But so far so good. So I should be okay.

Everybody wish me luck!!

Guest Column: The Gulf Oil Spill

Hi all! My cousin Kyle, who is awesome, is an oilman. Not a Texas oilman, exactly -- more of an Alaskan oilman. He also happens to work for BP. I asked him to give us his take on what happened in the Gulf of Mexico recently, when eleven men died trying to bring us fuel and plastic products and a potential environmental catastrophe was unleashed. Here's what he had to say.

It's been a very emotional month for most BP employees. What happened on the Deepwater Horizon and the subsequent spill will have far reaching effects for every single citizen - politically, environmentally, economically. The science and technology that is required to drill in ultra deep water is both amazing and immensely complex. It's difficult to describe, but the cumulative scientific knowledge and skill required to do this is second to none - this is NASAstuff.... not outer space, but inner space exploration. It is extremely difficult and it is very dangerous work. If anything, the public is not getting a crash course in the risks we take to "fuel" our life styles. There needs to be honest and open debate about the risk / rewards of the life styles we lead, because the Gulf of Mexico is a very prolific hydrocarbon basin and our most important source of domestic oil, but it also contains some the richest bio-mass and bio-diversity in all the known oceans.

The sequence of events is still not clear, but in most accidents like this there is a cascading string of events that ultimately lead to catastrophes. In all operations in BP safety is always first. So, imagine the reaction of all the BP employees when this happened.... the safety culture here is very deep and very real. When planning for deep water drill holes we try to anticipate and mitigate all the known and typical problems we experience while drilling including the dreaded blow-out. This was a shocker to me.

Known: There was a blow-out. First, you have to understand the pressures involved in deep water drilling. Pressure is the key and its what you need to control - it will kill you if you don't and it will kill you fast. Controlling pressure is a balancing act of sorts and very complicated, but while drilling we use weighted muds to hold back the pressure. If the mud is too light - hydrocarbons will enter the well bore at higher pressures and you get a kick. If you don't control the kick and it gets away from you a blow-out can occur if the blow-out preventers don't activate. If the mud is too heavy, drilling fluids can leak off in the the rock formations. If you lose too much fluid, the weight of your mud column decreases and again hydrocarbons can enter the well bore to create a kick and a blow-out can occur. These are the basics and it's important to remember.

Known: The Blow-Out Preventer didn't operate as designed. This is tantamount to having the wings fall off a jet liner. Wings are not supposed to fall off airplanes.... but in rare events they do. The 48-ft 450 ton BOP was designed to withstand and bleed off a 15,000-psi kick. If the BOP was compromised in some way, this pressure rating could be much lower. From what has been made public, the pressures experienced on the deep water horizon was at a minimum of 6000 psi moments before the blow-out.

About BOPs. The BOP can pinch or shear almost anything to prevent a kick reaching the surface. However, most BOPs cannot shear drill collars and some specific tools (I don't know much about this BOP). When running drill collars and tools across the BOP, pressure is monitored very, very closely and the mud is well circulated and circulation rates are observed to make sure there are not abnormal circulation rates which can be an indication of a kick. Also, most BOPs are in a default closed position - deadman trigger so to speak. Hydraulic pressure is used to actually keep the BOP from closing shut. Why? If communication is lost with the surface and the hydraulic pressure drops to the BOP, it will automatically close and shut in the well. In this case, the BOP might have been compromised. It is critical to the investigation to retrieve the BOP to see why it didn't prevent the release of oil.

Known: This blow-out DID NOT occur while drilling. Drilling was completed and the crew had cemented the last section of casing called the completion. Most exploration wells are plugged and abandoned after the evaluation - this requires the hole to be cemented-up and properly capped. At this point a well has no more utility. This particular well, however, was a very prolific producer and we chose to complete the well and put it on a long-term production test. The well was being prepared for a sub-sea tie back to a nearby existing production header on the sea floor. So, rather than cementing the hole, the well fluid (remember the drilling mud) was being displaced with sea-water. This is standard procedure when preparing a well for production as the drilling mud can damage the productivity of the well.

Speculation: The crew of the deep water horizon thought they were dealing with a stable well. Clearly, this was not the case. The entire well was now completely cased - drilling activity was over. Then the wings fell off - something went terribly wrong.

Speculation: Blow-out occurred so quickly the night tower crew didn't know what hit them. If they knew they lost control of the pressure below them, they might not have had time to react. A blowout is the uncontrolled release (kick) of crude oil and/or natural gas from an oil well after pressure control systems have failed. Blow-outs are violent and destructive. As the gas moves up hole the pressure decreased and the gas bubbles in the column expand and accelerate. Near the surface the rate of gas expansion can reach super-sonic speeds. The gas release at the surface will create a gas "wind" which can destroy equipment and kill. The wind of methane gas at these pressures could be as fast as 300 mph!!

Speculation: The gas somehow got into the the drill-string. The most plausible theory I've heard is that the final string of casing collapsed around the drill pipe forcing fluids up the drill pipe and through the last string of casing to the surface. Did the cement fail? Did the cement disaggregate methane hydrates? Was the casing not to spec? How this could happen is unclear, but this would be a very, very rare event given the stage of the operation they were in. Perhaps, the weight of the sea-water in the well (the drilling mud was displaced) wasn't heavy enough to keep hydrocarbons from entering the now completed well. It's hard to really say.

Known: In the end the BOP was compromised somehow and could not prevent the blow-out. Clearly, if failed to shut all the way.

This is really all I know. I'm not going blame any one company for this. As the operator of the well, BP is responsible for the clean-up and will need to provide answers to the public. In the end, it's my hope that logic, cool heads, and honest debate can occur, but at this point I don't expect more than political theater and finger pointing.

Kyle

Jen speaking: I'd like to hope that we can go a little farther than that and talk about our fondness for petroleum products, as well as alternative sources of energy. As of right now, nobody has come up with a better idea, and I expect offshore drilling will continue. We need to think about how much of that we want to do. And let's not forget that eleven families are without their fathers, sons and brothers today. People die to bring us oil, and not just in war zones.