Inkabout L. Darby Gibbs

Science Fiction & Fantasy author

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My father and I married people allergic to cats, but…

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we did have the good fortune of having cats in the family prior to those marriages.  So what made me think of this?  I saw a Siamese cat, a beautiful brown point, sitting on a porch as my husband and I were driving home today from the store.  And I just starting thinking about my dad’s Siamese cats, Ming and Ling. (There was also a parakeet whose name I cannot remember and a chihuahua named Pepe, but they have their own stories which I will leave for another time.)

They joined my dad’s family before I was born, but not too much before as we still had them when I was five, and they were pretty feisty then.  My father told me those cats were fearless and intelligent.  He said there was a full-size standard poodle who lived on the block, and it would walk past the house and menace Ming and Ling, even chase them if he thought he could get away with it.

Well, one day my dad was at home — must have been a weekend.  He noticed the two cats were hanging out in the front yard, but not just relaxing. One was in a small palm tree on the grassed area between the sidewalk and the road.  The other, we’ll say it was Ling, the male of the pair, was down below walking about the spiky trunk.  It was a fairly young palm tree, as I remember I used to hang my baby doll’s blanket like a hammock from the points of the sharp-edged trunk and place my doll inside for a nap while the slender swishing leaves dangled down about me, and that was after the cats had decided to live out on their own.

So he had noted their slightly odd behavior but had not thought much about it.  When he looked out front an hour later, they were still there, Ming mounted in the palm leaves above and Ling below tirelessly traipsing around the tree. My dad was about to turn back to whatever he was doing, when he saw the black poodle walking down the sidewalk.  He saw Ling still stepping around the tree casual as you please.  My father expected the cats to start spitting or run for the house.  But they did neither.  Ling sat down looking at the dog still a good fifty feet away.  That should have rang bells for the canine, but he planted himself firmly on four feet and then tore down the walk straight for Ling.  My dad regretted in that moment having had the cats declawed in front.  He’d wanted them to have some degree of protection, but he didn’t have much faith in the fact that they still had their rear claws.  Just as this poodle pounced on Ling, Ming leaped from her perch above on to his back, plunging all her rear claws into his back while wrapping her front legs around his neck and biting him wherever she could reach.  Ling in turn had twisted onto his own back, pressed his front paws into the ground beneath him and leveraged his rear legs up scratching at the dog’s face.  The battle lasted seconds before the dog took off making the usual frightened dog wails.  And the cats?  They just strolled back to the house.  My dad was certain it was a planned ambush.

This was my father’s story as all I remember of  Ming and Ling is that they left one day.  My father said they went off for adventures.  I recall walking around the house calling their names, hoping every day they would come back.  They returned once, weeks later, looking healthy and happy and then left again presumably off for further adventures.

I love it when a lesson comes together

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Today I was introducing the idea that interpreting poetry is heavily based in the personal experience and knowledge of the reader.  I wanted my students to have a strong grasp on perspective and how it influences how we look at things. So I found several Escher pictures online (http://mcescher.com/) and one by one (via the usual various cables, a computer, an overhead projector and a screen) presented them to my students.  We talked about each one and tried to switch back and forth to see the different images. 

I particularly like this lesson because the students get excited about seeing things in a different way.  Later when we start examining poetry and the students have different viewpoints on meaning and imagery, I can remind them of these Escher prints and how we each saw different images at first, but ultimately, they all drew together a similar idea about what was happening in the print.  They learned for this brief moment to appreciate the different viewpoints of each student and to realize those differences increase their understanding.

So today my students enjoyed a great lesson. It was one of those I wish my principal could have been present to see on those days when he is there to evaluate my teaching.  Aw well, there will be other great days when a lesson comes together and feels like I produced magic.

Tuesday prompt

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Imagine the sky a different color.  In fact, split it right down the middle.  To the left the loveliest color in your imaginative arsenal and to the right the most frightening color.  Choose one of these questions to get you rolling along in your writing.  1.  Who would live under such a sky?  2.  What could make the sky look like this?  3.  These are the colors you were expecting to see.  What would seeing pale blue do to your psyche?

Kenny Rogers, the First Edition and my writing

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I remember when I first starting thinking about writing my book In Times Passed.  I worked at a factory and was a product grader.  I would pull off the line anything that didn’t meet quality requirements.  Doesn’t take much thought or intelligence, just good automaton-like reflexes. I would listen to music, day dream, write letters in my head while my eyes registered flaws and my hands reached out and grabbed, flipped and dropped the item into the correct bin based on the type of flaw.

Then a song came on the radio by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, “I just dropped in (to see what condition my condition was in).” As I listened, the story of a man who found a means to travel in time started playing out in my mind.  I liked the image of him “dropping in to see what condition [his] condition was in.”  And it was there that the idea for my book came from. I actually didn’t start writing it for several months. Each night at work, I would run the story through my mind again and again, working out the characters, problems he would run into, who his friends were, where and when it was all happening.  And every once in a while, that song would play on the radio again and refresh the images in my mind.  So finally I sat down and began writing out the story.

The book has evolved a lot since then, changing, repeatedly edited, redrafted, etc. I thought of it as the book I was learning to write on, though I had written two other books before I began it.  It seemed to be the one I most wanted to make work.  I went on to write a sequel for it and then a third and fourth, thinking all the time that one of them would be good enough to get published.  But I never really made the effort to publish.  Oh, I did some half-hearted efforts:  I sent the manuscript to a contest once and a synopsis of it to a publisher another time.  Nothing came of it.  I’ve redrafted it several times since then.

So here we are in the digital age.  I can self-publish via Smashwords.com and see if someone can enjoy the story as much as I enjoyed thinking of it, writing it and redrafting it.  When I think of that book, it reminds me of the days in the factory and how much it made the time go by for me.  And I still think of it as the book I learned to write on.  And I think each one since has been an improvement. a step forward in the skill of story telling.  So it isn’t the best book out there.  I hope one day, someone will call it an early Gibbs, the one to read to get a sense of where I started. Where one can “just drop in to see what condition my condition was in.”

Tuesday prompt

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Frequently description starts wide then slowly narrows down.  In this prompt, start narrow, as tight into an object as you can; then move out, not just on the image but on the crux of the story as well. 

My example: The ridged metal round, a green stripe accenting it, was crimped tightly to the multi-flattened sides of the yellow painted wood length, the soft pink and black-stained eraser at one end a contrast to the sharp point of lead at the other.  The nearly new pencil lay in crystal sands, the rounded edge of a footprint holding it partially elevated and at an angle just so that it appeared to be an arrow pointing out the glimmering edge of a gold watch’s dialed face peaking up where the big toe of a dainty foot had pressed.  And Gina would remember that gesture of coincidence as the beginning, the glimmer of melting ice, in a very cold case.

How I made my book trailer

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I thought that since I just finished  the improved version of my book trailer,
that I should talk about what I used to put it together.  The main
programs (Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere) should be no surprise.  The
pictures were standard digital images I took with a simple digital
camera.  I opened them up in Photoshop and worked them into what I
wanted for the video.  My nerg box is actually a picture I modified of a
large safe.  There are no real nerg box prototypes for me to take
pictures of, so the safe was a great replacement.  Another picture I
took, which was of a wooded area with a path, was also easy to modify in
Photoshop.  The path actually led up to a lake shore, but that is not an
image needed for my book. I erased the unnecessary water feature which
worked out nicely in the video.

I then used Adobe’s
Premiere Pro video software to set up my video.  I uploaded it to my list
of media the pictures I had modified, and some animated backdrops and
royalty free music (I’ll mention those sources later in this blog). 
From that point on it was just a matter of entering titling, video and
audio transitions, though I did have to modify one of my animated
backdrops. It was actually blue, but I wanted to have a  pale white,
rather murky movement going on in the background because my character
travels in time, and the process takes him through a place between
future and past that is rather like a bright foggy day where nothing is
clearly visible.  This modification was not hard to do. Using a feature
called fast color corrector under video effects, I was able to remove the blue tint
and raise the intensity of the brightness.  Dropping in my media by
layers and resizing a few pictures was the last of the easy parts. 
Preparing the titling was the most challenging.  I had to come up with
what I wanted my viewer to read, but also select text size, placement,
font, animation and color.  I worked on titling the most because I wasn’t sure
what sizes and fonts would support my story, and I didn’t want them to
upstage it either.  My most important tool ended up being my daughter.  
After awhile I would get too immersed in the process and just couldn’t
step back far enough to get it an unbiased look.  I would have her
watch and tell me what she thought needed more visual work, and then I
would go at it again.

My source for the music and animated backdrops was
Digital Juice. A person can find all sorts of useful items at their
site, from backdrops to motion design elements, such as snow falling, frames,
and revealers. They are priced reasonably and well done. They also have music useful for every genre imaginable.  The packages include some with variety and well as music under a single genre. So you could order music that is space age
in style, country, jazz or inspiring, etc.   What makes the music
selections so great is that they are provided in various lengths that
usually run in 15 seconds, 30 seconds, one minute and full length (anywhere from three minutes to a bit over four). Having the different lengths already cut to fit make selecting music easier, though selecting the piece for the mood I wanted definitely took time. 
I ended up choosing four or five, dropping them into my media list and
trying each one out with the visuals I had laid out out on the timeline in
Premiere.

Now I had all this available to me because my husband and I had been involved in videography for a few years, and we kept our equipment and software after we got out of the business.  I won’t say that authors need to purchase all these items to make a good trailer, but if you think you are going to be making several trailers over time, these particular software programs and animations do offer advantages.