rlfj: Blog

One of you commented that my announcement in Chapter 28 that all of Carl’s actions up to that point had been to get to the party to meet Marilyn was wrongly done. Since Carl is writing his thoughts, he should have announced his plan to meet Marilyn much, much earlier in the story, as soon as he thought of it. My counter-argument is that: A) this would have ruined any surprise or suspense, and B) that this is a technique I have seen a lot of real authors use in real books. How many times have you read the hero telling his subordinates, “Okay, here’s the plan…”, and then the chapter ends? You see what happens in the upcoming chapters!

I believe the complaint is that this technique is acceptable in stories written in the third person (“He did…he said…”) but not in those written in the first person (“I did…I said…”). I think that is just wrong. It can be used either place.

On a side note, many of the great authors of the past used this type of technique, the ‘cliffhanger’, in their works. Especially in the 19th Century, many writers of fiction published their works as installments in newspapers. Every few weeks or maybe once a month, a new chapter would come out, and the newspapers would advertise these events heavily. These authors included Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alexander Dumas. In fact, the cliffhanger aspect to these stories is a major reason they are so popular. Most of these authors have never been out of print, a significant accomplishment!

I know Jack Daniel’s isn’t bourbon, but it isn’t because it’s not from Kentucky. The strict definition of bourbon according to the feds is that bourbon must be aged in charred oak barrels. Jack Daniel’s is charcoal filtered before aging, which violates the strict definition. According to NAFTA and several other international laws, Jack Daniel’s is treated for international trade purposes as bourbon. God knows, I drank enough way back when to know it tastes like bourbon!

There were a few comments about fraternity hazing and the dangers of the polar bear swim. As to the swim, five seconds in icy water won’t kill a healthy teenager, and the rope wrapped around his wrist will ensure he gets pulled out. Cold? Hell yes! Deadly? Not hardly! People do this stupid shit all the time in the winter, and usually the local television station will send a camera down to film them.

Hazing is common in almost any male group experience. Any anthropologist can provide chapter and verse examples from around the globe. It doesn’t matter whether it is a fraternity, the military, school clubs, sports teams, or Masai hunting groups. Hazing rituals are what separate non-members from members. “You’re not one of us.” “You’re not man enough!” “We had to do it, now it’s your turn.” All groups have them. The tough part is to make sure that the hazing group, the older males, have decent internal supervision and don’t get carried away. That can be tricky when everybody is drunk.

Several readers found errors in my statement about the availability of hand-held calculators and memory in computers. Here’s both my memory & the history.

Calculators: Hand-held calculators may have been available in 1973, but they were still ludicrously expensive. Simple four function calculators cost over $100 in 1973 dollars and would have been useless at a tech school. An HP 35, with math and trig functions very useful at a school like RPI, ran $395. Considering that tuition at RPI in 1973 was about $3,500, that was over 10% of tuition! Nowadays that would be over $6,000 for a calculator! Back then, very few students had that kind of cash. Most of us waited for a couple of years before the price dropped enough we could actually afford one. My first few years I used a slide rule, and most teachers would not allow calculators during tests for another 2-3 years.

One of the major topics of conversation of the day was which was better, the Hewlett Packard calculators or the Texas Instruments models. The HP systems had a “reverse Polish notation” method compared to the normal arithmetic “infix notation” used by the TI systems. I could afford only a TI calculator (the TI 30 model became available in 1976 for only $25!) but lusted for the HP. I ended up learning Assembly language programming their descendants.

BTW, that cost of $3,500 a year for tuition (not including room, board, & books) is correct. Tuition rose to just over $4,000 my senior year and it was an absolute scandal! How times have changed!

Core memory: RPI had an IBM 360 in ‘73 and had just upgraded the memory with the core memory I described in the year before. By the time I graduated, they had upgraded the whole system to a 370 model. Such core memory was still sold as late as ’75. I even checked Wikipedia to make sure my memory wasn’t playing tricks.

I remember in high school taking classes in how to use a slide rule! We actually had a gigantic 10’ long slide rule hanging over the blackboard. I remember my father had a beautiful Keuffel & Esser duplex slide rule that I hankered for. By the time I got old enough to need it professionally, we had calculators.

So many people out there connected Mrs. Berzinski with Mrs. Robinson! I swear, when I started writing this portion of the story, I had completely forgotten the movie. She never even crossed my mind. I figured it was just an interesting way to get Carl laid. So, here’s to you, Mrs. Berzinski!

I have had several emails from fellow RPI students telling of their time at the college. Feel free to let me know.

Welcome back to the adventures of Carl Buckman! Good news for all you fans - Book Three is almost as long as the rest of the story so far.

As always, let me know when you find any errors or anachronisms. I’m not as smart as Carl, so these things can slip through. Thanks.

One comment that was made was: ‘Thank heavens you don’t have Carl going the Delta House route!’ Oh, if you only knew the truth! Delta House was mild compared to what I saw when I was in a frat! No crap, but I saw about 90% of the antics in that story.

And so our journey together ends. This story has been just as enjoyable to write as AFS was, and without the heavy political tones that some readers objected to. Like AFS, it ended up going places I never quite expected, but I think it concludes satisfactorily. If there was one overall theme to what people wanted to read, it was Grim vs. Candy Pants at the end; that was always my intention, and I think I did it properly.

Many readers wanted Grim to keep going from 2010, but I always wanted to end in a current time frame, taking down the villain. I had a wide range of suggestions of what Grim could do in the future – many chapters on Reaper babies, including lots of girls, and catching grief from the men in the family, with Grim delivering babies during a hurricane/snowstorm/shootout; Al Qaeda/ISIS/Mexican drug lords coming after Grim and/or his family; Grim as a guest lecturer/instructor at the Georgia Police Academy and/or the FBI Academy in Quantico; Grim and Kelly meeting/hosting/rescuing Tolley Hunter during a visit to Georgia; Grim’s life being made into a book and/or movie, like Audie Murphy’s; Grim and Candy Pants in a gigantic showdown. Those were just some of the suggestions. Many of these ideas had merit, but at some point a character becomes a caricature and, ultimately, a cartoon.

Still, Grim has been one of my most popular characters. He’ll be back for a couple of sequels. Just be patient. I’m returning to AFS for a bit.