Well, I’m lucky. I got to have another birthday. Many people didn’t–more than usual. I got some fabulous birthday presents: My wife made me a fresh apple pie and gave me the five books of Conn Iggulden’s Genghis/Kublai Kahn series. An agent sent me a rejection letter that was very encouraging. She had even given the book a second reading before deciding against it. And I received a similar rejection from Tor not too long ago. While it may seem strange to view rejection as hopeful, the tone of both rejections is telling me that I’m close. I keep reminding myself that a professional writer is simply an amateur who never gave up.

Speaking of aging, a quarter of a century ago I was studying French history and compared my achievements to Napoleon’s. At age 35, he had done so much more than I had. Then I stepped back and thought about how many million people I didn’t kill, so maybe I wasn’t doing so badly. Today, I can say that when Napoleon was my age, he’d been dead for ten years. Plus I’m happily married, have lived on three continents, once stood on the edge of the polar ice cap, and never, ever tried to put my children on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Not bad at all.

My heart goes out to everyone in the throes of the covid-19 crisis. I was “potentially exposed” recently and had to take the test–an experience best described as asking a long-fingered stranger to help me pick my nose. I wasn’t infected, but I have withdrawn more to my home since then. I try to cope by keeping the current tragedy in a bigger historical context. It isn’t a good strategy (phrases from Connie Willis’s short story Fire Watch keep coming to mind) but it seems to be the best I can do for now. And if you have never read Fire Watch, it’s worth your time.

Flying is difficult. I thought it would be about five times harder than driving a car, but it’s far more difficult than that. People think of cars as moving in two dimensions and airplanes in three, but that’s not the case: Friction keeps cars from sliding sideways, so most driving is only one-dimensional (along a non-Euclidean line). Even if you’re drifting, there’s plenty of friction unless you hit a patch of ice.

Boaters have a better chance of understanding the difficulty of flight because they’ve tried to sail or motor to a pier in a crosswind, aiming for a fixed point with thrust along one line, drifting from the wind along some other line, maybe drifting along a third line because of a current or tide, and rotating because the centers of mass, water resistance, and wind resistance are all in different places. Flying is more like that, with the added complication of being up in the air in defiance of gravity. And weather. That’s a topic for entire books.

I had imagined that most of flying was “pointing” the aircraft, but it’s more about maintaining a pitch attitude that gives the necessary speed and lift, understanding the effects of the weather, not getting lost, controlling the energy produced by the powerplant, dealing with the sometimes baffling gyroscopic effects, and managing the total potential and kinetic energy of a thousand pounds of steel and aluminum so that when you do get back to the ground, you ease from three dimensions back to one without hurting anything. Even birds are a pain because they are the armadillos of the air, just waiting to get whacked. The difference between armadillos and birds is that armadillos rarely require you to file paperwork with the NTSB.

Flying is a fantastic learning experience. I’ll probably have my first solo in a few weeks, working literally without a net for the first time. I’m looking forward to it.

I can’t remember when I first heard Angus MacPhail’s word “MacGuffin”, a term for a plot-fungible object at the center of a story. In the early days of Hollywood, Pearl White called it the “weenie”. Cultures that strive for Capital-A Art might have given it a fancy name, like l’objet d’le coup (I made that up.) But lucky for us, Hitchcock popularized the term MacGuffin. I like it because “MacGuffin” is itself a placeholder (like “Whatshisname” or “Bugalugs”) and reflects the object’s anonymity.

The Wikipedia page on the word “MacGuffin” reveals some disagreement over whether the audience has to care about the MacGuffin. I think the distinction in the argument hinges on whether one is talking about the structure of the story or the ability of the story to grab the audience.

From the standpoint of structure, if a story stays the same whether everyone is chasing a box of diamonds or a bottle of super rocket fuel or a briefcase of Illudium Phosdex, I think you have a proper MacGuffin. You can swap the Maltese Falcon for the Burmese Lion and have the same story. Brigid O’Shoughnessey is still going over for it and Joel Cairo still smells of gardenia. That’s what I meant by the admittedly pompous term “plot-fungible”. On the other hand, you can’t swap the Maltese Falcon for the Eiffel Tower. That has to be a different story.

But from the standpoint of story telling–capturing the attention of the readers/viewers–I think the object does need to connect to the audience. If it doesn’t hook into their view of the world, they can’t identify with the characters pursuing it. Westerners can identify with Caspar Gutman waxing romantic about the Templars. We can imagine him drawn into Eastern romanticism about the first Dalai Lama, pursuing an alternate MacGuffin called the Lotus Of Tibet. But I don’t think we could put enough romanticism into Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan Island for $24 to make anyone drool convincingly over the Bronx Rabbit. It just isn’t “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

My personal favorite MacGuffin is Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom. It’s silly. It’s absurd. And we need it desperately because Earth’s supply is alarmingly low. Meg and I use the phrase all the time–“The refrigerator’s supply of coffee creamer is alarmingly low.” In my personal head-canon, the briefcase in Pulp Fiction contains Earth’s last 600 grams of Illudium Phosdex, which Marcellus Wallace needs to shave his head (as indicated by the band-aid).

My second favorite MacGuffin is the plaid bag in What’s Up Doc? The way I look at it, there are two MacGuffins (the diamonds and the secret documents with conflict) and two non-MacGuffins (the rocks and the clothes without conflict), but since all four are packaged in identical plaid bags, the bags become ober-MacGuffins that drive the hijinks.

Several articles on MacGuffins cite Rosebud in Citizen Kane as an example, but I disagree. Yes, Rosebud is fungible–it could have been anything from [that-period-in-his-life]. But Rosebud isn’t involved the plot. It doesn’t motivate any central characters. It’s irrelevant for all but a few seconds of the film. Rosebud is a contrived mystery that brackets the biopic and provides an emotional punch. Without Rosebud, the final moment of the story is boring: “…and the old shit died. The End.” Rosebud is an artistic flourish, not a MacGuffin.

My least favorite MacGuffin is unobtainium. Even the people grinding out cheap weekly serials in the 1930’s came up with better names. The name doesn’t even work, because they’re actually obtaining it. They would have done better to call it “maguffium”. “Why is it called that?” “We don’t know. Does it matter?” Then at least they could have gotten a couple of points for a decent in-joke and a pun.