Percent Human DNA ribbon

When I attended my first WorldCon, I created some Airship Pirate ribbons to promote the serialization of Revin’s Heart. It was (from my perspective) a wildly successful promotional campaign. It was a huge amount of fun, gave me an ice breaker to discuss my book as people walked by the table in the dealer room, and was surprisingly (to me) gratifying to see dozens of strangers all over the convention wearing my ribbon. Since then, I’ve thinking about what I could do to meet or surpass the standard I set then. I think I may have done it with a new ribbon to promote the Better Angels.

The Better Angels are non-human biological androids. That means that they have no human DNA — they are the product of clean-room biological engineering. They are molecularly assembled to spec, fully grown (well, as pre-teen girls), and have a personality module that has programming to govern their behavior. So, although they look like pre-teen girls, they are not human. They were not born. They don’t grow or develop. And they are programmed with a stack of modules that provide all of the functionality for their behavior, from basic autonomic physiology to language and higher-order behavior. In the case of the Angels, they can be singing-and-dancing pop idols or ruthless, cold-blooded covert-military soldiers (Or more! Read the stories to see what else they can do!)

This time, I’ve created a ribbon people can wear with a space to write in their percentage of “human DNA.” You might ask, “How do you know your own percentage of human DNA?” What a great question! To answer that question, I’ve created an app (well, just a webpage, actually) that analyses your DNA and tells you what percentage is “human.” The Better Angels, of course, have zero percent “human DNA”, but how much do you have? Luckily, the app can tell you!

screen of Makasete Human DNA Analysis screen

The 任せて Human DNA Analysis app is simple to operate. You scan a QR code to open the app on your mobile device and tap the fingerprint icon on the screen. The app runs, emits several progress messages, and finally reports your percentage of “human DNA”. Sometimes the first time it runs, it may give you anomalous results. But if you run it a second time (or more), it gives you “more accurate,” precise, and consistent results.

Note the disclaimer at the bottom of the page, however: “Accuracy of 任せて DNA Analysis ±100%”

Also note that, yes, of course I could link the app here. But you’re going to have to come visit me in the dealer room to get the QR code. (smiley-face)

I used to write little web apps like this all the time. For most of my career, I was the Director of the Biology Computer Resource Center at UMass Amherst. I created dozens little web apps for teaching or infrastructure for the Biology Department. But I haven’t done anything like that for a few years. I had to solve a variety of minor technical problems to make it work, and I was tickled to find that I haven’t completely lost my touch.

I invested a fair amount of time investigating what to use as a plausible value of percent human DNA. The simplest answer would have been 99% or something like that. But that wouldn’t have given me a context to talk about the structure of the human genome, which is delightfully weird and complex.

Most people know there are these things called “genes.” And a lot of people know that genes contain the “code” for proteins. When Francis Crick and others “cracked the genetic code” there was great optimism that we would quickly be able to read the “blueprints of life.” But genomic structure turned out to be way, way, way more complicated.

It turns out that only a tiny part (1%-2%) of the DNA in your genome contains coding sequences to make proteins. There are lots of other sequences in there, many of which are still only poorly understood. Each coding sequence is paired with regulatory sequences that control when it is transcribed. There are also bits that code for RNAs that aren’t translated into proteins (transfer RNAs, etc). As much as 8% of your genome includes human endogenous retroviral sequences. Retroviruses (like HIV, varicella-zoster (aka chicken pox), and herpes) have been sticking their DNA into eukaryotic genomes for billions of years. Then there are structural and repetitive sequences, that include things like centromeres, telomeres, and microsatelites, that may comprise as much as 50% of your genome.

Humans are primates and mammals and tetrapods and vertebrates and eukaryotes. The amount of “uniquely human” DNA is actually vanishingly small. Almost all of our genes are literally identical with bonobos (our closest primate relatives) and are functionally identical with all mammals and tetrapods and eukaryotes. Some proteins (like ubiquitin and cytochrome C) have been honed by billions of years of evolution and are virtually identical across all living organisms.

In the end, I met with a couple of professional biologists to ask them what percentage I should report as “human DNA” with the goal of being able to tell a fun story about genomic structure. They were pretty amused by the idea, once they got past the science fictional elements (One said, “What! They don’t go through development!?”), and we agreed to pick something something around 60%.

The ribbons are currently scheduled to be delivered in time that I should have them for Readercon! And I will bring plenty to Worldcon. (Well, a goodly number, anyway. These things don’t grow on trees, after all.) I’m excited, because I suspect they’ll be a hit and, when people see others wearing them, they’ll want to stop by the table to get one of their own. And, who knows, maybe even pick up a book!

So if you’re coming to Readercon or Worldcon, come find me at the Water Dragon Publishing table and get your DNA analyzed.

I sold books at the Amherst Artisan’s Market today. A little blond girl, with her mother and younger sister, stopped by my vendor table and was very taken with the cover illustration on Better Angels: Tour de Force. I did my regular pitch:

I call this “fluffy military space opera”. It’s about a group of non-human biological androids that look like pre-teen girls and act as a magical-girl singing-and-dancing troupe, but they can change up their programming and become a covert military force.

“That sounds fantastic!” the girl said.

“I should tell your mother,” I said, “that although this book doesn’t have adult themes, it does have some violence. The contrast between the Angels being cute little girls and ruthless killers, when they turn on their soldier programming, is what the Japanese call ‘gap-moe’ and is what I was going for as an author.”

“Oh, violence is just fine,” the girl said. “I read that all the time.”

“But do you have ten dollars?” her mother said.

The little girl’s younger sister piped up and said, “She has a HUNDRED DOLLARS.”

“No, she doesn’t,” her mother said.

“But, Mom!” the little girl protested, as her mother dragged her away.

I almost wanted to say, “Sorry, Brunhilde!”

June was super busy, with the Nebula Conference and the two Pride bookselling events. July looks to be quieter. There are a bunch of events I could have attended, but I’m currently only scheduled to go to Readercon. Look for me in the dealer room where I will, again, be running the tables for Water Dragon and Small Publishing in a Big Universe.

If you’re an author planning to attend Readercon and you don’t have a place to sell books, there is probably still time to request a spot at the Small Publishing in a Big Universe table. It costs very little and gives you a place to tell people to buy your books. Plus you can stand behind the table yourself to meet with readers and sign copies. It doesn’t work so well for authors who are not in attendance but, if you’re there in person, you can really make a lot of sales that way.

I was so busy in June, I didn’t get much writing done at all. Some people can snatch moments here and there to write. For me that can work alright for the little story fragments that I write for #wss366, but it doesn’t work for making progress on my serious writing projects. I did, finally, get back to writing in the past week and wrote the final, climactic scene of one of the storylines in The Ground Never Lies. I had been putting it off for months. Now I only have one or two world-building scenes left to write and then I can try to merge the two storylines. After that, I hope to pass it off to my trusty beta readers to see if the whole thing hangs together. It will need a lot of revising, but July should be perfect for that.

In August, I will be attending Worldcon in Seattle. The schedule has not been finalized, but my draft schedule looks great. I’m currently scheduled for seven panels (serving as moderator on one) and a reading. The reading is from my forthcoming book A Familiar Problem which has been delayed since January. I’m really hopeful it will be out in time for Worldcon. (Of course, I also really hoped it would be out for Boskone and Watch City and the Nebula Conference and Readercon, but… Well… Sigh…)

I finally bought our plane tickets. The most convenient airport for us is Bradley, in between Hartford and Springfield. It’s nice because it’s a somewhat smaller airport and only half the distance to Boston. But Boston tends to have more direct flights. When I fly to Europe, I’ve usually flown out of Boston. I did a search and found that there were no non-stop flights to Seattle from Bradley. There were two from Boston. When I checked, however, they were operated by Alaska Airlines and the cost was nearly twice as much as having one stop. So, we’re flying out of Bradley.

After Worldcon, I will be busy with family and then getting ready for the fall. The fall… Sigh… I have to teach the writing class two more times (in Fall and Spring) and then I will finally be able to retire and be done with working. Then I can dedicate myself to writing full time. I’m really glad I did the phased retirement, but I’m looking forward to wrapping it up.

I was interested to read this interview with Peter Thiel because, although I’ve heard a lot about him and his stupid ideas, I’ve never actually seen what he has to stay for himself. It turns out that he’s an idiot — at least about science.

He’s basically the kind of person who, when the TV isn’t working right, believes in percussive maintenance — that is, to whack it a few times and see if that makes it work better. He basically supported bringing in Trump to whack the United States a few times and see if it starts to work better. His thinking is that, if it starts working better then great. And if it doesn’t, you just throw it out and buy a new one. I mean, it doesn’t really matter to HIM if a bunch of people that depend on government services die or whatever. But, rather than pushing this analogy any further, let’s look what he actually said.

His basic critique is that our society — science in particular — has become stagnant or, minimally, is offering only diminishing returns:

There are intellectual questions: How many breakthroughs are we having? How do we quantify these things? What are the returns of going into research?

There certainly are diminishing returns to going into science or going into academia generally. Maybe this is why so much of it feels like a sociopathic, Malthusian kind of an institution, because you have to throw more and more and more at something to get the same returns. And at some point, people give up and the thing collapses.

There are a couple of inter-related problems with his assertion. The first is that current science is just a lot more complicated than people in previous generations expected. If you read people around the time of Crick and Watson, everyone thought that, since we’d “cracked the code” of DNA, we would simply be able to read the “blueprint of life”. As we know now, it was not nearly so simple, with introns and exons and non-coding sequences and RNA processing and endogenous viral elements and epigenetic effects and many, many other complicating factors that people had no idea of in those earlier times. And complicated science leads to the second problem: it’s a lot more expensive and we’ve defunded the government and education.

If you note when all of these breakthroughs were happening, it was during a time when the United States was taxing the highest incomes at 90% and investing a lot of that money in growing higher education. That money was gradually choked off and before Trump researchers were spending most of their time applying for funding. Rather than, you know, actually doing research. That’s why things weren’t going any faster than they were. And now that there’s NO FUNDING, there’s no chance of doing the research at all.

Furthermore, the slow, patient work of science has made astonishing breakthroughs which he seems to completely neglect. We have made astonishing breakthroughs on cancer. Cancer used to be a death sentence. Now, there are a lot of cancers that we can simply cure. And the rate of progress has been accelerating — at least until we let Peter Thiel and his moron surrogates defund the NIH.

It’s impossible to quantify how many people are doing to die because of what Trump has done. Even worse, it’s probably going to take generations to recover — if science in the United States ever does. Labs that lose funding probably won’t ever recover. A lot of the people that were doing the work will move to other countries or other lines of work. A lot of people that were going to go into science now never will. We’ve lost momentum we will probably never regain.

Peter Thiel doesn’t care.

I spent the weekend of June 21 and 22 selling books at two events. I had applied and been accepted to participate in the Queer Artisan Market back in late May. But then in the middle of June, there was was a flurry of activity to organize the first Amherst pride parade in just a couple of weeks. I volunteered to sell books at the rally after the parade and got accepted to that as well.

Before I went, I checked the books I had on hand. I had copies of my own books, Revin’s Heart and Better Angels: Tour de Force plus two or three copies of six other titles — Water Dragon has an extensive selection of LGBTQIA+ books in their pride collection. I reached out to see if I could get a few more titles. Unfortunately, he wanted to hold back the stock he had for BayCon, so I just went with what I had.

I also printed out a bunch of extra copies of my Islands of Revin’s Heart and Better Angels ‘zines. I spent the time in the booth, after I set up but before things got busy, folding them up. It’s a nice, relaxing thing to do. And people really seem to enjoy taking copies of the ‘zines with them. I don’t know how many people actually buy the books after taking one, but I figure they can’t hurt.

The very first time I sold books was at the 2022 Queer Pop-up Market at the Mill District in North Amherst (just down the street from my home). I only had the first two novelettes of Revin’s Heart, with the third (of seven) about to come out. I didn’t have any of the kit for selling books yet. But I had a great time meeting potential readers and sold enough to be encouraged. Now, I’ve got everything I need and have become an old hand at loading in and setting up.

Over the years, the market has evolved into an artisan market. It was canceled in 2023 (due to weather, I think) and I was declined a spot in 2024. But this year, I had booth number 1. They have gotten their organization down to a fine art. Everything was laid out nicely for my arrival. I was able to back my car up to my spot and got my son to help me unload everything and set up in just a few minutes.

The market was lively in spite of hot weather. The booth next to me sold crocheted animals, including a lot of molluscs. There were jewelry makers, a booth with fancy lemonade, printmakers, and many other awesome booths. I was the only bookseller.

It took me a few tries to develop an effective tour of the table that let me pitch the books most effectively. I sold out of one of the books before noon. But I still had at least one copy of all the rest at the end of the day.

Over night, it rained very hard and was still raining in the morning in advance of the Pride Parade. I watched the radar, trying to decide whether to go. Books don’t do well in the rain. But there was a message from the organizers saying that the rain was predicted to end at 9:30. Sure enough, the rain ended and I headed to common to set up.

I was a little worried because it was the first time they’d run the event. Information about setting up had been sketchy. They didn’t have assigned locations. But I pulled up, grabbed the spot closest to where I was parked, and — after spreading a plastic drop-cloth on the grass— I was able to set up.

It was quiet for the first couple of hours until the parade arrived at the common. Then it got super busy. I ended up selling about twice as many books as I had the previous day in a much shorter period of time. I still had a few books left at the end of the day, but I had sold out of several things and what was left fit in a single box.

I should look into other pride events around the region to sell books at. I like the community and excitement of pride events. They’re fun and welcoming.

Although I had attended the SFWA Nebula Conference previously as a virtual attendee, 2025 was the first year I went to the face-to-face conference. For me, it was the capstone of a three-week-long road trip with my son. We attended a wedding, then visited my brother for week, and finally continued onto the Nebulas in Kansas City. We had a great time.

Before the conference, the SFWA Board had a two-day retreat to talk about strategic planning. This has been a priority of mine as a new board member. Until the Nebulas, we’d been largely in crisis management mode, after the loss of the leadership and staff last summer. This retreat gave us the opportunity to dedicate enough time for some extended discussions about where we think the organization should go

It was also my first opportunity to meet most of the principals of SFWA. I had only met one of the other board members previously, other than via Zoom. Zoom is great for meetings, but it doesn’t provide much opportunity for side-conversations. I also got to meet the staff, including the new executive director that we just hired. More about that below

Note: this is not any kind of official report and represents only my personal impressions of what we did over the two days of meetings.

We began broadly by reviewing SFWA’s mission statement. Then we cast a broad net and began to consider how to more concisely sum up what we want SFWA to be. After an hour and a half, we had a working statement to use as the basis for further discussion to start developing our strategic plan.

SFWA does a lot of things. From the estates and legacy program to the writing dates. From the givers grant to the emergency medical fund. From the contract committee to griefcom. We tried to list out all of the programs that SFWA currently manages. It’s a long list. Then we tried to put the activities in categories: development, membership, communications, internal support, and programming. Finally, we tried to develop a set of priorities to help us understand what we want to accomplish in the coming year.

In the afternoon, we focused primarily on discussing the membership program, so we could talk about the other aspects (development, communications, and internal support) with the staff that would be attending the following day. We identified three areas to prioritize and then split up into breakout groups to develop plans for each of the three areas with action steps. After we shared out the results, we adjourned for the day.

On the second day, the board met again, this time together with all of the staff and volunteers for introductions. Unlike the Board, where we had been meeting via Zoom, I mostly hadn’t interacted with others except via email or Discord, so it was nice to be able to associate a face with a name. We had a brief discussion with the new executive director to describe what we had accomplished during the strategic planning. Finally, we had a brief official board meeting and, among other things, voted to accept a proposal for the proposal for the location of next year’s Nebula conference.

When I got home after the conference, I had a one-on-one onboarding meeting with the new executive director. I had an opportunity to discuss what my goals are for SFWA. We had a frank discussion where I had a chance to share my perspective. I’m really impressed by her acumen and approach. I think she’s going to be a great addition to the organization.

I’m very encouraged for the coming year. We developed some good, concrete plans for improving the organization. We are fully staffed with great people. The leadership team looks to be stable for the coming year with fantastic new people coming in board in July. I think we have successfully weathered the crisis and the sky’s the limit going forward.

I’ve already signed up to attend the Nebula Conference in 2026. It’s going to be in the Chicago area. Through June 30, early bird registration is available at a reduced rate. Since it’s in the midwest, I can probably combine it with a visit to my brother again. I hope to see you next year in Chicago!

After a long chilly spring, the weather has finally turned hot. And hot weather requires hot salsa.

A few restaurants I visited, especially in the southwest, had great salsa or — if you were lucky — fresh pico-de-gallo. Most of the salsa I found in our local grocery store, however, was disappointing. I think I must have tried every kind of fresh or bottled salsa over the years, looking for the right one. Little did I know how easy it was to make your own salsa. Here’s my recipe:

Ingredients

1 large can of petite-diced tomatoes

1 red onion, diced

2 jalapeño peppers, finely chopped

several sprigs of cilantro, coarsely chopped

1 big squirt of bottled lime juice (maybe two or three limes worth)

salt to taste

Directions

Dump the can of tomatoes in a plastic storage container, add the onions, jalapeños, cilantro, lime juice, and salt. Mix.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do. None of the proportions are really important. Just use a smaller can of tomatoes to make a smaller batch. But, honestly, why would you ever do that?

It does get better if you let it sit for a while. But, on a hot day, ain’t nobody got time for that.

At the Nebula Conference this year, Kat Brehm organized a live-action slush reading panel. She said this has been a dream of hers for several years and she was super excited to pull it off. She got Scott Edelman and Erin Roberts to read the openings to manuscripts (the first 500 words) and had a panel of slush readers who were to raise their hand when they were ready to reject a manuscript. And once three raised their hands, the reading stopped and she asked the slush readers to explain why they had rejected the manuscript (or why not). I decided to submit a piece to the event and attended the panel.

It was interesting to see what the slush readers liked and didn’t like. To be honest, I couldn’t always tell the difference between the things they gushingly extolled and the things they rejected out of hand. A common factor was starting the story at the wrong place: they sometimes thought a story had too much set up, but frequently were willing to tolerate (what seemed to me) like. a vast amount of set up if they liked something or were intrigued by something.

Obviously, it was about striking a balance. Some had too much worldbuilding. Some had not enough worldbuilding. Sometimes reviewers agreed and sometimes they disagreed.

Their responses were also calibrated to what kind of submission it was: short stories needed an immediate hook while they were willing to let a novel start more slowly, acknowledging there was time to let the action develop,

My piece didn’t fare very well. It wasn’t the worst (which was someone who used a mirror trope that got universally rejected within the first two sentences.) But mine was rejected before half way through.

The first reader rejected it almost before the narrator started reading. They said it was “not the type of story they vibe with.” Two or three more raised their hands at more-or-less the same moment about halfway through. Most of their comments didn’t really tell me anything I don’t already know about my writing.

The goal of my opening was to present what I thought might appear as a conventional (perhaps even cliched) scenario and then take it a different direction with a twist. But all of the slush readers simply rejected it as appearing too conventional. They never got to the twist because they didn’t give it a chance. That’s really useful for me to know about slush readers. I’ve been a slush reader before (though not very much) and one of my goals was to try to actually get through a story, unless it was really intolerably bad. But that was my privilege, since I don’t have to do it very often.

Another comment they made was that the language was too ordinary or matter-of-fact. This is an intentional stylistic choice I make. I hate flowery, literary writing. It gets in the way of me being able to enjoy a story. So I strive for relatively simple, prosaic prose. But I can see that, at least these, slush readers would prefer something that sounds less ordinary.

Finally, one or two slush readers pointed out that they want to know more about the protagonist’s feelings — to have more interiority. Again, this is a stylistic choice I make (which I’ve described elsewhere). Since we can’t get inside other people’s heads and only ever hear our own thoughts, Unless I’m writing in first person, I much prefer to write about things are observable: people’s words and actions. But it’s obviously out of step with what these slush readers were expecting. Or, rather, what they were looking for. They probably expect most manuscripts to be terrible, which is why they don’t bother to read more than a few sentences before rejecting them.

This isn’t really a surprise to me. I know that the stuff I write isn’t what a lot of editors are looking for. But I like it. And I was disappointed that people didn’t even get to the twist to see where the story was going. It’s given me some useful perspective to figure out what to consider going forward. But it leaves me with a question.

How much should I try to change my writing to satisfy others? If they’d read the whole story, I expect they’d have a bunch of other complaints about my writing. I don’t like a traditional three-act story structure either. I’m not big on the whole “dark night of the soul” thing. I like more episodic fiction with different kinds of pacing and stakes.

I really appreciated John Wiswell’s comments in his Nebula acceptance speech. He described being rejected again and again and again until he gave up. Then he really doubled down, quit trying to satisfy editors or agents, and wrote something as “weird and neurodivergent” as himself. Thanks, John.

The SFWA Nebula Conference is coming right up (June 6 and 7, 2025). Although I’ve attended remotely before, I’m attending this year in person for the first time. I will be appearing at two events on Friday, June 6th: a “Meet and Greet” at 4pm CDT with William Ledbetter, Greg Leunig, and Michael Capobianco and a Networking Reception from 8 to 11pm.

I have also been invited to serve during the award ceremony as a “runner,” that will guide people to the stage during the event. When I was asked if was willing to do that, I pointed out that I would be happy to, as long as it didn’t actually involved any running, as I will be wearing a mask and walking slowly with a staff. I was assured that would be fine, and so I said I would be happy to serve.

Prior to the conference, the SFWA Board will have a retreat to discuss strategic planning. Anyone who’s been reading my blog will be unsurprised by my focuses: restoring normal functioning, increasing fundraising, and improving member retention. To accomplish the last two, I think we need to improve publicity and outreach. SFWA does a lot of great stuff, but people don’t always know what we’re doing.

I really do appreciate many of the things that SFWA offers. I particularly take advantage of the Writing Date for socialization and networking (though a little less since I run my own similar event for the Straw Dog Writers Guild). Writer Beware is a particularly useful useful service. The information about contracts and publishing have been extremely helpful. And I appreciate the SFWA community as a resource to learn about craft of writing, the publishing landscape, to learn about new projects, and to hear scuttlebutt.

I find I’m a little more nervous heading to this convention than I usually am. I think this is because I’m a little more concerned than usual about making a good impression. I’m going to be meeting a lot of people that I’ll be working with for the next couple of years as Secretary. But everyone involved in SFWA leadership has been fantastic to work with so far, so I’m not really worried — just a little nervous.

When I was a kid, I started walking with a staff as a walking stick. My family lived in a forest in southwest Michigan. My brother Philip had a friend, Richard Molenaar, and they were always doing all kinds of creative fictional things, making fantastical maps and stories and artwork. At one point, they constructed an imaginary religion and used a wind-thrown tree in the forest as their “Temple of the Staff.” I liked imitating things that my older brother was doing, so I cut a staff too and started walking with it. In those days, I usually cut a staff of ironwood (Ostrya virginiana), which I would often mark with runes.

I had learned to make runes when I read The Hobbit in fourth grade. Tolkien had adapted futhorc runes when he created the dwarven map and I had reverse engineered them once I realized that it was just a substitution cipher of the English text from the book. My friends and I exchanged all of our notes in class in runic when I was in high school, so I was quite proficient at writing in runic, once upon a time. It worked really well, although one time I wrote the note in Spanish and my friend (who was studying French) was very puzzled when he tried to read it.

Years later, when I moved back to Michigan for graduate work, I decided to cut a small red oak (Quercus rubra) tree in the forest and made two staves. I peeled the bark just at the top on each and, on one for myself, I carved an S rune and, on one for my wife, I carved an A rune. I still have those staves, thirty years later. I used them only occasionally for most of that time but, when I fell on the ice several years ago, I injured my right knee. Since then, I’ve found using a walking aid helpful, and so I’ve taken to using a staff pretty much any time I have to walk for more than a few blocks.

The staves are pretty long — around five feet — so they don’t really fit conveniently in the car. When we began our road trip, it became clear, I couldn’t bring either of my existing staves, so I decided I would undertake to make a new staff while en route.

When we arrived at Phil’s apartment, I mentioned my plan and inquired whether there might be a good place to cut a staff. He said that he had a number of walking sticks already that I could borrow to see if any might be right. One was from the Kalamazoo Nature Center, but it was too short. Another was a big crooked piece of osage orange driftwood. It was closer to what I wanted in height, but just wasn’t a good fit.

We puzzled for a while about where to cut a staff but we couldn’t come up with a place where it would really be appropriate to do that. So I fell back on my plan B: to look for a wooden handle at a hardware store that I could adapt to be a staff.

We went to a local hardware store to see what was available. They had axe handles and shovel handles, but they were all too short. Push broom handles were longer, but too narrow. There were dowels, but they were also too short. There was a really long piece of heavier wood, but it was so long there was no way to carry it in the car. A wheelbarrow handle was long enough, but the bottom two-thirds was squared off, making the whole thing a bit cumbersome and heavy. There were a bunch of other cylindrical objects that we joked about making into a staff: water pipe insulation (not rigid enough). Florescent light bulbs (too brittle). Eventually we gave up. I nearly resorted to going to one of the large chain stores, but Phil remembered another local hardware store and, after we looked there, we found a dust mop handle that had a metal part at the end (to hold the dust mop), but which was otherwise about the right length, diameter, and heaviness. Plus, it was absurdly cheap (like $10). We bought some rubber feet and took it home to work on it.

I wanted to decorate it a bit and had been thinking about how to do it as we investigated the various possibilities. I considered buying a dremel motor tool and routing out some runes, but that was a bit more expensive than I had bargained for. Phil suggested wood burning. He had an old woodburning kit he had gotten as a teenager that he’d been carrying around for fifty years. So, after cutting off the metal head and sticking on a rubber foot, we got out the woodburning kit and I gave it a try.

I wanted to put on a rune, or runes. When I had carved runes before, it was enough work that I just put on a single rune at the top. But with the wood burning kit, I aimed to do three runes to spell out SDB. I looked through the various tips and selected one that was rather like a standard screwdriver. It worked admirably to made wide, even strokes for runes. Then, I added a diamond-shaped mark between the B and the S, to make it clear in what order the runes were to be read. But then the rest of the staff looked very plain, so I considered adding more runes.

I experimented making small runes with the wood burning tool. By pressing the tip into the wood, I could easily make small line segments and, from those, I could construct runes. Putting one above another, I could make the stem and then I could add two more to make a T or an A rune. But a D rune required like 8 little segments and was so hard to keep aligned that the result wasn’t really readable. So I decided to cheat: I went to the store and bought a pack of fine-point sharpies and so I could just write the runes in several colors.

I decided to have the text spiral around the staff. I wound a piece of masking tape around and around the staff and then wrote out the words of La Vojo in runes going down, above the tape in black, and then back up below the tape in red. It only took me about 40 minutes of focused effort and, although the runes are little scribbly, I’m quite satisfied with the result, which is very mystical.

On Saturday, Phil’s Historical European Martial Arts group was tabling at their local farmer’s market. I went along and took my staff. Even before I was introduced, my staff was an object of great fascination, which I found quite gratifying. And it serves its primary purpose, as a walking aid, very admirably.