POP!
The shock wave from the bubble bursting was probably enough to disturb your sleep, even from half-way around the world. The single jolt probably rustled you from your dream, barely enough to wake you up, but you just rolled over and fell back to sleep. But it happened!
I’ve had a very mentally exhausting last few weeks. Between developing mission strategies for land projects and meetings on an ever growing number of issues that require mental gymnastics between meetings just to keep up with the subject of the moment, I come home most days and really just need to mentally unwind. Well, I’m all caught up with DVDs of Justified, The Walking Dead and the Americans that Ann has sent (Game of Thrones is starting back up soon!) and wanting more than the few laughs the Daily Show/Colbert Report gives me, I remembered that one of the fiction series I like was supposed to have a new release soon. So last night I went on to Amazon and sure enough, a new book was released three weeks ago and, thanks to the Kindle iPad app, I had it loaded onto my iPad in a matter of minutes. And this time, the adventure occurs in East Africa! Sure, it’s half a continent away, but it’s Africa!
Now there’s great literature and there is good story telling. Sometimes they’re the same, but when what you want is something to just suck you in, pull you along and not make you think too much - good story telling is hard to beat. I give great story tellers a lot of credit. They create a world that takes you from this to another reality. Last night I got sucked in pretty quickly. And when I woke up this morning, the first thing I thought of was getting back to the story, after making some coffee of course.
So here I was, Saturday morning, fresh cup of coffee, sitting on my couch deeply engrossed in a story and it happened. The bubble pops, something in the story-telling goes grossly awry. I’ve had it happen before, some gross factual error that the writer didn’t properly research (it was a photography thing) and I even once had it happen with the language used (two sentences in the middle of a paragraph that were just wrong - a book and a half into one of the best written stories I’ve ever read and two poorly written sentences shakes me out of the alternate reality). This time, the pin to the bubble that the author created was factual knowledge.
There is no way in Hell that a 40-year veteran of the CIA, who cut his teeth in Africa in the 1970’s and -80s, that in previous books has coordinated activities with the military, and has worked on counter-terrorism for the past ten years does NOT know that the headquarters for AFRICOM (the Department of Defense’s Africa Command) is in Stuttgart, Germany. Maybe he doesn’t know who the current commanding General is (General Hamm - yes, the banter in the book played off on the irony of the General’s name), but he has to know that AFRICOM is in Stuttgart.
Bubble popped.
I know most people don’t know that fact and maybe that fact is vital to the story and the author had to make sure the reader knew that fact, and at the least it led to an entertaining couple of paragraphs in fantasy land, but he should have found another way to do it - the bubble had been popped. No way the one character didn’t know that fact.
Thank goodness the writer kept to form and the bubble quickly formed again. My morning has flown by and I’m forced to put the story down lest I get absolutely nothing done today. There’s always tonight! And it’s a two day weekend!
I hope the shock wave from the bubble bursting didn’t disturb your sleep too much.