E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

Last night I watched the first episode of an NBC miniseries called “The Storm.” This struck a nerve. My first mystery novel, Hour of the Manatee , was originally titled Storm Warning , and it was just that. The NBC movie was marginally about Global Warming and very exciting, and timely too, were it not for the ridiculous plot. The basic theme of runaway weather is real enough, as we speak. Bizarre mini weather phenomena have been occurring worldwide of late, and if not quite as dramatic yet as in the film, it is at least equally strange and perplexing. Even in Seattle, where I now live, the weather has shown a remarkable tendency towards the strange, pretty much since I got here two years ago. I also felt exonerated, too, by seeing a high level General as the prime heavy in this script. In my latest eco-thriller Cry of the Heron , an Air Force General is less than heroic. Weather as a weapon? Maybe. But it is Mother Nature’s weapon, not ours (which in fairness, is the underlying moral...

I believe there is such a thing as time travel. It is called 'Art.' It's music. It's film. It's paint. It's sculpture. It's what we do that makes us human. Art is timeless. You're there, at the moment of creation, every time. Have you ever wondered why it is that when you listen to an old song, one that got you viscerally that first time you heard it, it's that first time happening, at some level in your soul, all over again? Why is it that ten million people wanted to attend Michael Jackson's funeral? I was never a fan, but I always found him fascinating, and that Moon Walk was kinda cool. As a human being, he was a pretty spectacular flop. But at some level, he reached maybe a billion people worldwide, with those moves, those tunes, that beat. And even I, ever a non-fan, can summmon a moment in my past life when it got to me, and even I was sashaying across a floor in a club somewhere (I lived in L.A. back then) moving backwards, trying not to...