2005: The Weighting Game
The Weighting Game
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reader's guide
contents
links
about the weighting game
The Weighting Game is a title searching for a book. I came up with the title when I was talking to my wife about fad diets. I think I said something like, ``People on fad diets are just playing the weighting game.'' Then I think I said, ``Wait a minute. That sounds like a good title for a book.
epigrams
...the American goverment's harsh treatment and segregation of the Cherokee Indians was not because they were deemed any more savage than other Indians, but because they were the only ones who had developed syllabic writing, because they were able to combine vowels and consonants and write things down in order to remember, thus giving their demons access to the written word.--from Luis Fernando Verissimo's Borges and the Eternal Orangutans p. 66
principle characters
stephen bastille
Stephen Bastille has had a hard time finding a permanent job after grad school. After completing his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Washington, he's done a series of post-docs. His latest appointment in the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Lab has expired and he needs to find something quick. Stephen's father, Harold, tells him about an opening at Second Coming Bible College in Victory, Oklahoma. They need a physics teacher for their Science department. Stephen applies, comes down for an interview, and gets the job. This all happens before the novel starts. The novel opens with Stephen Bastille having just moved to Victory, Oklahoma from Downers Grove, Illinois.
harold bastille
Harold Bastille is Stephen's father. He lives in Liberty, Oklahoma (in the central part of Boomer County). He's lived there all his life. His father, Henri Bastille was a farmer, as was Henri's father, Gaston. Gaston Bastille took part in the November 1, 1895 land run that opened up what would become Boomer County to white settlement, displacing the indigenous peoples that had been relocated their from their original tribal lands some years before.
Harold didn't care much for farming, so after high school he went up to Stillwater and attended OSU and got a degree in journalism. He returned to Liberty and started working for the French language weekly, L'Indicateur.
Harold is also quite a raconteur. He has all kinds of stories about life in French Oklahoma. For thirty years he's been writing his stories and printing them in L'Indicateur and other French language periodicals. Many of his stories he has translated into English. These translations were collected and published in book form by the University of Oklahoma Press.
angela redbird
The Weighting Game will have several principle characters. In addition to Stephen Bastille, there is Angela Redbird. She's in a similar situation as Stephen. She grew up in Boomer County and went away for school. She studied human nutrition at a university in New York City. She worked for a couple of years at a hospital in Queens before giving up big city life to return to Boomer County. As the novel opens she's been back in Boomer County for three years and has been working at a weight loss clinic and diabetes center located in the eastern part of Boomer County. A large part of the population of patients that Angela Redbird sees are Native American.
minor characters
Wen Hu - The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant where Stephen and Angela meet. Wen Hu makes his own fortune cookies and customizes the messages inside for each of his patrons.
Professor Barton Hayes - The chair of the Science Department at Second Coming Bible College. He is a chemisty professor. In addition to teaching a full load of classes and directing the several chemistry and pre-med majors, he is the spiritual leader of his department, leading morning devotionals and making sure the four faculty members in his department are on the straight and narrow.
places
boomer county, oklahoma
Boomer County is a fictional place located on the outskirts of Oklahoma City's northwest side. Don't go looking at a map of Oklahoma and expect to find Boomer County. I made it up. Also, the county is not an overlay. I've not blotted out any part of the actual Oklahoma map with Boomer County. If pressed you could imagine that Boomer County is wedged in between Oklahoma and Lincoln counties. It would be south of Payne County and east of Logan and north of Pottawatomie.
The last actual land run in Oklahoma was on May 3, 1895, opening up the Kickapoo lands to white settlement. In my fictional history of Boomer County, the land run that opened up the land that would become Boomer County is Oklahoma's last land run. Boomer County was opened up to white settlement on November 1, 1895. Most of the white settlers that made the land run on November 1, 1895 were in fact French speaking farmers that had immigrated from Belgium looking for a new life in the new world. To this day, Boomer County has the largest concentration of French speaking people in Oklahoma. Stephen Bastille's father, Harold, works for Liberty's French language weekly, L'Indicateur.
