anticontrarian

First-Ever Fiction Sale

2011-08-26T11:02:00.000-07:00

Also, go check out my new website, at dallas-taylor.com.

2011-06-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

Hello, visitors. Thanks for stopping by. I have moved my blogging/website operations over to dallas-taylor.com. Come on over and check me out over there. Love to see you.

For what it's worth, I will leave anticontrarian up for awhile while I decide what to do with it, but almost all new content will be appearing there, at least for the time being.

Thanks, y'all. See you at the new digs.

d

The Chanteuse

2011-04-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

Chanteuse (flute)
4 oz sparkling wine, spl absinthe, 1/2 oz pernod, 1 cube sugar, peychaud's
soak sugar cube in peychaud's
pour absinthe and pernod over it through a slotted spoon
top with sparkling wine
drop sugar cube in bottom

The Chanteuse has a couple of origin threads. One is my friend Cumorah, who used to work at the bar next door to mine, and is a culinary-school-trained chef and a big fan of Pernod and anisette in general. The other is an Iron Bartender competition that I lost (albeit closely) a few months ago at Tiger Tail in Ballard. The secret ingredient that evening, which we were obliged to use in three different concoctions, was Marteau Absinthe, a French-style absinthe made in Portland, Oregon. Marteau was the semi-official sponsor of the competition that evening (they did, at very least, donate a case of the stuff for us to use).Two of the rounds of the Iron Bartender competition involved creating a cocktail to match with food from the Tiger Tail kitchen, and the first round was an oyster shooter appetizer that was heavy on the salt and lime.

Now, normally anisette is not the congener that I would match to something like that, but, it being an Iron Bartender competition, I was obliged to use the absinthe. But the classic pairing with oysters is sparkling wine (well, champagne, technically, but you get the picture). And so I got to thinking about how I could combine the two. Absinthe and sparkling wine, that is. I also wanted something light, minty even, to counteract the sour-salt sting of the oysters, which was, honestly, a little overdone.

Mint didn't really seem the way to go, though, but I thought that maybe the eucalyptusy airiness of Peychaud's bitters might work. Mint and Eucalyptus are pretty different, but they do share a certain sort of ethereal quality, in that they clear air passages and soothe them with a similar coolness.

What I decided to do, in the end, was a variation on a classic, the Champagne Cocktail, which is just a glass of champagne with a bitters-soaked sugar cube dropped in it (the bitters being Angostura, the one every bar carries). Instead of the Angostura, I used Peychaud's, and I mixed a little absinthe in as well. It worked okay, though I wasn't as crazy about it as I wanted to be, at least at the competition, but it put the idea for the thing in my head.

Later, one night while I was working at Tost, Cumorah came in for a drink, as she was wont to do from time to time, and told me to make her something. I am, apparently, the only bartender she trusts to just make something up for her, and I knew she had a certain fondness for anisette, and for funny bitters-y liqueurs in general. And so I decided to make her a second-generation prototype of the Chanteuse. I made it without the absinthe, which Tost doesn't stock. I just dropped a Peychaud's-soaked sugar cube in a flute, poured sparkling wine over it, and drizzled a little Pernod over the top, which turned it a lovely shade of green.

She loved it. Which made me happy, because I like when people like my drinks.

So, for the party, I decided to take it just a little bit further, and prepare the drink in accordance with traditional absinthe service (wherein it is poured over a sugar cube). So, for the Chanteuse, the cube is soaked in Peychaud's, over which the Pernod and Absinthe are poured, then topped with sparkling wine, making a cloudy green bubble bath of anise-flavored decadence. Then I drop what's left of the sugar cube into the bottom, where it bubbles away for a while, giving the drink a nicely effervescent texture and slowly sweetening it as the sugar dissolves. It also makes a little patch of pinkish-red below the cloudy green, which I think looks nice as well.

As for the flavor, if you like licorice, you will love the Chanteuse. It's a very powerfully flavored drink, that provokes an odd mellowness when you drink it. It's not the most complicated flavor I've ever devised, but it's a little challenging and exotic (hence the name), and the rewards for engaging with it are well worth the effort, I think.

2011-04-04T17:40:00.000-07:00

Since I don't smoke or drink and swear unconvincingly, symmetry is my only vice.
-Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

Draining the Swamp in my Innards

2011-04-04T16:58:00.000-07:00

Some what know me well know that once a year or so I give over my bad habits and try and give my corpus a chance to clean itself out and set itself straight. Last year was the intestinal flora rebalancing diet. The year before was the allergy elimination diet. Both were hard, and took several weeks, but did wonders for my body, which I appreciated, since I've only got the one and it's lost a touch of its native resilience what with the punishment and the aging and such.

This year I'm going back to my roots, and working my way up to a fast.

I've done several over the years. It's a nice way to give my body a break from digestion and let it process out some buildup. There's a fair bit of controversy over the practice, with the western medical establishment pretty decidedly anti- on the one hand, and many individual anecdotes on the other side quite fervently pro-.

As for myself, well, I suppose I come down on the pro side, though I'm cognizant of the arguments on the other side, most of which seem to revolve around the lack of studies showing that fasting and the like produce the results proponents promise and concern that the lack of nutrients, protein in particular, can, if taken to extremes, result in serious harm to the body. The second thing makes sense, certainly, and I'm certainly mindful of those risks (though having the amount of stored extra calories I carry around in my belly gives me a bit of wiggle room, I suspect). I have also, for what it's worth, not found any studies in my internetical peregrinations that purport to demonstrate the harm in fasting, so there's that, too.

This time around, I've decided to try a little something different. Previously, I've been a pretty staunch juice faster, which is just what it sounds like, pretty much. You stop eating food, but keep the nutrients coming in by juicing fruits and vegetables. You can also drink vegetable broth and herbal tea. It's good, because it keeps your blood sugar from doing crazy things while giving your digestive tract and your liver a chance to move some things along.

This year, I'm trying the Master Cleanse, also known as the Lemonade Diet. The notion is similar. You mix up a concoction of lemon juice, grade b maple syrup, cayenne pepper and water and drink it when you get hungry. The notion is that the lemon juice and cayenne help to unstick the gunk that gums up the works in your digestive tract and the water helps flush it out (with the help of senna-based teas, which stimulate intestinal peristalsis in a downward direction). The maple syrup, presumably, provides the calories.

Back in the day I used to just start right in, but over the years I've learned it's a bit kinder on your body to ease into things a bit. So for the last two weeks I've been what amounts to a teetotaling vegan. No booze, no coffee, no animal products. Minimal processed food, though I haven't been too strict on that (there have been chips and salsa; I'm not ashamed). Now, for the last couple of days, I've cut my diet down to just cooked vegetables and fruit and nuts. If it feels right, I will start fasting tomorrow.

I have also, in preparation for the coming process, started drinking the spicy lemonade, and I think it's working, though I don't know that I have yet really begun to work out the really deeply-embedded gunk.

As for how long I'm going to do it, my goal is to make it three days and see how it feels. As far as I can recollect, I've only ever made it five before. Most of the master cleanse sites I've visited and read say ten days at a minimum, but that seems long to me. Mostly I plan to just listen to my body and play it by ear.

So far it seems to be going okay, though I'm a little sluggish upstairs and undermotivated. There have been some headaches, and the intestinal flush process is still not quite underway in the way I'd like it to be, but overall I'm optimistic.

I'll let you know how it goes. Wish me luck.

Worst April Fool's Day Joke Evar

2011-03-31T11:57:00.000-07:00

House Republicans so desperately want HR 1 (a budget bill with $61 billion in spending cuts, which went to the Senate and was voted down 56 to 44) that they are going to try and suspend the Constitution on Friday to make it law.

That's right. They're going to try and suspend the Constitution.

Did your head just explode? Thought so.

Oh, and the funny thing? The Senate would have to willingly cede its constitutional authority for such a maneuver to work. Yeah, that'll happen.

I guess, in the end, the joke's on them. Or us. Yeah, probably us.

The Libyan Intervention

2011-03-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

So, I've been doing a fair bit of reading about the No Fly Zone and the limited projection of American military power in support of the uprising in Libya. Unsurprisingly for the blogosphere, people have pretty strong opinions. To say there's been some Monday morning quarterbacking would be an understatement.

For what it's worth, the most worthwhile exploration of it I've read is here.

As for my own part, first off, I think that it doesn't matter that much what anyone's opinion is as to whether or not we should have, because, well, we did, and until someone invents a time machine, we live in the world we do, and things can be done, but rarely undone. That said, you can support or not support our intervention, on many different grounds, most of which seem to fall into the rubric of moral or practical.

Both sides have some compelling arguments. And I do not wish to discount them. One of the things about modern discourse I find just absolutely maddening is that when many people take a side, they are unable or unwilling to grant any legitimacy whatsoever to the other side's position or arguments, and denigrate and discount them (or, often as not, the people who make them), which trivializes and nastifies the debate without doing anything to serve the truth. To my mind, it's not a question of who's right and who's wrong, since both sides are often both: it's a question of who's more right and less wrong, and what will the outcome likely be if a particular policy or course of action is undertaken. It's about weighing the arguments against each other, and finding where the balance of truth lies.

In my own explorations of the issue of the Libyan Intervention, I've done my level best to do so, and where I've come down is this:

I support the intervention, at least so far.

Now, I could spend enough paragraphs to make your eyes glaze over and your mind start singing Hansen tunes rehashing the various arguments and weighing in on them from the position of my own personal moral calculus, but neither of us really wants me to do that, I don't think. Suffice to say I've gone back and forth, momentarily swayed by the words of many an earnest partisan of pro or con, right up until I read the above linked post (by new favorite blogger zunguzungu).

Put simply, if we hadn't intervened, there'd be a whole lot more dead Libyans right now than there are.

When the UNSC resolution was passed down, Ghaddafi's forces were poised outside the town of Benghazi, where the revolution's main battle force, such as they were and are, were holed up. These were regular people, armed with assault rifles and whatever other munitions they'd managed to seize, most with no military training. Ghaddafi's forces, on the other hand, had fighter jets and helicopter gunships and tanks. Serious military hardware. Had they been allowed to attack, it would have been a absolute slaughter, not only of the revolution's army, but of the people of Benghazi. Some estimates have up to 100,000 people killed, just in that engagement.

100,000 people.

And here's the thing. Knowing it was going to happen, and having the forces in place to intervene, had we decided not to, we would have been morally complicit in those deaths. Not as much as Ghaddafi and his army, certainly. But we would have, because we could have stopped it but didn't. We would also have been on the hook for the crackdowns that would have followed. No dictator ever has responded to an uprising by liberalizing his regime's practices. It's not how that game gets played.

On the side of non-intervention, the question of Iraq has arisen many times. And indeed it applies. Just not how it's been meant. It's not Iraq in 2003 we'd have been looking at, but Iraq in 1991, after Operation Desert Storm, when the Shia, encouraged by us, staged an armed uprising against Saddam Hussein, which was put down in true dictatorial style, with indiscriminate projection of military-grade force into crowds of civilians and random executions in the streets on the principle of collective responsibility.

Now understand, my support is provisional. That we have stood down from leading the operation and are taking on more of a support role is encourging to me, because a) we don't need to be seen leading another operation against an Arab regime, no matter how odious (and if you think Ghaddafi isn't odious, well, I'll just suggest you consider his material and spiritual support of guys like Charles Taylor), and b) because our economy and our military are just stretched too damn thin. The second we talk about putting boots on the ground, I'm against it, for the above-stated reasons and others I won't enumerate at present.

But in this particular case, where we were able to step in and level the playing field, giving the popular uprising a chance to fight and win their own revolution, using our air and sea capabilities without committing to a ground invasion or (heaven help us) nation-building, I'm for it, even given the inevitable negative externalities that will undoubtedly manifest.

Given the opportunity to save 100,000 lives, and to allow a people the chance to win their freedom, I think it's worth the price I think we're likely to pay. Your mileage may vary.

One Year Ago Today

2011-03-08T14:28:00.000-08:00

I got the email telling me I had been accepted into the Clarion Writers' Workshop, a life-changing event (or, more accurately, a series thereof) whose repercussions are still playing out. And now here I am, still unpublished, but much more serious about writing and being a writer than I ever was before, about to get on a train so I can finish a novel draft on my way to see three of my fellow students and two of my instructors at my first ever Con, and happier with the direction of my life than I have been for a long, long time.

I know there are probably a hundred or more people out there right now, waiting to hear back about their own applications, or keeping a lid on the fact that they've already been accepted until everyone has been notified. To those who'll be chosen, you're fortunate to be so, but more than that, you are deserving, so keep rocking with your bad selves and get to girding those loins for the struggles ahead, because it won't be easy. And to those who don't make it this year, don't despair and don't give up. Keep writing, keep trying, and keep becoming more awesome.

It's on Everyone Else's Blog

2011-03-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

So here it is on mine, too.

It's not that we don't need to do a little belt-tightening as a nation. Though it's not the sky falling, the federal deficit is an issue that will need to be addressed. But it's rare that we ever get a look at the trade-offs that are negotiated behind closed doors.

Here, in handy chart form, is a series of, on the one side, programs we're being asked to sacrifice, and, on the other, tax breaks that have been granted to those members of our society who have the most money and power.

Put like that, it doesn't seem right, does it?

Look, I'm all for fiscal responsibility. But more than that, I'm for fairness, and those at the top of the economic chain derive far and away the most benefit from the American economic system. More than seems fair at all, it seems to me, but that's a whole other blog post.

Nonetheless, it seems to me not only fair but reasonable that in times of economic hardship and revenue shortfalls that everybody ought to do their part. Some would say that that means everybody ought to contribute equally, but that isn't really fair, because far too many Americans ain't got shit and can't afford a share.

No, what seems fair to me would be for everyone to contribute proportionally to the benefit they derive from the system we all support.

But maybe that's just me. Either way, if you can look at that chart, at the line by line comparisons between tax breaks for those who need the least help and vital programs for those who need the most, and say to yourself, "Yeah, that seems right," well, I would contend that there's something wrong with your sense of fairness, and, maybe, with your heart, too.

But then, I subscribe to some pretty radical notions, like that we're all in this together, and that the society that doesn't provide for all of its citizens is not much better than the jungle we so pride ourselves on having gotten out of as a species.

What the Protagonist Carried with Her into Battle with Her Nemesis

2011-03-06T22:18:00.000-08:00

1 Uzi-Pro, with two clips
2 Jericho 941 pistols, with two clips each, one clip being short 2 rounds
1 Beretta 21A Bobcat, with 1 full clip
2 Flashbang grenades
2 Concussion grenades
1 Trench Knife
1 Pair Mirrored Cop Glasses

Now to decide how she will use it all. I suspect there will be mayhem.

Being a writer is fun.

Writing Dreams

2011-03-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

It's taken me a while to notice, but I've started having a new kind of dream somewhere in these last few months, in which my sleeping brain is trying to figure out how to put together various stories. I never remember them when I wake up, which I do quite frequently on the nights that I have these dreams (I had several last night, and am grumpy and groggy this morning as a result), but I remember snippets, and they all have to do with fitting the moving parts of a story together into a shapely, coherent whole.

Oddly enough, none of them seem to have anything to do with any of my current projects, though I wish that they did a little. Or maybe not. Being that I don't remember anything of them after it probably wouldn't do me any good, anyway.

As a writer, storytelling is my kryptonite, which fact I freely admit (see previous sentence clause). Due to my cussedness as a person, I spent the first decade of my self-taught writing apprenticeship obsessing over my prose style (with largely pleasing results), but it wasn't until Clarion that I started to think in any systematic way about what to do with said prose style. Partly it had to do with the fact that I primarily, read, write, and think in novel-sized chunks; there's just a lot more room to play and experiment there.

But you can't do that shit in a short story for the most part. There just isn't time, or room.

I remember my first one-on-one at Clarion. It was a hot, sunny Friday afternoon, a week into the workshop. I had just had my first story critiqued, and it smarted (oh, how it smarted), and I was meeting with the estimable Delia Sherman to discuss another story of mine (which I had been quite proud of, before I knew any better). Long story short, she basically told me to read it again, scrap it completely, and start over, which took all of two minutes, and then we talked about my strengths and weaknesses as a writer, which was, as you might expect, rather bracing. The gist of what she had to say was that I did the grad-level stuff very well, but that I failed the basic, elementary school stuff almost completely. On the plus side, she reassured me that once I got to figuring it out, it would come to me easily enough.

And I assume that's what's happening now, with these dreams. They are my brain rearranging itself in such a way that I will become better at arranging the depolyment of narrative, backstory, character, and plot in a more pleasing shape. That's what I hope, at least.

If nothing else, they're way better than the bartending dreams I used to have. Those were just annoying.

Thought for the Day

2011-03-02T13:29:00.000-08:00

The problem with class warfare (at least as waged in contemporary America) is that only one class knows there is one (hint: it's not the middle class).

Discuss.

The Wise Man's Fear Book Signing in Seattle

2011-03-02T11:28:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a good and writery day for your faithful correspondent. After an afternoon in the office plugging away at the ever-expanding manuscript (made my quota plus 700 words-w00t!), I made my way over to the University District, where my dear friend Suj'n had saved me a spot on the floor near the back of the actual seating for Pat Rothfuss' first stop on The Wise Man's Fear signing/reading/hilarious extemporizing tour.

I will pause here a moment and offer further mad props to my homegirl Suey, who not only saved me the aforementioned spot, she also told me about the event in the first place, which I was ignorant of, having been eye-deep in the day-to-day grind of writing my own novel on a looming if self-imposed deadline.

Those of you that follow this blog may recollect my recent extended squee over the first book in the Kingkiller Chronicles, The Name of the Wind, some two weeks ago. I had been saving the book for most of a year before I read it, for various reasons, and I enjoyed it most thoroughly. I seem to have done something right, albeit unconsciously, because unlike most of the rest of Mr. Rothfuss' fans, I did not have to wait long for the next book, and indeed I purchased a copy yesterday for him to sign.

But enough about me.

First thing to say about the reading is: man is that Pat Rothfuss a funny, entertaining guy. He's apparently a big anti-fan of spoilers, so the only bit of the new book that he read was the prologue, which, like the first book, is really very short. Mostly he just extemporized, sometimes extemporaneously, other times in response to questions. He even managed to answer many of those questions in the course of said extemporizing.

At first I was a little disappointed that he didn't read more, but as things went along I realized that that was just because all the other events like this I've been to were mostly taken up with an author reading a story or a passage from their book. But I respect the choice he made not to read much from the book (which several people in the audience were reading while waiting for him to start and then for him to sign; I saw at least one guy who was three-quarters of the way through it), because of spoilers but also so we could all get an extra dose of Pat being Pat.

I suppose when you enjoy the kind of success Pat Rothfuss has, it encourages you to grow a little larger than life. In many people this turns out to be a bad thing. Not so Mr. Rothfuss, who seems to have grown into his success with some humility and recollection of where he came from intact. He's still wicked funny, and I'm not saying the man doesn't know he's a badass, because he does, and he's not afraid to let you know it, too. But he's so obviously having such a great time that it's hard not to go along with it. And like I said, the man is damned funny. He's also damned smart (smart enough, for instance, to ask that no one record the proceedings, so that he could speak off the cuff without the fear that he'd end up on YouTube saying something about how long-winded JRR Tolkien was).

Most of the hour or so was taken up with answering questions (though he did read, in addition to the prologue of the new book, a couple of his poems, at least one of which ended quite badly). Most of it was pretty typical fan stuff (my own question involved the chicken and egg of world-building vs story), and he was expansive in his answers. But what I really respected was his refusal to answer certain questions that didn't lend themselves to the pith and concision required by the venue. For instance, a poor college student asked if he might, having purchased the hardcover, make his own digital copy, which is a viper-infested minefield that one might spend hours and hours discussing, and Mr. Rothfuss ably answered why he couldn't answer that question without coming down either way on it (like I said, this is a smart guy).

As for my own experience with him, of course I wanted to chat him up and drop my credential and whatnot, but I was just another guy in line, and given how many people were behind me waiting it seemed like it would be disrespectful to do anything but say thanks and have him sign the book (I got The Wise Man's Fear inscribed to me and had him inscribe my paperback copy of The Name of the Wind to my gfk August, who I hope will like the book as much as I did). I did manage to stand out a little by offering him and Nate Taylor (who drew the map for the Kingkiller books and illustrated The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle, his not-for-children children's book) some of the girl scout cookies I had bought on the way in. Perhaps if I am lucky enough to meet him sometime in the future I will remind him of that and see if he remembers me. After all, everybody loves girl scout cookies.

You can buy The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear here at Amazon, but if you have a local bookstore you should buy it from them if you can. Local bookstores rock.

Worthy Quotations

2011-02-28T13:30:00.000-08:00

The imagination is necessary not to make things up - that would be wrong - but to come up with plausible scenarios for what one's senses are detecting; theories that might explain what is going on.
-Iain M. Banks, Transition, p27

One for the Ages

2011-02-28T13:14:00.000-08:00

A unionized public employee, a teabagger and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the teabagger and says, "Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie."

A Statistical Observation, in the Form of a Prediction

2011-02-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

Neither you, nor almost anyone you know, will ever be rich. I don't mean wealthy. I don't mean comfortably well-off. I mean fuck-you money rich.

On the plus side, studies show that money doesn't make you any happier. So you got that going for you. Which is nice.

Something I've Noticed

2011-02-24T16:45:00.000-08:00

When I'm writing, and the words are coming easy, when I'm just cruising along with the road open ahead, when I know what's happening and what happens next, and exactly how I want to say it; those are the stretches I end up editing the most when I go back. It's the times when I struggle, when every word is like squeezing water out of a rock, when I don't know what I'm doing and can't remember what I just did, that what I come up with reads the cleanest, the clearest, the smoothest, as if the wrenching discontinuity of the words' production somehow folded in on itself and became its own opposite on the page when I wasn't looking.

Fun with Numbers

2011-02-23T22:13:00.000-08:00

According to the Financial Times (article is behind a paywall, citation from here):

The Republican plan to slash government spending by $61bn in 2011 could reduce US economic growth by 1.5 to 2 percentage points in the second and third quarters of the year, a Goldman Sachs economist has warned.

Now, I trust Goldman about as far as I can throw them, ethics-wise. But I do trust them to be clear-eyed when it comes to economic projections. That's their bread and butter.

According to this website, the GDP from Q4 2010 was $13.38 T. That's more than thirteen trillion dollars. So if the economy grows by 1.5 to 2 percentage points less, that's at least $200 billion dollars less money sloshing around in the economy, paying people and buying stuff.

How many jobs do you suppose that is, even after the super-wealthy take their outsized cut?

Oh yeah. They don't care.

Dear slight majority of Americans: You voted for these guys why again?

I Stole This Graphic from Mother Jones

2011-02-23T16:35:00.000-08:00

If you want to know why things are the way they are in America, economically and politically, this graph (and the other seven) will give you a pretty good idea, I think.

How the Other Half Thinks

2011-02-23T10:38:00.000-08:00

Scott Walker got punk'd yesterday, and had a 20 minute phone call in which he spoke quite candidly about what's going on in Wisconsin with Ian Murphy of the Buffalo Beast (or 50 Most Loathesome fame), thinking Murphy was David Koch of the Koch brothers.

You can listen to the call here:

and here:

Edited transcript here.

No real surprises, and no admissions of overt wrongdoing, though there was at least one tactical error in describing the quorum trap Walker's people are working on. Still, that's just political hardball, and my panties remain unbunched despite its dirtiness.

No, the real takeaway is the mindset behind Walker's moves, and the coziness of the oligarchy/parasite class with the officials their money helps elect. Posing as David Koch, Murphy gets right through to the governor (whose face must be pretty red, now that this has gone public), which of course I would expect, but expecting and hearing firsthand are two different things.

It may be that Walker genuinely believes that he's doing the right thing. He probably does. After all, no one is a villain in their own mind, and people generally do what they think is right, or find ways to paint doing what they want or what is to their advantage as the right thing to do. But it's also clear who the man's real constituency is, and who he really represents. And it's not the working people of Wisconsin, who are only useful insofar as they have been made to suffer, and can be convinced to desire the suffering of others like them, to provide cover for the plutocracy to make everyone suffer even more, so that they can have what little wealth remains outside their immediate control.

If You Ever Wanted to Know...

2011-02-22T21:50:00.000-08:00

...under what circumstances I would not only approve of but encourage the projection of military force overseas by the United States' Armed Forces, shooting the helicopter gunships and jet fighters attacking civilians in Libya out of the sky would probably be right up there.

It's one thing to sic your riot-gear cops on protesting civilians. But it's a whole other can of worms when you cut loose on civilians with military-grade weaponry.

Of course, we would never do that, because Libya has proven oil reserves.

Quote of the Day

2011-02-22T14:19:00.000-08:00

"Inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such things of right belong to those whose labor has produced them. But it has so happened, in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and others have without labor enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong, and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government."
-Abraham Lincoln

Koch Whore Pays the Vig

2011-02-22T14:09:00.000-08:00

If there was any doubt that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is anything other than a bought-and-paid-for thug for the parasite class, this and this should put those doubts to rest.

If he was arguing in good faith, that Wisconsin's budget troubles necessitate some collective belt-tightening and that public-sector unions have to do their fair share of the tightening, that would be one thing. Those unions have said over and over that they'd be willing to sit down with the governor, and would even make many of the concessions he's asking for in order to strengthen Wisconsin's budget picture. But that's not what he's asking for. In fact, he's not asking for anything, he's playing Big Daddy and telling them what he's gonna do, and what he's gonna do is strip away the public-sector unions' collective bargaining rights.

So why does Scott Walker hate working people?

Make no mistake, this is not an assault on big government. This is an assault on the working middle class of Wisconsin and of the United States at large. Lots of other governors have similar rules changes in the pipeline, waiting only to see if the unions in Wisconsin, which has a long and storied history of labor activism, can be broken.

The middle class as we know it was born of labor activism. It doesn't take a genius to figure it out. I'm willing to bet that everybody reading this has at one time or another worked for a company or a boss that wanted to screw you out of all the work, time, and productivity they could while paying you the least they could possibly get away with for it. It's not even their fault; it's in the DNA of capitalist enterprises. And unless you're some kind of irreplaceable rockstar genius, when you sit down to negotiate your compensation and benefits, the power dynamic involved is going to be weighted against you.

So how do you equalize that power dynamic? Collective bargaining. Collective bargaining is why we have things like child labor and workplace safety laws, why the 40 hour workweek is standard, why we have things like weekends off and vacation time and pensions for when we're too old to work. Take that away and we're all at the mercy of our plutocratic overlords.

Which is exactly how Scott Walker and his parasite-class puppet-masters want things. Because it makes it easier for them to keep all the money. After all, there's only so much to go around, and in any sane society the inequalities Americans take for granted and even cheer on, some of them, would be cause to rethink the whole damn system.

In a way, you almost have to admire the brilliance of Walker's agenda. First, pass upper-income tax giveaways that take your state's small surplus, which was the result of hard choices made by the previous legislature, some of whom probably paid the price for their prudence at the ballot box last November, and turn that surplus into a deficit. Then, take the resulting deficit, which you have created through irresponsible giveaways to people and industries that supported your political campaign, and use the resulting 'crisis' to justify not only taking money out of the pockets of working people (it doesn't matter who their employer is; in this case it just happens to be the state), but to take away their right to a seat at the table when the terms of their employment are negotiated. It's absolutely fawking brilliant in its malevolent nefariousness.

And now that the people have risen up, and protested for eight straight days, what's Walker's response? Well, he's going to start laying people off. Not that he needs to for budgetary reasons, but to teach those lousy proles a lesson about who they're messing with.

But I guess when you are a tool of the Koch brothers and the other members of the parasite class, that's just the vig on the money they loan you to get elected in the first place.

Quote of the Day, the Second

2011-02-21T13:05:00.000-08:00

When anyone in a position of authority--an employer, the police, a school administrator--advises you not to hire an attorney, it's time to hire an attorney. When they advise you not to hire an attorney because it will create a confrontational atmosphere, you should have hired one yesterday; you're being railroaded.
...
[T]he system has a word for a guy without a lawyer, and it's guilty.
-IOZ

There's a reason our system of jurisprudence is adversarial. Because, not unlike the class war the bottom four quintiles are so often in denial about, the powers that be are, in general, out to get you. That they ever say otherwise is just part of the game.

Put another way, never, EVER, trust anyone who says "Trust me."

Quote of the Day

2011-02-21T10:22:00.000-08:00

Science fiction is read most avidly by precocious children, brainy adolescents and a particular kind of retarded adult.
-Thomas M. Disch

Title in Search of a Story

2011-02-20T23:42:00.000-08:00

Crouching Flygirl, Hidden Badass.

Quote of the Day

2011-02-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

According to another study by Cornell's Suzanne Mettler, many Americans don't even realize they're relying upon government services. 53 percent of those who said they're not using a government program borrowed a student loan from the government. 44 percent are on Social Security. 39 percent are on Medicare (reinforcing the imperative: "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!"). 27 percent are on Medicaid. 28 percent are on Disability. 41 percent are receiving veteran's benefits. Again, these are people who also insist they're absolutely not "living off the public tit," to quote Senator Chuck Grassley. But they are.
-Bob Cesca

Quote of the Day

2011-02-18T00:25:00.000-08:00

I am not interested in anything any Republican or Conservative has to say about debt or deficits or "shared" sacrifice.

Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever again.

You are the Party that inherited surpluses from Bill Clinton and pissed them away.

You are the Party that ran two wars on a credit card.

You are the Party that ran two wars on a credit card...while cutting taxes.

You are the Party that only learned how to spell d-e-f-i-c-i-t ten seconds after the Black Democrat was inaugurated.

You are the Party that held medical care for 9/11 first responders hostage so that you could ram through one more round of giveaways to billionaires.

...

To reiterate, I am not interested in anything any Republican or Conservative has to say about debt or deficits or "shared" sacrifice.

Not now.

Not tomorrow.

Not ever again.

-driftglass

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

2011-02-17T23:28:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you how much I loved this book. I took it with me on a trip back to my alma mater for its 50th anniversary reunion, a long weekend of celebrations, events, and visitations at which I was reunited with some of my favorite people in all the world, people who were there when I formulated the beginnings of the person I grew up to become and who, despite all they've seen, not only still like me, they downright love me. And I love them, as much as I've ever loved anybody. Some of them I hadn't seen in more than a decade. Some of them aren't even on Facebook, if you can believe that. We danced, we partied, we revisited much-loved places where some of the most significant events of our variously-spent youths occurred (and believe you me, shit was epic back in the day). We showed the kids that go to school there now how it was done, and we looked good doing it. I don't think I got more than five hours of sleep a night for most of a week.

The night before I flew home, I think I got five hours. The night before that, no more than 3 1/2. I had a 13+ hour day of flying to get back (from Florida to the Pacific Northwest, with not one but two layovers). It was actually still dark when I got up and got going to the airport.

I had more than a couple of drinks, and took a painkiller for my back. I was exhausted.

You would think I would have slept away the hours on those flights. Any sane person would. More than once, I thought for sure that my eyes were just going to roll into the back of my head and I would have to be shocked awake with a defibrillator to get me off the plane.

But I did not sleep, because I was reading The Name of the Wind, and all I wanted to do was keep reading. So I did, until I finished it.

The Name of the Wind is both intimate and epic, deeply immersive in a fantastical way and also recognizable as a real world inhabited by real people. It is (the beginning of) the story of Kvothe, a magician and hero of great renown, told in his own words, a story of tragedy and tribulation and the dirty, gritty realities that underlie the stories we tell about our heroes. In that, it is also, perhaps, a commentary, not only on heroism, but on the transmutation of life into narrative, and the divergence between the two. It's a tale of love and loss, of the quest for knowledge and the pitfalls that lie hidden along the way.

It is also, as you may have guessed from what I said above, a rollicking good tale of adventure and magic, a story so compelling that a near middle-aged man will suffer sleeplessness to the point of near-hallucination because he can't put it down because it's So. Fawking. Good.

So why is it so good? What makes it so compelling that its 722-odd pages fly by so quickly?

Part of it, of course, is the fascination with heroes, and the lives they truly lead. The difference between deeds of great renown as they are told after and the blood and dirt and uncertainty while they are actually happening is a rich vein, and one that's been mined profitably in quite a bit of literature, both genre and mainstream. But Kvothe is an imaginary hero. As the reader, we don't know the stories, and Rothfuss doesn't waste time giving them to us. It's enough that he's known; we don't need the details.

What makes the story so addictive is the human element. Kvothe is a complicated character, intelligent but sometimes foolish, accomplished but sometimes so overconfident he is nearly killed, driven by a personal history that would make most people curl up in a ball and die and desires he can only barely begin to understand. And because we know that he becomes great, watching him stumble through his early life, with successes and failures in near-equal measure, the shape of the life we know he'll lead lends greater significance to what we see happening. And because he has not yet become great, is for much of the tale just a kid, really, however talented and intelligent, we cringe at the things he doesn't see, even though he sees them now, looking back, and so do we.

It is also a love story, so filled with stumbles and misunderstandings it would be farcical if it wasn't so tragic (he's just a kid, remember), and this reader, for one, recognized more than one or two foolishly romantic mistaken ideas and poor decisions.

And, even more exciting, there is a story brewing in the present while the tale is being told. More than once we are returned to the scene of the telling, where the something is happening, and it is more than passingly implied that Kvothe's storied past is coming back to haunt him. It's only a minor thread in this first volume (of how many, who can say? One hopes at least a trilogy, which I would like to become available Right. Fawking. Now), but one has the impression that interesting things will be afoot in the story's present as well as its past in short order, and this reader is more than a little excited to see what those things might be.

We are used to seeing our heroes on their pedestals (or onscreen, which is often no different), presented in all their glory, near-infallible in their moral compass and near-undefeatable in their badass-itude. We lionize them, but in doing so we make them less (or at least other) than human, and their stories suffer as a result. One of the things I learned at Clarion, and this comes from Faulkner, is that the proper, indeed perhaps the only, subject for literature and narrative is the human heart in conflict with itself, and at the end of the day, that's what makes The Name of the Wind such a great book. Yes, it's got a fantastically imagined and realized world, with rules that make sense and a cool take on magic. Yes, it's got long odds and tremendous obstacles that must be overcome by our hero, who makes bets and takes risks that only a genuinely brave soul would have the courage to do. And yes, it's evocative and well-written, with solid prose that puts you there in the world and makes it feel real. But at the end of the day, what makes this such a great fawking book is the hero at the center of the tale, who tells the tale, to us and to the others within it: fallible; imperfect; facing danger and desire, unrest and uncertainty; driven by forces that would break a lesser soul; taking great risk for great reward (and not always getting it); muddling through as best he can with whatever he can scrape together and not a little help from his friends. A complex, interesting person, who dares greatly, and accomplishes great things, and knows the cost that comes with it.

I can't wait for the next one.

The Jet Set Flip

2011-02-05T22:10:00.000-08:00

The Jet Set Flip (rocks)
dark rum, tuaca, lemon, egg white, vanilla brown syrup
shake ingredients and strain over fresh ice
sugar rim, lemon garnish

The Jet Set Flip was my favorite drink on the Launch Party cocktail list. Partly due to my love affair with dark rum (well, good dark rum, anyway), partly due to my newfound appreciation for vanilla. And partly because it has egg white in it, because making drinks with egg white in them is not only delicious, but also just cool, for reasons that are either self-apparent or never will be. It's old-school in all the right ways. There really was a golden age of mixology, a back in the day, if you will, when they were better at this whole business of making cocktails, and didn't use all this prefabricated high-fructose corn syrup nonsense that's so prevalent in bars today, because they didn't have it. And when you look in recipe books from back in those days, a staple, especially of tropical sorts of drinks, was the egg white, which turns creamy and frothy when you shake it over ice, and transforms the harsh acidity of citrus juices into a teasing, exotic, velvety-glove kind of feeling that strokes your taste buds in the most tantalizing way.

I have my friend Andrew to thank for my knowledge of/interest in egg whites, and thus for part of the inspiration for this drink, of which I am, as I mentioned, quite fond. He worked with me for many years at Tost (in fact, I gave him his first shift as a bartender) before moving on to other things. Of all the people I ever trained as a bartender, he's the guy that's picked it up and run with it more than anyone else, and it's pretty impressive to see how far he's gone (you can check out his blog, Cask Strength, to which he too occasionally posts, here).

Anyway, sometime during the period when I'd stopped being Andrew's boss, and he'd started being mine, Andrew became obsessed with the Pisco Sour, which is, incidentally, technically a Flip, I think, since a Flip is a Sour with egg white in it, and the Pisco Sour is traditionally made with egg white. However the etymology works out, we started stocking egg whites at the bar, sometimes (mostly, even) at Andrew's expense, just to have them around. There was even a small following, for a while, a few people who'd come in and ask if we had egg whites that day so we could make them a proper Pisco Sour. Later, Andrew and I collaborated on a bar for a charity event for a company he was working for, and co-created a drink called the Girl from Ipanema, that I think involved dark rum and pineapple juice, and also had egg white in it. I don't remember what else was in it.

Egg white is kind of a litmus test for a drinker or mixologist. Enthusiasm for egg whites is usually the first sign of mixological dorkdom, and even if you've tried it and don't care for it, it's a good sign if the guy or girl who's mixing your drinks gets excited about egg whites. It usually means they know their stuff, and know the old ways, when people had to make their sour from lemon juice and simple syrup or even sugar, because there wasn't such a thing as sour mix.

Mmm. Got so excited talking about the Jet Set Flip I decided to stop and make myself one. Delicious.

So, getting back on track, the Jet Set Flip was one of the later additions to the cocktail list, one of the ones I created with the ingredients for previous cocktails on the list in mind. After all, I was trying to need the least number of different kinds of liquor, while still being able to make interesting things. I'd already decided to add the Sly Wink, an old standby whose story I'll tell some other day, which meant I needed a bottle of Tuaca, but wouldn't be using much, since there's literally just a wee touch of the stuff in the Sly Wink. So I started thinking about what to do with the rest of the bottle. I'd also already decided on having the Caribbean Christmas, which has been one of the most successful drinks I've ever invented, universally loved by everyone who's ever tried it, and which meant I'd have Gosling's Black Seal Rum, which is my one of my favorite dark rums. There are better, to be sure, but nothing near that good at that good a price. Putting the two in the same glass seemed like a good idea. I also briefly considered adding some brandy to the mix, but when I made it at the lab it was too astringent, and the astringency blocked the considerable synergy between the Gosling's and the Tuaca, which seem to be made for one another. The Tuaca takes the alcohol edge off of the rum, and the burnt sugar aspect of the rum's flavor profile syncs nicely with both the vanilla and the nut flavors in the Tuaca, and cuts the syrupy sweetness so common in liqueur-strength alcohols.

The Tuaca lemon drop is a good standby when someone wants something a little off the beaten path, but you don't feel like making something up on the fly. It's a crowd-pleaser, and not particularly challenging to make. So I knew that lemon played nicely into the Tuaca's flavor profile, and that a little sweetener to take the edge off the lemon would work as well. I find the Tuaca lemon drop a little sweet, myself, so cutting the Tuaca with rum seemed like a good idea. And the difference between a Lemon Drop and an old school Sour (with vodka, in this case) is more or less academic, to be honest.

The night I was playing with the recipe was also the night I was working on Porch Rockin' Punch #3, discussed below, and, having made the vanilla brown syrup to play with, I tried it in the Jet Set Flip as well, and was much pleased with the results. The egg white just seemed a natural fit, though I didn't decide on it for sure until I named the thing.

I have a confession to make. I love naming drinks. It's one of the funnest thing about making them up. Yes, I love mixing the flavors and doing the things I know how to do to make them come out a certain way. But giving a drink a name, really encapsulating its essence, is my favorite little nook of the mixologist's art.

I usually look for inspiration in one of two places. Either I name it after something to do with women (the Chanteuse, the Sly Wink, and the Catholic Schoolgirl being examples), or I take my inspiration from where the liquors are made. Tuaca is Italian. Gosling's is made in Bermuda. I tried to think of a connection. What I came up with is that Italy and Bermuda are both nice places where wealthy people like to go because it's so pleasant to be there. The Jet Set, if you will. Then the words 'The Jet Set Flip' popped into my head, and it just seemed so right that it stuck. And I think it works. It is, after all, a luxurious sort of drink. Dangerously so, in fact, as it goes down all too easily, and hides it potency until it has snuck up and had its way with you.

I remember making a round for Tess and Eric at the Launch Party. They'd both gotten wise to the way to go at that point, and were ordering two drinks apiece. I don't remember what the other round was, but by the time I'd finished making them, their Flips I'd served them a minute ago were gone.

NOTE: This was originally posted on 5/19/09, on the Practical Hedonist Blog.

Kristen Schaal on the Daily Show

2011-02-03T10:30:00.000-08:00

Rape loophole... heh.

hat tip Chez P (again)

More Hilarious Win

2011-02-01T10:17:00.000-08:00

Hat tip Chez P (one of my favorite writers on the internet) and, of course, Tom Tomorrow.

Oh, Yeah. Right.

2011-01-31T23:38:00.000-08:00

Once again, hat tip to the Angry Black Lady.

Most Insane Movie Trailer Ever

2011-01-31T12:23:00.000-08:00

The trailer for Endhiran, the most expensive movie ever made in India. Worth every freakin' rupee.

Thank you, India. And thank you, Angry Black Lady.

Take that, Sucker Punch.

Word of the Day

2011-01-30T13:00:00.001-08:00

Quiplash: (n) the soreness experienced in the neck or brain by a spectator in a battle of wit, or the confusion caused by too much clever banter

(hat tip to Liz A, Kath N, and the other members of Tuesdays at Inner Chapters)

This Guy's been in Congress for 20 Years

2011-01-30T11:59:00.000-08:00

He seems genuinely not to understand the causal link between the casual overuse of antibiotics and the evolution of resistant strains of bacteria and other pathogens, which is just one example of what happens when ignorance trumps understanding. The insistence at the end that there is 'adaptation,' whatever that means to Rep. Kingston, but not evolution would be pathetic if it weren't so troubling.

Here, briefly, is how this particular scenario plays out:

People get sick with some sort of bacterial infection. Their own immune systems could fight off the illness, but they go to their doctor, who prescribes antibiotics, which is in many cases like prescribing napalm because there are some weeds in your garden. Some of the bacteria is able to resist the antibiotics, thanks to its genetic makeup. The rest dies, leaving the resistant bacteria alive to reproduce. Because the non-resistant bacteria is dead, the resistant bacteria fills the niche. Over time, the non-resistant bacteria dies out, and the resistant strain thrives, and the next time someone gets sick, the antibiotics don't work. This is evolution in action. Bacteria evolve more quickly that humans because they live, die, and reproduce on a much quicker timescale. The end result, which is happening now, is that we have bacteria and viruses that we can't treat with antibiotics (which is, pretty much, what we've got to treat them with), and people whose own immune systems can't fight them off on their own get sicker and maybe die.

I understand that some people, like Rep. Kingston if the above clip is any indication, find it distasteful to think that human beings evolved from earlier primates who were less like humans and more like monkeys. I get that. And I know that a lot of people are pretty strongly invested in those stories people told a couple thousand years ago. But the evidence really is overwhelming. The theory of evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology. As science goes, it's been through the gauntlet and held up to the scrutiny of thousands of people testing it, trying to find a hole to poke in it, and they haven't been able to.

It seems to me that that ought to carry some weight with people, even people who don't want to believe it.

Note: I wrote about one problem I think plays into this particular mental stumbling block a while back, and I still think my observation holds up. I think at least some of the problem can be attributed to a disconnect in terminology.

What is Where You Live Worst At?

2011-01-29T23:36:00.000-08:00

(hat tip Jason Sanford, whose blog I found this on. Graphic and research from Pleated Jeans).

I'm really glad to know that, of all the things to be the worst for, my adopted state of Washington is number one for Bestiality. Thanks, Enumclaw.

An Ill-Informed but Somewhat Cathartic Rant about Dentistry

2011-01-28T10:46:00.000-08:00

So, I got a root canal the other day (thanks), after which the dentist said that he recommends I get a crown on the tooth. Now, I get that this is standard procedure in these cases, but there's a part of me that has to ask.

Really?

I mean, I don't think they're just trying to get extra money out of me or anything. But after drilling out every last little particle of nerve tissue and the bacteria that was eating it, he filled my tooth in with permanent filling. The same stuff they use to patch up the outsides of teeth when they need it. Basically cement, I'm pretty sure. But apparently my tooth is in danger of cracking if I chew something too hard.

That is, my tooth, which is newly filled with cement or something like it, is in danger of cracking.

Why don't they fill the tooth with something harder, if that's a danger? Is the filling material not harder than the dead nerve tissue? One assumes that it is. I mean, I understand that they drilled out the core of the tooth, and that they had to do so from a hole they drilled in the top. BUT THEY FILLED IT WITH F-CKING CEMENT. How is that not stong enough?

I think the best part was after the root canal was done, and we were talking about it, and I was asking if I needed the crown right away or if it could wait (the expense of a root canal, even at the UW Dental School, is not inconsequential) and he said, casually, "Maybe a month or two." So I figured okay, I can deal with that. Then he said, "Just chew on the other side of your mouth." And I said, "You mean, like, today, while the tooth is still sore." And he said, "No, until you get the crown."

And of course I'm going to do it. After all, I have not spent the last several years studying dentistry (he's a grad resident, so he's already got his degree), and I was warned that almost all root canals end up needing a crown. But there's still that part of me that can't help but think WTF?

Okay. End of rant. Thank you for listening.

PS Don't forget to enter this week's Dallas' writing-related contest. It's easy, and there're fun and prizes to be had. You'd be crazy not to.

New Contest

2011-01-26T19:56:00.000-08:00

The last contest was so much fun, I decided to do another one.

The contest: Over the course of the next week or so, I'm going to do another revision on the short story I've been working on for the last few weeks, wrestling it into what I hope will be its final, submittable form. How many words long do you think it'll be?

Clues: This the the third major revision. The first draft was 3757 words, the second draft was 4181, and the third draft was 6713. I expect that it will be a short story (generally understood to be 7500 words or fewer) but am not completely sure.

The prize: The five closest guessers get a sneak peek at the finished story, before I start submitting it for publication. Besides myself, you will be the first people in the whole world to read it. I will also write you a haiku on the subject of your choice.

Bonus prize: Anyone guessing within 10 words of the actual total will be Tuckerized in either a future story or the novel I'm working on (up to three people). No promises as to the survival and/or happiness of the character named after you. *

The rules: No looking over my shoulder or hacking into my computer. Contest runs from right now until 11:59 pm Pacific time on Wednesday, February 2nd. One entry per participant. Leave your guesses in the comment thread here or on my Facebook page. Winners will be announced Thursday February 3rd.

* I know John Scalzi just did this, and I'm a total copycat, but I thought it was a cool idea. Which is why I stole it.

Writing Music-Caribou

2011-01-25T13:14:00.000-08:00

I first heard of Dan Snaith's band Manitoba (Caribou's earlier incarnation) when I missed them opening for Stereolab on the Margarine Melodies tour a few years back. A friend of mine caught their set, though, and bought their CD (people still did that, back then). I've been a fan ever since.

I bought Swim, Caribou's most recent record, just about as soon as I heard it was out, and pretty much since that day it's been my go-to album for writing to; sometimes I just put it on repeat in the background and play it over and over.

It works for me in a lot of ways, being active and energetic enough to provide a sense of subliminal momentum while nonetheless not demanding an active listening. And even more importantly, the vocals are low enough in the mix that they do not unduly interrupt my own linguistic flow (or lack thereof).

Also, it's just a great f-cking album.

Anyway, here is Odessa, the first track, which in addition to being a fine song is like the Pavlovian signal that makes my writerly tongue begin to salivate. Probably you've already heard it, but maybe you'd like to listen to it again right now. I know I'm about to.

Jon Stewart FTW (again)

2011-01-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Petty Woman

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>

The Daily Show on Facebook

And the Winner Is...

2011-01-20T19:22:00.000-08:00

Dustin J. Monk, whose guess of 1391 was only 18 short of my actual total of 1409.

Runners-up are Rachael Martin, who guessed 1217, and Annie Dubinsky, who came in at 1542 (thanks for the vote of confidence, Annie!). Runners-up receive a haiku on the subject of their choice. Feel free to get in touch and let me know what you'd like, ladies.

Thanks to everyone for playing (and to Kai for the youtube link), and look for the next contest soon, just as soon as I can think of what it is.

Contest

2011-01-19T16:34:00.000-08:00

Okay, I've got an hour and a half before I have to leave the office and go cook dinner for my lovely lady and her almost-but-not-quite teenaged son, and I aim to do a bit of writing on my novel.

The contest: How many words will I write? Take a guess, and leave it in comments here or on the link on my Facebook page that you (probably) followed here. Closest guess wins.

The prize: A 500-word story, written by me, about you saving the world from the forces of evil, deliverable within one week of your certification as the winner.

The rules: No looking over my shoulder or hacking into my computer. Contest runs from right now until 6pm Pacific time tomorrow (Thursday, January 20th).

And... go!

How many spaces after a sentence?

2011-01-19T14:14:00.000-08:00

Thesis: Typography nerds and Farhad Manjoo don't like the second space after sentences, and think you're kind of stupid if you do. John Scalzi agrees.

Antithesis: Tom Lee dismisses much of Manjoo's argumentation and engages what's left, finding that the separation of sentences by the extra space to be a useful innovation.

My take: I come down with Lee on this one, both for functional and for aesthetic reasons. It may just be that I am old enough that I was taught that two spaces after a sentence is appropriate (however arbitrary it may or might have seemed). But as someone who spends a great deal of time in the contemplation of text, both as producer and consumer, I find it not only aesthetically more pleasing to have the extra space between sentences, which variance breaks up the units of sound and meaning on the page into more interesting and pleasing fragments in my opinion, but also more functional, in that I am able to intuitively recognize the discrete lumping of said units of sound and meaning in a better, more meaningful way without having consciously to think about it, which frees up mental resources to engage the text's meaning more fully, however fractional the increment might be.

Chip Delany taught us at Clarion that writing was a means with which to cause a series of effects in the mind of the reader, and, to me, a healthy component of that process is the rhythm inherent in grammar, punctuation, and spacing. The double space after a sentence tells me, unconsciously, to pause just a tiny quantum longer than the single space between words does, which I find both appropriate and helpful.

That said, I don't hate on people who prefer the single space, though I do find myself hating on Farhad Manjoo a little. Not for his beliefs and preferences, mind you, but because he comes across as kind of a dick in his article. Ah well, that's polemics for you.

Snuff Film

2011-01-18T11:30:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of the Salt Lake City Police Department.

Suicide is Painless

2011-01-18T11:01:00.001-08:00

for the person who commits it. For the people left behind, not so much.

That's all.

Rejection

2011-01-17T15:03:00.000-08:00

Yet another thing I am grateful to the Clarion experience for is my new attitude towards rejection.

Before that wonderful and amazing crash course in what it is (or at least might be) like to be a professional writer, I had never submitted anything to a publisher. Okay, I did submit one thing a couple of weeks before I went, but only had the cojones to do so because I'd been accepted to Clarion. I was totally punching above my weight-class, too, though for what it's worth they still haven't sent me my rejection, so the hope is still alive, however feeble.

But before I realized just how much rejection is part of the game, and an integral part at that, my very first one would have been devastating, because I would only have sent something I had gone over and over and over again, obssessively, until every detail was just perfect (I sometimes lose whole hours and days of writing time fiddling with the prose of the sections I've already written), and would only have been able to bring myself to risk the inevitable rejection after I was convinced that the piece just couldn't be any better.

It might even have been the case (works of art are never finished, only abandoned), but I might have picked the wrong market, sent it somewhere it didn't quite fit. Any number of reasons exist why it might not have been right. I was, at the time, almost pathologically averse to learning about the nuts and bolts of the business side of publishing (hey man, I'm an artist 'n shit), and so I would have taken that rejection as a reason to go back into my cave and fiddle with my prose style for another few years before trying again.

Yeah, I know, I'm a bit oversensitive.

But now I know that you're not a real writer until you can wallpaper a medium-sized room with rejection slips, and that a rejection is not necessarily a judgement of the quality of your story (though sometimes it is) but a judgement about whether and how it fits with a particular market's aesthetic and backlog.

And I have learned to make some distinctions among kinds of rejections, and to take encouragement from the amount of time it takes to receive them. Basically, the longer it takes, the more they're willing to consider your story for publication (or, they're just really backed up). And then there's the form rejection ('Thank you for your interest in our magazine. We are, unfortunately, not able to publish your story at this time.') vs. the personal, where the editor (or, more likely, one of the editor's minions) writes you a few lines about why they can't accept your story, which has its own gradations, some of which are obvious (they like your story but it doesn't fit, for example) and some less so. For instance, you can often tell a bit about how far you got by who sent the rejection. The editor, after all, will often only see a story after at least one (and, I think, often more) person has read it, approved, and passed it on. So if you got your rejection from a slush reader, you know you didn't make it out of the slush pile, but at least your whole story got read, since slush readers read with an eye for any reason at all to stop reading, so as to continue addressing the generally considerable backlog of material. If you got your rejection from an assistant editor, then that tells you something, as well.

At present, my highest acheivement has been a brief personal letter of rejection from Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov's, which made me feel quite warm and fuzzy on the inside, and filled me with hope that I might be closer than I think, which is pretty freakin' awesome, if you ask me.

Besides, after spending one morning a week having twenty or so literary badasses tell me at some length what I'd done wrong with the story I submitted to them last night, which I'd generally spent hours and days wrestling forth from my creative unconscious and hammering into shape, it's hard to imagine any busy editor taking the time and energy it would require for a rejection to even tickle.

That's what I tell myself, anyway.

"Now you see the humiliations that authors are put through,"

2011-01-15T15:28:00.000-08:00

he said with a good-natured smile in his voice last night, after we missed him at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, due to the random catastrophe of a blown transformer and the liability issues involved in having a book-signing when the power was out. He was talking about his next appearance, today at noon, at the downtown Costco.

He joked about signing a gallon jar of pickles for us.

Robert Crais is a New York Times-Bestselling author and Clarion graduate (I won't say what year; suffice to say it was a while back), whose writing credits are so lengthy that their word-count exceeds the upper limit accepted by most fiction markets, and who I was fortunate enough to meet last summer when he and Kim Stanley Robinson came down from LA to see Chip Delany, my instructor and also theirs, back in the day. He's a wildly accomplished writer and a hell of a nice guy, and he taught Clarion in 2009, the year before I went, when my new friend and fellow writer Liz Argall attended, which was how I knew that he was coming to town, since I mostly live in a bubble of my own devising.

We tried to see him last night, as previously mentioned, but he'd left about ten minutes before we got there, so we made the pilgrimage to Costco today at noon. Liz's husband Mike joined us as well.

As you might expect, Costco is a pretty bizarre place to hold a book-signing. They do not have a book section, per se, so much as a long table filled with many copies of current bestsellers and the like (I'm pretty sure you have to play in the big leagues to get picked up by places like Costco), set in the middle of the store, between the clothing section and various bulky food items. Saturday being a pretty busy day down there (though, to be honest, I've never seen Costco not totally packed with people pushing very large carts full of very large packages of food), there must have been five hundred or a thousand folks meandering around, shopping, while Bob cranked out the autographs (257 copies, according to the inventory manager). Most of the shoppers were more or less oblivious, not being there for the book signing, or books at all, for that matter, which was great for us, as we were able to chat at some length with Bob, who, as I mentioned before, is really just a great, great guy (I was filled with warm and fuzzy feelings that he not only remembered meeting me, but also remembered a couple of things about me, and expressed interest in what I was up to these days). One other person came to get a book inscribed, a zookeeper who worked with the elephants at Woodland Park (another interesting conversation), and a Costco employee also requested a book to be made out to his wife.

Of course, I also got a book inscribed, which I look forward to reading, and which led to a hilarious and almost quite terribly awkward moment when I got to the register and it came out that I am not a Costco member (we snuck in the exit to get in, sneaky folk that we are). I had even said good-bye to Bob a bit early, so as to properly pay for my copy (and up his first-run sales appropriately; these things are, after all, important). Luckily, the supervisor on duty recognized us and punched in the appropriate code, so I was able to purchase my inscribed copy, and it didn't have to go back on the shelf, for some poor soul to purchase all unknowing and then see that it was made out to someone else, which would have been rather awkward, I suspect.

Still, it was an interesting insight into the life of a successful writer (which, you know, I someday hope to be), and a chance to see and reconnect with a new friend as well, so yeah, in all, a lovely way to spend an hour or two on a dreary Saturday afternoon.

Now, of course, I must away from this blogging business, and get back to the writing and critiquing I'm supposed to be doing. Ain't it the life, though?

Robert Crais' latest novel is The Sentry. You can buy it here or here.

The Clarion Writers' Workshop

2011-01-14T13:28:00.000-08:00

Established in 1968, the Clarion Writers' Workshop is the oldest workshop of its kind and is widely recognized as a premier proving and training ground for aspiring writers of fantasy and science fiction. Many graduates have become well-known writers, and a large number have won major awards.
Clarion has been known as the “boot camp” for writers of speculative fiction. Each year 18 students, ranging in age from late teens to those in mid-career, are selected from applicants who have the potential for highly successful writing careers.

Applications are currently being accepted for the 2011 Clarion Writers' Workshop, and will be until 11:59 pm Pacific time on March 1st. It costs $50 to apply and most of $5000 to attend, and if you are or aspire to be a writer of fiction of any sort, but most especially a writer of speculative fiction (understood loosely as science fiction, fantasy, horror, and slipstream), it will, without shadow of a doubt, be the best money you ever spent.

Scholarships are available.

Something like one-third of all Clarion graduates have gone on to publish, and many have gone on to successful careers as writers (no easy feat, as you will learn). Instructors are all certified bad-asses (one of this year's is John Scalzi, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; kind of a big deal), people who have studied and mastered the craft of writing, and can and will teach you the fundamentals of what you need to know in order to one day achieve that mastery yourself.

So what's the secret? How does it work? Why does it work?

The answer is, as most answers are, kind of complicated. First, there is the workshop structure itself. Each weeknight, between two and four students submit a draft of a story, which everyone then reads with their newly-developing critical eye. The next morning, everyone gets two minutes to talk about each story, either going around the circle, or, in the case of Clarion 2010, raising hands and volunteering. You talk about what works and what doesn't; you riff, sometimes, on other critiques, dittoing and undittoing the commentary of others; you marshall specific examples to illustrate your points. Then, it's the instructor's turn. Instructors get all the time they want (because, as has been mentioned, they are all certified bad-asses, and you want to hear what they've got to say, even, especially, when it hurts. And it will hurt. After all, they are vivisecting your baby, metaphorically speaking). Critiques are directed at the work, never the author, and man alive can they smart. But they will make you better, which is what they are supposed to do. After everybody's taken their whack at your story, you get your two minutes to say 'thank you, sir or madame, may I have another' and tell folks what you were trying (and probably failing) to do.

Then everybody takes a break. Then it's the next person's turn, and you nurse your wounds and hope they will scar over quickly, making you stronger for next time. Sometimes you cry.

Depending on the instructor, and the critique-load, there may or may not be lectures during workshop hours (it's four hours per day, and each critique session takes about an hour, usually). Lectures might be on craft, or the business end of things, or sometimes, if there is enough general interest, you might get a talk about writing novels, or the history of the genre, or any other thing an instructor thinks you should know. These talks might also occur in the evening (and will be optional). During my Clarion, we got a lecture from George R. R. Martin on the history of science fiction and fantasy one night that ran over three hours and caused more than one person to collapse from exhaustion, and that was only the second week.

You will, also, once per instructor, have half an hour scheduled to talk to them one-on-one, a half hour whose content is entirely up to you. They can critique another story you've written, talk about careers and publishing, tell you funny stories about writers whose work you admire, explain what you do well and poorly (I had a great/horrifying/quite pleasant meeting with Delia Sherman in which she told me the story I'd asked her to read over needed to be torn apart and totally reconcepted and, having concluded that in the first two minutes, we had a lovely chat about my strengths and weaknesses as a writer and about the writer's life in general), or any other thing. It's up to you.

Other than that, you're on your own, more or less. You could, conceivably, just wander around in the sunshine (there is no sunshine, San Diego has its worst weather in summer) and chase bunnies (there are thousands, and they are too fast for you to ever catch, but you will try, at least once). Most folks in my Clarion turned in a story a week, which is the upper end of the average output and can, as I can personally attest, drive you to the brink of insanity and perhaps a little beyond. Most people write and workshop three to five stories while they're there, written mostly in the afternoons and on weekends, because every night you have to read and critique the stories of your fellows, and you'll probably want to sleep a bit from time to time (I averaged about six hours a night, I think).

But the experience is more than that, and the secret of Clarionite success is somewhere in that nebulous more.

Don't get me wrong, the crucible of the workshop process will indeed help to crystallize the precipitate that is you the writer from the gooey mess that is you the person, and it will hurt and be awesome all at the same time (and, as time passes, the hurt will fade, and the awesome ascend to prominence). The words of wisdom and professional contacts that you glean from the instructors will help you parlay the experience into publication and success (or at least make it much likelier than it was before). You will, by dint of your attendance, receive at least a provisional membership in the spec-fic cool kids' club.

All of those things are good things, helpful things, facets of the shiny sparkly gemstone that is the Clarion experience.

But what makes it the thing that it is, makes and remakes you in the form of a better, more serious writer, is something more nebulous altogether, something that even after having been through it myself I have some difficulty putting into words. It's the kind of thing you can't so much articulate the essence of as just write around and around and around it, giving shape to its contours and dimensions and leaving the ineffable essence of it in the negative space in the center, for others to peer at through the fog of unknowability that surrounds it and try and guess what it could be.

Somewhere among the camaraderie of your class, the eighteen of you putting aside everything else in your lives (as much as is possible) and devoting a month and a half to this and only this; among the late nights and hazy afternoons wrestling a story out of the churning mess of your creative subconscious; among the revelations and realizations that yes, this is what you want to do with your life (or hell no, after this you're done with this bullshit), that even with the pain, the sleeplessness, the unreasoning anger you might feel when people just don't get what you're trying to do: somewhere among all the madness and hard work a transformation occurs, down inside you, so deep you'll never be able to fully understand or articulate it, at least not until you've got way more distance from it than I do as I write this. The metamorphosis is subtle, and complete, and what you are when you come out the other side is different from what you were when you went in.

That's the best I can do to put it into words. I hope it's been, if not illuminating, then at least informative. But I will say this: if you're serious about being a writer of fiction, speculative, literary, whatever, going to Clarion is something that will make you better, no matter how talented you are or where you are in your career.

I know it made me better.

The 2011 Clarion Writers' Workshop runs from June 26th through August 6th. Instructors are Nina Kiriki Hoffman, John Scalzi, Elizabeth Bear, David Anthony Durham, John Kessel and Kij Johnson. For more information, or to start the application process, click here.

"I'm rubber, you're glue..."

2011-01-13T12:37:00.000-08:00

When Jared Loughner put a bullet in Gabrielle Giffords' head and then opened up on the crowd around her, killing, among others, a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl, there was a moment, before anything was known about the assassin or his rationale, when we were all pretty sure that somebody had finally snapped and made good on the myriad threats of violence and reprisal against their political opponents that characterize the state of the right's current political discourse. Even Sarah Palin's people believed it, as evidenced by the speed with which they tried to take down the target map and relabel the cross-hairs on it 'surveyor's symbols.' When it came out just how batshit crazy Mr. Loughner turned out to be, you could practically hear the sigh of relief from those whose livelihoods and political agendas depended on the language of insurrection and revolutionary murder.

With their next breath, they started yelling about how it wasn't their fault, and fuck anybody who said otherwise.

After all, as anyone who's seen his YouTube videos can attest, Jared Loughner is obviously crazy, and since the mind of a crazy person is unknowable to us sane folks, it must serve as explanation enough for his actions. It couldn't be the fault of the people on the right, because Jared Loughner wasn't political. He didn't subscribe to the platform of the Republican Party. He wasn't a Tea Party activist. Sure, his political philosophy has a lot in common with the Sovereign Citizens movement, but they are, by definition, not sufficiently organized or coherent as a political faction to point a finger at, so shut up and quit trying to pin this on the people whose violent rhetoric is as pervasive as graffiti used to be in New York City.

Do you see where this is going?

Once upon a time, crime in New York seemed to be an intractable problem. No matter how many arrests were made and criminals locked up, crime rates just kept going up, until somebody finally hit on the idea of addressing the environment this was all taking place in. Cops started busting people for all the low-level stuff, like graffiti and window-breaking, that they'd used to ignore while they chased
the real bad guys, who robbed and murdered and raped and such. Things got cleaned up some, and suddenly New York didn't look like the kind of place you could just not give a fuck in. And lo and behold, crime rates went down, significantly.

Turns out, environment matters. When the ground was covered in broken glass and the walls with graffiti tags, people unconsciously absorbed that information and acted accordingly. The pervasiveness of decay and disorder was internalized, and it didn't seem out of place to beat somebody down and take their wallet or shoot that guy from the next neighborhood over for walking down the wrong street. But when the city got cleaned up some, and didn't look like the kind of place you could casually commit a crime in, people internalized that, too, and crime went down. It was a real accomplishment, and it revitalized the city and its reputation significantly.

And that's why, even though you can't draw a straight line from any particular right-wing rabble-rouser's call for revolution or other violence against their political opponents to Jared Loughner's Lone Gunman routine, people like Glen Beck and Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle and Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage do indeed share in the responsibility for what happened in Tucson. They are culpable in that the environment they have helped to create is one in which it seems perfectly reasonable on an unconscious level to prescribe Second Amendment remedies to the sickness that is the other side of the political debate. After all, if things are as bad as they are routinely made out to be, and the left half of America is genuinely devoted to destroying all that is good and righteous and beautiful and true about our great nation, then it is absolutely appropriate to cock your Glock and start spraying.

I think they know it, too, which is why they've doubled down. Why their protests are so loud, so strident. Why they've adopted the 'I'm rubber, you're glue' tone that they have in the last few days. Because when you traffic in absolutes, you can't ever admit that you were wrong.

I'm a big believer in free speech, and all of these assholes do in fact have the right to say the things they do, and I will defend that right, in word and in deed, from any who would try and take it away. But something that seems to get lost in all the endless bloviation is that rights come with responsibilities, and the refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of their words and actions, however indirect, speaks volumes about the characters of such people, and is an indication that maybe we ought not to listen to them anymore. That maybe we ought to turn the discussion back over to the grownups, who recognize that there are things in this world, lots of them, about which reasonable people might disagree, and who will engage in serious and reasoned debate about those things, with minds opened to the possibility that the other guy might have a point and hearts aware that he has to live in this world too and that he's acting in good faith and trying to make it a better place, even if the way he wants to go about it is different from the way we might.

It won't happen, I know. But a man can dream, can't he?

Tucson

2011-01-11T18:06:00.000-08:00

The great American culture medium seems to nourish, every few years, a person who just can't sleep at night until he's blown away a dozen or so strangers.
-Michael J. Smith

I've been chewing this all over for a few days now, ever since logging on for some internet on Saturday morning and discovering that a Democratic member of the House of Representatives that I'd never heard of named Gabrielle Giffords had been the victim of an assassination attempt.

As far as I can tell, I had the same initial instinct as everyone else on the internet, that some Tea Party nutjob had finally flipped out and decided to prescribe one of Sharron Angle's Second Amendment remedies. Given the state of things in Arizona, with its gun culture, economic woes, and sharp divisions between partisans on the two sides of our traditional political divide, it seemed like a pretty reasonable hypothesis, and I surely wasn't alone in believing that that was most likely the case. Before the shooter was identified, and his YouTube channel, MySpace page, and the tweets and statements of those who'd known him were offered up to the national conversation, all manner of folks seemed to believe that he was going to turn out to be inspired by the overheated rhetoric of insurrection, secession, and violent revolution that has characterized the right wing of the Conservative end of the political spectrum for the last couple of years (or, if you will, the last couple of Democratic Presidential Administrations). Even Sarah Palin's people were scrambling to remove evidence of her map of twenty congressional districts carried by McCain/Palin that had Democratic Representatives, going so far as to float one of the all-time most ridiculous and absurd spin-memes ever, that the cross-hairs on said map were not cross-hairs at all (though Palin had referred to them as such), but "surveyor's symbols."

It's easy to lose track of, but in those first hours, before we all learned just how f-cking crazy Jared Loughner is or appears to be, just about everybody realized that Occam's Razor said this guy was a right-wing nutjob, and acted accordingly.

Even the most cursory examination of Mr. Loughner's YouTube postings reveals a mind that is, to say the least, off the beaten path. He seems mostly to be concerned with things like grammar and currency and mind control, both in the sense of the control of the minds of others (through things like grammar and currency) and also in the sense of taking control of his own mind, and by extension reality, by way of what he calls conscience dreaming, which I'm going to go out on a limb and guess is actually conscious (or lucid) dreaming, wherein the dreamer recognizes that s/he is dreaming, and through that realization takes control of the dream. There seems to be a fair case to be made that Jared Loughner believed that lucid dreaming could be made to apply to the real world as well as those associated with his own REM-sleep cycles.

The collective sigh of relief from those whose fame and fortune depend on rousing the raging rabble of the right to further fits of apocalyptic apoplexy when Mr. Loughner's imbalanced mental condition went mainstream was almost audible even if your internet connection was down, and it wasn't long before the recriminations began. Reading the right-wing blogosphere, the impression one received was that the real victims of this tragic and regrettable incident were not in fact the murder victims or the wounded, however grievous their injuries or uncertain their prognosis. No, the real victims, it would seem, were those very folks whose stock in trade were the demonization of anyone to the left of center-right and calls for violent insurrection should our electoral system not deliver the outcomes they preferred.

It was not unlike what happens when white folks get accused of being racist. The horror and historical facticity of racism in America, what with the slavery and the lynchings and the deck-stacking against folks with too much melanin to their skin tone, gets brushed aside, because somebody got made to feel bad about something they said or did, and suddenly it becomes about them, they're the real victim here, and the incident or statement in question gets brushed conveniently under the rug so we can talk about how insulted the accused feels and how completely out of line the person pointing out that what they said or did could be construed as racist is for even thinking such a horrible thing (see this for further elucidation).

In short, methinks they doth protest too much, and the further they go to deny their culpability, the further they dig themselves in.

Indeed, the conversation that we as a society maybe ought to be having, one that's going to be pretty uncomfortable for a lot of people, is getting swept under that same rug, thanks to Jared Loughner's pretty obvious mental imbalance, and to the speed and vehemence with which many on the political left accused (rightly or no, the jury is still out on that one) those on the other side of the political divide.

Current conventional wisdom seems to hold that Loughner was crazy, that was why he did what he did, the minds and motivations of such people can't be understood, and that's that. There's little evidence that Mr. Loughner subscribed to the views of either political party, at least with any real fidelity, nor any that his politics falls within our usual left-right continuum of political understanding and discourse. That his favorite books run the gamut from Mein Kampf to The Communist Manifesto would seem to indicate as much (though evidence that he had the intellectual heft to read and comprehend any of the books he listed is sorely lacking). Indeed, reading the Mother Jones interview with his high school friend Bryce Tierney, the closest we come to a rationale is that Giffords' failure to adequately answer a question he asked her (What is government if words have no meaning?) at another Congress on your Corner event in 2007 seems to have engendered an animus against her in Mr. Loughner's mind.

There are, however, several parallels between Mr. Loughner's avowed beliefs and the Sovereign Citizen movement, most notably his concerns with grammar and currency. It's my understanding that Sovereign Citizens point to certain grammatical choices made in Constitutional amendments as evidence that the United States is slowly undermining the rights and freedoms of the citizenry. And his statement that he would not pay his debts in a currency not backed by gold and silver is straight out of the fringe libertarian canon.

Now, even on the right, Sovereign Citizens are pretty fringey. But the anger that underlies that movement is the same anger that many on the right have used to whip their supporters into a frenzy, to raise money, drive eyeballs to websites and television shows, and in order to get out the vote. It's an anger that's easy to understand, rooted in not only economic uncertainty but also in some genuinely troubling developments in the way our government conducts the business of the people.

However, that anger is, to say the least, unhelpful if what we're really interested in is actually addressing these problems and finding solutions to them we can all live with. I know from personal experience, as does any- and everyone reading this, that people do not make rational choices when they're angry. They do not weigh costs and consequences, and it becomes easier to see those who might think or believe differently from us as something other (and less) than fully human. As John Cole so elegantly put it:

This is really not a hard concept to follow. There are crazy people out there. Stop egging them on.

I'm going to have more to say about all of this in the days to come. For now, this is all I can stand to put down in words.

Something I've Noticed

2010-11-04T16:23:00.000-07:00

When Republicans win, by whatever margin, it is not only a mandate from the people, but God's will, and everyone who thinks otherwise can go suck it, and shut up, that's why.

When Democrats win, by whatever margin, it is evidence not only of voter fraud, but the hijacking of our great nation by dangerous, un-American forces bent on destroying everything the Founding Fathers stood for, and Republicans and their associated cadres of Libertarians, militiamen, and now Tea Partiers have not only the right but the absolute obligation to do everything in their power, to lie, cheat, threaten, and kill if need be, in order to take their country back.

Please, Oh Please

2010-11-04T14:44:00.001-07:00

Let this come true.

More Hilarious Irony, a Response to Someone's Facebook Post

2010-11-03T18:47:00.000-07:00

Q: It's November 3rd and I'm so disgusted I could spit. So many things yesterday went horribly, horribly wrong. WTF is wrong with people???

A: Congressional Blue Dogs prevented the stimulus from being large enough, and diverted too large a percentage of it to tax cuts, which had the overall effect of stopping the economy's slide into Depression but not reversing the momentum. As a result, unemployment remained high, even as the economy began to grow again and more private sector jobs were created than in the entirety of the Bush Administration. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough, and in the face of persistent unemployment and economic uncertainty, the electorate did what they always do, which is punish the party in power. In a hilariously ironic twist, the majority of Dems who lost their congressional seats were the aforementioned Blue Dogs, whose conservative voting records and philosophical bent did nothing to save them from the monster they created and then failed to appease.

Also, a bunch of white folks freaked out because we have a Black President.

(hat tip Kristina for the prompt)

Pre-emptive Schadenfreude, or The Silver Lining

2010-11-02T14:22:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to agree that today will be an electoral bloodbath, not only for Democrats, but sane people who would like to see the nation's problems addressed in a constructive manner by qualified grownups in general. And of course I do not wish to downplay the severity or tragedy that I believe is afoot.

But there is something funny that I think will come as an unintended consequence for those making up the bulk of the Tea Party movement.

From much of what I have read, the Tea Party is largely made up of anti-Socialist activists who have lots of time on their hands to go to rallies and listen to talk radio because many if not most of them are on some sort of state-sponsored financial support, be it Social Security, Federal Disability, or Medicare. And while they do not appear to appreciate or even see the irony of such a position, there will be ironically hilarious consequences to their activism and votes for their wing of the Republican party.

See, the two things I think we can credibly expect from a Republican-controlled House of Representatives are a) investigations, most if not all of them spurious, into any- and everything the White House does or has done, and, more importantly, b) another Government shut-down like they pulled in the '90s when they don't get their way legislatively. And that's where the hilarious irony kicks in, because when the shut-down occurs, all those dumb fucking assholes who voted Tea Party and who live on Social Security, Disability, and Medicare are suddenly going to stop receiving those checks. If the shut-down goes on long enough, some of them may lose their homes, or become sick, or possibly even die, and it'll be their own damn fault for not paying sufficient attention to the actual policy outcomes and political platforms of the people and party they voted for. They'll have to live in the dog-eat-dog paradise that is the unregulated market without the social safety net government properly provides, and may their God help them when they are suddenly forced to realize just what that really means.

And, individually, it will be tragic. Just absolutely horrifying. And it may make me a bad person to think that it's funny, or will be. But I suppose I am, at heart, American enough to enjoy seeing people get what they deserve, and as I am forced to watch this land that I love turn away from what I believe in my heart to be the right way forward, and to become less than it is or should be, I cannot help but take some small comfort in the suffering of those who helped bring it about.

2010-10-29T01:33:00.000-07:00

Found this from 2004 on driftglass. I have to admit, it's got me to thinking.

Initiatives, Referenda, and Joint Resolutions: a Guide to Washington State's Midterm Ballot

2010-10-28T18:38:00.000-07:00

As an American, I feel it is every citizen's duty not only to vote, but to inform themselves as to the choices they have in the voting booth, and the consequences of those choices. But I also understand that not everyone has the time or inclination to dig into it that I do. So, as a public service (or possibly just a cry for attention), I have spent the afternoon going through the Washington State Voter's Pamphlet, reading through the wording, the consequences, and the statements for and against, and I have assembled this handy guide to how I think you should vote and why.

Please note that this is only a guide to Initiatives to the People, Referenda from the State Legislature, and State Senate and House Joint Resolutions. I may or many not have time to write about the races for federal and state political office later this week. I feel like people are probably already pretty set as far as the types of candidates they support, being that people generally know where they stand on the political spectrum. But ballot initiative and the like take a little more unpacking, I think, and I wanted to devote a little time to figuring it out for myself, and apparently I've decided that you want to know what I think, too. So here it is.

The Quick and Dirty Version:

I-1053: NO
I-1082: NO
I-1098: YES
I-1100: YES
I-1105: NO
I-1107: NO
R-52: YES
SJR-8225: YES
HJR-4220: NO

Reasons why below the jump, for those who care to know.

Initiative 1053: Tim Eyman tries to turn us into California (and not in a good way)
How I think you should vote: NO

Faux-populist jackass Tim Eyman is back with another plan to starve Washington of needed revenue and preserve tax breaks and loopholes for such stellar coporate citizens as BP Oil. As with nearly all his initiatives, it sounds good on paper--who doesn't hate taxes, after all?--and would be absolutely ruinous in practice.

Look, we all hate paying taxes, but you know what? Taxes are what pay for all the good things we think of as free, or at least as given, things like roads and teachers and libraries and firefighters and domestic violence hotlines and regulatory agencies that make sure the food you eat and the toys your children play with aren't made of poison because it's cheaper than making them out of not-poison. And sometimes, times like now, when the state has a budget deficit to close, the state needs to be able to raise taxes in order to fund all those good things we all take for granted. It sucks but there it is, and the responsible, grownup thing to do is to acknowledge that fact and make peace with it. Yes, I, too would like to keep a little more of my money to spend as I see fit, but honestly, the trade-off just isn't there unless you are ridiculously wealthy, in which case, hey, cry me a river.

If I-1053 passes, it would take fewer than twenty lawmakers to put the kibosh on any tax increase. So much for majority rule. You know how the US Senate can't get anything passed because of the supermajority requirement in the Senate rules? It'd be like that, only worse.

And even if one were of a mind to give it a shot and see how it worked out, well, we don't even have to do that, because it has been tried, in California, and boy are they proper fucked as a result.

Initiative 1082: Big Insurance wants a piece of Workman's Comp
How I think you should vote: NO

While I am not explicitly anti-capitalist, there are certain things that I think should be kept insulated from market forces and the profit motive. This is one of them.

If you get hurt (or killed) on the job, workman's comp is there to help pay your bills and get you back on your feet. In return, you and your employer pay a little bit of money into a state fund set aside for that purpose. It's really basic social safety net stuff, like Social Security and Medicare, the kind of thing where the last thing you want on the other end if you have to make use of it is somebody whose motive is to fuck you over and keep the money. Because that's what'll happen. It almost has to.

The purpose of capitalist entities is not to provide services (that's actually somewhat incidental); it's to make money. It's in their corporate charters. They're actually exposed to shareholder lawsuits if they don't do every little thing they can think of to maximize shareholder value, no matter how short-term or short-sighted. It certainly doesn't matter what's the right or wrong thing to do. Corporations are inherently psychopathic, as they by their very nature lack the neurological architecture to identify with the emotions or well-being of others. They literally cannot care about anything other than the bottom line.

Basically, I-1082 is a bait and switch. The bait is that you won't have to pay your share of L&I anymore; your employer will be on the hook for all of it. The switch doesn't come until you try to make a claim, and they deny you for any or no reason at all, and you languish in poverty and the aftereffects of your on-the-job injury because you can't afford a lawyer to force them to do what they're supposed to do.

You'll be like those folks in Tennessee whose house burned down. They saved themselves $75.00 by opting out of their local fire department's program, and lost everything when their house caught fire.

Initiative 1098: State IncomeTax for high earners
How I think you should vote: YES

While I am cognizant of the slippery-slope argument, that allowing an income tax for high earners opens the door to expanding it to everybody, as it stands I'm in favor of this law.

Opponents will call this a tax increase, but that's not really true, if I'm reading this right. What it is is a tax shift, and a progressive one at that. The only people who'd have to pay it are individuals earning more than $200,000 a year and families earning more than $400,000 a year, who would pay no tax on earning up to that point, then 5% on anything over that up to half a million for individuals and a million for families, at which point the 5% jumps to 9%. As an offset, Business and Occupation taxes (at least as far as the state is concerned) would be eliminated for some 80% of small businesses, and state property taxes would be cut by more than $350,000,000.

As far as I'm concerned, this is a gimme. Small businesses and homeowners come out ahead, the vast majority see their tax burden shrink, and the people who derive the most value and advantage from our state's economy, and who are best able to afford it, pick up a little more of the tab for health care and education. I imagine that many of those people object to the imposition of this tax, to which I say this: cry me a river, I'd love to have that problem, and so would almost everyone I know. If you don't like it, move somewhere else.

Initiative 1100: Repealing the State Liquor Monopoly
How I think you should vote: YES

Just as I think there are certain things that should be kept out of the purview of the market and the profit motive, so I also believe there are certain things that should not be the purview of the state, except with regards to taxation. Liquor is one of them.

It is, and always has been, disappointing to me that Washington state has such draconian liquor laws, throwbacks to the Prohibition era, and that the state feels it not only has the right, but the obligation, to tell adults when and where they can purchase alcohol, and at what price. I-1100 takes those functions away from the state and returns them to the market, where in my opinion they belong. The state retains its authority to grant (and retract) licenses to sell, distribute, and make hard liquor, and the Liquor Control Board will still maintain its authority and mission to enforce liquor laws. There will still be revenue from the taxation of liquor. We just won't have to pay the state's 50+% markup, or abide a limited number of liquor stores open a limited number of hours, selling a limited number of spirits decided upon by faraway people in Olympia who have, at best, limited accountability to we the people.

I am aware with a certain disconnect here, in that I-1100 will cost the state a not-inconsiderable chunk of revenue in lean times when there are budget shortfalls to be made up. However, it's my considered belief that the revenue loss is an acceptable price to pay for a more just and appropriate arrangement of society.

Initiative 1105: Replacing the State Liquor Monopoly with Private Liquor Monopolies
How I think you should vote: NO

Although I-1105 echoes a good deal of the populist sentiment behind I-1100, the fine print reveals a couple of key differences. Here's one of them: "The Board would make spirits distributor licenses available to all applicants who are appointed by, or agents of, spirits manufacturers, distillers, or suppliers..."

That's right. It's big business trying to horn in and replace one monopoly with another one. Same price-gouging, same lack of negotiating power for the consumer, only the beneficiaries are a bunch of giant out-of-state corporations who could give fuck-all about anything but their own bottom lines.

What's worse, I-1105 repeals all liquor taxes, and directs Olympia to make up the (much larger) revenue shortfall with some other tax. Which you know is just going to work out great for you and I.

Just to clear something up, I think vice should be largely out of the control of the state, aside from common-sense enforcement provisions designed to protect society at large, but I also think that vice is a fine thing to tax, and that the revenue it generates can and should be used for the general good.

Initiative 1107: Repealing the Tax on Candy and Soda
How I think you should vote: NO

Candy and soda pop are not food. Repeat: candy and soda pop are not food. If anything, they're drugs, and what's worse, they're drugs that are extensively marketed to children. You don't even get a good buzz off of them, either, unless you count a sugar rush/crash as fun, in which case, well, I don't know what to tell you.

Proponents call the (mostly temporary, all quite minimal) taxes they're trying to repeal 'grocery taxes,' which is pretty misleading, as the (mostly temporary, all quite minimal) taxes in question are on candy and soda pop and processed food-like products, which as mentioned previously are not food.

As far as I'm concerned, we're back in vice territory here. And, as with liquor (and cigarettes, and, honestly, most recreational drugs) I think they are ripe for taxation. There are larger societal costs associated with their use and abuse (diabetes, anyone? childhood obesity?), and while I don't necessarily think they ought to be banned, I think that adding a small tax to their purchase is perfectly okay, especially when the state has budget shortfalls in the works that will cut essential services that I think most people would prefer to see remain available.

That it might, on a statistical level, cause a slight drop in the consumption of aforementioned non-food items is, to me, a feature and not a bug.

And, in case you had any questions about who's behind I-1107, according to the Washington State Voter's Pamphlet, almost all the funding behind I-1107 comes from one source, the American Beverage Association, an industry group whose profits are affected by the (mostly temporary, all quite minimal) taxes in question. And, honestly, fuck 'em. They've got plenty of revenue, and they still will, even if Washington state temporarily and largely minimally taxes the purchase and consumption of their products to make up revenue shortfalls.

Referendum 52: Bonds for Energy Efficiency Projects
How I think you should vote: YES

R-52 empowers the state of Washington to isse $505 million in state bonds to fund energy efficiency renovation projects in public schools, universities and community colleges. While the actuarial tables indicate that the overall cost for issuing the bonds and servicing the debt (over the course of twenty years) comes to most of a billion dollars, the criteria for awarding funding requires that the energy efficiency projects funded by the bonds must be cash flow positive, meaning the energy savings from the improvements must outweigh the costs of the project. One estimate of the savings from the projects is something like $130 million a year. Even figuring five years before the savings kick in, $130 million a year for fifteen years saves the state $2.25 billion, meaning a net gain of more than one and a quarter billion dollars.

Win.

And, as icing on the awesome cake, that's $505 million worth of construction jobs, which, given the economy, sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I'm sure it sounds pretty good to all the men and women who used to make their living building things during the housing bubble but now make their living from unemployment insurance and being greeters at Wal-Mart.

In addition, R-52 extends a tax on bottled water set to expire in 2013. I'm all for this, as I think bottled water is one of the biggest scams ever, being basically tap water from somewhere else sold in a plastic container that'll take a thousand years or so to decompose, so anything that makes that that much less attractive as an option is okay by me.

Senate Joint Resolution 8225: Taking Federal Subidies into Account when Deciding Bond Issues
How I think you should vote: YES

This is a tricky one, invovling accounting and debt calculations, but as near as I can make out, what SJR 8225 basically does is allow the State Treasurer to take federal subsidies of bond issues into account each year when deciding how much money the state can borrow in the form of said bond issues.

Basically it works like this: the state has a debt ceiling, a certain amount over which it may not borrow money, which is calcuated twice a year when the State Treasurer issues bonds and such, and which includes, among the many numbers involved in said calculations, taking into account how much it costs to service the bonds already issued. Now, the federal government has taken to subsidizing these payments, as a way of keeping state employees employed, which keeps people working and helps keep the economy going (awfully nice of them, right? I know). Anyway, what SJR 8225 does is a) make Washington state's bonds eligible for this subsidy, and b) allow the State Treasurer to take these subsidies into account when calculating the state's bond issues each year.

Sounds good to me.

House Joint Resolution 4220: Expansion of the Power to Deny Bail
How I think you should vote: NO

HJR 4220 was passed in the wake of the unprovoked shooting of four Lakewood Police Officers by Maurice Clemmons in a cafe on November 29, 2009. It passed unanimously in the State Senate, and almost unanimously in the State House of Representatives.

As it currently stands, the Constitution of the State of Washington only allows the denial of bail by judges in cases of capital crimes, i.e. those which carry the death penalty as a possible sentence. HJR 4220 would alter the Constitution to expand that to include crimes which carry the possibility of life in prison as a punishment, so long as there was evidence of a propensity for violence and a reasonable probability that the arrestee might constitute a danger to others if released before his or her trial.

There is room for disagreement here, and I can respect those who differ from me on this. I can see where it would be possible to read HJR4220 and find it a reasonable tool to add to the state judicial tool-box in order to provide for public safety.

But I cannot see it that way, myself. In the wake and the horror over Clemmons' unprovoked murder, the legislature felt a need to do something, and be seen doing something, because that's what politicians do when shit like this happens. It's perfectly understandable. The problem is the solution is almost always worse than the problem, and often would not have prevented the tragedy that brought it about.

Which is certainly the case here.

For all the horror and tragedy that came as a result of Clemmons' release (he was out on bail for raping a child), at no point did the judge who set his bail decry his inability to deny bail. Nor did he set it as high as the prosecutor requested.

But like I said, in situations like this, politicians need to be seen as having done something, even when the problem/tragedy in question is not amenable to a legislative solution.

So, had it been in place, HJR 4220 would not have prevented the tragedy it was passed in reaction to. Which leaves us with the state attempting to arrogate to itself powers that it didn't have before and which are amenable to abuse. It's the PATRIOT Act all over again, only on a smaller scale. As a civil libertarian, I have to oppose it, despite the horror I share at Maurice Clemmons' actions (and I am horrified by them). And while I do believe that something should be done about people like Maurice Clemmons and what the system does to them (and what they do in reprisal; after all, this was a guy who was thrown into prison at 17, which surely played some role in the man he became), I absolutely do not believe that HJR 4220 or legislation like it would do anything at all to address that problem, but that it does open the door to denying potentially innocent people rights they are currently guaranteed under the Washington state Constitution.

And, as a general rule, and specifically in this case, I'm against anything that rolls back my rights and civil liberties.

Curb-Stomping the Bitch

2010-10-26T13:01:00.000-07:00

You know she had it coming. If the damned media hadn't edited the video you'd see that that woman was totally a Muslim sleeper agent, probably illegally Hispanic, and that the ironic Republicorp Employee of the Month award she was attempting to give Rand Paul was so dangerously unConstitutional and would have done such grievous ideological and political harm to his anointed candidacy, that the ~~Confederacy~~ Republic, God bless her, would never have recovered. So really, these large and seemingly irrationally violent men should lauded as the heroes they truly are, bravely and selflessly wrestling this small, suspiciously swarthy woman to the ground and stomping the Satan out from under her ~~disguise~~ wig.

Hell, bitch is lucky they didn't express their Second Amendment rights, too. You know she was asking for it. They all are.

UPDATE: The curb-stomper in question appears to be directly involved with Rand Paul's campaign. Which makes Paul's non-condemnation on Fox news even more craven. I guess what they say about lying down with dogs must be true...

Sigh

2010-10-14T16:56:00.001-07:00

You know your girl's a keeper when she sends you links like this.

Reading and Writing 10/10/10

2010-10-10T22:11:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, Glen Cook was one of my guilty pleasures. What's changed is that I am no longer guilty about how much pleasure I take in his work. Put simply, Glen Cook kicks ass.

My earliest encounter with his work was the first three or four books of The Annals of the Black Company and, later, The Garrett Files, back when I was just a wee young whelp blazing through as many tomes from the Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Club as I could get my hands on. Later, I read (and loved) The Dragon Never Sleeps, a stand-alone space opera that I found a used copy of a couple of years ago and read again. To my great delight, it was just as good, if not better, the second time around.

So when I recently found myself gazing upon the vast to-read pile that adorns my bookshelves, with an (oddly rare these days) opportunity to read whatever I wanted, I leapt at the chance to read Passage At Arms, one of his lesser known works, a military SF standalone that is, in the words of my esteemed Clarion instructor (and literary hero) Jeff VanderMeer, the "Das Boot of SF." If you look at the picture above closely enough, you can see where he says it, there at the top, above Cook's byline.

Synoptically speaking, Passage at Arms is a first-person narrative account of one ship's patrol into unfriendly space during a protracted war between humanity and an alien race called the Ulant. Told from the perspective of a discharged Navy Lieutenant turned war correspondent, the story revolves primarily around the claustrophobia and paranoia of the crew on their months-long patrol through the vicissitudes and uncertainty of war in space. Despite its science fictional premise, there's a certain verisimilitude here that really brings things home. The narrow focus on surviving the present; the lack of information; the contempt for Command: it all rings true. It all sounds like what it's really like to be at war, or would be, under those circumstances.

And while it takes a bit of time to get going, once the ship is off on its mission, away from human space, where the crew's only hope and solitary focus is surviving long enough to empty their missile silos into appropriate targets, man does this book get harder and harder to put down. Seriously, this stuff is like crack to me; I almost literally can't get enough. This is one of those books that, while I was reading it, I had to make myself do other things, like work, or write, or otherwise take care of business, because all I wanted to do was open it back up and keep reading.

That's not to say that this is a perfect book, or that there aren't things that might have been done better. But once it gets going, the stakes just keep getting higher and higher, the odds of survival lower and lower, until you almost can't believe they're going to make it, even though you want more than anything for them to do so.

For what it's worth, some of the writing gets a bit dense and hard to follow, in part because like many good sci fi writers, Cook invents milieu-specific language and lingo to tell his story in. Some of the tech gets a little deep, though it's consistent and pleasantly non-magical (in the Star Trek/Arthur C. Clarke sense of the term), and it plays just the right role in the story, drawing boundaries in which the story can take place without overwhelming the human element of the story.

And in the end that's important, because in the end what Passage at Arms is about is not spaceships or interstellar war or anything like that. In the end, Passage at Arms is about the people the rest of us come to call heroes, who do their duty in the face of death and uncertainty, each for their own unknowable reasons, who fight and die so that those things worth fighting and dying over can survive.

As for myself, and my own humble undertakings, I am currently around 4500 words into the short story I started last week. I'd hoped to be a little further along by now, but I've been working a fair bit lately, which has taken its toll on my time, focus, and energy, and, to be honest, I ran into kind of a wall early last week with it that made me want to jump up and down and throw things through windows.

Mind you, that's not an uncommon reaction to frustration for me, which may or may not be alarming (or surprising) to my friends and loved ones. And it is, unfortunately, a not uncommon occurrence in my writing life, though, on the plus side, it seems to be getting better. The basic problem (I couldn't tell you how many times this has happened to me) is that I got off to a pretty good start, was feeling pretty good about this thing I was writing, and then, well, then I realized I didn't know where it was going or how I would get it to go there even if I did.

Luckily, I have been experimenting with a new writing program called Scrivener that lets you break stories (and/or longer-form fictions) into scenes, which you can view on a sort of electronic corkboard as a series of note cards. So I created a bunch of blank scenes and then did my plot synopsis on the corkboard. I don't know if it was the tools the program gave me, or just the simple fact of sitting there trying to plan out what I was going to do ahead of time, but whatever it was I managed to get something like a plot figured out over the course of fifteen or so scenes, which seems to have gotten my hindbrain back up and running as far as the story goes. I'm currently in the midst of scene 8, and of course the story is evolving, requiring me to revise my synoptic notes as the story develops in my brain, but having a general idea of the shape of the thing has really helped me to focus in and make some progress, which is good, because I'm hoping to finish at least a first draft, if not a revised draft, by the end of the month, at which time I'll either send it out or put it away for a while and come back to it.

As far as Scrivener goes, the real test will come later this month, and, more specifically, next month, when it comes time to NaNoWriMo. The plan is to use its many features to plan out the novel I've been working up to writing, setting up files for each chapter (or major hunk of text; I may or may not use a chapter format for this) and making notes and so on as to what's supposed to happen and why and how the whole thing fits together. I'm optimistic about it. I think Scrivener will turn out to be a real help, and will put some structure to my normally chaotic novel-planning process. Historically, I've always been a sort of start, and when you get to the end, stop kind of writer, which hasn't always worked out for me, since when I get stuck on something the whole process stops. So I have high hopes for this whole planning things out in advance thing I'm trying these days. Suppose I'll find out next month if it really works.

Worthy Quotations

2010-10-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

One of the great rewards of a writer's life is that it lets you read all the books you want to without feeling guilty.
-Damon Knight

Reading and Writing 10/4/10

2010-10-04T23:09:00.000-07:00

Finished Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell today at work (not a single customer all day; I used to dream about having jobs like this). What a great freakin' book. It'd be easy to get bogged down in the structure of the work; it's a series of nested stories, each of which references the previous one, which are arranged palindromically, I guess you'd call it, since each ends in a cliffhanger somewhere in the middle, until the story at the center, which completes, and then the stories are reprised and finished, in reverse order, until the book ends with the same story with which it began. But while the structure, which in lesser hands would be downright gimmicky, certainly dominates the reader's attention (and kept at least this reader's attention with the unceasing novelty of a new character, setting, POV, and narrative/dramatic arc every--for lack of a better word--chapter), there are some interesting and insightful themes running through the work (colonialism, violent conquest, historical teleology, the way that words, things, and ideas take on a life of their own) that carry it past the merely gimmicky and into the realm of Literature-with-a-capital-L. And it's fun, too. The proliferation of stories and POV characters allows Mitchell a great deal of room to play (even while the underlying project has all the seriousness one might ask of a work of literature), and the result is an absolute joy to read. Friends of mine have been recommending this book to me for years now, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it. Especially after 2666, this was just what I needed: just the right blend of levity and gravity in an interesting puzzle of nested narratives each with its own particular flavor and character but that connected to each other in interesting and not always obvious ways. I've also got Black Swan Green, one of his later books, sitting on my bookshelf, which I hope to read soon, but, alas, will not be able to get to immediately, since I'm going to have to be more targeted in my reading in the immediate future.

Why? you ask. Well, I'm glad you did (which is why I did it for you).
I have decided, along with several of my Clarion cohorts, to participate in November's annual National Novel Writing Month, during which I, along with several thousand others, will attempt to write a 50,000 word (roughly 175 page) novel, starting November 1 and finishing no later than midnight on November 30. For those of you not doing the math at home, that's roughly 1667 words a day (if I don't take any days off). What will I write about (nice of me to supply the questions for you, isn't it?)? Well, I've been working on an outline and other related miscellany for a novelization of one of the short stories I wrote at Clarion, and though I've toyed around a bit with some ideas for actually writing it, I haven't actually written more than maybe a thousand words on it, so I'm going to table the actually writing it part til November and just work on getting it planned out between now and then. I was planning on a pretty intense period of work on it around then anyway, though I'd envisioned a somewhat longer, less-intense period than I will now be doing, but things just seem to be falling in place so I'm going to run with it. NaNoWriMo is supposed to be more fun and silly than what I'm planning to do, but I like the idea of having this arbitrary-but-kind-of-crazy deadline hanging over me, and it's not like I was going to kick out perfect final-draft copy anyway. If all goes according to plan, I'll at least have something like a completed draft by the end of November, and since I was going to have to go back and revise it anyway, it's a win either way.

So if you don't hear much from me next month, it's not that I don't love you (all five or six of you who read this blog), it's just that all my creative word-forging powers will be bent to this singular task of conjuring forth a tale of blazing awesomeness from the nebulous netherworld of my subconscious dream-factory.

And, of course, there are other projects in the works in the interim. I did a first-lines exercise the other day (something they taught us at Clarion: spend fifteen minutes just writing down first lines; pick five and write first paragraphs to go with them; pick the one that interests you most and write the story), and came out with three things to work on. One was a scene from the novel, so that's obviously on the backburner. One is a flash-fiction version of Gravity's Rainbow, which I read obssessively in my twenties, probably four or five times all told, which I've currently got at about 500 words, though I'm sure it'll get up to most of the whole thousand once I remember everything that happens in the book. And the last is a revamping of one of my submission stories to Clarion, which I thought was pretty freakin' awesome at the time but have since come to understand just how deeply flawed an attempt at storytelling it really is. So I've got that to keep me occupied for the rest of the month, in all the spare time I'll have between working, going to Oregon to work on a property a friend and I own there, planning the novel I'll be writing in November, playing soccer and ultimate frisbee every week, reading, blogging, and, you know, like, having a life and stuff.

Reader's Journal 9/24/10

2010-09-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I finally finished the second half of Roberto Bolaño's 2666. I'd begun it way back in February or March, right around the time I was applying to/frantically writing stories for the Clarion workshop, and I'd got about halfway through it by the time I was accepted (you can read my thoughts about it then here). I put it down at that point, partly because it was pretty overwhelming as a work of fiction, but mostly because I suddenly had a lot of reading to do in order to prepare for the workshop. After it was over (and I'd finished reading The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi, which I read for fun at Clarion (you know, in all my spare time), and which I really enjoyed, and will hopefully remember to write about sometime), and I had returned home, I decided to pick it back up again.

As I recollect, I'd blown through the first of the five books, The Part About the Critics, very quickly, getting lost in the intertwinings of the the professional (and personal) lives of a group of Eurpoean academics whose scholarly work revolved around the books of a German author named Benno Von Archimboldi. Archimboldi bookends 2666, as the subject of scholarly interest in his work in the first book, and as the protagonist or at least the subject of the fifth. One can only assume that his (tenuous, ambiguous, possbily illusory) connection to the three middle books, which deal with the imaginary Mexican city of Santa Teresa (modeled, I have it on good authority, on Ciudad Juarez), comprises the mystery that Bolaño invites the reader to... well, not really solve, but perhaps explore, since it seems to be one of Bolaño's central artistic tenets (at least so far as 2666 is concerned) not to solve any mysteries, but merely to present them in all their ineffable squalor and glory, that the reader may contemplate and engage with them on his or her own.

Certain parallels suggest themselves in the two books about Archimboldi (whose connection with Santa Teresa smacks of the sort of random arbitrariness found more often in real life than in literature). In both he is something of a cipher. In The Part About the Critics, Archimoldi the man is the central mystery of the academics' lives, at least professionally, although the reader's sense is that the actual central mystery of most of their lives is which of her two lovers the Englishwoman will eventually choose. The interplay between the personal and the professional is telling, since we are first introduced to Santa Teresa through the eyes of the critics, who have followed the thread of hints about Archimboldi's lived existence (about which nothing is known; only his work as a novelist is extant) there. And though they sense that this is as close as any of them will ever actually come to finding him, there's very little urgency to the endeavor as far as the critics are concerned: they have their own dynamic, which takes the opportunity of the venue change to play itself out, somewhat dramatically. In a certain sense, The Part About the Critics sets up the question of Archimboldi, which is engaged with, but not actually answered, at the end, in The Part About Archimboldi, in which we discover that he is in many ways an unremarkable man, a product of his times who drifts along on the currents of history until history ceases to pull him along, and then takes up writing novels, for reasons that are never really made obvious or sensible to the reader.

Archimboldi writes because he cannot not write, which is, perhaps, a statement about the Artist as trope or phenomenon, that he (or she, of course) will by default create because some strange compulsion that is, if not actually inexplicable, then at least not interested in explanations. That his talent should arise in the ruins of postwar Germany (and in the person of a soldier of the German infantry) is perhaps meant as a sort of gesture of redemption from the unflagging horror of the latter half of the book (more on that below). I couldn't say for sure. There seems also to be some trouble taken to disconnect the art from the artist, although where that fits in to Bolaño's underlying constellation of meaning isn't entirely clear.

As may be apparent, there's a great deal to digest in 2666. It is a work of great ambition, which, if it doesn't always grasp what it reaches for, nonetheless reaches for some pretty amazing stuff.

The main body of the book (The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, and The Part About the Crimes) seems in a certain sense to bear only the most tenuous relationship to the more European subjects and sensibilites of its outer edges. It's here that the book becomes more overtly Mexican, and not only the setting, but the tone (of the prose, and of the characters' lives) changes dramatically. In the Archimboldi bookends, even the latter, in which Archimboldi manages to survive the vicissitudes of the Eastern Front, death is always at a distance. Even when his comrades-in-arms die, it rarely rates more than a simple declarative sentence; the horrors of war and mortality are offstage (with the exception of the Romanian general's crucifixion, although one presumes Bolaño has some purpose in the comparison and contrast of the general's considerable penis pre- and post-war). But with The Part About Amalfitano we begin our descent into the miasma of life in Santa Teresa. Amalfitano is a minor character in The Part About the Critics, a Chilean scholar whom the critics are somewhat amazed to find at Santa Teresa's backwater university (by way of Barcelona). Amalfitano seems somewhat surprised to be there himself, and as the background hum that is the the regular and brutal murders of young women from the colonias rises in pitch (or comes more to the foreground, as our POV shifts from the tourist to the local, albeit still with the academic's refined sensibilities), his fear for his daughter Rosa's life and well-being seems to begin the process of driving him mad, though the possibility remains that the process was already begun.

There's a certain dropoff, to be honest, in The Part About Amalfitano and The Part About Fate. If any of 2666 has a certain, shall we say, sloggish character, it would be these two slimmest of its volumes. The Part About Fate, in particular, is difficult, because Fate himself (a magazine writer from New York, whose mother has just died) seems such a cipher, a leaf afloat on larger currents (much like Archimboldi, later on). But now that I've read the whole volume, their purpose begins to seem clearer to me, and I think I understand not only where they fit, but their necessity to the work as a whole. Their purpose is to be the stairway for our descent into the latter half of the work.

What lies at the center of 2666, so far as I can tell from my present vantage (and I suspect that this is a book that would reward multiple readings) is the creeping sense of inexplicable and inescapable horror that pervades life in contemporary northern Mexico, the breakdown, if it ever even existed, of the compact on which human society is built. Which brings us to The Part About the Crimes, which is both the book's heart and also its strongest, most compelling section.

The Part About the Crimes eschews nearly every literary convention you can think of. Characters come and go, plots and sub-plots arise and fade into the aether seemingly at random. The only constant is the steady drip of women's bodies, sometimes several per month. Their murders are brutal. Most have been raped repeatedly. Some of the bodies have been mutilated. The reports of their discovery, and the often cursory investigations, comprise the bulk of The Part About the Crimes, presented in the most straightforward, almost journalistic prose, in contrast to those parts dealing with the living, in which Bolaño's prose becomes more playful, more literary.

At first blush, it seems there must be some serial murderer, and indeed it seems eventually that there is, though whoever he is, it seems obvious that he is only one of many murderers, that the bugaboo of Santa Teresa is something so much greater than one man might comprise.

Some of the murders are quickly solved, crimes of passion in which the culprits are obvious, and often confess. Some seem obviously the work of a serial killer, with a signature killing style having to do with mutilation of the women's breasts. But the vast majority of the killings fall into neither of these categories, and though Bolaño gives the reader enough clues to make at least a solid guess as to who the murderers are, this is no whodunit, and there is no inspector in the study, unmasking the murderer for all to see.

The Part About the Crimes is only tangentially about the crimes, of course. They are the framework on which Bolaño hangs the artistic statement which is his purpose (at least so far as this reader is able to tell), which is not so much a plot as a place and a time, the northern Mexico of the twenty-first century, in the borderlands where narcotraficantes flourish and the lives of the maquiladora girls are so cheap that many of the victims are never even positively identified. There is more here than murder and mystery, of course. Even amidst such horrors as these, life goes on. From Amalfitano, whose sole concern is the safety of his daughter, to Fate, for whom his time in Santa Teresa is a surreal journey through an inexplicable social and cultural landscape, to the police detectives, reporters, suspects, and sundry others who populate and visit Santa Teresa in The Part About the Crimes. And indeed, despite the horror of it all, we are given to see that even the murders are part of life going on here, that the powerlessness of the people and the powers-that-be is part and parcel of the place and the time, and that that's the point, really.

Those seeking closure will find none here. As has been mentioned, the reader is given enough information to if not solve the crimes, at least get an inkling of their nature and the nature of those who commit the majority of them, but as in life, nothing resolves neatly, and the one person who comes closest to finding out what is actually going on (an American sherriff investigating one of the victims, who was American herself, which I imagine to be significant in Bolaño's mind) disappears himself, in a not so amgibuous fashion.

Contrast this to The Part About Archimboldi, in which a relatively brief sketch of the writer's biography is presented, presumably as a sort of more civilized and European contrast to the sort of Mexiacn style of incipient horror and arbitrary death, at least in those sections regarding Archimboldi's military service during WWII as a German light infantryman. Although more widespread and well, industrial, the horror and death of WWII happens nearly all offstage. There are a few vignettes, mostly presented as a means of framing Archimboldi as something of a Holy Fool (not unlike his beloved Parzifal), whose madness presumably protects him in some subtle way from the vicissitudes of war and the dangers of flying bullets (though he is, to Bolaño's credit, wounded somewhat severely as a result of his foolhardiness). But the sense of horror is tamped severely down here.

Redolent of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (a volume with which I am intimately familiar), The Part About Archimboldi recalls the peregrinations of another guileless parzifal, Tyrone Slothrop, albeit in a more restrained and less paranoid fashion. For whereas Slothrop was the target of an active conspiracy (albeit a rather absurd one), Archimboldi is simply adrift in the chaos of war and its aftermath. And while both pull a disappearing act, the contrast between the two is telling. Slothrop simply fades, lost in the undertow of the currents of history, his relevance briefly eulogized and that's that. Archimboldi, on the other hand, engages in a more willful obscurity, a protective layer of obfuscation that separates Archimboldi the man from Archimboldi the author, whose greatness is luckily recognized by a publisher of the old school, a man willing to take a loss on Archimboldi's early editions until the world catches up to the particularity of his genius.

One wonders somewhat at Bolaño's refusal to present word one of Archimboldi's oeuvre, either in The Part About the Critics or The Part About Archimboldi. I suppose it's beside the point. What's important, so far as I can tell, is not so much what he writes, but that he writes, that the author and the artistic impulse are able to arise from the ashes of a devastated Europe to redeem (at least insofar as is possible) the horror and devastation of the war. Whether this is meant as a commentary on Bolaño himself (as the author who arises from the slow burn of contemporary Mexico) remains obscure. Perhaps it is significant that no such redemptive figure arises (at least not within 2666) from the horrors of Santa Teresa, whose character and banality stands in contrast to Archimboldi's own crucible, although the breakdowns in the social compact have some resonances.

In all, 2666 is a vast and sprawling masterpiece. A flawed masterpiece, no doubt, and there is little doubt, in my mind at least, that Bolaño would have worked on it further had he lived to. I haven't read enough of his work to know whether 2666 is his crowning acheivement, or merely a reaching that exceeded his ability to grasp, or possibly both. But wheresoever it fits into his oeuvre as a writer, 2666 is one of those massive books that more than justifies its word-count, a book that pushes the limits of what novels are for and what they can do, that blows open a space for itself, not only in Literature but in the reader's mind, as well. To some extent, I'm still reeling from it. It's one of those rare books that, once I had finished it, I had to wait a couple of days before I could start a new one, while my hindbrain attempted to assimilate what I had just fed it. I'm still not sure I've fully absorbed it, although writing the present treatment has definitely helped certain things to crystallize in my mind. There's so much in there, so much to absorb, that I can't help but think I'll have to read it again before I really get it. Lucky for me, it'll totally be worth it.

The Sun, in Ultraviolet

2010-09-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

Thank you, APOD.

2010-09-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.
-David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas p 16

Why I Love John Cole

2010-09-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

Because every now and again he says something like this:

You know what? Screw the damned markets. How about we start crafting economic policy that makes sense for Americans, and the market thing will take care of itself. How about we get people back to work so they can start spending and investing and saving, rather than worrying about the fee-fees of our “producers” on Wall Street. I’ve got a basic premise here I’m working off of- if more people are working, more people are buying shit and paying taxes, the market will be just fine.

It's the complete lack of bullshit that really makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. I've been reading this guy for years now, and I can't think of anybody who's made me say "Not just yeah, but hell yeah!" so consistently and often.

Dept. of True Dat

2010-09-22T12:11:00.000-07:00

A conservative doesn't want anything to happen for the first time; a liberal feels it should happen, but not now.
-Mort Sahl

Enthusiasm Gap

2010-09-19T21:45:00.000-07:00

I've done my level best for some months now to stop obsessively following politics in America. I still think it's important (being that this is the game that determines the shape of the field and the rules of the game we all play by), but I've been trying to concentrate on other things, for the sake of my sanity as well as many other good reasons.

But I still keep my ear to the ground, if for no other reason than that obsessions die slowly, and one thing I keep hearing in the run-up to the midterm elections this November is about the enthusiasm gap between those on the left and those on the right. The story I keep hearing goes something like this: the wingnut right is in ascendance, making lots of noise and getting lots of coverage, because their side lost last time and so they've decided it's the End of Days, and as a result they've gone even crazier (or just gotten louder about it). And since apparently very few of them work they spend a lot of time protesting and driving up Glenn Beck's TV ratings. They hate Barack Obama and everything he stands for, even when he stands for the same things they do, and they're all really excited to go to the polls and elect like-minded ignorami who believe things that are completely crazy, like that doctor visits should be paid for with chickens, that social security ought to be privatized or abolished, and that tax cuts will solve the budget deficit.

On the flipside you've got the left, who're upset because Obama hasn't completely reversed the world-historical fuckups of the Bush Administration and because the political realities of actually governing (especially when the opposition party doesn't negotiate in good faith or actually want government to work) require compromises that are disappointing to them. And apparently many of them are so upset that they are considering staying home en masse come November in order to punish the Democrats for not living up to their dreams and making everything better in the two years or so they've had control of the White House and both Houses of Congress.

Now, I have every sympathy for people who find the Democrats maddening.
They are, in general, hapless, feckless, overly-compromised hand-wringers who've been slapped around so much the past few decades that I'm starting to think they kind of like it. They routinely fail to manifest the integrity to stand by their avowed principles, even when they have both the moral high ground and the numbers to do so. They often give the impression they'd stand to the side trying to have a reasonable discussion with a raging lunatic who was in the process of raping their mother after emptying their liquor cabinet and shooting their dog. It's enough to drive you crazy just watching it happen over and over again.

Believe me, I understand. And there's a part of me that would like to see the Democrats punished for their failures and shortcomings, not least their seeming unwillingness to throw a goddamned punch at their abusers. It would be downright cathartic, and they might even learn something (they wouldn't, but it's nice to think they might).

But here's the thing: politics is not therapy. As much of a game as it appears to be, elections have consequences. Back in 1999, a bunch of folks thought that Al Gore was insufficiently liberal (I might even have been one of those people), and a small but telling percentage of those people voted for Ralph Nader (I was definitely one of those people)*. As a result, we got George W. Bush's Presidency, and I think we all know how that worked out.

And now here we are, heading into midterm election in which several certifiably crazy people are poised to be elected, and the balance of power is poised to shift back over into the hands of the political party who nearly wrecked the country the last time they were in charge. And it's not like they learned any lessons from the disasters they wreaked. Listen to them talk, and they're promising to do exactly the same thing they did before, only with less forethought and more feeling.

Say what you will about Democrats, but they at least have a plan for getting us out of the ditch and back on the right track. It may not be fast enough for some people, and there are some genuine failures that will need to be addressed (probably in an ongoing fashion for many, many years to come). But at the end of the day, you've got to move the ball down the field. The raging right nearly took the whole country down the last time they were in charge; we'll be cleaning up that mess and restoring our honor, integrity, economy, moral stature, and armed forces capabilities for many years to come as a result. Now is not the time to give these people even a little bit of power back. They will not use it responsibly, because the Republican party has been overrun by fucking lunatics.

Tempting though it might be to teach the Democrats a lesson by staying home come November, that warm fuzzy feeling of catharsis will be short-lived when the government grinds to a halt, the economy continues to stall, and the entire business of the House of Representatives becomes a series of competing investigations into Barack Obama's birth certificate, while worthwhile programs and extensions of jobless benefits for teachers, cops, and working people languish in committee and the top 1% of earners get another tax break so more of their wealth can trickle down to bankers in Switzerland and the Caymans.

And to those who think that maybe if it gets bad enough, there'll be a backlash, and the pendulum will finally swing back to the left, all I have to say is this: this is the pendulum swinging back. This moment, right here, right now. And the only way it'll continue to keep moving in the right direction is if all the grownups show up come November and pull the lever for the good guys, even if by good guys I mean the less-bad guys.

And really, that's the crux of it right there. At some point in everybody's life, they realize that they will have to forego present satisfaction for future gain; it's all part of growing up. And sometimes, when presented with a choice between not-great and godawfully horrible, you have to pick not-great, because if you don't, you could end up with godawfully horrible, and even if you didn't pick it and it's not your fault, it's still your problem.

*As for that vote, I cast it knowing that Al Gore would carry Washington with no problems (he was up four or five points in the polls), and I hoped that the Green Party might win five percent of the vote nationwide, which would have opened up all manner of government matching funds and things to them, giving them more of a chance to become players on the national scene, which I believed at the time and continue to belive would be a good thing. As for Ralph, frankly he leaves me cold, and I think he'd be a terrible President.

WTF?

2010-09-19T20:44:00.000-07:00

(Hat tip Xeni J. from Boing Boing)

Quick n Dirty Chimichurri

2010-09-18T11:25:00.000-07:00

This is a recipe (or variation thereon) I got from my Aunt and Uncle back in Florida. They are pretty foodie kinda folks, and my uncle is one of those guys that can do just absolutely magical things with a hunk of meat and a grill.

Made this this morning to marinate some bison steaks for a BBQ this afternoon. I'd say the proportions as enumerated below make most of a quart (which you can use as marinade and/or condiment, and which freezes quite nicely).

2 bunches flat-leaf parsley
1 large red onion
1/2 head of garlic (peeled)
juice of 1 lemon
1 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
salt and pepper to taste (I use a tsp of each, more or less)

Peel the garlic, coarsely chop the onion, throw it all in a food processor, and let the good times roll. Easy peasy and delicious to boot. Works especially well on red meat.

Mmmmmmmm... red meat.

Update: Ken K. points out (quite rightly) that a little crushed red pepper is both delicious and appropriate, with which I heartily concur.

Dept. of True Dat

2010-09-13T17:07:00.000-07:00

That earnest, upward-striving society of Eisenhower simplicity, of well-paid factory workers dreaming of a little summer place at the lake, and the Main Streets bustling in the cheerful early twilight of Christmas Eve, and the Beach Boys crooning about "fun, fun, fun," and purloined German physicists stashed in comfortably aire-kooled rooms, turning a few tossed-off equations into moon-shots, and Bob Hope cracking wise before a nationwide audience of car-dealers and self-satisfied Rotarians - well that America has imploded like a weevil-infested hubbard squash in a back pantry. And all the prayers to Moloch by the Jesus boomers in and out of congress won't make it whole again.
-James Howard Kunstler

Dept. of Yup

2010-09-13T16:58:00.000-07:00

On the other hand, the 100-million-dollars worth of banking industry, brokerage industry, oil industry and pharmaceutical industry commercials that paid everyone’s salaries were bright and lively.
-driftglass

Epigram

2010-09-13T14:37:00.000-07:00

What Americans desire most from their entertainment is to identify with the good guy as he kicks the bad guy's ass.

Mad Props!

2010-09-13T01:06:00.000-07:00

To Tom Underberg and Kali Wallace, two of my Clarion classmates whose entries were selected for the Thackery T. Lambshead's Cabinet of Curiosities anthology. Good job, guys.

An explanation of what I'm talking about, along with all of the submissions, can be found here.

And, for what it's worth, here's mine, slightly redacted:

WOODEN STAKE. 8-3/8” long, base diameter 1-15/16” tapering to a sharp point. Item was mistaken for a structural element of the cabinet until the discovery, in a separate wax-sealed box, of a note dated September 1735. Signed by Drs. Flückinger and Glaser, the note identifies the item as the hawthorne stake driven through the heart of Arnont Paule’s exhumed corpse in the village of Medveda in Serbian Moravia, ca. 1726 (the posthumous certifications of Paule and Petar Blagojević by Austro-Hungarian medical authorities are considered proximate causes of the Eighteenth Century Vampire Controversy). Dendrochonological analyses confirm item to be fire-hardened Crataegus monogyna, 250-350 years old. Haematology samples reveal certain unexplained irregularities and traces of at least five individuals’ genetic material. Dr. L-------- is believed to have won the item from a bastard son of Otto Habsburg-Lothringen in a card game in Paris in 1967.

Writer's Journal 9/12/10

2010-09-13T00:46:00.000-07:00

Today's been downright writerful, all things considered. Woke up and spent the morning doing critiques for my new writing group (or, rather, the already-established writing group that was kind enough to welcome me as a new member), finishing just in time to make the meeting in a punctual manner. Seemed like a productive session. I feel like it's probably about time for me to submit something for critique, though I'm not quite sure what. Of the things I wrote at Clarion (which comprise the bulk of my shorter work), I've only revised one, and it seems like kind of a waste to workshop any of the rest, at least until I've had a chance to fool around with them some and fix the problems I know are there. I suppose that means that the thing to submit is the one I've revised, but for some reason I left the session with the ambition that I would pick another one and fix it up for everybody (and, of course, it was one of the ones I haven't really thought about much yet, because that's how I roll).

I need to be careful about that, though. After all, the plan is to stay focused on the (hopefully short) novel I've been developing for the last couple weeks. I have not been terribly productive of late (hence the paucity of Writer's Journal posts here, or any posts at all for that matter, aside from my habit of passing along various and assorted pithy encapsulations and quotable quotes for your delectation and delight).

Partly, it's that my regularly-scheduled life has taken up a fair bit of my time; I'm currently in the midst of reorganizing my files and paperwork and such, with an eye towards getting my various taking-care-of-business-type stuff wrestled into manageable and comprehensible form. I was also, until Friday night, organizing a surprise birthday party for my lovely and awesome girlfriend Kendal, (in the Pussy Room at the Copper Gate in Ballard; later the two of us wandered down to Ocho, which is where I took Kendal on our first date (and have taken her on several subsequent dates), for some late-night tapas and cocktails).

So, partly I've just been busy with life, and not very disciplined about making time to work. But I've also been trying to lay back and let my creative subconscious do its thing. So far it seems to be working. I finally got a chance to sit down and work on the outline a bit tonight, and though I definitely suffered from some focus issues (as I tend to do), I managed to get a fair bit of work done.

I'm kind of excited with this new approach I'm trying, figuring out how it's all going to fit together before I actually start writing it. I've always been a start, and when you get to the end, stop kind of writer, which, given the rate and quantities at which ideas occur to me, has led me down any number of paths that led nowhere besides the conviction that it was time to start over.

So this whole planning things out in advance thing is a really refreshing change.

And it seems to be paying off. Despite my hummingbird's attention span, I still managed to tack 1000 words or so onto the plan tonight, and I seem to be developing a structure (for the plan, at least) that's working for me. I've got much (though not quite all) of part one figured out, two ideas for the prologue that are fighting it out in my head, and the early stages of part two mapped out as well.

The way I'm organizing it is into three sections for each part (there are three in addition to the prologue, provisionally named Camel, Lion, and Child): a summary of what happens and what it means, writing notes (on POV, tone, what's hidden and revealed, etc), and a basic sequence of events. I imagine as I make more passes over the thing, the structure will continue to ramify, but I am pleased so far with how I'm figuring out not only the plot but also how to tie it to the overall structure of the novel. I mean, I've experienced some of these sorts of epiphanies before with my previous project (the giant sprawling mess currently on the backburner while I do this more limited, probably more saleable project), but never in this focused a manner. It's great.

As to the plan going forward, I aspire to have the outlining and preliminary work done in three to four weeks, after which I intend to schedule enough writing time (and keep the project limited enough) to bang out a draft in three to four months (say by mid-January).

I think I'm most of the way to ready to start pushing it a little in terms of engagement. After all, I did much if not most of the heavy lifting at Clarion, concept-wise, and it seems like the ongoing epiphany process seems to be well underway. I've been taking it easy since I got back, waiting while my subconscious reconfigured itself and internalized the many invaluable lessons I learned over the summer. I'm still not quite ready to start writing. But I can feel it coming, and I think my plan, though it'll be intense, is doable, especially if I'm able to keep forging ahead with all this planning and outlining.

The only problem is staying focused, which brings me back to the first paragraph of the present installment of this writer's Writer's Journal. Because I do also want to workshop stories, and critique, and submit for publication and such. But I have some fear that I'll get sidetracked from the project I'm supposed to be working on, so I'm going to have to figure that out. I've thought a little about trying to write some flash fiction (1000 words or less, for those unfamiliar with the term), which doesn't seem like it would be too distracting, and would provide sufficient fodder for submission (and rejection). I just have to think of things that are amenable to being written in that form. But I don't know. Maybe I should stay focused on the project at hand, and let the rest slide, at least until I've got a completed draft.

Either way, it's a pretty exciting place to be.

Dept. of Yup

2010-09-10T11:03:00.000-07:00

So many pixels are wasted in the pundit business arguing that good people shouldn’t have to follow the law of the land, when what ought to be argued is that the law of the land needs to change so good people can get on with their lives free of state interference.
-mistermix at Balloon-Juice

Dept. of Speak, Brother, Speak

2010-09-09T21:11:00.000-07:00

When someone says that the drug war is a failure because instead of stopping drug use, it destabilizes narco-producing regions of the world, brutalizes the underclass, perpetuates inequality, and foments the expansion of the police-prison state, then that person has mistaken a slogan for a product. When someone muses that our "strategy" in Iraq or Afghanistan is a failure because it is not producing "a durable, non-violent resolution to . . . political conflicts", then that person is a fool. And when someone says that late, post-industrial capitalism fails to "bring together willing buyers with willing sellers in order to produce value," then I wonder in what idealized world of pure form and meaning has this man been living, because obviously, if you consider the current American economy and the global system in which it is embedded, the production of "value" is incidental to the continued concentration of material wealth and political influence. That is the point. It isn't a failure of the system. It is the system.

[...]

Cui bono, motherfuckers?

-IOZ

That last line should be the motto and first question of any serious seeker after political or economic truth.

Dept. of True Dat

2010-09-08T21:24:00.001-07:00

When you expect stuff, you get disappointed. When you don't expect stuff, you get surprised, and that's much better.
-Mike O.

Dept. of True Dat

2010-09-08T15:20:00.001-07:00

Conservatives are satisfied with present evils; liberals want to replace them with new ones.
-Anonymous

Why Damon Knight was Famous and I'm Not

2010-09-05T22:53:00.001-07:00

Real life does not often furnish a dramatic series; if it did, our instinct for order and design would be satisfied, and very likely we would feel no need for fiction.
-Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction p 90

See, it's just like what I said, only pithier and more insightful.

I've been reading Creating Short Fiction off and on for the last week or two, and it's pretty freakin' fantastic. I wish I'd read it before Clarion, so as to avoid some of the rookie mistakes that I made there, and I'm pretty sure I'll end up reading it (or parts of it) over and over again, until I have finally and fully absorbed the many, many invaluable lessons on craft and storytelling it contains.

It's out of print, but if you or someone you love wants to be a writer, or a better one that you/they already are, I can't recommend this book enough.

While I'm at it, I also highly recommend Kate Wilhelm's Storyteller. The two of them pretty much invented the Clarion Writers' Workshop, and, in addition to successful careers as writers, they taught writing (or what of writing can be taught, which is a post for another day) for decades, and both of them have a lot to say about how it's done sucessfully.

It's funny; I spent many years convinced that I could figure out how to write on my own, and in some senses I was right. But it sure is a lot easier when you have such handy guides to the nuts and bolts of things. Wish I'd picked up both of these many years ago.

Truth is a Bitter Pill to Swallow

2010-09-05T12:40:00.000-07:00

While we were distracted searching for Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Iran began revving up its actual nuclear program and Osama bin Laden and his fanatics ran free to regroup in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America’s signature values on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers’ dollars from Baghdad’s Green Zone, much of it cycled corruptly through well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq still doesn’t have reliable electricity or trustworthy security. Iraq’s “example of freedom,” as President Bush referred to his project in nation building and democracy promotion, did not inspire other states in the Middle East to emulate it. It only perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian logjam it was supposed to help relieve.

-Frank Rich

Writer's Journal 9/3/10

2010-09-03T17:21:00.000-07:00

By the last week of Clarion, I was pretty sure I knew what the plan was, at least as far as my writing was concerned. I was going to revise (some of) the stories I wrote there, one by one, and send them out for publication or, more likely, rejection. I was going to buckle down and write an outline for the novel I've been slaving away on for the last eight or ten years, then get to work on a draft, which I'd hoped to complete in some reasonable yet currently unspecified period of time. Then I was going to do some concept-work on a couple of other ideas I've been kicking around.

Oh, and I was going to start looking into putting together a Clarion Class of 2010 anthology, so we could all become rich and famous and stuff, and maybe even raise a little money for the Workshop, which is, like all worthwhile nonprofit enterprises, generally in need of financial support in order to continue its mission of training and grooming the coming generations of speculative fiction authors to delight and amaze readers of all ages and backgrounds.

That was the plan, anyway.

I knew I'd probably experience a slump in productivity after it was over. Indeed I was encouraged by several of my instructors to welcome such a period of creative inactivity whilst my hindbrain absorbed and internalized the many valuable lessons about craft and storytelling I'd learned. So I didn't much worry about the fact that on those few occasions I sat down to write something (even a simple blog post) that my brain turned quickly to inarticulate, unimaginative mush, and so I went on with the business of getting my regularly-scheduled life back in order without worrying about it overmuch.

Then, this week, I decided it was time to get back to work. It was a little arbitrary, to be honest. I had recently joined a writers group, and there was a session scheduled for Wednesday for a few folks to get together and write. Of course I forgot to check the yahoo group, so I didn't know that noone else was going to show up, but once I was there I figured I might as well do something, so I pulled up the story I'd intended to revise next and tried to get to work.

It was not quite so difficult as literally pulling teeth, but the phenomena were not unrelated. I kept getting lost in little culs-de-sac of word choice, and I found that my hindbrain had neglected to formulate solutions to the many problems my fellow Clarionites had so helpfully pointed out to me, nor to string together a plot or any real narrative structure out of what ideas I did have about it.

Okay, I thought to myself. No worries. Maybe that one needs to marinate for a little while.

So I thought maybe I'd hunker down with my novel, really get it figured out and outlined at least enough to start working on again, but it's so big, and there're so many things to figure out, that it gives me a headache just thinking about it. Truth be told, I'm starting to think that GoATDaD and the Army of Monkeys will turn out to be my masterpiece, which means, among other things, that it'll probably be a good few years before I'm ready to complete it. I'm still thinking about it, and mulling over the details of the plot and the themes I'm trying to string together into something meaningful, but I'm realizing that I want a more limited project to work on for now.

Which is where today comes in. Having run into the previously enumerated dead ends, I decided to do some concept-work on another project I've been mulling over. Despite a few obvious flaws, I was really happy with the last story I wrote at Clarion, and one of the things that were on the near-to-middle horizon was to do a little thinking about expanding it to novel length. So today, lacking inspiration to do anything else, but feeling like I needed to do something useful and writerly with my time, I decided to do a little background work on character and plot.

Apparently, this is the project I want to be working on. Backstory and concepts literally poured out of me, two thousand words' worth in a few hours. My protagonist's life story, which I'd sketched out in my mind beforehand, came together as if I were reading the executive summary of her biography. The speculative elements (some of which I'd developed for GoATDaD) fit themselves to each other and the world I'm building as if made for one another. I even got about halfway through a basic plot/strucural synopsis before I got tired and switched over to writing this.

I don't know if I have a muse, other than my readerly self, but I definitely have what Kate Wilhem (one of the founders of the Clarion Writers' Workshop) calls a Silent Partner (her husband and co-founder Damon Knight apparently called his 'Fred'), which is basically the voice of my creative unconscious. You can't really tell your Silent Partner what to do, from what I understand, but you can tell them to think about stuff, give them problems to solve and images or scenes to string together, and they get back to you when they're ready.

Apparently mine is most interested in this right now. Which works for me, I think. I mean, it would probably be good if I could focus in on revising my short stories, since those are easier to find markets for. But if there's one thing I learned at Clarion, it's that I'm not really a short story writer. It's not that I don't think I can do it so much as the things I naturally gravitate toward writing are longer-form, because my brain gets all excited and wants to pack all these interesting ideas into whatever I'm working on (which is one reason I've been working on GoATDaD for so long without having ever completed a draft). I might could write flash fiction every now and again (my most successful Clarion story was only about 1000 words; its current form is only 750 or so), but for the most part, I think I am a novel- or at least novella-length writer, which I'm okay with.

Looking at where my head's at right now, it seems like what I want to do is to work out how to turn that last story into a 60-80K word novel, which is long enough for me to have room to stretch out and play around in, but short enough that it won't get away from me, and something that, if I really put my mind to it, I could plan out and get a draft of in a few months (say 4-6). It's totally not what the plan was, but one of the things I learned at Clarion is that when you're really excited about writing something, and it's easy and fun, then that's the thing your creative unconscious wants to be working on, and that's the thing you should do. So I think that's what I'm going to do, even though it's totally not what I thought I would or should be doing right now.

More Words to Live By

2010-09-03T00:16:00.000-07:00

You carry either arms or drugs, but not both at the same time.
-Roberto Bolaño, 2666 p 492

Chase Whiteside at Glenn Beck's Stealing King's Legacy Rally

2010-09-01T12:14:00.000-07:00

Words to Live By

2010-08-31T18:08:00.001-07:00

Pee where you're supposed to pee, and don't steal things.
-Desiree

PAYPAL IS THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD

2010-08-30T19:12:00.000-07:00

As requested by John Cole, my favorite political blogger. Pretty f-cked up sh-t. Read about it here.

2010-08-27T12:42:00.000-07:00

If such a thing were possible. If it were possible to convey what one feels when night falls and the stars come out and one is alone in the vastness, and life's truths (night truths) begin to march past one by one, somehow swooning or as if the person out in the open were swooning or as if a strange sickness were circulating in the blood unnoticed. What are you doing, moon, up in the sky? asks the little shepherd in the poem. What are you doing, tell me, silent moon? Aren't you tired of plying the eternal byways? The shepherd's life is like your life. He rises at first light and moves his flock across the field. Then, weary, he rests at evening and hopes for nothing more. What good is the shepherd's life to him or yours to you?
-Roberto Bolaño, 2666 p432

True Dat

2010-08-26T14:55:00.001-07:00

Profiting off crime and war should be left to novelists, filmmakers, and the video game industry.
-E.D. Kain

Smart Guy says Something Smart

2010-08-26T13:21:00.000-07:00

Hey, maybe decades of downward pressure on real wages, the destruction of even the tissue of socially guaranteed retirement, and the artificial extension of the duration of the working life in response to these pressures has created a paucity of demand for new labor that has made economic independence economically unobtainable for young people. I'm just, you know, throwin' it out there. Maybe the near-total absence of even subsistence-level wages for people without an at-minimum four-year program of educational debt-indenturage is driving the upticking of the age of marriage and the formation of independent households just as much as "social acceptance of premarital sex." I'm just, you know, sayin'. Maybe the general trend of our society at all but the highest levels of class and income, which are principally inherited anyway, is toward debt-and-wage-peonage that is gradually reducing the viability of the independent household to exist at all.
-IOZ

Epigram

2010-08-25T11:43:00.001-07:00

Skepticism is healthy, until it starts closing off possibilities.

Evil or Stupid?

2010-08-24T00:29:00.000-07:00

You be the judge.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Parent Company Trap

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Myself, I lean evil with a splash of stupid for color.

Writer's Journal-What I've Been Working (and Not Working) On

2010-08-23T18:35:00.000-07:00

Spent most of the last week, along with many of my fellow Clarionites (-oids? -istas?) working on a 150-word micro-flash piece for Jeff and Ann VanderMeers' upcoming The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, a follow-up to the award-winning Thackery T. Lambstead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases.

A description of the project, and my entry, can be found here (also look for entries from fellow Clarionites Leah Thomas, Gregory Norman Bossert, and Tom Underberg; entries by Kali Wallace, Nick Farrar, Jessica Hilt, and Dustin J. Monk are currently in the works). We've been reading each other's entries all week, and it's been great fun, and great reading, too: that's a talented bunch of people I got to learn with this summer, and I don't doubt that many of them will be chosen for inclusion in the Cabinet, as well as accepted for publication at the many and sundry markets to which we are all submitting these days.

Speaking of which, I also spent a bit of time this past week revising a flash piece I wrote while at Clarion, which I have tentatively entitled 'Emergence.' It's a 700-word story about a hive-mind on a space station that's lost contact with the rest of humanity. I'm pretty happy with it, I think. I put it up on the google group today for my fellows to read through, so we'll see what they have to say. I'm going to send it to Clarkesworld first, though it's kind of a longshot, since they only take 12 unsolicited submissions per year. But they are a pro market, and they turn around their slush pile pretty quickly. Jeff and Ann, who read and critiqued the original version, suggested I start there when I was ready to try and publish it, which seems like an even better reason than those stated above, since they are, if not as gods, then still pretty freakin' awesome.

That said, I have not done a great deal of writing or revising since I got back home. It's getting better, but my hindbrain feels as if it's in the middle of reconstructing itself after being broken down into its constituent parts at the workshop, and the thought of trying to write anything (even this) makes my head go all fuzzy. I'm told it's relatively normal, and it was suggested to me by at least half my instructors (two of whom were in the Clarion class of 1992) that I take a few weeks off after all was said and done to rest up and internalize the lessons I learned while I was there, but I do wish I felt more like being productive (both as a writer and in general). It felt good to write that micro-flash piece (about the stake used to 'kill' a 'vampire' in 18th century Serbia), and to do a bit of work on 'Emergence,' but I've got at least three more stories from Clarion that I think I can make something out of that I'd like to be able to work on. And there's getting back to work on my novel, which I may or may not put on the back-burner for a little while while I work on other projects (for one thing, at least one of the stories I wrote at Clarion strikes me as eminently novelizable, and much easier to write than the one I've been working on for the last several years).

Ah, the life of a working writer...

Epigram

2010-08-18T13:00:00.001-07:00

What you owe your ideals: a realistic understanding of the historical, political, and social world you inhabit, and a plan for advancing them that accords with that understanding.

Something I've Been Thinking About

2010-08-17T17:28:00.000-07:00

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
-Mark Twain

I've been thinking a lot about this quote lately, partly because I've been so engaged in the writing of fiction and the craft of storytelling, but also because of the way it plays into some long-running thoughts and speculations I've been toying with for many years now.

It's long been a contention of mine that one of the primary ways people engage with and understand the world is through stories and narrative. From the mythologies of the Greeks and the Norsemen to the vagaries of the modern news cycle, one of the primary drivers of any phenomenon's meaning is the narrative structures it can be fitted (or forced) into. Human brains, by nature, function primarily by recognizing patterns, by focusing in on specific details and then using those data-points to backfill a larger picture. Later data-points are then interpreted through the established/recognized pattern and fitted into it or, if they don't fit, they are often discarded and/or ignored, since the maintenance of the pattern/larger picture is so important to the perceiving subject's mental and psychological well-being.

This is why truth is stranger than fiction (well, most fiction, anyway), because the world as it truly is is a sprawling mess of a place that is generally too complicated and contrary to make any sort of sense out of, at least by such limited creatures as human beings. To say things happen for a reason is, at best, an assertion of faith.

Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. It's what we want from our narratives. We need these patterns, these narrative structures that make some sort of underlying sense, because otherwise the world is just this crazy mess of a place in which we are lost, because nothing means anything. Fiction is truth hammered into some sort of recognizable form, a tool we can use to understand ourselves and the world.

The Free Market of Ideas

2010-08-11T10:18:00.000-07:00

The fact that they believe they will lose the debate without that legal coercion speaks volumes about how confident they actually are in the rightness and persuasiveness of their views.
-Glenn Greenwald

This is an almost perfect encapsulation of what I think every time I come across someone who wants to legislate morality or squelch the other side of any debate or conversation. If your ideals and ideas can't stand up to scrutiny and can't survive the crucible of reasoned argument and debate, if they can't be compared side-by-side and win on the merits, then maybe you ought to reconsider them, because by refusing to allow opposing ideals and ideas to be aired you are more or less saying outright that you don't think that yours are very strong and you don't have very much faith in them.

2010-07-01T01:04:00.000-07:00

"I was born," the Mouse said. "I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you."
-Samuel R. Delany, Nova p175

Quick Note

2010-06-28T13:57:00.000-07:00

So, turns out I will not be blogging the Clarion experience. Our first instructor, Delia Sherman, made a very good case last night as to why we should not (having mostly to do with focusing on our work), and I have decided to bow to her wisdom and the strength of her arguments.

As a result, I expect posting will be sparser than previously expected, though you never know: I may just take it into my head here and there along the way to spit something out that I'm thinking about that doesn't fit into any of the things I'm doing here. You'll just have to check periodically and see.

I will, however, continue with my plan to post micro- and flash-fiction, along with various fragments and cast-offs from what I'm working on, on my Facebook Writer page. So if you just really need a fix, try that.

1200 Miles Later

2010-06-26T22:42:00.000-07:00

I have arrived in San Diego. Too tired to talk in detail about the trip (which was good) or the four fellow Clarionistas I've met thus far (they're awesome), but I am here, and this is happening, and, so far at least, noone's popped up and said "Smile! You're on Candid Camera" so I'm just going to continue on the assumption that this is not some elaborate hoax played by the forces of evil on yours truly.

Perhaps tomorrow I will be less exhausted, and I will blog more blogfully about what's happening, but for now I am pretty well done in by three days on the road and reunions with friends old and new. Those few who're just absolutely jonesing for some content can look to my Writer page on Facebook, where I posted a little splash of a thing that I made tonight. Not sure how I feel about it, if I like it or not, but I promised myself I'd put new content up there most every day, and I didn't want to not do it on the first day. So there.

The King is Dead. Long Live the King.

2010-06-25T00:55:00.000-07:00

Change is coming to the anticontrarian blog. Those of you that already read it probably know that I'm attending the Clarion Writers' Workshop this year (indeed, in two days). Those of you who've found your way here from elsewhere probably know that, too, come to think of it.

Up til now, this blog has been whatever I wanted it to be: rants on politics, work, and people in general; a few stabs at philosophy; links to things I think are cool or funny; other cool, funny things that I embedded; quotes from other writers that struck me for some reason and that I wanted to share; the occasional aphorism.

However, given the focus I expect to exert over the coming six weeks on writing and craft and particularly the craft of writing short fiction, I expect the focus of this blog will also change to reflect that. I imagine I'll still post interesting quotations and/or the occasional video of a dancing cat. But I'm moving into a phase where I'll be focusing almost exclusively on fiction writing, and so the political stuff and general internet-related weirdness is likely to decrease.

The plan is that I'll use the anticontrarian blog to write about writing, about the workshop and the things I'm learning there, and how I'm applying them to my own work, both at Clarion and on other projects (most notably my novel-in-progress, which is provisionally entitled GoATDaD and the Army of Monkeys).

Those of you who are interested in what I'm actually producing are invited to view my Facebook Writer page, under my full name: Dallas Simmons Taylor. I would be grateful if you hit the like button there.

I won't be making any longer-form fiction available online in the immediate future (and I haven't really tried selling any yet), but I will be posting flash- and micro-fiction pieces there, along with interesting phrases and fragments from works in progress that I like but can't use. I hope you enjoy them.

Welcome to my brand new world; I'll show you around once I figure out where the lights are.

Two Haiku I Wrote a Couple of Years Ago

2010-06-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

The mountain looming
over my fair city will
one day destroy it.

Paranoia may
destroy ya, but only if
They don't get you first.