Homily

This is the homily I wrote for Laura's funeral service today. It makes reference to Ecclesiastes 11:1 "Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days." To me it sounds a little strange and detached, since I'm writing about myself in third person. But I felt it was important to make the homily as broad as possible, and talk about the impact she had had on so many lives. There were well over a hundred people at her funeral today--we had been told the church seated 140, and there were people standing around the back it was so packed. I didn't want to make it seem like I alone was claiming her memory by telling a personal story about her. But, I promise I will post some of those personal stories here in the coming days. For now, this is what people in church heard from Reverend Tammy Lee:

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Whenever Laura went out in public, she always met someone that she knew. It didn't matter if she was at a restaurant, a park, a theater, or just walking through a grocery store--she would bump into people who wanted to stand and talk with her for ten minutes. And she would always give people those ten minutes, or more. It sometimes seemed like Laura knew details of everyone's life. When she'd see people, she'd remember the names and ages of their kids. She could talk about where they'd just gone on vacation, or how their parents were doing, or what their favorite flowers were. It was as if she knew every single person in the town of Chapel Hill, and they all knew her.

Laura had plenty of excuses not to spend time standing in a grocery store chatting. She was a busy single mom who over the years dealt with health problems that sometimes made even a small excursion exhausting. But she cast her bread upon the waters by giving everyone she met her time and her kindness. She was willing to offer her friends help in anyway--giving people rides when they needed them, offering what little financial support she could cobble together to people in tougher situations than her own, and, most importantly, in always being willing to listen to people no matter what their problems. Her sage advice and terrific sense of irony carried her friends through many a tough time. In later years, she saw the bread she had cast upon the water returned to her. Her kindness and charity were given back ten fold by her vast network of friends and loved ones.

Laura lived life with a sense of adventure and passion. Laura once wrote in a letter to James, her companion, "Sometimes I get very excited when I think of what will happen between now and this time next year. Great things can happen. Life is often like the fruit on the branch, it ripens and becomes sweeter." Her optimism inspired the people around her. Yet there was nothing unrealistic in her acceptance of her circumstances in life. Laura lived knowing that she might not live as long as the average person. She never allowed that to make her bitter. She accepted her problems as part of her life, and learned to draw wisdom from them. She believed that the battles she fought in life, even the losing ones, made her stronger. She said, "I get what anyone gets, one lifetime." She made the most of that life. Laura remained focused on what she could do, not on what she had lost or might lose. She found something beautiful in almost every day.

Laura loved her children. She was proud of Bevin's maturity and independence. She adored Simon's humor and insight. She cherished Veronica's creativity and energy. She loved her family, her parents: Bob and Anne, her brothers Mike and Matt and Andy, her sisters Sara and Alicia. She welcomed any and all additions to her already large family, forming a special bond with her sister in law Jessica and her sister in law in waiting Naoko. Her joys in life were many and simple--she possessed an almost inexhaustible knowledge of flowers. She loved Mediterranean food and wasabi and pickles. She wore out many a pencil filling in su-do-ku and crossword puzzles. There was almost no occasion in life where she couldn't find an appropriate quote from the Simpsons. She could find something to laugh about in even the darkest moments.

We all lose something in her passing. But we've all gained something from her life. We can take the seeds of her kindness and love and wisdom and carry them out in to the world and plant them in our own lives and the lives of others. The good she did in this world doesn't end simply because her life has ended. As long as we carry her in our memories, Laura will be with us.

Laura photos

Laura Kathleen Herrmann

She was dying when I met her. We met through online personal ads, and she wrote me saying that she liked the philosophy I had sprinkled through my post. I don't even recall what it said, really--something about finding humor and hope even in down times, I think. And she told me she'd been through some down times. She'd fought breast cancer, her husband had left her when she was diagnosed with the disease. This might send other people into a spiral of despair and self-pity that they could never pull out of. But, she hadn't surrendered to her worries and woes. She bested them, and went on to live a terrific life. She had gotten a butterfly tattoo--it was her symbol of transformation. The time of her cancer and her divorce were when she had been drawn into her cocoon. But she'd emerged with wings.

At the time I met her, she was cancer free--or, more accurately, her cancer treatment had pushed the disease back to a level below the threshold of detection. She was up front about this--she told me that she was living with the knowledge that her disease might return any day. After I'd been dating her about three months, she put a timeline on it. According to the doctor, she said, all but a handful of people who had been through breast cancer and had it spread to other parts of the body would survive more than five years, even if they were "cured."

We were in the stage of our relationship where we were hungry for each other, very fully in that early, giddy, passionate love that is so intoxicating. And she wanted me to have all the facts. She wanted me to understand, before I fell too much in love, that we would probably never have the kind of relationship where we would grow old and gray together. There wasn't much chance of us sitting on the rocking chair on the porch and watching our grandkids play. Her exact words to me were, "I'm not a very good investment."

I admit, at the time, it staggered me. She said she didn't really know if she would live to see her 40th birthday. It wasn't something I could really wrap my head around. At the time she told me this, she was very healthy--maybe the healthiest person I knew. She ate right, loved being outdoors, and possessed this thirst for life that just made it impossible to think that she might be in any danger from disease. Plus, every day in the papers, there was some new development in the fight against cancer. The genetics were being unraveled. New drugs were better, more targeted. Worrying about death from cancer five years out just wasn't a worry I was prepared to embrace. I really believed at the time that a real cure was only a year or two away. And so I told her I was in this for the long haul. Things would work out.

So, of course, the cancer returned a few months later. Lungs, liver, spine--tiny tumors only millimeters long, but described in the cat scan as "innumerable." The tumors were like shrapnel from the world's slowest hand grenade. Up until that point, we had been able to talk a bit about a future together. But, we hadn't been rushing things. She'd been through a divorce, I'd been through two--we weren't the sort of people who were going to run out and get married in Vegas. We both felt a long, slow courtship was best. If marriage was going to be talked about, it would be talked about after a few years, not a few months. But once the cancer returned, discussions of the future were shut down. We dealt mainly with the day to day, and with the immediately problems caused by her illness and treatment.

Last year, I asked her if she would like to get married. She'd gotten too sick to work full time. It seemed like there was a lot I would be able to help her with as a spouse that I was legally not able to as a boyfriend. She turned me down. She said she didn't want to take me down with her.

Even then, I didn't give up hope. The growth of her disease had been very gradual. The tiny little flea sided tumors would grow to rice sized tumors, then fade a bit, then return as fly sized tumors. A few years ago a few of the tumors in her lung went wild and grew much larger--her lungs began to fill with fluid, and she landed in the hospital with blood oxygen levels at in a range that might have killed another person. That was about 18 months ago--and she beat it back. She had a drain installed in her chest--and every night for weeks we would drain of the fluid. And slowly she got her breath back. She went from near death on New Years Eve to walking over a mile in downtown High Point with me in March as we looked for a Mexican restaurant "just down the street" that turned out to have shut down months before. The chemo she had gotten immediately after her surgury did a good job of holding back the disease. I started to think that anyone who could survive that dark time could beat anything.

She died Saturday morning, May 6, about 3:40. She was 39. I held her hand as she went.

In the days to come, I plan to write a lot about Laura. I didn't write much about her here over the last few years because I worried about her kids reading my blog and discovering my fears and anxieties. For that matter, I didn't want her to read about my fears and anxieties. I had a clearly defined job in Laura's life. She saw a lot of doctors over the years. I was her spin doctor. There was no bit of news she could get that was so bad that I couldn't find some positive or funny way of looking at it. When chemo made her skin peel and crack, I told her to imagine that same reaction going on inside, chewing up tumor. When she was in the hospital week before last with her liver swelling, she was next to a woman who was flat out yellow, like florescent highlighter had been rubbed over every part of her body. That woman was obviously dying, and in a lot of pain. This is a horrible thing to say, but I helped Laura find a grim comfort in it, because, in the presence of someone whose liver had failed, the fact that Laura's liver had swollen didn't seem so bad. Things were going wrong inside her, but obviously her liver was still working, and if she had to spend the rest of her life in maternity pants, well, there are worse fates.

So, for close to four years, I've spent pretty much every day thinking of reasons why Laura was going to beat the cancer, and giving her pep talks. And then I'd come downstairs (I rented her basement apartment) and stand in the shower and groan, on the verge of tears, because I knew, deep down, that I didn't believe it. Little by little, the cancer was winning. Every time a chemo drug exhausted itself, it left her just a little sicker and the tumors just a little tougher and more drug resistant. I knew it was only a matter of time. She knew, too. But the unspoken rule was that we were never going to talk about the possibility of her losing. She wanted to fight until the last possible second, and I had her back.

As she died over the last few days, I've second guessed a lot of my decisions. Because, if someone had given me a calendar, and said, "Yep, May 6. That's the day," then maybe I would have handled things differently. I praised her almost daily about what a fighter she was, and how awed I was of her strength. I told her I admired her courage. But, I wish there was a point where I had also said it's okay to give up. No one was going to judge her or think her weak for letting go. And maybe she could have used the last few days to say good-bye to people. But I don't know. I don't know if she could have made peace with the idea of dying, or if her desire to live was just too strong for her to ever willingly let go, no matter how bad things got. I wasn't there with her when they put her under Thursday morning to hook up the ventilator. I'm told her last words were, "Is there hope?"

The fact that I wasn't there to say yes is going to haunt me for a long time.

I talked to her a lot while she was under the morphine, probably beyond hearing me. I'll never know. A lot of what I said to her is going to remain between me and her. But there was one thing I told her. She was the best investment of time and energy and love I ever made. I don't believe in a soul, or an afterlife, but, I promise you, I believe in memory, and her memory has forever changed me, and changed dozens of others. Everyone who knew her is going to carry part of her for the rest of their lives. She will live on from this day in a slowly expanding wave of kindness and courage and hope that spreads from the people who knew her to the people they know.

She was dying when I met her. She knew it. And it made her truly, deeply aware that she loved her life. She lived with a passion and a grace that I've never before encountered.

Oh, sweet Jesus, I'm going to miss her.

Modern Magic Artwork

Today I learned about David Seidman's website. He's the insanely talented illustrator of the modern magic anthology. If the stories in this book are 1/10th as good as the illustrations, it's going to be one heck of a collection. Take a look here to see some good stuff.

Funk

So, tonight I'm in a funk. One of those moods where I'm trying to make a list of things I like about the world and I'm coming up with, oh, my girlfriend, her kids, and kalamata olives. And in the list of stuff I hate I have pretty much everyone else in the world, and everything animal, mineral, vegetable, and political.

The odd thing is, this been a great week for me. I accepted the book deal on Bitterwood. It's not as good as my wildest fantasies would have liked it to have been, but it ain't bad, either. Much better than my deal with Phobos for Nobody Gets the Girl, at least. It's with a company that I have good vibes about, Solaris, a new fiction line from BL publishing. They are located in the UK, so my book will get a truly international release, which is damn cool. So, I'll move Solaris out of my hate column, and, what the hey, the rest of the Brits. Good people.

No, I think I can narrow down my hatred tonight to Americans. You hear conservative talk shows going on about how liberals hate America--well, why not? I'm not even a little bit liberal, and I'm fed up with it. The way we spend money at such a crazy pace--both on a national level and at a personal level. Are we insane? We are a nation living on its credit cards, and I see not one politician of any stripe who has the faintest plan of what to do with it. Tax and spend was awful, but borrow and spend is worse. And it's the same old endless cycle of it all that gets to me--the problem's facing the world today seem to be variants of the same problems we faced twenty years ago when I was in college. Social security in crisis, conflict in the middle east, political corruption... it just gets wearisome. I tune out. Then I hate myself for tuning out, because I believe that we've wound up in the mess precisely because people tune out.

I'm not sure what brought me to the snapping point. But it's been a week where every news story just drove home to me that I live in a world full of scummy, awful people. For instance, there's a guy here in North Carolina who was recently let off death row because it was learned that the prosecutors in his case had surpressed clear evidence of his innocence--namely, at the time of the murder, the convicted man was securely locked up in jail for entirely different charges. His name is Alan Gell--you can google him if you want to learn more details about his case. In a way, it's a happy, feel good story if you're an optimist--the system worked, the innocent man was spared, after nine years, from death row. But, if you are in a mood where you hate everyone, you have to wonder why the prosecutor was allowed to almost get away with murder and faces no real consequences for sending an innocent man to jail. Then, to make sure there's absolutely nothing good that came out of this case, this week Gell was again hauled before the court, this time to face charges of cocaine possession and having sex with a 15 year old girl. Were his nine years in prison such a holiday that he wanted to get back in? Here's a man who was literally given a second chance at life--and he seems to have made a choice to live that life in prison after all.

Then, tonight, driving home I was listening to the radio and they had two stories in a row about finding the bodies of missing children. I know no further details. But hearing the news just left me despairing. How do you fix a world where people murder kids? Religion sure as hell hasn't worked. Politics seems to be making a mess of it. Prisons apparently aren't answer. I ask myself, what can I do about this? About anything? Nothing.

So, yeah, I'm in a pretty bad funk tonight. And I'm trying to hold onto it just a little longer. Because, I know, I'm going to get some sleep, then tomorrow I'll be busy mowing the yard, catching up on email, maybe going to a movie--and I'll forget about it. The evil in the world will be a distant and forgotten thing if I stay away from the newspaper and the radio. It will become someone else's problem again, nothing I need to worry about as long as the people I love are safe.

So why would I want to hold onto such bad feelings? Because, often, the further down I go into a dark mood, the more likely I am to surface from it with a story. There's a lot of story potential in the question, "How can the world be made a better place?" In many of my stories, I struggle to answer this question. Which might surprise some of my readers--I'm often told that the worlds I show in my stories are rather dark ones, and I'll plead guilty to that charge. But I think, on the whole, my stories usually move in the direction that allows the lead characters to find happiness or at least peace in the middle of their broken, fucked-up landscapes. Devie in "Perhaps the Snail" finds bliss after having her entire life exposed as hollow and meaningless. Rob in "Little Guilt Thing Goin' On" learns to allow himself to love who he loves rather than who he thinks he should love. Tony in "To the East, a Bright Star" faces the ultimate apocolyptic conclusion, at ground zero of a comet strike, and, with inescapable death seconds away, to live a good, full, final fifteen minutes.

Not all of my stories fit this model, of course. But, a few years ago, in a critique group, a woman named Mary (and, alas, I'm drawing a blank on her last name at the moment), gave me a bit of advice that was probably the best thing I've ever learned about writing. She told me to show my character's beautiful world. She used the example of the movie Trainspotters. The characters are heroin addicts, living lives that by any objective standards are pretty rough, yet the movie still manages to show why they live this way--it finds the beauty that the characters see, the reason they stick with lives others would find unacceptable. I'll take her word on this specific case, since I've never seen the movie. But, it made sense when she said it. Since then, I've written some pretty bleak, dystopian futures (and presents for that matter), but I've always been aware that there are things that my characters do in pursuit of happiness.

I'm rambling, aren't I? I started off talking about hating everything in the world and worked around to beauty and happiness. Dammit, I knew I couldn't hold onto my funk if I started writing about it. Writing is my pursuit of happiness. Ultimately, it's my own answer to what I can do to fix things. Maybe one of two people will see the world in a different light when they are done with one of my stories, and see a path to happiness in a world that seems in active opposition to their joy. I'm writing to save the world!

Now if only I can work up the same enthusiasm for mowing the yard tomorrow....

The Ugly Clock

So, I own this ugly clock. I first encountered the clock in an antique store, and from a distance, I thought it was a fairly unattractive work of timekeeping, and assumed it was fairly old. But when I got closer to it, I realized it was of more recent vintage--for one thing, it was all plastic. Also, the clock had fiberoptic flowers in its guts. But the thing that truly pushed it over the top for me, and changed it from an ugly clock I noticed in a store to an ugly clock I was willing to shell out ten dollars for, was the crude cloth butterfly glued to the second hand. The notion of the butterfly racing around above the glowing fiber optic flowers, all set within the belly of a gothic, stern-faced eagle somehow touched me. Because someone, somewhere, some dreamy young clock designer thought this combination of elements, of mean-eyed eagle, meth-amped butterfly, and radioactive flowers was beautiful.

That dreamer was wrong, of course. In my darker moments, the clock looks like the sort of timepieces that would be on walls everywhere if the Nazi's had won the war. There's something vaguely sinister about it - as if the cruel eagle of the superman has devoured the flowers and butterflies of the world, and their eventual digestion is only a matter of time.

But, perhaps I'm reading too much into this. The clock is from Taiwan. Probably, its true origins are in a tiny factory where some entrepeneur got a good deal on hollow gold eagles, fiber-optic flowers, cloth butterflies, and battery operated clockworks. Then, knowing about America only from pop culture, he figured, well, American's like eagles, right? And women everywhere love flowers and sparkly things. And who doesn't need to know the time? Thus, from the bowels of a third world warehouse, the ultimate American clock was born.

Sadly, time has not been kind to the ugly clock. The clockworks have failed. Apparently glueing a large butterfly onto the second hand wears out the works. Worse, the fiber optics don't work any more. I had to unplug it months ago due to a faint burning smell. I banished the clock to a back closet, and dragged it out today thinking I might sell it in a yard sale this weekend. When I plugged it in, the flowers didn't light up. Time has vanquished the flowers and the butterflies, now faded and dusty, as the eagle looks stoicly onward. I take some small comfort in thinking he will look stoicly onward through nuclear wars, global warming, bird flu, and economic collapse.

Speaking of economic collapse, I'm thinking of asking $5 for him. True, he doesn't work anymore. But, you know, Americans will buy almost anything, as my ownership of this clock proves.

Secretly, I hope he doesn't sell.

Modern Magic release imminent....

So, I've been told that the Modern Magic anthology is going to be going to press this week. There's a link along the side of this page if you want to check it out. If you like my writing, I highly recommend my story in this antho, "Pentacle on His Forehead, Lizard on His Breath." If I become a famous enough author one day to wind up in a trivia game, a good trivia question would be "What was the longest title of any published James Maxey story?" This story would be the answer. No, wait, now that I think about it, it ties with "Earl Billings and the Angels of the Lord."

But I digress. What I intended to say before getting sidetracked by self-admitted trivia is that "POHFLOHB" is actually one of the stories I'm most proud of. It's funny, scarey, weird, and a little heartbreaking. It's got tea made from lizard parts and a pentacle made out of duct tape. Also, a mayonnaise painting. And, sure, some monkeys. Invisible monkeys.

On another publishing matter, some of you may have heard rumors about my novel "Bitterwood" finding a publisher. Currently, I do have an offer, but I feel like a shouldn't talk about the book until all the details are hammered out. So, all I will say for now is, watch this space.

Has this ever happened?

So, I was reading an old Fortean Times when I stumbled across a reference to women and children who, in times of panic, gained superhuman strength and lifted cars or other heavy objects. This certainly isn't the first time I'd heard of this--I suspect most people believe that bursts of superhuman stregth occur under the right circumstances. But has there ever been a real, documented case of this happening on film? It seems like if people really go gain superhuman strength in panic situations, we would see that caught on police chase film or something. There are thousands of rescue situations caught on film each year. Can someone point me to proof that panic strength is real? Or is the last second surge of superhuman strength just a myth we embrace to comfort us?

Final Flight of the Blue Bee

So, I've been telling people for months now to look for the "Final Flight of the Blue Bee" in Asimov's in April. My timing was a bit off--it's on the newstands right now. If you like your superhero fantasies straight, this might not be the story for you. On the other hand, it does have a damsel in distress atop the Empire State Building. How wrong can you go with that?

More Harlan Ellison Stuff

Recently over at Codexwriters, a conversation got started about Harlan Ellison's teaching style. Apparently, he has a reputation as a bully. I have some insight as to why. But, the bigger question was: Are his methods effective?

I'm not here to defend Harlan Ellison or condemn him. I can say that my writing changed after a week with him, and can never know if I turned back the clock what my writing would have evolved to without the Ellison encounter. It's possible I would have gone on to write exactly as I write today--or possibly better, or possibly worse.

But I took two things away from that week that forever changed my attitude toward my own writing. To boil those two things down:

1: Only show people your best work. Before Harlan, I used to workshop every thing I wrote. There was no trivial bit of unfinished crap that I didn't consider worthy of other people's eyes. I had a workshop mentality--I would show people my unpolished, unfinished work, get their reactions, then tweak it. I didn't pay much attention to detail on my early drafts, and was lazy about spelling, grammar, etc., because, hey, this was only a dress rehearsal, not the real show. I wasn't giving stories to people so they could read and enjoy them, I was giving them to people so they could tell me what was wrong with them. I was letting other people do part of my creative thinking for me. This works fine in workshop world, where everybody turns in poor work. But in Harlan world, it was asking for grief. I made the mistake of writing a story and turning it in without reading it, due to the time constraints of the workshop. Whether the story was any good or not is irrelevant. Harlan started tearing the story apart in the first sentence, because there was an obvious, easily fixed spelling error. When I defended it as a workshop piece, not something I would send to an editor, he tore into me, and said that if I didn't care enough to make sure that my first sentence was free of mistakes, I didn't care about my readers, period. In retrospect, he was right. I didn't care enough about making my writing look professional, even under a terrible time crunch, even for a workshop story. I told him it wasn't the best I could do, but I'd be glad to mail him a copy of the best story I'd ever written. He wasn't interested. It was too late. I didn't get a chance for Harlan to read another James Maxey story until I published work in a market he read.

I'm not making any kind of claim that I write error free work today, or that everything I write is golden on the first draft. I actually write horrible first drafts. But I no longer workshop a piece until I'm sure that it's something I'm happy with. I view every story that I give to someone to read--even my peers on critique groups--as a chance to gain another loyal James Maxey fan. If I write a story that isn't up to that standard, I spike the story without showing to to people.

2: Every word is important. Without revealing any names, there was a writer at that Odyssey that turned in a story that had a pretty good story idea but was written in a fairly plodding, workmanlike voice that buried the clever premise under banality. In his critique of the story, Harlan broke a cardinal rule of workshopping: He said, "Here's how I would write this story." Then he proceeded to give us five hundred or so words of a new opening. The very same story, the very same premise, even if memory serves, the same opening scene, but this time written in a style where every word popped. I wasn't just drawn in by the premise, I was drawn in by the voice and the energy of the prose. And the style wasn't anything particularly fancy. Harlan made it clear that the keys to his written style was that he wrote with his mouth--one breath, one idea. Every sentence made you want to hear the following sentence. Of course, this is unfair on many, many levels. Harlan is a master of style, so of course he was going to do better than some unpublished writer in a workshop. And, he was reading out loud, and it's hard to know if what was on the page would have translated in my head into that dynamic, enthralling Harlan voice. Still, it was an eye-opening experience, hearing the dull story transformed into a brilliant story just by changing the style in which it was told. Since then, I've always strived to make sure my stories sound good when read out loud.

To put it more succinctly, pre-Harlan, I thought the key to good writing was to tell a good story. Post-Harlan, I realized that a good story isn't going to get a chance at being read unless it's matched with great writing.

I saw people humiliated in the course of Harlan teaching these things. I, personally, reached one of the lowest emotional points of my life due to that week. But, six years on, I'm glad I had the experience. Orson Scott Card asks wanna-be fantasy authors, "What is the price of magic?" In my case, I feel like I sometimes, every now and then, write magic. And the price I paid was that one stressful week. I think it was worth it.

Duds

I recently wrote a big list on the wall next to me of all the stories I've written to date. And, looking over it, I think I've written more duds than gems. The majority of my duds happened early in my writing experience of course, when I was ignorant of many of the best practices of story telling. That's to be expected. I just chalk these up to the growing pains any writer experiences as he learns a difficult craft.

But my later duds are harder to explain. I've been writing fiction for 15 years at this point. Either I should have learned how to tell a story by now, or I should give up. Yet, again and again, I dud out, and put stories on the page that I'm not only not proud of, I'm actually a little ashamed of.

Why? My flops fall into three categories.

1: I try something new. It gets boring telling stories in the same linear sequence, beginning at the beginning, ending at the end, telling the story with a reliable single POV character. So I occasionally get these brilliant ideas to tell the story backwards, or to make the narrator insane, or to attempt some new voice that I've never tackled before (I have a story called "40 Pound Hammer" that I tried to write in the voice of an illiterate 10 year old child that is just cringe-provoking when I read it). In retrospect, I'm usually tempted to try new techniques and approaches when I'm worried the story needs spicing up to make it interesting. So, most of these failed stories come not only from bad writing, but also have, at their centers, ideas I didn't fully believe in.

2: I try something old. Many of my duds result from my trying to mimic my own successes. My first real breakthrough story was "Empire of Dreams and Miracles." This was a story that initially met with nothing but rejections. Critique groups always split down the middle, with people telling me not to change a word and other dismissing it as rambling and wordy. I believed in the story, and still rank it as among my finest work. But, I have two other stories set in the same setting, based on characters introduced in "Empire." I have a story from the POV of the death-poet Makan called "One Plus One Equals One" and a story from the POV of Alandra, the Empire-protagonists ex-lover called "Tuesday Morning By the Sea When We Were Gods." Both are written in the same sensual, poetic voice I used in "Empire." Both are built around characters I found interesting and worth a second look. Both explore interesting aspects of the world of "Empire." And I gave up on both of them long ago. They just didn't pop for me. They are stories I wrote not because I had an idea that I got excited about and had to write, but because I had some success with a story and then went back to it looking for more ideas I could milk out of it.

3: Sow's ears. You really can't make silk purses out of them. Occasionally, the central idea I have for a story just sucks. I'm excited about them when I sit down to write, but in retrospect I shouldn't have been. These are often stories where I use heavily explored premises. I do this because I've sold heavily explored premises many times. Maybe the world didn't need yet another story about a comet that's going to hit the Earth, but, what the hell, I wrote one anyway, and liked it, and sold it to Asimov's. On the other hand, I wrote a time travel story about a guy who goes back into the past to warn his younger self about a mistake to avoid called "The Machine in His Mind." This was a pretty threadbare premise, but I thought I could make it my own with good writing and a character I loved. Today I still like the character, and I think my writing in that story is some of my best--it's tight and focused, funny when it should be funny, moving when it should be moving. But, I look at the story now as a flop and rarely try to market it. It flops because good writing and likable characters still aren't enough to make readers shake off the "been there, done that" feeling they get when they read the story. No amount of further line editing or tweaking is ever going to overcome the hurdle that the idea the story is based on is well past its shelf date. If I'd written the story in 1890, man, I'd have a hit on my hands. But ten-thousand time travel stories later, there just isn't enough new there to justify the stories existance.

The extra special bonus reason #4 why I often write duds: If you want to be a writer, you gotta write. And my best writing, the stuff I'm in love with, usually comes to me from some moment of clarity and inspiration where I realize I have something big to say and have stumbled upon the proper vehicle to say it. But, if I only waited for these moments of clarity and inspiration, I might be lucky to write a story every other year. If you want to make it as a writer, you have to have the discipline to make yourself sit down and write a story even when you don't have clarity and inspiration, even when you haven't got a damn thing to say, even when you hate your characters and you hate the voice of the story and you hate the stupid premise that you've pulled out of your mental hat. You gotta punch those keys and hope that magic happens. Sometimes, it does. You get 1000 words into the worst story you've ever tried to tell and BOOM, the lightning strikes, and suddenly all is right with the universe. But, if the lightning doesn't strike, you haven't wasted your time. The hours you spend slogging through the swamps of your duds help you build up strength and endurance for when the you finally do have the golden idea handed to you.

To change analogies in midstream, if you're not striking out from time to time, you're not swinging for the fences.

Well, Cheney just shot a man . . .

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/02/12/D8FNQDG80.html

Not only did Cheney shoot an innocent man, that man is 78 years old. They say it was an accident. Sure.

Personally, I can't help but think this will really boost Cheney's poll numbers. It's really kind of bad-ass when you think about it.

Ghost lyrics

So this morning, I wake up with a song in my head. In my mind's ear, it sounds a bit like Bob Dylan singing. They lyrics I can't recall are:

The things that you want back
are the things you can't get back
And when you get them back
You'll really want to know
But the things you want to know
You know you already know

So, probably, these aren't Bob Dylan lyrics, because, well, they aren't all that good, and he's a genius. Then again, genius or not, when you have a catalogue of a couple of thousand songs, some are going to be clunkers.

Still, I've googled bits and peices of the lyrics this morning, trying to figure out what song I'm hearing, and I can't find any songs that match. The tune, for what it's worth, kind of matches the opening of "Hurricane," and plainly these aren't lyrics from that song.

It's not at all uncommon for me to get a song stuck in my head, so stuck it dislodges all other attempts at thought until I dig out the album and listen to it. But how the hell am I supposed to do that with a song that, apparently, my mind has just made up?

Nothing profound

So, yesterday was a slow day at work... the first truly slow day I've had at work since moving to this location. I spent the morning searching the web for free Mountain Goats MP3s and found over 30 of them. Most of these are live recordings from various concert venues, plus a few demos and outtakes from earlier albums. About half of the material I found was of songs I'd never heard before, the other half was familiar material with a new twist. "Delaudid" performed solo with guitar instead of the orchestrated cellos of the album version was raw and gripping, but the original version of "Coroner's Gambit" was awful--the lyrics are the same, but the music is too driving and uptempo for a song about death. It's interesting to see where the creative process led both these songs from thier original forms.

But the song that stuck with me is one called "Elijah." This is also from the Coroner's Gambit album, and when I've listened to it in the past I've been intriqued by what the lyrics possibly meant. I assumed it was a song about reincarnation, because I've been listening to it without noticing the title. As an MP3, the title is showing now as I'm driving around in the Scion and, duh, the song isn't about reincarnation, it's about Elijah. He was a Biblical prophet taken up into Heaven who supposedly will return to announce the arrival of the messiah. The song refers to setting out an extra plate--I think this is an actual Jewish tradition, to leave a plate out for Elijah during the celebration of one of their holidays. (I don't know which one, alas... all I know about the tradition I learned from the Saturday Night Live where Jerry Seinfield plays Elijah showing up for dinner. He asks the teenage daughter of the family to answer three questions: "First, are you a virgin?" She "Yes." "Then forget my other two questions.") In any case, this got me thinking that people probably do carry on this tradition, after almost 3000 years of Elijah failing to show up, just as Christians still fervently believe Jesus might show up any minute despite his 2000 year delay. And, rather than striking me as silly or absurd, it strikes me as beautiful, this human ability to believe fervently in the impossible (or highly unlikely).

The ability, even the need, to believe in impossible things is, after all, the very thing that makes all fiction possible. I couldn't make up stories, write them, and have people read them and like them without that important bit of wiring in the human brain that allows us to regard the imaginary as being as real as the real. I'm currently reading "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson. It's the sort of book that, while I'm reading it, I'm actually drawn into a second reality where the characters seem like living beings and the imagined settings seem quite solid and real to me. When I put the book down, the illusion vanishes, of course, but it's still a pleasurable experience.

So, perhaps religion can be viewed as fiction that people can't put down. Or, perhaps good fiction is a little, temporary religion that makes you believe in a new creation if only for a few hours.

In Search of Ancient Idiots

So, every now and then I like to read the sort of trashy 70's paperbacks I was addicted to when I was a teenager. There were dozens of books out about the Bermuda Triangle, ancient astronauts, UFO's, and Bigfoot, and I eagerly devoured them all. I was addicted the implication that there might be some huge secret just waiting to be revealed, some final proof of alien life visiting Earth, or of a second, primitive race of man still hiding in the forests.

I recently found a copy of "In Search of Ancient Mysteries" in a Goodwill Store for a nickel. Who can argue with that price? I read it, wondering if I could still work up that sense of wonder and mystery I'd loved so much as a teen. Alas, no. I'm really left more with the impression that my teen self was a moron. The authors main premise is so self-evidently awful that I can't believe there were enough readers for this book to justify a dozen printings, as the cover boasts. The premise is a familiar one: All the great stone monuments built in ancient times could not have been built by ancient man alone. The blocks must have been carved and moved great distances with the help of advanced alien civilizations. As added proof, any rock carving of a man wearing a funny hat is held up as portraying an astronaut in a space helmet. Any triangular rock is pointed to as a delta winged aircraft, any circle is called a flying saucer.

Many critiques have pointed out that this genre of book is insulting to ancient humans, who were quite capable of these wonderful feats of stone engineering. But, I can't help but think they are also insulting to the ancient alien civilizations as well. They came there across vast reaches of interstellar space and built homes for themselves, and the best material they knew how to use was rock? They built all these giant stone buildings with no running water, no electrical outlets, etc., and they are supposed to be more advanced than we are? Show me a Mayan temple built out of 2000 year old plastic and I might be a little more convinced.

Going Too Far

Yesterday, I found the December Asimov's in a local Borders and peeked inside to confirm that I wasn't dreaming, that this issue did indeed contain my story "To the East, a Bright Star." I also noticed something standing in the bookstore that I was blind to in my subscription copy. There's a warning label on my story! "A word of warning: there are brief scenes in this story that may be disturbing to some readers." I don't recall ever seeing that label in another issue of Asimov's before. (Although I've since been informed they've done it for a few years now.)

I'm slightly more flattered than offended by the label. Part of me does wonder what, precisely, earned the warning. I suppose it was explicit drug use. Worse, it's explicit drug use that doesn't ruin the character's lives.

Yet another part of me views the label as completely extraneous. My story might disturb people. Why did they need the word "might" in there? Has fiction become so bland and timid that writers no longer produce disturbing stories? In the stories I'm most proud of, I almost always come to a moment where I'm disturbed by what I'm writing. There's a moment where I think, "I can't write this--I'm going too far." In Nobody Gets the Girl, I felt this way when Rail Blade has her temper tantrum in Jerusalem. Then, I topped my discomfort a chapter later when Rail Blade's father sticks the needle in her veins and delivers the lethal dose of poison. In "Empire of Dreams and Miracles," I felt this way when the Dobay the Gold admits his lust for his transgendered father, and later when he gets his eye gouged out by a clawhammer. In "Perhaps the Snail," I write about masturbation in the back seat of a cab, and took comfort in the fact that the story was so offensive it would never be published and I would be spared the embarassment of having people read it. (I was wrong on the never being published part.)

Perhaps there are some writers who get a thrill out of shocking their readers, and purposefully set out to be sexually explicit or ultra violent. I am not one of those writers. Each time I get to one of these scenes, it's a struggle. I worry about losing readers. Worse, I worry that one day, against all odds, my parents might pick up a science fiction anthology and find out what kind of sicko crap I'm churning out. Yet when I come to these scenes, I never have the option of simply not writing them. My stories often climax with a single, transformative moment in a character's life, and these moments are often disturbing and uncomfortable for the protagonist. If, in "Perhaps the Snail," Devie had decided to go get some ice cream instead of agreeing to be a nude piece of living furniture for her rock star idol, I might have had produced a story that didn't offend anyone. Instead I decided to tell the story of the worst moment of her life--and show how humans are capable of taking these worst moments and flipping them around until they become the moments of thier greatest strength. I write about trauma so that I can write about transformation.

If you aren't convinced the human mind is programmed to make these flips, I have more evidence. I write stuff that I'm embarrassed to write--and later feel proud of it.

So, yeah, some scenes may be disturbing to some readers. If they aren't, then I'm just wasting my time.

Harlan Ellison

So, just now my phone rings and it turns out to be Harlan Ellison. He read to "To the East, a Bright Star," in Asimov's and wanted to welcome me to the community of professional writers. He also told me that I should have used "as" instead of "like" in the sentence, "It worked quickly, like he remebered."

Harlan Ellison changed my life, a couple of times. First, when I was a teenager, leaving behind a very theistic view of the world and making my first intellectual forays into a science-based world, I read every bit of SF I could lay my hands on. Harlan Ellison's work stood out. I loved everything he wrote. I loved all the long essays and introductions in his anthologies, I loved his world view. I wanted to be a writer, and, not so secretly, I wanted to be Harlan Ellison. He was the ultimate in cool to me when I was 17. I really knew nothing about him but the word he had put on paper, but his words charged me up like lightning.

The second time Harlan changed my life, he was writer in residence the year I went to Odyssey. This made my trip to Odyssey something of a religious experience. The way some pilgrims might journey to Italy to see the Pope, I journeyed a thousand miles to spend a week in his presense. At the workshop, Harlan tore me apart. He ripped to shreds every story I submitted at the workshop. He did have a few nice things to say, but I still have the paper where he circled a misspelling in the first line of my story and wrote "You're writing like a goddamn illiterate redneck." He capped it all of my not even reading my final story and dismissing me as too arrogant for him to waste his time on. The final night of Harlan's stay, I cried like I had never cried in my life. I felt like he had completely crushed my dreams of being a writer. He had taken everything I had written and dismissed it as crap. He had made me look incompetent and ignorant.

It was a huge favor, one which I finally got the chance to thank him for. Because in crushing my dream of being Harlan Ellison, he helped me form a new dream of being James Maxey. By tossing in the wastebin ten years of writing, he gave me the freedom to write in a new and better style, and write stories that were less imitatative of what I had read before.

So, having him call me was a shock. Having him call me a colleague is an honor. And having him correct my story after it's published is a thrill. Yowza.

Bill Bennett=Racist

So, in my last post I mentioned my recent insomnia. I was so tired I felt drunk. Here it is five hours later, and I'm wide away. Well, "wide" may be the wrong adjective there. I'm narrowly awake, awake by a bare sliver, yet it's a vital sliver. A voice in my head just won't shut up. What kills me is that other people probably get voices in thier heads that worry about important stuff. I'm kept awake by the worst kinds of trivia. I don't know if you've ever seen the comic strip "Syvia." Nicolle Hollander has a running gag about "The Woman Who Worries About Everything." In these strips, the woman is awake in bed thinking about some new political development--Friday, the woman wakes up her husband by worrying out loud about pharmacists refusing to fill prescription drugs, for instance. I identify with this on so many levels. "Sylvia" is one of my all time favorite strips with a political bent. I like Doonesbury and the Boondocks, but seldom do I find myself laughing out loud over their particular brand of humor. They usually devote thier energies to making fun of right wing politics, which is fine by me, but "Sylvia" usually has a more absurdist spin on things. She's making fun of right-wingers, often savagely, but there is also a subtle recognition in her political commentary that recognizes that outrage and fear over a lot of political issues is funny in it's own right. I think she's aware that waking up in the middle of the night to worry about the FDA or Tom Delay or Halliburton is a fairly absurd reaction to most politics. She's making fun of politics, but also making fun of people who take politics seriously.

Which brings me back to my insomnia, and the stupid stuff I worry about. Tonight it's Bill Bennett. By now, most people have probably heard about his suggestion that we abort all black babies to reduce crime. I read about it on Buzzflash, on Democratic Underground, and on Media Matters. Deomocratic Underground has a thread calling for this racist cracker's head on a platter--or, short of that, demanding that he be taken off the air. There's a petition going around, yadda yadda. I heard the clip played on the Alan Colmes show, and thought it was pretty amazing that Bill Bennett had said such a thing. It was also puzzling, because I thought he was opposed to abortion. Sure, maybe he hated black people, but didn't he also hate abortions?

So, driving home yesterday, I heard a longer version of the quote, and more about the context of the quote. Turns out, he doesn't support aborting all black babies. Nor was it even his argument--he plainly states that it's an argument he read in a book called "Freakanomics." And then, in the sentence immediately following his presentation of that arguement, he goes on to call the argument rediculous and morally reprehensible. It's a common defense of politicians to claim that they've been taken out of context--but all the outrage over these remarks plainly requires that his comments be taken way, way out of context. To spin this like this is Bennett's belief requires a level of intellectual dishonesty that makes me ashamed of my fellow human beings.

This isn't just something the left does to demonize the right. The right did it as well with their spin that Gore claimed to have invented the internet. It's a claim he never made, based on spinning a factual and much more modest claim that Gore had been supportive of legislation that funded development of networks while he had been in congress. This is an easily verified, totally non-controversial statement for Gore to make. So, of course, the right wing spin machine yanked his comments out of context and eventually rewrote them to turn Gore into a liar, based on a lie that he never told.

What kills me is how well this works. I don't have any hard polling data, but I would guess that the number of people who believe Gore claims to have invented the internet is up around 70 or 80 percent. The number of people who believe that Dan Quayle went to Latin America and lamented that he didn't speak Latin is probably higher than that--once again based on something that he never said. And now this Bill Bennett thing--a year from now, all people will know about him is that he's the guy who wants to kill black babies.

So, tonight I'm blaming my insomnia on my concerns about the collective ignorance of Americans. Now that that's out of my system, I'm going back to bed.

Total collapse

Finished this week with 15 hours overtime, assuming I don't go in to work more this weekend. Totally exhausted, though I had a nice caffiene-like jolt when I got my paycheck from the last two week period. I had 15 hours overtime on that check--this week I've matched that, and still have a week to go. It helped that I finally got a raise after a year and a half since my last performance review. Way back then the company was going through belt tightening and there were salary caps set at ridiculously low levels that I had long since passed. I was shocked to get any raise at all back then--and insulted that the raise was a dime. Seriously. Ten freakin' cents. Why bother? My raise this time is nothing to brag about, but it did manage to squeak above the level of insulting. It more than makes up for the fact that driving to work costs twice as much as it did a year ago.

All week long I've had serious insomnia. I thought I'd be collapsed long before now. I've been sitting around playing Spider Solitaire and singing in an off-key country twant to They Might Be Giant's "Cyclops Rock." "You turn around and break my heart" is part of the lyrics, and that's just about as country as you can make a lyric, in my opinion. I feel drunk. In conversation at dinner, I felt like I was in pure babble mode. I'm probably babbling now.

Man, I need to sleep.

SWEET!!

Man, I got home today totally wiped out. I left work at 1:30 am--after clocking in at 10am. 15 1/2 hours of my life I'll never get back. It's Tuesday, and I've already worked 24 hour this week, with another 27 scheduled. I drove home completely brain dead--and found the December issue of Asimov's in my mailbox, containing my short story "To the East a Bright Star." Sweet! Now I can quit my day job!

Oh, wait a minute. I've already spent that money. Ah, well.

Curiously, during the summer, when work was kind of slow, I was writing very little. Now that September has hit and half the staff quit, forcing me into long, stressful hours, I'm writing pretty steadily. Unfortunately, I'm not writing science fiction. Having made two sales to Asimov's I'm really wanting to send them more SF, but all my story ideas lately have been mainstream and horror. The piece I currently have submitted is only tangentally SF, and probably more deserving of the label "fantasy" since it has the angel Gabriel as one of the characters. I wish now I hadn't sold som many SF stories to Phobos for their anthologies. I've published some pretty good stories in books that barely sold a thousand copies.

Okay, 2:30. I'm tuckered, even with the Asimov's jolt. Best go to bed.

Libertarians in 08! Rah, rah!

Speaking of doomed love, the Libertarian party in NC has been decertified. My registration has been switched by the state from LIB to IND. I wish I could work up more of a sense of outrage about this. A lot of libertarians I talk to are truly convinced that if people would only hear their ideas, they would win elections. The ultimate Libertarian campaign slogan would be "OUT." As in "Out of Iraq, out of our bedrooms, out of our wallets." To me, this is a very atractive proposition.

Out of Iraq (and Germany, and Korea, and Japan, etc.). We shouldn't be using our army for anything but defense of our own borders. The case was never made to me that Saddam Hussien was a real threat to America, and to the level that he was a threat, there are a half dozen other countries more deserving of our attention as breeding grounds for terrorism, places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, our supposed allies. Not that I'm advocating invading any of these places.

Out of our bedrooms: The level of hostility some people feel toward sex is astonishing. I would say that a firm majority of people would strongly agree with the statement, "Sexual activity should only take place in the context of a monogomous marriage." And I would say that a large majority of people who strongly agree with that statement had premarital sex or had affairs. I'm not opposed to people holding this point of view, by the way. To each his own. But the government shouldn't be involved in regulating consensual sexual activity.

Out of our wallets: The first two outs get a lot of liberals excited. But the last out pisses them off. The income tax needs to be abolished. The notion that if I work a 10 hour day, 3 of those hours are mandated at gunpoint to be worked for the financial benefit of others is outrageous. We wouldn't need an income tax if we didn't feel compelled to station troops all over the world, and to fund massive entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. The real work we need government for, crime fighting and road building, is a tiny portion of our national spending, less than a tenth. We could fund it with a lottery and bake sales.

Did I have a point to all this? Oh, yeah. The point is, Libertarians don't get votes not because people don't hear thier positions, but because they hold positions that almost all conservitives and liberals rabidly disagree with. Conservatives oppose cutting our military and letting people sleep with whoever they want to sleep with, liberal oppose eliminating the income tax and entitlement programs. The only way that libertarians will ever make it into power is for our candidates to lie through their teeth at every opportunity and tell people what they want to hear.

It works for the other two parties.

Still more God and Hurricane Yammering

So, of course this morning I notice yet another article on World Net Daily making the claim that Hurricane Rita is God's way of communicating to America that we are a sinful, sinful, nation. A letter to the editor yesterday argued that because we were a wicked people who had lost our way, God had lifted his protective hand and, while not sending hurricanes, he also was no longer stopping them.

Some people have noted that Las Vegas never gets Hurricanes, so God must love gambling, but I think they overlook the continuous drought that plagues that city, which is plainly God's judgement.

I will note that God apparently loves commies, since when they ruled the Soviet Union, I can't think of a single istance of a hurricane striking that country. But maybe they just hushed it up, sneaky bastards.

I don't understand the internet at all....

So, of course, I just posted a note about my lost posts, which I believed to be forever lost, and suddenly they pop up. I just don't understand the internet at all....

Well, bummer

So last night, I wrote a fairly long blog about my usual list of random stuff, and saved a draft on blogger, and today it's gone. The title of the post is still there, but the post itself can't be recovered.

Among other things, I was writing about the notepad I keep by my bed. I jot down quick notes when I wake up in the middle of the night and stumble onto some "brilliant" idea. I started doing this when I wrote Nobody Gets the Girl, and it worked well then. I was actually jotting down stuff that proved useful in writing the story. Ever since, not so much. Currently I have a column down the edge of one page where I've written--

nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing

-- and next to this I've written the words "thin nog" and underlined it three times.

I wish it meant something, but, alas, the nothings probably mean nothing.

I've toyed with the idea of writing a novel entitled "Nothing." I already have published a novel about "Nobody." I could write a third book called "Nowhere" and have a nihilistic trilogy. Maybe I shouldn't feed reviewers such easy straight lines though.

There was also a bit about the Justice League in the lost post, but I'm bored with the idea right now. Maybe later.

The stuff I jot down while I'm not sleeping.

I keep a notepad next to my bed where I jot down stuff in those dark hours of the night where I wake up and can't sleep because I have some story snippet or idea going through my head. I usually write without glasses or light, so some of my scrawls are indecipherable. Others can be ciphered just fine, but still don't make much sense. On my current page, I've written "nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing" in a column down the page, then next to the column I've written "thin nog" and underlined it about three times. Why? My head and my hand generated the words. Shouldn't they make at least some sense to me? Admittedly, I write about nothing a lot. And, I have toyed around with writing a book entitled "Nothing." I've already published a book about Nobody. I could finish off the trilogy with Nowhere. Sell the three together as a boxed set of nihilism. Somehow, though, the "thin nog" makes me suspect I wasn't thinking of the philisophical implications of the word as much as I was viewing it as a rack of Scrabble tiles.

Also jotted on the current page is a story idea about a man who is living in a friend's house, and the friend doesn't know it. He hides in the attic and basement, in the crawlspace in the walls, and only comes out to use the bathroom and kitchen when his friend's at work. That's it. That's all I've got.

Finally, for some reason, at 3am on some recent date, I felt compelled to jot down "Every member of the Justice League has been replaced." This wasn't a plot idea, just an observation. Superman was replaced by several different characters in his own books during the "Death of" storyline. One of his replacements, Steel, went on to join the League. Wonder Woman was replaced by some red-haired chick whose name escapes me. Hal Jordan Green Lantern has had three different League replacements, Gardner, Raynor, and Stewart. Green Arrow was replaced briefly by his son. Flash was replaced permanently by Kid Flash, who is now Flash, and has a new Kid Flash replacing him in Teen Titans. Batman wasn't replaced in the League, but he was in his own book for a while by Azreal. Hawkman--well, his continuity is so messed up, as near as I can figure, he was replaced by himself. Same with Aquaman--orange shirt Aquaman was replaced by no-shirt, long-haired Aguaman. The Atom was replaced by a second Atom in the pages of Suicide Squad. His replacement croaked, a common fate of replacement heroes, unless they are replacement Green Lanterns, in which case they hang around forever, drinking the League's beer. Only the Martian Manhunter has escaped the "let's swap the old one for a new one" plot line. This excludes, of course, a long list of minor Leaguers like Zatanna and Vixen.

Man, I have a lot of useless crap in my skull.

God Could Also Use A Good Ad Agency

So last night I blogged about the in-your-face God of my youth and how the current ACLU fearing, court-order shackled God of today seems a touch wimpy. This morning, I discover a link to this book on WND: http://shop.wnd.com/store/item.asp?ITEM_ID=1676

The premise of the book is that a mighty God is striking America with hurricanes and terrorists because we've been so mean to Israel. The author claims that every time we betray Isreal, God smites us with a natural disaster.

Let us assume the author is right. Doesn't this show his God as one of the least effective communicators ever? He's trying to get his message across with wind and water--and apparently, most people just aren't able to figure him out. It turns out that few people speak tornado. This is like one of those Men are from Mars/Women are from Venus thing. God is from Heaven, Man is from Earth. They each talk at one another, but don't really have any idea what the other one actually means. God says "Hurricane," meaning, "Stop fucking with Jews." People take this message and think, "Oh no, I'm homeless, how can this happen under the watch of a just God, woe is me." People then pray, "Lord, please spare us more hurricanes and death." God hears this and thinks, "They still aren't getting it! What these people need are more hurricanes and death!" It's a sick, doomed strategy that has lead to grief for five thousand years, and will keep doing so.

God wasn't always this bad at communications. The whole Ten Commandments thing--that was pretty good. Write down the rules in stone. People can get this.

If I were an ad agency consulting with God, here would by my advice. Go back to the divine chiselling of rock. Money is no object, nor are the laws of physics, so think big. If you don't want people to mess with Israel, write, "Don't mess with Israel!" in letters about 200 miles high on the face of the moon. If we can see a giant finger as it traces out the letters in the moondust, even better. I guarantee you, it will be a zillion times more effective than the hurricanes. God gets what he wants, no humans get hurt in the conveying of the message, it's win-win all around.

So, there it is, free advice to God. Never let it be said that we atheists aren't charitable.

Got God?

You know, as an atheist of many years, I get especially frustrated when I feel like I need to explain Christianity to Christians. Tonight on the way home I was listening to a talk show host on a rant over some judge in California declaring the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegence unconstitutional. This is an issue where I normally just roll my eyes and sigh. If I were writing the Pledge of Allegience, I wouldn't put the word "God" into it. Nor would I invoke him if I were declaring independence or drafting a constitution or even designing money. On the other hand, I am not so fragile and frail in my atheism that the words "under God" in a pledge cause me to reexamine my entire belief structure when I hear them. Nor have I ever picked up a quarter and read "In God We Trust" and suddenly thought, "Oh crap! I've been wrong this whole time!"

But, evidently, quite a few people are this frail--especially on the Christian side. Tonight the talk show host said "We've banned God from schools." He went on with variations of kicking God out of schools, removing God from courtrooms, banishing God from congress, etc. And I have to think to myself--just how impotent is your God if a court ruling is going to keep him out of a schoolroom? When I was a child, I grew up in a fundamentalist church. There was a mighty and powerful God--omipotent, omnipresent, infinite and incomprehensible. He was a God who was just as powerful on the surface of the moon as he was at the bottom of the sea as he was on the plains of Africa as he was in the subway of New York City. He was a God that was just flat out EVERYWHERE, in EVERYONE'S business every single moment of the day and night and he definitely wasn't a God who was going to get discouraged by a court ruling against him. Of course, paradoxically, according to the church, he was also a God who controlled everything. Your baby died? It was God's will. You won the lottery? It was God's will. The New Orlean's flood? God guided every molecule of water. So, by the tenants of my church, it was God's will that the judge rule as he did today, and that I be a snarky atheist with an internet audience of dozens.

Alas, for the talk show host's God, he needs a good lawyer and better politicians to get anything done. If I were the host, I'd think about shopping for a new religion. Something more fundamental. Old time religion. Like volcano worship. Let's see them try to ban volcanoes from classrooms.

Comment spam???

You know, people today just have a whole different set of problems than the human beings who proceeded us on the planet. I was happy to see some comments on an earlier post today--until I discovered they were spam for some mortgage company. I should have seen this coming I suppose. Spam has already made my e-mail unreliable. My spam filters sometimes catch messages I should have gotten, and all the time my messages get eaten by my friend's spam filters. E-mail is becoming more and more like putting a message in a bottle and hoping it washes up on the right shore somewhere.

Of course, spam exposes me as a hypocrit. I am a free market, free speech kind of libertarian. Deregulate commerce! Let people say anything they want to say anyway they want to say it! Yet somewhere around the deletion of the 10,000th penis enlargement ad, I start wondering why the government isn't shutting these people up. Bring on the jackbooted thugs! Ah, well. Consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds, I suppose.

Bad comics, bad politics, random garbage

I just got back from the mountains where I visited an old friend of mine, Eric Buchanan and his wife Suzanne Saunders. They are artists who have made their living the last decade living in New Orleans. They escaped fairly well in some respects--they got out ahead of the hurricane, they got their cats out, they had friends and family in they could turn to for help. What remains of their paintings, etc. left behind, they don't know. With luck, looters won't rob them blind--but it might take even more luck to keep mold from destroying thier work.

Eric and I are of deeply different political stripes. He's a yellow-dog Democrat who has never voted for a Republican, I'm a hard core Libertarian who has voted only once for a Democrat and once for a Republican in the last twenty years. (I voted for Jim Hunt over Jesse Helms--for what that was worth, and I voted for a Republican sherrif when I lived in Guilford county because he struck me as one of the least bullshit filled politicians I had ever heard, and there wasn't a Libertarian running.) But, we agreed on the broad issues of Hurricane Katrina--the government has blown the intitial response, and they are continuing to blow it. Stung by the criticism that they didn't evacuate the city before the storm, federal, state, and local government now want to empty the city in the aftermath--even parts of the city relatively high and dry, like the French Quarter. Yes, the city is a dangerous place right now, with the risk of lawlessness and disease. But keeping out the people most motivated to go in and clean up the mess is crazy. If this is a recovery run from the top down, it will be a disaster. Yes, there are large scale items the government must handle--pumping out the water, putting police on the street, getting ambulances and firetrucks back in business. But every home and business in New Orleans needs someone in it working to fix things on the small scale. I listened to a story on NPR about a guy whose house had been lightly flooded staying behind to pull out his carpets and swab down everything with bleach. We need guys like that in every house not actually under water. Yes, there are a lot of houses that aren't going to be saved with a claw hammer and a mop--but there are a lot more houses that could have been saved if their owners weren't kept out of the city. The government isn't going to go into people's homes and pull up damp carpets--nor should it. But it shouldn't be putting up unneccessary roadblocks in front of people willing to put their muscles and sweat into saving thier homes.

Which brings me to comic books. Actually, it doesn't--I've been so neglectful of my blog, I've forgotten stuff that I've written, and I see I had promised long ago to write about bad comic books. I wish I could say that there are so many to pick from it's hard to pick the worst--but, really, there are so many to pick from, and it's still easy to pick the worst. Hands down, "The Dark Knight Strikes Back," is the worst comic book I've ever read. Frank Miller is a comic book genius, responsible for The Dark Knight Returns, one of the highest achievements of the genre. It seems impossible that TDKSB is the work of the same man. Everything about it is wrong. The artwork is bad. While visually similar to The Dark Knight Returns, the artwork in Strikes Back is just lazy--computer generated backgrounds and special effects fill the many splash pages. And the costumes are abominable--the outfit he puts the Flash in is just embarrassing. Wonder Woman is to only character who looks halfway decent in this thing. Lex Luther is just a toadish squiggle, barely recognizable as a human being if it weren't for the coloring and the word balloons and the fact that everyone is addressing the squiggle as "Luthor." Plot-wise, the story is could be described in positive terms as "epic," but in more realistic terms as unfocused and confusing. The story also suffers from repetition--for instance, in the Dark Knight Returns, there is a cool fight where Batman beats up Superman. So, in the Dark Knight strikes back, there is a "cool" scene where Batman's army beats up Superman. Except it isn't cool, it's tedious. We've seen this before.

I have a million gripes about the book, but only have the energy right now to mention the truly horrible ending. Basicly, Batman convinces Superman to become Superfascist and rule the world. Seriously. Oh, and Batman kisses Robin. Not a friendly, "oh, it's good to see you" kiss, but a "let's get naked and make squishy noises" kind of kiss. Admittedly, Robin is female, and is probably 18, but Batman is, like, 90, and it's just wrong on so many levels.

I have one theory that about Dark Knight Strikes back: Frank Miller made it as bad as possible on purpose. I think he was harrassed for 20 years by DC to do a sequel. They probably offered him obscene sums of money. And I'd like to think he finally decided to take their money and make a book that met the contractual obligation but was so bad they wouldn't dare publish it. Only, the powers that be at DC were so blind to what makes a good comic book that the published it under the illusion that it really was worthy of publication, or else they knew it was crap, but also knew people would buy anything with Frank Miller and Batman on the cover.

Okay, so this has been a pretty random blog. With luck, I won't go 40 days without posting again, and can be more coherent next time. Or not.

Summer break

Wow, almost a month since my last post. I've been on something of a summer break, with 9 internet free days while I went to Trinoccon and then to the beach. The month hasn't been completely unproductive. I read the book Darwin on Trial, which was very interesting. It's a critique of Darwinism by an attorney who is quite adept at building arguments. (Sorry, the author escapes me--I'd have to walk almost twenty five feet to my bedroom to find out his name.) Anyway, it was a very good read--he's a good writer, very thought provoking. And, I will say that after reading the book, I am convinced that there are holes in the evidence for natural selection, and a lot of sloppy science has been done over the years in support of the theory. But, I thought this before I read the book--science is sloppy because people are sloppy, and any time you are trying to account for a 4 billion year timeline of life, you are probably going to be filling most of that time line with guesswork. But, I closed the book still feeling confident that natural selection is the best theory we have toward explaining the origin of species. The author, and attorney, claims that you don't need a competing theory to disprove Darwin, any more than you need to produce the real murderer to clear a man of a murder charge. But, sorry, that's the thing about a theory being the "best" theory. I would need to hear another, better theory before I would be willing to toss it in the trash.

In physics, there are some awfully big holes in the theory of gravity. Our theory of gravity predicts that galaxies should behave in a certain manner--yet when we observe them, their is a 90% discrepancy between theory and observation. This is a pretty big honking discrepancy. And scientists are resorting to imagination, mostly to explain the gap, postulating new forms of invisible "dark" matter. And so far, almost every prediction about the nature and form of this dark matter has proven to be unsupported by evidence--tests designed to find the matter almost invariably get negative results. Yet, scientists don't toss out the theory of gravity. It works on the short scale--we can put spaceships in orbit around Saturn within inches of where we aim them, using the theory. One day, I have faith that a new, better theory of gravity will emerge--but in the absense of the better theory, I'm not going to say the old one is nothing but bunk.

The unspoken argument in "Darwin on Trial" seemed to me to be, if Darwin was wrong, then God still created species. But where's the evidence for that? It's as if logic and evidence can be used against a theory built on logic and evidence, but we can toss those out the window if we come to a theory built only on faith. I confess, I can't see how this arguement can win anyone over.

In writing news, I've spent much of July working on a story I just finished yesterday. I really, really want to talk about this story, but I can't because it's getting entered into a contest, and people who might judge stories in that contest are also occasional readers of this blog. I will only say that it may be the worst thing I've ever written. And when I use the word "worst," I mean in a moral sense, as in contributing to the further degredation of all that is right and good in the universe. Writing-wise, I think it's spot on.

4th of July

The 4th of July was a hoot this year. Laura's daughter Veronica won first prize for her Statue of Liberty costume at the Carrboro Hooha (I don't know the official name of the celebration, sorry). We later got to see some kick-ass fireworks, and mow the yard. (Not in that order.)

At this point, I would usually twist this opening around to some sort of rant on politics or religion, but, you know what, never mind.

The Church of Atheism

Today being Father's Day, Laura and I were talking about our fathers and she mentioned that her dad had once had a serious discussion with her to warn her not to become a Scientologist. This is no doubt good advice, but strange advice, since at no point in Laura's life has she ever had any inclination at all to become a scientologist. For starters, she doesn't have the money. An even bigger obstacle, of course, is that the central beliefs of Scientologists are completely wacko. Let's face it: If you get to the part where your guru (or whatever they have in Scientology--an auditor, I think) is telling you the part about the intergalactic lord Xemu and you don't break out in a broad grin and laugh at how dumb all of this is, there is no hope for you. You have swallowed the Kool-aid.

Laura's 11 year old son, Simon, hadn't heard of scientology and asked us about it when he heard our conversation. He was actually somewhat inspired at the notion that a pulp science fiction writer could invent his own religion and rope in converts, and spent the ride home from the restaurant jotting down notes for starting his own religion. He wrote out his own ten commandments, only he didn't know how to spell commandments, so he called it the "To Do" list. Also, I think he only got through about six of them. Among them were "don't be picky" and "share your food." Religions have been built on foundations nowhere near as solid as this.

Which led me to remember my second wedding. Not my second marriage, which is mostly blotted out now, with only three whiny cats to remind me it ever happened at all. But the wedding was interesting because we wanted something fancier that just going down to the courthouse, but by state law we needed some ordained pastor to perform the ceremony. We finally settled on a Unitarian minister who promised not to use the words "God" or "prayer" in the ceremony. She broke her word, alas, deviating from the script in the actual ceremony. After that, I gave serious thought to starting my own Church of Atheism. Churches have many, many advantages. They make great places to hold weddings and funerals. They are nice meeting places to socialize with like-minded folks. They also provide a terrific support net for members, a community to turn to in times of trouble and grief, or to share in celebration. Finally, they frequently have great architecture and nifty art. So, there are dozens of things I love about churches--but I can never belong to one because I'm unwilling to sit there and listen to fairy tales for an hour. I have no doubt that there are people in this world who go to church because they enjoy the fringe benefits of church without actually sharing the beliefs of the church. My old scoutmaster, who was a member of my church, loved being a church member. But get him outside the confines of the church and he was a prone to telling dirty jokes and sneaking six-packs along on camping trips. I'm not saying he wasn't a good person, or even that he wasn't, in his mind, a christian. But he regularly engaged in behavior outside the church that he would condemn within it. Something about churches seems to breed hypocrits--although, of course, that could just be the nature of the human beast. There are so many hypocrits on so many levels throughout society that the church population just reflects the general population as a whole.

But, still, there are times when I fantasize about buying an old church one day, and replacing the stained glass window on the front with a mosiac of a big, cartoon monkey winking his eye, giving a thumbs up, and saying in a big word balloon, "Darwin Rocks!" Each Friday night me and my fellow atheists could get together and socialize. (One foundation of atheism we must not surrender would be the right to sleep late on Sunday mornings.) We could distribute little Chic-style tracts entitled "There is No God" and "This is Your Afterlife." (That last one would be nothing but blank pages.)

Would we have Commandments? Or, as Simon put it, a To Do list?

How about:

Remember this is your only life: Cherish it.

Cherish your loved ones; you have only your shared lifetimes to show your love.

Live responsibly: there are no higher forces to bail you out of the messes you create.

Hmm. Only three. Maybe that's enough. Probably three too many, in some people's mind. If you must have more, how about:

Don't be picky.

Share your food.

Amen.

Body and Soul

So tonight I read that the Terri Shiavo autopsy showed severe brain damage. It made me realize something that I've always known, but didn't really get, if you know what I'm saying: I have a very different idea of "soul" than most people.

I think that, to the vast majority of the world, the notion that people are purely physical creatures is a deeply non-intuitive notion. People are committed to the idea of soul--something that exists beyond the body and the brain, and animating force that can survive independently, and that can carry on after death. I've met many, many people who didn't identify themselves as Christian or as a member of any other religion, but were still, on a gut level, convinced there was something spiritual within them.

I've never seen the slightest shred of evidence that this is so. The fact is, if you change people's brains, you change people. Case after case shows that people with brain tumors or brain trauma can undergo tremendous personality changes. People even self-inflict short term personality changes through the use of drugs and alcohol. The pharmacopia available to alter human behavior is staggering. If we were something more than physical, how could these chemical changes to the brain have any effect?

Not to flog a dead horse on the Shiavo case, but I was listening to callers tonight on the radio and it was clear to me they embraced one central myth--Terry Schiavo was more than the shell that lingered on in that hospital bed. The fact that she was brain damaged means nothing to them--her soul hadn't been damaged, had it? It was still intact inside her, as healthy and whole as it had ever been. After all, what physical trauma could harm a soul?

I think that there is something inherently harmful in this attitude. Not that I'm a poster child for health and moderation, but the notion that people have that their bodies and thier brains aren't really them leads to a loss of respect for one's own self. Who cares if you get fat, get stoned, etc? It's just your body that you're messing with, not the real you.

Listen up, people: The body you're in? It's the only one you get. The brain you have? You won't be issued another one. Take care of them.

Entropy

Where to begin? Last weekend, a pipe burst in my apartment. I had been fixing an outside faucet, and when I went back down to turn on the water, there was the sickening roar of water running behind the drywall in the closet. It was only a few months ago that I had a pipe burst in the same general area. The pipes through there are corroded to a crazy degree, and apparently my just touching the outdoor faucet had sent sufficient vibrations through the pipes to burst them. So, I turned off the water and went at the wall with an axe. Then, I went at the ceiling with an axe, since it turned out thats where the breach actually was. The pipe wasn't just leaking--it had actually snapped in two at one of the joints. The copper pipes were so covered in corrosion they looked like something you'd find in a cave. This was Saturday morning--Laura's plumber of choice couldn't get here until Monday. So, it was a hot, sweaty weekend. Very hot and sweaty, in fact, because, oh yeah, this was the weekend the air conditioning broke. It's still broken--her chosen AC repairman hasn't even called back yet (to be fair, she only called yesterday). And maybe he has called--because, also over the weekend, Laura's phone went on the fritz. It would ring, but when she'd pick it up the line would be dead. People calling her would get a busy signal, or dead air. She could call out, however. I tried to diagnose this by going to the phone box outside, to see if the test jack in it worked, but when I opened it: No test jack. Just an empty slot where it was supposed to be. So, about five calls to the phone company later, we do get a repairman out Monday morning. The call to let us know they are on the way. Which, huh, is funny, since the phone worked. We do several test calls. The phone is working more or less perfectly when the repairman pulls into the driveway. We have him install the outside test jack (the phone company owes you one, man, seriously) and he says the problem must have been a short in the house that "needed time to work it's way through the wires." This explanation makes, like, zero sense. A short isn't like an air-bubble working itself through a pipe.

So, it was a trying weekend. Except, it was also an excellent weekend. On Sunday we went to a swimming pool. Laura and her kids Simon and Veronica fit very nicely in my Scion. We drove around with the AC cranked high and They Might Be Giants playing loud, singing along to the "Istanbul" and "Dr. Worm." Tons of fun.

Follow up from last post: Angel Hunted is out to the critique group now. It weighed in at 15K words. YOWZA. I honestly thought my edits were trimming it, not adding 2000 words. We'll see if anyone bothers to read it--the normal word limit on the group is 7k words, but the group has been in doldrums lately, with weeks going by without a new story.

One interesting thing about the story is that it contained one of my favorite lines ever: "Use your teeth." I know that doesn't look impressive out of context. But there was a time in life when it was my motto--if you swallow anything whole you'll choke on it. Use your teeth--tear and grind at anything the world tries to shove down your throat. It's a good motto. I feel like going out and biting something right now.

Scion, Mountain Goats, More Angels

So, over the weekend I went out and bought a new (well, newish) Scion XB. These are boxy little cars by Toyota that get great gas mileage but also have a ton of room in them. Seriously, the head room in mine is the same as the headroom I had when I was driving around my Dad's Jeep Wagoneer. It's a funky, practical little car that I'm insanely happy with, except for the payments. Sigh. For most of my life, I've somehow managed to wrangle out of car payments, mainly due to driving one car, a Honda CRX, for 14 years and 240K miles. I would say that I drove the CRX into the ground, except that last I heard, it was still above ground an rolling. But a few years back in a moment of weakness I sold it. The CRX was a zombie car--still moving under it's own unholy power, but visibly decaying, and making strange groaning sounds. I tried to duplicate my CRX experience a few years back by bying a Honda Prelude. The Prelude proved to be somewhat less dependable than the CRX. I was constantly having to do repair work on it--new radiator, AC work, I had a mysterious oil leak, and then, two weekends ago, the whole car just died on me. The starter would turn, but the motor wouldn't start. It left me stranded on the roadside--something the CRX never did once in all the years I owned it. (The CRX did once leave me stranded in my own driveway, but that's a far more forgivable sin.) So, for a while I'd been thinking of trading in the Prelude. I had several cars I was considering, but the Scion was the one I really wanted. The Prelude had one last trick waiting for me, however. When I went to the mechanic to pick it up after it's latest repairs, it caught the back bumper of a truck as I was pulling out of a parking space and put an impossible to ignore dent in side of the car. (I know, I know, I shouldn't blame the car, it was my fault, technically.) So, in one careless second, I knocked at least a thousand bucks off the value of the car as a trade in. I could have repaired the car, but was told it would be $900--it just didn't seem worth the bother. The car had the stench of doom upon it. I shall not miss it.

My new Scion has lighted cupholders--a feature I mocked when I saw it on the Scion website--and a feature I didn't actually know I was buying, and don't believe I was charged for, since it isn't mentioned in the sales papers. It turns out, if you don't pay for them, lighted cupholders are the coolest damn thing on Earth.

EXCEPT: The actual coolest damn thing on Earth has to be the Sunset Tree, the newest Mountain Goats album. I've loved the Mountain Goats for years. John Darnielle has this terrific mixture of humor, rage, panic, and sweetness in his lyrics that I can't get enough of. The Sunset Tree. Available now. Check it out.

Finally: I've dug out "Angel Hunted," which may actually be the first James Maxey story. It's not the first story I wrote--probably at least two dozen were penned before it. But it is the first story where I can read it and see the writer I wanted to be finally coming out. It's a quirky little tale in which Albert Einstein gets into a fist fight with the angel Gabriel. Ears get bitten. It's a love story. The funny thing is, I don't think I ever submitted it anywhere. It was 13,000 words long, and I never felt that I had polished it to submission levels. Eventually, I just forgot about it. But I found it last week and read it and find it's flaws easily fixable. The basic guts of the story still work for me. Hopefully, working on another angel project will help get my mind tuned back into novel mode.

Cancer Treadmill

A few months back (in a post I've since deleted, since it was part of my angel story and I very ghoulishly intend to market the story), I mentioned my girlfriend Laura's cancer treatment. I said that the irony was it was possible to judge how well a cancer therapy was working by how healthy Laura felt--if she felt okay, and could leave a more or less normal life, the therapy wasn't doing much. If she felt crappy, barely able to get out of the bed in the morning, the therapy was nibbling away at tumors. If she feels healthy, the cancer feels healthy.

Since January, Laura has been on a hormonal therapy and has felt great. Great may be an exageration, but she felt normal, at least. She was actually able to go back to work, if only part time. Alas, the pattern has held true. During this time, the tumors have continued to grow.

So, now she's back on the cancer treadmill, starting today on a harsher chemotherapy. She'll be in the hospital almost 8 hours today, although future infusions will only take about 2 hours. Again, Laura isn't someone who wants to hear statistics or odds. I, of course, compulsively research them. The good news is, I've found success stories for the drug. Some people with stage four cancers like Laura's have gone into remission on the treatment. Some people also report having very few side effects, and can tolerate the treatment very well. So, there's always hope-this could be the one that breaks the pattern. This could be the chemo that zaps tumors and leaves the rest of her alone. The tough thing is that it takes months before we find out. They did a cat scan last month--but then they wait 3 months before doing another to check for results. It used to be that, when asked which one of Superman's powers I'd pick if I could have just one, I'd say flying. It was a no brainer. Now, though, damn, I'd give anything for his x-ray vision.

Eric Rudolph

Am I a nut to think that if Eric Rudolph had been a left wing environmental terrorist or an islamic terrorist who killed two people an injured dozens of others, he'd get the death penalty? In the plea agreement, the government said that one thing they got out of the plea was that Rudolph had agreed to reveal the location of explosives he had hidden. Isn't this dealing with terrorists? I have no proof, of course, that there was a political motive behind the plea--but Rudolph is a hero among some of the more radical right. Giving him the death penalty could have pissed off some of the more wacko Bush supporters.

This is setting aside, of course, the issue of whether the death penalty is ever justified. One can make a blanket case that no one, not even Osama Bin Laden, should be executed. But if you are going to have a death penalty, what crime is more deserving than to plant bombs designed to kill random people? His bombs sometimes had a two-stage component--they would explode once, then explode again a few minutes later after police and firemen had time to arrive. It's really tough to imagine a more loathsome sort of murder. The fact that Rudolf doesn't show any real remorse, and even sounds boastful at times, only adds to my feeling that this plea bargain is a bad one.

Story doldrums

So, last Saturday night I finished the latest revisions on my novel Bitterwood. Then, Sunday, yardwork, then, Monday, I started my new job at the CPC in RTP. (One day, our language will consist of nothing but initials. But I digress.) Normally, after finishing a novel, I like to use some of my creative momentum to crank out a short story. I'm planning on starting another novel very, very soon, this week, I'd hoped, and when I'm working on novels I almost never write short stories. Since I have two sales to Asimov's now, and stories in a half dozen anthologies, I'd like to have more short work to keep out there on the market. Alas, this morning, everything fizzled. Some days, you sit down, and you are on fire, the words just flow. Other mornings, the well is dry, even if you have a fairly firm idea for the story. This morning I had a setting: The Scar. I know that China Mieville has a novel called the Scar, in a setting called the Scar, and maybe I'll have to rename my setting eventually, but right now I have this image of a nearly dead planet similar to the moon, only it's been smacked by a huge comet so hard the planet has a huge crack. (Maybe I'll call it the Crack instead of the scar.) Anyway, miners have swarmed to the planet and placed a shield over the surface of the Scar. Deep down in the crack, there's easy access to a zillion heavy metal and precious minerals. In the upper levels of the scar, there's oxygen and water left over from the comet impact, so human life is possible in this warren of houses carved into the cliffsides. The downside to life in the scar is that everyone works for the mine, and if you are fired by the mine, you are essentially dead. They have no legal obligation to feed you--basically you have to turn to crime since you can't work and can't afford a ticket off the rock, and even petty theft is punishable by death. My protagonist would be one of these men who've been fired and has to find a way to survive in such a hostile environment. He's been fired because he refused to carry out an execution of someone or other, I hadn't figured this out yet. Lots of times, this is all I'll need to start a story--a setting, and a character with a problem. A first sentence will come to me and I just plow ahead, letting momentum take me to places I didn't expect. Alas, I had several attempts at that first sentence, and nothing worked. The best I came up with was, "If I stayed on Earth, I wouldn't be a murderer, a thief, or a cannibal." Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.

The Hungry Edge

Sorry for the paucity of postings lately. I've been in the final crunch on my novel Bitterwood, polishing it up to prepare for submission to publishers. I've also been working on an audio magazine called The Hungry Edge. The first episode is now live. Find it at www.codexwriters.com--there's a link to the story on the main page. I'm the host, and I'm very happy to present a terrific story by Ian Creasey called "Night Shift on the Support Line." Very funny fantasy, and Ian has a terrific voice. Check it out.

The Hungry Edge

Sorry for the paucity of postings lately. I've been in the final crunch on my novel Bitterwood, polishing it up to prepare for submission to publishers. I've also been working on an audio magazine called The Hungry Edge. The first episode is now live. Find it at www.codexwriters.com--there's a link on the main page. I'm the host, and I'm very happy to present a terrific story by Ian Creasey called "Night Shift on the Support Line." Very funny fantasy, and Ian has a terrific voice. Check it out.