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.