My letter to my congressman

Driving home tonight, I listened to the President talk about the need for the 700 billion dollar bailout package. A feeling of terror gripped me; I am deeply, sincerely afraid that he might get away with this. For a long time, some of my more liberal friends have been pitching me conspiracy theories about George Bush and how he has turned the US government into a big cookie jar for all his friends to loot. They point to all the no bid contracts in Iraq, including the contracts of American oil companies to manage Iraqi oil assests. For a long time, I've resisted these conspiracy theories, choosing to believe that Bush was most likely doing what he believed was best for the country, even when I deeply disagreed with him.

However, after listening to this bailout being debated for a week, I'm now convinced that this is, in fact, nothing but a scheme to enrich a small handful of wealthy, well-connected people at the public trough. 700 billion dollars is a staggering sum of money that is going to wind up in the hands of a relatively small number of people. I have yet to hear one economist say it's actually going to solve the financial problems on Wall Street. I've been hearing dire warnings that the market may fall to 8000 in the coming days if action isn't taken. My 401k is already taking hits. It' scary to look at. But, here's the thing: if the stock market falls to 8000, it's because it's only truly worth 8000. If it's actually worth more than 8000, then people like Warren Buffett are going to sweep in and buy everything they can lay their hands on, because it will, eventually, rise back to it's true value. The government's actions seem to be dedicated to blowing more air (or, in this case, money) into a bubble that is rapidly collapsing. Why, why, why, why does it make sense to anyone to keep a financial bubble growing past the point where it should naturally collapse in on itself? Bailing out Wall Street now is going to be the equivilent of giving all the people defaulting on subprime mortgages high-limit credit cards they can charge mortgage payments to--which, believe me, some people have no doubt done. Blowing money into the bubble now is only going to make the collapse in the future far, far worse.

So, for the first time in my life, I've written my congressman an email. I doubt it will change a damn thing. But, I encourage you, if you are opposed to this bailout, or even in favor of it, to take the time to write your congressman. It's easier than ever these days. Two minutes on google will produce your representative's webpage and email address. We may see congress write the largest check of all time within the next week. One reason we're in this mess is American's have been willfully blind to most actions of congress and the administration. If you are ever going to make your voice heard, this is the moment to do it.

Here's the letter I wrote:

Representative Price,

I would like to add my voice to the flood of email I'm sure you must be getting against the proposed 700 billion dollar bailout. This is being sold to the US public in the same doomsday terms used to sell the Iraq war--then, we were warned of nuclear weapons, today we are being warned of long term recession. But, saddling the taxpayers with another trillion dollars into debt is insane. The very heart of our financial crisis is that too many people have been buying things they can't afford on borrowed money. Homeowners have bought houses using loans they couldn't afford, banks have made the loans using the plentiful credit available on world markets, and the US government has been helping create an artificial boom economy by spending hundreds of billions of dollars more than it takes in each year in taxes, purchasing the illusion of prosperity today at the expense of future generations.

The time has come to obey the first law of holes and stop digging. If the stock market collapses and credit markets freeze up, there will be a lot of pain, but it's a neccessary hardship to endure to get our economy back on track. A tight credit market will kill subprime mortgages and marginal credit cards, but I predict that responsible borrowers will wind up highly sought after and the credit market that emerges will be more restrictive, but sounder. Borrowed wealth isn't true wealth.

If the stock market falls to 8000 or lower, that's because that's the true value of the market--I don't see it as government's responsibility to artificially inflate markets. Yes, a lot of people will take a serious financial hit as their 401k's fall. I had been looking at my 401k as recently as last year with daydreams of early retirement. But I'd rather not build my life around a lie, where my wealth depends on an ever growing bubble. Sometimes, you have to let the bubble pop to find out what the true value of things are.

The right thing for you to do in the coming days is to just say no to any bailout at all. I hope you will have the wisdom and judgement to resist the president and leaders in your own party to make this stand. If you choose to reply, I would like to know how you intend to vote on this bailout.

Thank you,
James Maxey

Daikaijuzine

My short story "Final Flight of the Blue Bee," which first appeared in Asimov's, has been reprinted online at Diakaijuzine. It's a superhero story, so if any of you are fans of Nobody Gets the Girl, you're likely to enjoy this story as well. It's also a story about emotionally screwed up people striving hard to live their lives in a way that makes sense to them even though it makes no sense to any sane person - in other words, it's a James Maxey story. Check it out.

A long, cranky rant about our economy and our government

This morning I discovered something called the "Drew Carey Project" and heard he'd had put some videos on the web talking about the positive effects of immigration. It turns out that he has a whole series of short documentaries he produces and hosts on a wide range of topics. I've spent the last two hours absolutely absorbed in these things.

If I've ever had any wavering doubts about my libertarianism, they've been completely blown away by the video on bacon dogs. Drew tells a story of a street vendor in LA who was actually JAILED FOR 45 DAYS for the unthinkable crime of selling hotdogs wrapped in bacon. I'm not sure how to link to any individual video, but you can find a complete list here. Scroll down to the video labled "food fight."

On the surface, this was a bad week to be a free-market libertarian. When the stock market tanked early in the week, the blame fell on unfettered free markets and a lack of regulation. When they rose at the end of the week, it was because the government rode in on a white horse and rescued Wall Street and promised regulation to make certain this would never happen again.
In reality, the government's fingers are deeply dug into the current market woes, and the proposed action to save the markets are only going to lead to further woes. First, where is the government going to get a trillion dollars to buy all these insolvent loans? They'll either borrow it, tax it, or create it by printing more (not that I think any actual printing is involved). If they borrow it, it's just another shackle we're locking onto the legs of our children and grandchildren. Our debt is already pushing 10 trillion dollars. If they actually raise taxes to cover this, it's safe to say that will depress the economy enough to drag the stock market down as much as it was going to fall anyway. And, if we print the money, we'll add to inflation.

By intervening in the market this week, government has again rode to the rescue of people who made irresponsible choices. Borrowers shouldn't have been lending money to people with horrible credit scores and no verifiable income. And people with horrible credit scores and shaky income shouldn't have been buying properties they couldn't afford. Investors around the world shouldn't have been investing in portfolios they didn't understand.

Lending money to people with bad credit isn't risk free, or at least, it hasn't been. Now, as I understand the proposed bail out, the government is going to be buying the bad mortgages from banks so that they will no longer bear the risk, allowing their stocks to rise once again. Wall Street has learned a lesson, of course--not the right lesson, which is that they should be careful with the money they invest, but instead the perverse lesson that the government will bail them out if they make risky investments and those investments explode badly enough to cause the stock market to plunge.

If you do check out the Drew Carey Project videos, another eye-opening video is called "Living Large." The point of the video is that the middle class is more affluent today than at anytime in history. But, I think there's a point Carey missed: I'm willing to bet that all the middle-class boat owners he talks to in the video are in hock up to their eyeballs. My biggest worry about America's seeming affluence is that it's borrowed affluence. The government borrows money to keep our taxes low and our social benefits high and to fund foreign adventures and bank bailouts. But the American consumer is no more responsible with their own money--they finance furniture, televisions, boats, tanks of gas, lunches, etc. The concept of saving money to make major purchases is something that seems to have faded from American culture in the span of my lifetime. I remember going with my mother to the layaway department at Sears to make payments on appliances we were buying. The idea behind layaway was that you would go each week or month and pay a little on something you wanted to buy, and when you'd finally paid enough to buy it, you took it home. It requires patience and discipline to purchase stuff this way. Now, it's all been flipped; you buy first, then pay. Layaway departments no longer exist.

We've become a country where responsible choices are increasingly punished. If you choose to live within your means you will have a smaller house compared to your free-spending neighbor who buys a house he can't afford using a subprime mortgage. And, next year when he defaults--no big deal. The government will have backed his mortgage and will take it over, offering some sweetheart plan to prevent foreclosure.

The free market can only encourage responsible behavior if prudent behavior is rewarded in risky behavior is allowed to fail or succeed on its own right. Sometimes, when you go into a casino and put in a silver dollar and pull the handle, the slot machine gives you a million dollars back. Imagine how many more gamblers we'd have in this world if, everytime you put in a dollar you lost it, there was a congressman behind you telling you that it wasn't your fault, that it was the fault of the wicked old slot machine manufacturers, and here's a tax dollar to replace the one you just lost? Because if that's not what's happening on the large scale, I need someone a lot smarter than me to explain how all this makes sense.

In the meantime, I think I'm going to console myself by going to the grocery store and buying some hotdogs and bacon... don't tell the cops.

The two sentence guide to writing interesting characters

I've been corresponding with a fan of Bitterwood who's asked me for some advice on developing the characters in a story he's working on. I told him that, for me, one of the keys to figuring out who your major characters are is to figure out what the worst moments of their life have been, and know what lessons they took from these experiences.

One reason I start Bitterwood out twenty years before the main novel is that I wanted to tell my readers about a pivotal moment in the hero's life. The story starts with Bitterwood's brother on the verge of raping the woman Bitterwood loves. Bitterwood is powerless to stop his brother Jomath, but the rape never occurs because of the arrival of the Bible-thumping, axe-wielding Old Testament style prophet Hezekiah. Hezekiah proceeds to kill Jomath for being an unrepentant heathen; he kills a lot of other people too. Bitterwood is standing there witnessing this; his brother is dying at the hands of the Lord's messenger just at the moment when Bitterwood hates Jomath the most. Bitterwood comes away from this event with a clear vision in his mind that God is a god of wrath and vengeance. There is a higher force in the world watching out for Bitterwood and smiting those who have wronged him. Only, as the backstory unfolds, Bitterwood loses his faith in God when he finds out that Hezekiah is a false prophet. Then, Bitterwood becomes his own absent God; since there is no higher power dispensing punishment upon the wicked, he will do the job himself. He's not doing it for love or money; he's doing it because he wants the wicked to suffer, because that's the god shaped hole in his world that he needs to fill.

Of course, any rational reader will conclude that this is a fairly insane lesson to draw from the events of his life. Bitterwood would have been much better off, probably, just sucking up the injustices visited upon him and trying to rebuild his life. But, this is the second key aspect to character building: Characters are more interesting if they have learned the wrong lessons from life's traumas.

Take Bruce Wayne. He saw his parents gunned down when he was a child and drew the lesson that he should dress up like a bat and use his vast wealth to buy bat-shaped cars and airplanes, so that he could hang out in alleys and throw boomerangs at muggers. An alternative lesson he might have taken away would have been to use his vast wealth to try to strengthen police work and work for social justice to reduce the forces that give rise to crime in the first place. But, since he's learned the wrong lesson, he's interesting. If he'd learned the right lesson, who'd care? There are surprisingly few stories that feature well-adjusted philanthropists as their protagonists.

So my two sentence guide to writing interesting characers is this: 1. Know the event that sent the character's life off the rails. 2. Understand the major flaw in their world view that results from this event.

Obviously, this is oversimplified. But, if you're a writer trying to come to grips with who your character is, try the two sentence guide. Let me know if you like the results.

How to be a Writer

How to be a writer:

Step one: Write book.

Step two: Go fishing.

Yesterday, I finished step one. I started Dragonseed, the third Dragon Age novel, back in February, though I immediately came down with the flu after chapter one, so my real start was actually more like March. I finished the first draft in early June, the second draft in early August, and have spent the rest of August reading the book out loud polishing the prose to make it sound natural to my ear. This last week I've been tweaking, trimming some spots, beefing up others, doing tedious searches for words I know I sometimes overuse. Then: poof. At some point yesterday, I realized I was done. I cannot at present make the book any better than it already is on my own, so it's time to but it into my editor's hands and let him take a crack at it. Not that I think there will be much cracking. It may be that I'm too close to judge, but this book feels tight to me.

Yesterday, after I finished the book I went to Walmart and browsed through their fishing department and I spotted something I hadn't seen in a while: Mepps spinners. I learned the magic of Mepps when I was a teenager in Mississippi, and fished with them religiously when I moved to NC. Then, I stopped fishing for about a decade and when I picked it up again I remembered using spinners, but was a little vague on the exact brand. I tried a bunch and never had any luck. But, yesterday, my eyes fell on a Mepp's rooster tail and instantly I knew it was the spinner I'd used 30 years ago. I bought two, then drove over to the Eno and tested it out. Bam! I caught fish right and left. Actually, that was it: two fish, a small bass to the right of a small waterfall and a nice sized blue gill to the left of it. But, it was a nice test. I'd already made dinner plans so I had to stop fishing and go get ready for that.

Driving home last night, a storm passed through the area. I woke up this morning certain that fish were biting. So, again I went down to the river, cast with the Mepps, and wham, first cast, first bass. Second cast, second bass. Then it slowed down for a bit, but I caught two more bass over the next half hour. They were about 10" to 14" long. I threw back the smallest two and decided I had more than enough fish to make a big batch of ceviche.

Here is a picture of my catch, in its deconstructed ceviche form:

I'm certain that other writers have other rituals to recharge their souls, but for me, fishing is a transcendent activity, a perfect restorative for mind, body, and spirit. There's nothing quite like looking at a swirling eddy of water and thinking, "I bet there's a fish there," then sinking your lure directly into the bulls eye of the current and seeing your rod bend two seconds later. Life is fantastic and magical.

For one of my favorite stories about the healing power of fishing, I highly recommend listening to "the Test" by Scott Carrier. You can listen to this story at the This American Life archives. This whole show is terrific... nothing Scott Carrier has ever recorded is boring.

By now, my ceviche should have finished marinating. Lunch time!

Single Issue Voter

I've been wrapped up in the final draft of Dragonseed during a time when there's been a lot of developments in the political world. I'm someone who takes pride in knowing what's going on in national politics, although at some point my motivation for following the news slipped from wanting to understand the world to wanting to be able to get the jokes on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

Due to my deadline, I haven't watched a minute of the Democrat's convention, nor did I take time to listen to McCain's announcement of Veep. I didn't even watch John Edwards creepy confession of infidelity, despite the fact that he's from NC and despite the fact that I have personal experience both with unfaithful spouses and cancer stricken partners. And, really, what is there to debate about the whole Edward's thing? Other than whether or not we made a mistake by getting rid of the stocks we used to lock people into on the public square so we could pelt them with rotting vegtables?

The Edward's thing did lead me to realize a very subtle distinction in public moral attitudes that I don't think I was aware of before. It's scandalous, though not always ruinous, for a politician to cheat on a spouse and stay with that spouse. On the other hand, if a politician cheats on a spouse, then dumps them and marries the new object of his affection, it's no big deal. McCain pays no price for cheating on his first wife because he dumped her. I think that American's are open to the storyline that someone can be married then meet someone new and fall in love, but are less forgiving of politicians who are just out chasing tail. Or maybe none of it matters anymore.

But I'm getting sidetracked. The title of this post is "Single Issue Voter," and it's my announcement that for the first time ever I'm giving serious consideration to not voting for president this time. I usually vote Libertarian, but I don't think I can vote for Bob Barr. This has almost nothing to do with logic... I just dislike the man personally. He flip-flopped on so many issues in order to become a Libertarian that I think it's legitimate to wonder about his sincerity. He now says marriage law should be left to the states, but in congress he was one of the authors of the Defense of Marriage act. I just feel like it's creepy for a man who's had three wives to be legislating anyone's morality. Finally, there's just something deeply disturbing about the fact that his mustache is a different color than his hair.

So, I may not vote in this election because as the years have gone by, I've drifted into the stance of being a single issue voter. The only issue I care about at the moment is the Federal debt. I have strong opinions on a zillion other issues, but the Federal debt is the monster issue that is eating up every other issue on the table. Our shared debt has turned us into a nation that is borrowing money in order to pay the interest on the money it's already borrowed. If a family household reaches the point where it's using credit cards to make payments on other credit cards, any intelligent person would agree that family is in serious trouble, and the first is most sensible advice you would give that family would be STOP BUYING STUFF YOU CAN'T AFFORD! Both Obama and McCain are running on platforms of tax cuts while at the same time talking about new spending, either military or domestic. Both of them make vague, laughable projections that sometime around the end of 8 years in office, their budgets will finally balance and they'll leave office with the nation poised for a new golden age.

Either McCain and Obama are idiots, or they are opportunistic sleazes who understand the problem but are instead committed to telling American's what they think American's want to hear: Everything's going fine! We'll give you more and take less! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

I talked to someone at dinner the other night who supports Obama and believes that Obama really does intend to balance the budget with higher taxes, and that he's only talking about tax cuts right now so that he can make it into office. I've heard a few Republican's say similar things about McCain, that they think he'll be a deficit hawk and be much more agressive with spending cuts than he lets on. There's something embarassing, I think, in supporting a candidate because you know in your secret heart that he agrees with you, and his public positions are just lies to appease the masses.

Even the libertarian position on the deficit/debt is a joke. They believe you can cut government services enough to get rid of taxes once and for all! Utopia! But, our debt is so large, you could stop all spending. Everything. No social security, no congressional salaries, no military... and you still couldn't pay off the public debt.

Not all debt is evil, of course. I've gone into debt to buy my house and my car. Debt is a useful tool for making big purchases. But, all the debt I've taken on, I have a plan and a budget to pay off. The US plan for debt at the moment is... keep borrowing more!

So, I will support the first candidate who obeys the law of holes: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. How can you stop digging? 1. Freeze spending until we are back in the black. The country didn't fall apart at our present level of public spending this year. We can probably survive on the same level of spending next year, and the year after. 2. Stop cutting taxes. We actually collect a seriously impressive amount of money each year. And, we survived this year at our present level of taxation. It won't kill us to put up with it for another year or two. Since our present spending and taxation produce deficits, we wouldn't have a balanced budget, although due to economic growth we would eventually get there. After we stopped actively making the problem worse with tax-cutting and increased spending, we could then tinker at the edges to get us into the black. And then, this is important: We can't just balance the budget, we need to begin to run surplusses and keep running them for decades to pay down our debt.

Find me one politician who has a serious plan to stop digging, and I'll give him or her my vote.

Now, back to Dragonseed!

I just couldn't keep quiet!

Okay, so two columns back I announced I wouldn't be posting any columns here in August because of the deadline for Dragonseed. But, yesterday I was doing my morning wake-up browse of the internet and stumbled onto an editorial by Dennis Prager, a talk show host. He's written an article arguing for the neccessity of God, as opposed to the existence of God. It's basically a list of 14 reasons why, if we assume there is a God, we are better off than if we assume there isn't.

You can read his whole article here. Unfortunately, the article didn't have a comment field beneath it. I don't want to violate any copyright by cutting and pasting his 14 point here to argue with them one by one.

Some of them, I don't argue. Some sound like pretty good arguments for atheism, starting with his first item:

Without God, there is no good and evil; there are only subjective opinions that we then label "good" and "evil." This does not mean that an atheist cannot be a good person. Nor does it mean that all those who believe in God are good; there are good atheists and there are bad believers in God. It simply means that unless there is a moral authority that transcends humans from which emanates an objective right and wrong, "right" and "wrong" no more objectively exist than do "beautiful" and "ugly."

I'm perfectly comfortable with the notion that good and evil do not exist in some form that transcends humanity. Once I stopped attempting to divine the wishes of an invisible judge who will weigh the value of my life after I die, my life became a bit less stressful.

But, moving on, there was one point that was made that really made my eyes pop open:

Life is ultimately a tragic fare if there is no God. We live, we suffer, we die – some horrifically, many prematurely – and there is only oblivion afterward.

I dislike the use of the word "tragic," but aside from that, I agree with the basic thrust. However, the alternative seems to be this: Life is ultimately a tragic fare if there is a God. We live, we suffer, we die – some horrifically, many prematurely – and afterward all but a tiny handful will be punished with everlasting torment.

To me, the first statement seems far more acceptable than the second. We live, we suffer, we die--but at least God isn't eating popcorn while watching kids starving or getting abused or coming down with cancer. The human condition seems to me to be exactly the same level of suffering with or without God--only, if you do presume the existence of God, you're left wondering why he hates you and what you've done to deserve the tornado that just wiped out your house.

One last point that also got my goat: If there is no God, the kindest and most innocent victims of torture and murder have no better a fate after death than do the most cruel torturers and mass murderers. Only if there is a good God do Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler have different fates.

This was closely related to the moral argument that eventually drove me into atheism. Because, according to the teachings of my church, there was no path to God but through Jesus. So, being kind wouldn't save you. Being an innocent victim of torture or murder wouldn't save you. And, if a murderer repented on death row for killing and raping some Buddhist hippie, that murderer was going to heaven to live it up while the woman he killed was going to spend all of eternity in a pit of eternal flame suffering far worse agonies than mere rape. In my church, Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler did have the same fates--they were both going to hell, since Catholics weren't really Christians. Ghandi was going to hell. John Lennon, hell. Every native American born before Christians reached the America's... hell bound. Unborn babies aborted in China were heavenbound, since sin didn't pass on until you were born, but all their commie mommies and daddies... off to hell! God doesn't care if you're a good mother or an axe-murderer. If you aren't born again, you burn. And, he doesn't really grade the sins... Hitler is going to suffer in the same hell that Ted Kennedy is going to for voting against the Iraq war (or whatever).

Anyway, sorry to break the silence with a rant, but I just couldn't let these two arguments pass. Now, back to Dragonseed.

Dona Nova at Golden Belt

I took a break from my writing marathon on Friday night to go see my friend Dona Nova's new studio at Golden Belt in Durham. It occurs to me that this gives me the opportunity to sneak in a five-thousand word blog post, since a picture is worth a thousand words:




I worry that my cell phone photos may not do justice to the intesity of color and depth Dona manages to achieve in her work. If you look at the painting immediately below the penguins above, you'll see a yellow and purple abstract that looks like just a bunch of swirls. But, when you are actually standing right in front of it, these swirls all create an illusion of depth and you feel as if you are staring at something organic. I took a close up of this painting from about three inches away:

Dona's art works at a distance, but also rewards people who are willing to put their noses a few inches away from the canvas.

A last post on writing before a month long break...

Sorry for the lackluster post rate lately. I'm posting more frequently at my dragon blog these days as I work to promote Dragonforge. The prospects of more heavy posting in August look dim. I've got to turn in the third Bitterwood book, Dragonseed, at the end of August. I'm still working on the second draft, and am probably going to wind up with only three weeks to finish the final draft. That means I'll need to be reading aloud and polishing 10 chapters each week. Eek! I'm not complaining. Getting that immersed in a writing project is actually pretty close to my dream life. But, it definitely means a fall off in blogging until the book is turned in.

So, since it may be a month before I get back to this blog with a substantial post, I figured I'd toss out a bit of writing advice that crystalized for me just this week. Many writers struggle with backstories for their characters. How to get all the information in about what has gone before is a challenge, and leads to the dreaded writing technique known as infodumping. So, here's a different way of thinking about backstory that may be of use: Turn your backstory into setting details.

For instance, if you were to visit my house, a halfway careful observer would figure out a lot of my personal backstory just by looking at my walls. It would probably be fairly simple to deduce that I'm a writer, given that I have covers of my books framed and displayed in my living room, as well as a shelf there with a copy of every anthology I've ever been published in, as well as all three of my novels, including ARCs. Oh, also some posters from bookstore signings. You would also find a photo of Laura prominently displayed in my living room; since there's no woman living with me, you might guess it's a girlfriend, but if you dug around a little you'd find the obituary I keep in the white table in the living room. There's also picture frame on my bookshelf that opens into a small photo album; it would be simple to deduce what had happened to Laura by following the sequence of photo there.

When you are crafting scenes, remember that characters aren't just sitting around in their houses or cars or workplaces... they are sitting in the middle of their backstories. If you carefully focus the camera of your prose upon the right details of the setting, you will reveal things about the character's past. A key example of this from Dragonforge would be the second chapter, when Graxen and the Matriarch are speaking in the thread room. There are tapestries on the walls that tell the entire racial history of the sky-dragons. I don't describe the history page after page, but I do describe the tapestries enough to bring it to life in the reader's mind, and the presence of the tapestries serves at key moments in the conversations as jumping off points for talking about backstory without it seeming infodumpy. It's natural that they should briefly discuss Vendevorex, for instance, because there's a blackboard where the Matriarch updates her genealogical notes and Vendevorex's name is written on the board in bold letters and surrounded by question marks. The matriarch doesn't know his origins, and it's her job to know everyone's origins... and we can learn this because of the setting detail that invites this explanation. And, we also get a very brief summary of the conclusion of Vendevorex's storyline from the first novel. Again, it doesn't feel like a naked infodump because it flows from the setting.

So tie your setting and backstory together whenever possible. It makes both richer.

More posts on writing will be coming next month!

Cuteness as an evolutionary strategy

I've been assured by fellow codexian bloggers that I'll double my readership if I start adding pictures of my cats. At first I thought, yeah, that's not going to happen. Readers of this blog come here for my discussion of politics and religion, as well as the occasional advice on writing. Cuteness has never really been part of the mix.

Then, I thought, well, why not? So, here they are, in all their feline glory:

Isosceles is 14 years old, blind in his right eye, and cannot drink water like a normal cat. He must instead splash the water all over the kitchen, then like his paws. I'm told that this isn't that strange of a behavior, that, having evolved in deserts, cats dislike large still bodies of water. I feel like evolution has had more than enough time to get them out of that habit, but what do I know.

Sarah is about 9 years old and insists on drinking her water straight from the faucet. She also assumes that the bathroom sink was built as a cat bed. She is perhaps the least aloof cat in the world. She has absolutely no fear of strangers, and if you sit down on my house, she has some sort of lap-radar that will bring her running to sit on you.

Since it's been a while since I did a science post, one of the things that most interests me about cats is how humans and cats (and other animals) are co-evolving. We seem to be selecting them for increasing cuteness. It's obvious that they've thrived as a result--there are cats in the US with better health insurance than many kids. Somehow, cats trigger all the instincts in humans that make us treat them as if they are our own babies--small, crying creatures that respond to perpetual nursing.

It's obvious why cats benefit from this relationship. But, it's also easy to see that, by evolving instincts that found cats to be cute, humans increased their survival odds as well. Having lots of cats around is a good way of not having lots of mice and rats around--or, for that matter, spiders, snakes, and various other creepy crawlies that my cats seem hardwired to hunt. So, in some ways, they repay us better than babies, which just lay around all day and are real slackers in the vermin hunting department.

Of course, I don't have a lot of mice or snakes around my house reguardless. And, snakes would be just as good at keeping the mice population down anyway. So, perhaps my theories about cuteness as an evolutionary strategy has a few holes in it.

If any has any suggestions on how to get either of these critters to reliably drink from a water bowl, I'd love to hear it by the way. There's nothing quite like getting into bed and having a cat with cold wet paws walk across your back.

By the way, it remains unlikely I will be posting wacky pictures of them with "I can haz" captions.

Unless the hits on this post really spike. Then, I can't promise anything.

My first ever blog post composed on a cell phone

I'm at the beach, sitting in the crows nest of a beachhouse, typing a blog post on my phone. It's one of those strange moments when I worry that my sense of wonder is either underdeveloped - I am, after all twenty yards from the Atlantic and completely ignoring it - or overdeveloped, since I'm feeling all tingly with gadget awe, and the uncanny sense that the future has arrived.

We live in a world of casual miracles. Today I've communicated with people on three different continents, messages flying around the globe in seconds. Earlier, I rode to the beach in my friend Cheryl's hybrid Toyota. It converted five gallons of gas into 200 miles of forward motion, and in under four hours we'd covered a distance that once would have required days.

Of course, my sense of wonder is tempered by a fair share of pessimism. Not more than an hour ago, I had a conversation where I adopted the rather sour opinion that we are on the brink of a new depression. So much of our current prosperity seems built on unsubstainable debt. A viscious cycle of ever increasing debt defaults will lead to less credit, leading to more default, until everyone is living on actual cash in hand-a situation that will topple the structure of our economy.

But then I go up above the roofline, look at the ocean, and write about it on my phone, and I feel like things will be fine. There is so much innovation and progress - We'll beat this current downtick. I can't imagine how, but I didn't see blogs, cell phones, or hybrid cars coming either.

Sometimes, I worry about my mood swings...

Odyssey Fantasy Writer's Workshop

In the last two weeks, I've driven an insane number of miles. First, I drove 700 miles to Chatanooga to attend a gathering of my fellow Codexians. We were graciously hosted by the family of Codexian Mary Robinette Kowal, and had as a special guest the legendary editor Ellen Datlow. Best-selling author David B. Coe also made a special appearance for a night of grilling... I don't mean barbeque, I mean we questioned him about every last aspect of making a living as a writer, and his answers were an inspiration for everyone in the room. Codexwriters.com was started a few years ago by Luc Reid as a gathering place for writers at the start of their career. It's members have since gone on to publish more books than I can count. One of the qualification that will let you join the group is if you've attended one of the major writing workshops, like the Odyssey Workshop in New Hampshire.

I attended that Odyssey back in 1998, and learned from such luminaries as Harlan Ellison and James Morrow. So, it was a tremendous honor to leave Chatanooga after a wonderful long weekend of writing and drive 1200 miles to Manchester New Hampshire, to return to Odyssey as a guest teacher.

There are certain milestones in my life that have increasingly made me feel like a writer. It seems odd, perhaps, that after having written 8 novels, 60ish short stories, and published a respectable chunk of them, that I still sometimes have to remind myself that, oh, yeah, I'm a writer. The goal I sat out to achieve back when I was 25 has been met. I can walk into almost any Barnes and Noble in America and find my books. For that matter, I could walking into any Waterstones in the UK and get them as well. I'm invited to be a guest at cons, editors of magazines solicit stories from me, and I actually have, you know, made a little money at this game. Yet, none of these accomplishments have quite given me the adreneline rush that returning to Odyssey did. Because, when I was at this workshop ten years ago, with every writer who visited to teach, I was sitting in the classroom thinking, "One day, I want to be up there." So, last Friday was one of the greatest days of my life.

Also, one of the most nerve-wracking. I've never really been nervous about speaking in public. I'm really comfortable when I'm on panels at cons, and I love doing readings and signings. Yet, at Odyssey, I was a complete nervous wreck the whole time I was in front of the class. Part of it was that I'd made the mistake of reading my lecture out loud the night before around midnight, when I should have been going to bed... and realizing that my lecture was the dullest, driest, most boring thing I'd ever written. So, the next day in class, I pretty much decided to wing it. I had a few excercises to fall back on. I knew the big points I wanted to make. I had no idea if I had enough material to fill up 2.5 hours. Also, I'd forgotten to turn my cell phone off, so the whole time I was in front of the class, I kept thinking, "It's going to ring... NOW. It's going to ring... NOW." Luckily, it didn't ring. The more or less random collection of thoughts I had bouncing around in my skull all managed to find their way out without me saying anything too embarassing.

The subject I was speaking on was "How to get a reader past the first page." Fortunately, I'd stumbled onto a good metaphor for the point I wanted to make as I was getting ready for the workshop. During my ten days away from home, I'd saved a shirt and a pair of pants specifically to wear when I taught the class. I'd obsessed about what I was going to wear for months. I didn't want to go too formal... I'm there to lecture on writing, not banking. On the other hand, a tee-shirt and shorts seemed perhaps a bit too casual. So, I'd saved a pair of black jeans that are well broken in without being torn or stained, some nice shoes that were a decent balance of dressy and comfortable, and a Hawiian shirt that's actually moderately tasteful... it's black with large pale flowers, nothing too loud. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going to dress myself because I know that visuals matter. I was going to be judged before I ever opened my mouth. Which led me to the most important point I had to make about writing: A writer must dress the first page of his story with the same care and obsession that I brought to dressing myself to teach the class. The images and sensory detail matter to readers judging your story in the same way that they matter to students judging a teacher.

Of course, it's difficult for many writers to think of details, especially the right details, to include on a first page. Writers need to have a mental bucket full of these images that they can draw upon when the time arrives to actually write. So, one of my excercises was to send the students on a mission to actually fill buckets with images. I gave them stacks of paper strips only an inch tall and three inches wide and told them to go search for actual, concrete items that would be interesting if they were placed onto a page. This was a tough environment for this excercise, since classrooms aren't exactly full of exciting and interesting objects like jet fighters or switchblades or dragons. Yet, the class performed admirably, spreading forth and returning with strips of paper populated with autoflushing urinals, black gunk on the edge of the stairs, wet grass, and toenail fungus. We dumped out nouns into the bucket and passed them around, with everyone taking six and writing a story opening with all the elements interwoven.

I must say, they did a great job. This was a really talented class. My fellow Solaris author Justin Gustainis was there as a student, as well as fellow Codexian Sara King. In all, I read and critiqued 7 stories by 6 authors, and, with no offense to my classmates from back in 1998 intended, I thought that, based on this random sample, this was a much more advanced collection of students than it was when I attended. It makes sense, I suppose. Odyssey was fairly new when I attended. Now it's starting to rival Clarion in reputation. Competition to get into the workshop is no doubt becoming more fierce with each year. Jeanne Cavelos, who runs the workshop, has certainly earned bragging rights in developing this workshop into such a success.

After the lecture and critiquing, the Odfellows had a cookout. I've never turned down free food in my life, so here's a photo of me chowing down, taken by Chad Wilson:

Although, upon closer inspection, despite the fact that my hand is near my mouth, I think I'm actually signing a book in this photo. I'd carried up a case of books and gave one to everyone at the workshop, so the aftermath of the cookout became my first ever outdoor book signing. Hopefully I didn't get too much mustard on the books... I'm going to make a bold, and potentially wrong, statement and say that the woman whose book I'm signing is Breanna Wojcik. Maybe. It will be embarrassing if I'm wrong, since I talked with Breanna for twenty minutes in a one on one critique of her stories. But I also talked to Jasmine Hammer as well for a one on one critique, and there's a reasonable chance this could be her. Or maybe it's neither of them. It was a long day. I can tell you in great detail about their stories (or could if the critiques weren't confidential), and can say with some authority that, whoever the hell this is, she's off to a good start as a writer.

If my memory has failed me after one week, I have a good excuse: Immediately after the cookout, I embarked on the 900 mile drive back to North Carolina. I was exhausted and nearly brain dead after over a week on the road, and what few synapses I still had firing were shocked into stupor when I paid $4.68 for gas in New York. I made it home roughly 24 hours after pulling out of New Hampshire and collapsed into my unmade bed instantly snoring for twelve hours while my cats crawled over me, licking my fingers and ears. They were either attempting to revive me in hopes I would give them attention after my long absense, or else taste-testing me in the event they are one day forced to feed upon my corpse. With cats, you just never know. *

*At the Codex gathering, I was assured by Laurel Amberdine and Jenny Rae Rappaport that if I talked about my cats on my blog, I'd double my readership. I'm not sure that they had in mind that my cat's first appearance here might be as potential body eaters, but what the hell.

Anthology Builder

I'm a featured author this month at Anthology Builder. Anthology Builder is a neat little concept that is a bit like a paper iPod--you go to the site, browse through the hundreds of authors and stories available, and select the stories you want to put into your custom anthology. You can then pick your cover and give your anthology a title. The anthology is printed out and shipped to you. Neat, yes? There's a $1 discount on the anthologies if you select a story by a featured author.

I've only got two stories available there at the moment, my two Asimov sales. "To the East, a Bright Star" is my first sale to Asimov's and is the story of a former circus acrobat as he navigates a flooded city on his way to watch a comet strike the earth. It's quite possibly the most thought-provoking story I've ever written. My second tale, "Final Flight of the Blue Bee," is about a former superhero sidekick named Stinger who's spent forty years in prison for murdering a supervillian. Stinger's finally been released and is seeking revenge on the Blue Bee, the superhero who abandoned him at his time of greatest need and allowed him to rot in prison. If you're a fan of Nobody Gets the Girl, my superhero novel, then Final Flight of the Blue Bee will be right up your alley.

Anthology Builder does let you see PDF previews of the stories. (It must allow a certain number of characters for the preview... I notice that some of the previews don't just end in mid-sentence, they end in mid-word!) It also has search functions that let you look for keywords, though I'm a bit confused as to how they work. "Superhero" doesn't turn up the Blue Bee story, nor does the word "bee." In fact, "flight" seems to be the only keyword that brings up the tale. Strange. Hopefully as the site grows, the search features will improve. One nice feature is you can sort stories by publication--so, if you like stories that appeared in Asimov's, you can see their whole stock of these stories quickly and easily. (All stories, it should be noted, are reprints from professional publications.)

I plan to add to my stock of stories on the site eventually. Unfortunately, my early Phobos tales are tied up by a bad contract I should never have signed. My stories at Intergalactic Medicine Show aren't available since they may be reprinted in an IGMS anthology--in fact, definitely will be, in the case of To Know All Things That Are In The Earth. A few of my other tales appear in small press POD anthologies, like Modern Magic or the Urban Bizarre, and I don't want to undercut potential sales of these books if a person wants to read my stories in them. Still, if I see that people are actually buying my stories on Anthology Builder, I may change my mind about what I make available there.

Check out the site. Looking it over, it makes me wish I was romantically involved with someone right now: a custom anthology of love stories seems like it would be perfect gift for a significant occasion. I probably wouldn't use the cover with the spaceship for this, though.

Essential Loneliness

I haven’t had a lot of success in my life building my own family. Both my marriages ended childless, which saved a lot of paperwork on the divorce, I must say, but that’s not a huge consolation. I’m deeply envious of people who’ve managed to select their mates wisely and raise children. It is, I think, one of the highest possible achievements of any human to launch a child safely and securely into adulthood.

Still, while my romantic entanglements have always been something of a mess, I’ve been much luckier in friendship. I have a wide circle of friends, including some I would count as true friends. As the old joke goes, a fried will help you move… a true friend will help you move a body. Fortunately I haven’t had to put these friendships to the body test yet, but I know in my heart who I’d make the first call to if the situation arose, and I know that not only would he help, he’d probably have the foresight to bring power tools. Of course his car isn’t very big… luckily I have another friend with a pickup truck, and I’m certain she would loan me a tarp, and I know she won’t rat me out.

I fear I’m veering off topic.

What I meant to get at when I sat down to write this post was that I think I have stumbled on to a key element to being a writer worth reading: the writer must always possess an essential loneliness.

Having a successful marriage and family won’t necessarily preclude this loneliness. Having good friends can’t truly cure this loneliness either. A writer, or any other artist, must always possess a sense that he is an outsider. Place him in the middle of a crowd, and he can never truly think of himself as part of that crowd. He is, instead, an observer of the crowd. If he’s participating in whatever the crowd is doing (cheering a rock band, for instance, or walking through a crowded mall the weekend before Christmas), he’ll still feel like he’s only pretending to be part of the group; on a deep level, he’ll never truly fit in.

It may be that everyone feels this way. It’s certainly a common theme in movies, books, and song lyrics. Far more likely, feeling this way may be a motivator to write movies, books, and song lyrics. Because one of the things that keeps me writing, day after day, year after year, is this never ending quest to explain myself. I am forever crafting small homunculi of myself and sending them out into the world via fiction, hoping they’ll find acceptance.

Writing has a way of weeding out a lot of lesser motivations. If you’re writing seeking fame and fortune, this might keep you going for a book or two, but you’re going to realize fairly quickly that fame as a writer means that in any random crowd, nobody is going to have a clue who you are. As for fortune… I suspect panhandling would probably provide a more steady income, and would keep you out in the fresh air and sunshine to boot. Most writers I know are pale people deficient in Vitamin D.

The one thing that kept me typing year after year, until I had committed a million words and then some to paper, was this quest to ease my loneliness by revealing hidden aspects of myself in fiction. When I first started writing, I used to have a fear that people would see too much of me in my writing. One reason I think I have found the modest success I have as a writer is that at some point I stopped being afraid that people would discover my dark secrets and started to embrace this as a hope. The stories that receive the greatest reaction are stories where I confess the things I least want the world to know about me. Admittedly, I do this obliquely… I place my hate into the character of Bitterwood. I place my more sadistic thoughts into Blasphet. My sleazier, cheesier elements find voice in Pet. In Nobody Gets the Girl, I confess my sense of being an outsider rather nakedly in the form of Richard Rogers, AKA Nobody, a man moving through the world as an unremembered ghost, invisible, intangible, hungry for the simplest human connections.

It is possible, of course, to write stories that don’t have this confessional element. I’ve certainly done so many times, and with some success… “Final Flight of the Blue Bee” will soon see publication for a third time, and I’m hard pressed to say that a reader would learn much about me reading it… except, perhaps, in the last moments of the story, when Stinger is falling to his death, and he yells out his final message to the Blue Bee. His voice is drowned out by the drone of the millions of bees that surround him. The most important words he’ll ever say go unheard. I think this moment captures my fundamental belief that, in the crucial moments, the things we most want to communicate are almost always missed somehow.

In the end, the feeling that I’ve never truly said what I most wanted to say is what keeps me coming back to blank pages again and again. I am forever tapping keys to fill the empty space with words, in a desperate attempt to keep myself from fading from this world, unknown, unremembered, a nobody.

Can a powerpoint presentation change the world?

Ross Perot is back! The last person to discuss the federal budget seriously with voters has launched a website discussing a doom I've been known to howl about here a time or two, the federal debt. It's a 20 minute power point presentation that you can watch here.

In four years of doing this blog, I've never directed readers toward videos of singing cats, nude celebrities, or politicians forgetting thier lines. So, hopefully I've earned your trust that I'm not going to direct you towards time-wasting trivia. This presentation corrects some of my doom and gloom statements about the federal debt. For instance, it's really closer to 5 trillion than the 9 trillion I quote, due to the so-called social security trust fund. Yet, in other ways, I've also underestimated the true size of the problem, and thought we could fix it if we'd just do stuff like not fighting in Iraq. Turns out, ending the war tomorrow wouldn't even make a dent.

In any case, I highly recommend the presentation. Whether you are liberal or conservative, democrat or republican, it can only help to get your hands on the facts.

Racing toward the End

I've been hunkered down writing a good bit of the day. There's also been some bill paying and air conditioner purchasing and installation mixed in there... we're pushing 100 degrees here in NC. I bought a 12,000 BTU model that's supposed to cool 550 square feet--roughly the area of my living room, office, and a bit of the kitchen. So far, the day is really testing the unit. Tomorrow, I'll install the much smaller 65000 BTU model in my bedroom and see if that helps things out. Days like today make me wonder if I'm wrong about global warming. But, of course, the data from any given city on any given day is pretty meaningless. And global warming is one of those issues where it really doesn't matter much if my opinion is right or wrong. So what? The reality is, we as a species are going to be pumping a lot more CO2 in the air next year, and we'll be pumping out more the year after that, and more the year after that. The AC unit in my window is making my carbon footprint bigger, but I'm one of the select few people on the planet that get to have AC. That's not going to last for long, though. The chinese are putting in AC. People in India are installing AC. Coal is going to be powering most of this.

And, of course, that's not even the big driver of greenhouse gasses. The big drivers are the agricultural systems that keep American's fat and happy... and, coming soon to a planet near you, steak-eating Chinese will make American's look like vegan sissies. Food follows money.

So, we're all doomed, unless we're wrong, and there are feedback systems in the planet that keep the thermostat stable, or unless the extra heat turns out not to matter all that much. The ice caps will melt, and we'll lose some tropical shoreline, but we'll start building beach houses in Russia and Canada, and life will roll on.

This wasn't at ALL what I sat down to talk about by the way. I'm actually sitting down to report that at some point tomorrow, I'll roll over the 120k mark on Dragonseed, the third Bitterwood book. Actually, there's a decent shot I'll roll past the 125k mark. I worked on Chapter 29 today. Tomorrow I'll do 30, and maybe go back and fill in a scene or two, and that will be the end of the first draft.

Right now, I'm in a good news/bad news sort of area, plot wise. I had really set myself a goal of finishing all the major plot threads raised in the trilogy at the end of this book. Any further books set in the Dragon Age were going to follow a different cast. But, while I'm confident I'll end the story of Bitterwood, it looks like I'm going to have to leave a few of the rest of the cast with some dangling plot threads. Not major ones, but my goal had been to have all the characters by the end of this book either living happily ever after, or dead. Now, it looks like I'll be getting many of my characters out of the fire at the end of the book, but still in a frying pan, so to speak. Ah well. These things happen. Rome wasn't built in a day, and the human/dragon struggle for dominance can't be completely resolved in a few books. It's like waving a magic wand and saying that the Palestinian/Isreali conflict is all better now.

Sunday, I plan to nap. Maybe go fishing, even with the heat. Maybe stretch out in front of the AC and read a book. Then... the rewrites begin. But, that's the thing about endings. They always seem to morph into beginnings.

Concarolinas and Creationism

I'm just back from Concarolinas in Charlotte. This is a kick-ass con, extremely well organized and well attended. I got to hang out with old friends like Ed Schubert, Gray Rhinehart, and Gail Martin, as well as making some new buddies like Jeremy Lewis and David B. Coe.

I'm exhausted though... I was on 11 panels this weekend, and my brain is now mush. My last panel of the day was on paranormal phenomena, and I was too bushed to rant.

One thing I really like about Concarolinas is that they do several science panels. I enjoy going to cons and talking about writing, but I LOVE talking about science, especially with folks who know what they are talking about.

One point that came up at the con was an argument put forth that creationism and evolution aren't incompatible. I've heard this argument many times. Basically, the logic is that the presense of evolution doesn't disprove the existence of a creator--which is something I freely concede. There could have been a creator. Or, all of reality could just be a computer simulation we're all trapped in without knowing it. Or, all of reality could just be the dream of an old man, and when he wakes up, everything will cease to be. However, just saying something could be true doesn't make it true.

Here's the difference between creationism and evolution: Evolution is well documented by physical evidence, both fossil and DNA, and by observation. Evolutionary theory makes predictions that can be tested. If we say that man evolved from a common anscestor with chimps and gorillas, then we should find evidence of such beings existing in times before there were humans and chimps... and we do.

Creationism makes no predictions. What is a feature you would expect to find in a created world that you wouldn't find in a world that just sort of came together over a long period of time? I can think of one obvious prediction: I would expect a created world to have been put together in a reasonably short period of time. It's taken about 4.5 billion years for man to appear on Earth... a span of time that just seems implausibly long if there were a guiding force. If God could make a living organism like a tree or a squirrel just by speaking them into existence, why would he bother with a seemingly endless cycle of creation and extinction of tree precursors and squirrel ancestors instead of just jumping straight to the final forms? But, this is, I admit, an easy target... I'm thinking of a prediction that others will no doubt argue is a stupid prediction. 4.5 billion years seems long to us, but maybe it's like an week for God. But, in that case, human life spans must be like nano seconds. We must flash in and out of existence at such an absurd rate that he can't possibly take time to get to know us. So... what am I being blind to? What is a testable prediction of creationism? What is the evidence that supports the theory?

I will say that, if there was a creator, he went through a hell of a lot of trouble to hide his workmanship. He created our world in the middle of an almost infinite multitude of stars, so that we wouldn't get all snooty and think our star was special. He created and destroyed billions of species over and over before he got around to making a species in his image that he intend to spend eternity either rewarding or punishing. And, the only people he's ever told the story to have been loners in the desert. He could have carved his signature in twenty mile letters on the moon. Or, he could, you know, have a blog or something. Anyone could just post a message in his forum and he could straighten them out on anything we might be unclear on. Instead of everyone arguing about gay marriage, he could just spell out his position. If he was smart enough to figure out DNA, it seems like HTML would be a breeze.

The Prophet and the Dragon

Last year around this time, I launched my Bitterwood blog. In retrospect, launching a blog that was dedicated to a single book was perhaps a bit short-sighted. So, this weekend I'm launching a new blog, The Prophet and the Dragon. It will be dedicated to all my Dragon Age titles--Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and the upcoming Dragonseed, as well as any novels that may follow this.

To launch it, I'm kicking it off with a recipe for Bitterwood's Dragon Tongue Chili, and a contest! I'll be giving away a signed copy of Dragonforge every Wednesday in June, and you can also win a complete Dragon Age collection, Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and the Solaris Book of New Fantasy. The contest rules are at the top of the new blog.

Will things get better, or worse?

As a science fiction author, I spend a lot of time imagining what the future will be like. Though, I suspect the implied causality of that sentence is flipped. Because I spend a lot of time imagining what the future will be like, I became a science fiction author, is perhaps more accurate.

Most SF visions of the future fall into two categories: Utopias and dystopias. The world either gets much, much better or much, much worse. Utopias aren't lacking in conflict, nor are dystopias lacking in their rewards. The Star Trek series is essentially utopian. People have come together and worked out their differences more or less peacefully and banded together on a shared goal of intergalactic exploration. Technology has gotten cleaner and better. There doesn't seem to be a lot of poverty. The Star Wars series tilts toward dystopia... there's an evil empire that goes around blowing up planets that challenge its authority. There does still seem to be a lot of poverty, and more than a little racism, or at least speci-ism, with comments like, "I'd sooner kiss a wookie!" And, apparently, it's still possible to be sold into slavery on the black market. Yet, even against this backdrop, the people don't seem to be miserable. There's still music in the bars. People get together and watch pod-racing. They master they world they live in and endure, even thrive.

So which direction are we trending? By "we," I mean all of humanity. Is the world getting better? Or are we racing toward misery?

Trends that hint at a brighter future:

1. The growth of knowledge. This is a powerful one. As a species, we are simply better informed today than at any point in history. We've figured out the basic fundamentals of biology, chemistry, and physics. We know more about fighting diseases than ever. We know more about growing crops. We know how to purify drinking water, and move goods and services and people around the planet, and we have all these wonderful information technologies that let us move knowledge around the planet in seconds. Knowledge is a powerful tool for fighting human misery. It seems almost fated that, as more and more people learn more and more things, life will get better.

2. The spread of innovation. This is an outgrowth of the first one. In the last two centuries, innovation and invention flowed from a few hotspots--America and northern Europe. For whatever reason, all the life changing technologies like electricity, vaccines, telephones, computers, automobiles, planes, etc. were coming from a fairly limitted geographical area. They say that neccessity is the mother of invention. I suspect, however, that the true mothers of invention are education, wealth, property rights, and good patent and copyright laws. A relatively small portion of the world's population enjoyed these things over the last two centuries. Toward the end of the twentieth century, we began to see innovation spread to places like Japan and South Korea, as they took things like cars and stereos and television and began to find ways of making them better. Now, we're on the threshhold of truly world-wide innovation. Wealth and education are spreading to places like India, China, and Brazil. American's are going to keep buying oil to run our cars as it rolls up to 200 dollars a barrel. We're invested too heavily in the infrastructure of oil. But, countries like Brazil are already shifting their cars to a biofuel economy. By developing later, it's easier to move to better technologies without being tied to older ones. It similar to places like India leapfrogging over building a network of landline phones and just moving directly to cell phones. I was listening to an NPR report about how advanced cell phones are in places like India and South Korea when compared to American cell phones. They have better networks and more features because they aren't laying the new technology onto an network build decades before.

The point is, we aren't going to depend on a small handful of countries for innovation any more. We're going to see it becoming global.

3. The decline of war. War certainly hasn't gone away. Many places are still wracked with internal conflicts and civil wars. But, it seems like the full-blown invasions where one country decides its going to roll into and take another country are on the decline. Invading armies were commonplace throughout the twentieth century. Japan invaded China and Korea. Germany invaded France and Poland. Russia grabbed the Eastern Bloc and Afganistan. Iraq grabbed Kuwait. And then... it stopped. Many countries are still occupied by their old invaders, but the wholesale scramble of countries grabbing adjacent territories seems to have slowed to a trickle. The one big exception, of course, is America's "liberation" of Iraq. That went so well, however, that it may truly be the last true American war. The political costs have been so high that it's difficult to imagine a president in the next half century launching a similar adventure. And, the economic costs of this and other things are on the verge of clipping America's wings. We won't be able to invade other countries because we won't be able to afford it. And, I think this is going to be the true end of full blown war. At some point in the last few decades, it simply stopped making economic sense. Invading neighbors has been politically and economically ruinous for the invaders time and time again.

Trends that point toward misery:

1. The embrace of ignorance. Here's a curious trend: As knowledge has grown, and technology gotten more complex, it feels like the world has become increasingly dumber. There are a few people who understand their cars, their phones, or even their televisions. They can operate them, but they can't really understand them. There is also a fall off in basic knowledge. American's are trained universally how to read and write, and the fundamentals of math. Most people have basic training in science, history, civics, and economics. When I look at the things kids are learning in thier text books these days, I feel like they are certainly being exposed to a vigorous and wide-ranging base of knowledge. Yet, it seems like by the time these kids reach adulthood, all this knowledge evaporates. They could read, but they don't, and the ability to communicate by writing and reading withers. They could do math, but they don't, and lose the ability to figure out a 15% tip, or figure out the square footage of a room. On my day job, I do a lot of things that require some basic math, and I find that people have just lost the ability to understand numbers any more.

I sometimes wonder if television, computers, and calculators haven't somehow crippled us intellectually. True story: I spoke to a woman on the phone a few days ago who couldn't find our store. She was following a GPS device and our address wasn't coming up when she programmed it in. So, I tried giving her directions. My work is really simple to get to: It's right off the interstate. If you can find the interstate, and read exit numbers, you can find us. But, she sounded almost panicky as I tried to give her the very simple directions. She kept getting stressed that her GPS didn't show a shopping center off the exit I gave her. It was as if, if her GPS didn't believe we were there, then she couldn't believe we were there.

I have no hard data. I'm not even sure how you would test something like this. But, it feels like people are becoming less knowledgable as knowledge technology improves. Once we have machines to do our thinking for us, we seem to embrace ignorance. The main purpose of the mind ceases to be the pursuit of knowledge and becomes instead the constant quest for distraction and entertainment.

This seems dangerous in the long term for two reasons: First, people no longer seem able to judge the pronouncements of their political leaders. We start to base our decisions on who looks better on television and who is funnier in a debate rather than on who is actually better informed. Once the population loses the ability to judge our politicians, it seems we are fated to drift toward a government that more closely resembles the Star Wars dystopia than the Star Trek utopia. Secondly, the world is so interconnected that I worry that the stupid decisions of a few could wind up dragging us all down. The mortgage crisis is a good example. People were taking out loans they didn't understand. Now, everyone's home value is likely to decline, and responsible homeowners with good credit such as myself will wind up paying more for our next mortgage because we'll be paying for the losses of people who made foolish, ill-informed choices.

2. The rise of complexity. As technology spreads, and innovation spreads, it's going to become increasingly difficult to keep track of everything. There was a time when the study of radioactivity was relatively unregulated. I have comic books from the early 1940s where kids could order radiactive elements, including uranium, as part of a home laboratory. Fortunately, we figured out in a reasonably short period of time that this stuff was risky and passed regulations that kept us from poisoning ourselves with these dangerous substances. A similar response was called for with DDT and flourocarbons. We've been able to identify the dangers we are creating with our technological advances and nip the more harmful ones before the damage becomes permanent. But, this was when the world was much smaller. It wasn't that hard to band together to regulate DDT and flourocarbons. The manufacture was controlled by countries based in North America and Europe, places where representative governments have incentives not to kill off their populations. But, the next environmental threat to arise from our own cleverness could spread much more rapidly than these previous technologies, and be manufactured in more locations, and in countries with more authoritarian governments. Here's an completely imaginary scenario: Some bioengineered virus thats supposed to attack some obscure wheat fungus could be invented in South Korea, be in use worldwide five years later, and two years after that we start hearing reports about the world wide decline in earthworms. We take five years to argue about whether the bioengineered virus is the cause, but even when the consensus in most of the world shifts to thinking it is, political action to ban it is nearly impossible because a few non-democratic regimes insist it's safe. Ten years later, 90% of the world's worms are gone and we're seeing famine of Biblical proportions.

This is, of course, a highly unlikely scenario in its specific details. But, the broad categories I think are plausible: An innovation with an unsuspected consequence spreads rapidly with catastrophic results, and political action to fight the threat is nearly impossible because the knowledge has spread to places without the proper checks and balances of the American and European systems. Here, companies might halt the manufacture of a dangerous substance even without waiting for government regulation because they fear the effects of lawsuits. (Though, there are certainly many products, such as tobacco, where this hasn't proven true.) And, due to patent laws, if the company that invented the technology shuts it down, it shuts down. But, in places like China where patent law is almost non-existant, and lawsuits against a harmful manufacturer unlikely, what are the checks and balances that will prevent irreparable environmental harm?

In my more optimistic moods, I think that the good forces of knowledge and innovation will always stay a few steps ahead of the risky forces of ignorance and complexity. Problems will arise, some created by our own cleverness, and we'll solve them, and move on to the next problem. It will be a never ending cycle of innovation that leads us to an ever more utopian future. But, the pessimist in me can't help but think that, while the good forces must maintain constant vigilance to show true improvement, the darker forces only need one victory to knock everything down. We need only slip up once on an global environmental threat to create world-wide famine and misery. The laws of unintended consequence are going to forever result in people of good intentions unleashing threats to the health, wealth, and peace of their fellow men.

If you want the utopia, don't sit back and assume others are going to build it. Stay educated, stay engaged, and stay vigilant. If enough of us do this, perhaps we'll have a long, happy run on this planet.

Under Construction

Whateverville is no more! For a long time, I've been worried that my blog title was too close to the title of science fiction author John Scalzi's much more popular blog "Whatever." I was unaware of his blog when I named my blog "Whateverville," and, since he probably gets 1000 hits for every 1 I get, I didn't want people to think I was trying to leach off his glory.

There is already at least one blog with the title "Jawbone of an Ass," but it updates only once every few months, so I doubt I'll be accused of trying to steal his readers.

Why "Jawbone of an Ass?" First, I like the image of Samson standing in the middle of 1000 philistines, smiting them with a donkey-bone. Occasionally on this blog, I rail against forces that outnumber me by an insane ratio. I write about atheism in the midst of a nation that thinks of itself as Christian. I write Liberterian manifestos in a nation where the Libertarian party routinely draws under 1% of the popular vote. I feel like the fabled lone voice crying in the wilderness. And yet... I still believe in the power of words. Despite much evidence to the contrary, I still hold out hope that words can change the world for the better. I may be surrounded by Philistines, but I intend to keep swinging.

Second, well, I can be something of an ass, and I like to use my jawbone. I don't go out of my way to be polite. I may occasionally use derogatory terms like "idiot," "inbred," and "Republican."

I'll be making several changes to this blog and soon to be announced companion blogs over the coming weeks. There's a lot of stuff I need to update. For the rest of the month, consider this site under construction.