Author: J.S. Bangs

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If you really read the fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon one thread. Cinderella may have a dress woven on supernatural looms and blazing with unearthly brilliance; but she must be back when the clock strikes twelve. The king may invite fairies to the christening, but he must invite all the fairies or frightful results will follow. Bluebeard’s wife may open all doors but one. A promise is broken to a cat, and the whole world goes wrong. A promise is broken to a yellow dwarf, and the whole world goes wrong. A girl may be the bride of the God of Love himself if she never tries to see him; she sees him, and he vanishes away. A girl is given a box on condition she does not open it; she opens it, and all the evils of this world rush out at her. A man and woman are put in a garden on condition that they do not eat one fruit: they eat it, and lose their joy in all the fruits of the earth.

— G.K. Chesterton

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It’s January 2. Am I too late to get in on the year in review parties? Did you already tear down the decorations and put away the confetti? Really? What about the rum punch?

Well, never mind. I guess I’ll have to drink my own rum.

So what actually happened this year writing-wise?

  • I finished my second draft of The Wedding of Earth and Sky and had it reviewed by two writer friends. Final draft will come out in 2013.
  • I finished a total of eight short stories.
  • I sold two short stories: The Typographer’s Folly and the The Suffragette’s Election. Both of these are going to appear in the early months of 2013.

This was hardly a breakout year, but it was decent, steady progress. The most remarkable event of the year was the fact that The Suffragette’s Election sold on its first submission, after lingering for four years in my pile of unfinished stories.

For 2013, the biggest thing that I regret is the fact that it takes me so long to finish a novel. Consider that Wedding was drafted first in 2011, second-drafted in 2012, and won’t be considered finished until 2013… which seems a little slow. In 2012 I pushed myself to finish at least 6 short stories (a target which I exceeded), and I think in 2013 I’ll be focusing on getting novels done in a reasonable time. I’m going to push Wedding through its final draft and start sending it to agents, and then I’m going to work on getting my next WIP all the way to a final draft in the same year.

The next thing that I intend to write is a novella rather than a full-sized novel, so this should be doable. We’ll see how it comes out.

Oh, and additionally, I joined Twitter just today. Content will be random and possibly nonexistent.

Here’s to 2013!

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I wrote the following story when I was in the fourth grade. It won the school-wide Christmas story contest, and I received a twelve-inch-wide giant frosted cookie as my prize. It’s not the most valuable payment that I’ve ever received for my writing, but it was certainly the most delicious.

The Best Christmas Ever

It was the day before Christmas Eve, and I was doing my last minute shopping. In my hand I carried a Christmas list my son had given me. I had checked off everything on the list except for a few items that were too expensive, and one I had bought before recieving the list. I was about to look for my daughter’s list, when I remembered I had no list from her. My daughter, Rachel, who is five, insisted on writing a list to Santa, but I refused to let her. I remembered the details of the scene.

“Daddy, will you give this list to Santa at the mall?” Rachel had asked.

“Rachel, how many times have I told you there is no Santa Claus!” I yelled. “No I will not give your list to Santa.”

“But he’s real,” Rachel insisted.

“No he’s not!” I shouted, “and that’s final!” I stormed out of the house.

Now as I walked down the hall in the mall, I thought about my wife, Mary. She had died in a car wreck two years ago, on Christmas eve. Since then eeach year had been worse. This year I just about had it with Rachel’s constant pestering and all.

By the time I got home, both my kids had put themselves to bed. I sighed. I hadn’t gotten anythnig for Rachel because I didn’t want to get her something she didn’t want. Finally I climbed into bed and fell asleep. The next day was Christmas Eve. I was up first and eating breakfast before Paul, my son, was up. I then proceeded to make breakfast for Paul and Rachel, who was also up by that time. Rachel looked as if something was on her mind.

“Are you thinking about Santa Claus again?” I asked.

“Yes,” Rachel replied honestly.

“Well you’re not writing to him,” I said.

“All right, Daddy, I won’t write a letter to him,” she said. But she had an uneasy look in her eye. The rest of the day was spent wrapping presents and putting them under the tree. Rachel didn’t say anything else about Santa Claus.

That night I heard a noise downstairs about midnight. I got up to investigate. When I got there, there were cookies and milk set by the fireplace. By it was a short note that read:

Dear Santa Claus,

Plees bring me a china dol, a new dres, and help my daddy to be niser. from: Rachel.

At first I wanted to tear it up, but I paused. Instead I went to an old trunk, where I kept my favorite memoirs. I knew that I had an old doll there that my Grandmother had given me. When I found it I hurriedly wrapped it up and put it under the tree. I also had a dress that was Mary’s when she was little. I put that under the tree too. “And I’ll work on the third thing,” I vowed. I then took two blank cards and wrote “To: Rachel, From:…” I was about to sign my name, but I stopped. Instead I wrote: “From: Santa Claus.”

Before dawn the next morning I was awoken by shouts of joy from downstairs. There, Rachel was cradling her doll and admiring the dress. She looked up and yelled, “Look, Daddy, what Santa Claus brought me!”

I looked at her and smiled.

Adoration of the Magi

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I did my best to ignore the news after the Newtown shootings. The story fell into the category of news which neither affects me directly, nor is something that I can help. The only purpose of the news was to make me sad and angry, and to offer no release. I hate this kind of news. I think that nothing good comes of turning such crimes into national media events, and I would recuse myself from it entirely if I could.

The political reactions in the following days have been even worse. For the most part, they’ve been so infuriatingly predictable. We must eliminate guns; we must put guns in the hands of every schoolteacher; we must fight mental illness; we must bring God back into schools. I don’t know whether any of these things will help, though I doubt it. Yet it’s not the banality of these responses which gets to me, but rather the frantic grasping which all of them represent.

Something terrible has happened, see, and now we feel we have to do something. It does not matter whether the things we do are actually helpful or reasonable. We must stir ourselves up into activity, to find something to do which will plaster over the hole of fear and vulnerability which this atrocity has revealed. We will frantically call for action, ensure that something gets done, and so reassure ourselves that we have done our part, have beaten back danger, and have earned the right to slumber again.

If you really want to know what I think should be done, I will defer to Megan McArdle, who is consistently one of the most intelligent and reasonable voices on the internet:

But beyond the strange calls to make serial killers pray more and outlaw things that are already illegal, the most interesting thing is how generic they were. As soon as Newtown happened, people reached into a mental basket already full of "ways to stop school shootings" and pulled out a few of their favorite items. They did not stop to find out whether those causes had actually obtained in this case….

What Lanza shows us is the limits of the obvious policy responses. He had all the mental health resources he needed–and he did it anyway. The law stopped him from buying a gun–and he did it anyway. The school had an intercom system aimed at stopping unauthorized entry–and he did it anyway.

I understand that we want to do something. But sometimes we must consider the fact that there is nothing to be done.

I could be wrong about this. Perhaps there is a simple and obvious law that could be passed which would make this sort of disaster less likely. If such a thing exists, then I am all for it.

But even the existence of such a fix would not really solve the whole problem, would it? We can cover over this flaw in the legal or mental health system, this time. But there will be other holes. There will be lapses in attention and people who slip through the cracks, and disturbed and evil people will exploit these flaws. There are a lot of things we cannot know about these tragedies, but one thing is for sure:

This will happen again.

This will happen again.

What a disgusting truth.

We might—maybe—succeed in making these horrors less common, which would certainly be progress. But we will never eliminate them. And this fact, the essential ineradicability of evil and murder, is what really gets at me. How is it tolerable that any parent should have their child destroyed by a madman? Why is anyone so depraved or damaged as to do this? Why should anyone suffer so much as to want this, and why should they inflict their suffering on so many others?

And I remember that the sorrow of one parent who loses a child is not really different from the sorrow of twenty parents who lose their children. What shocks us during these times is the number of the dead. But children die every day, one by one, and their parents weep for them just as much.

There could be a disturbed young man here in my town. Tomorrow he could steal a weapon, go to the preschool, and kill my boys. There is nothing I could do to stop him.

This is the fear that haunts the calls to action. This could happen to any of us. And if it did, there is nothing we could do about it—but we desperately wish that there was.

I vividly remember the first Ash Wednesday after my oldest was born. I was an Anglican at the time, and I was attending the service which marks the beginning of Lent with my son, who was almost a year old at the time. At the end of the service, we came forward for the imposition of ashes.

The priest came to me and crossed my forehead with ash, saying "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." This is the usual formula, and I’ve heard it enough times that it’s lost most of its emotional impact.

Then he turned to my precious, innocent, sleeping infant boy. And he marked his forehead with ash, and said, "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

It was like an ice pick to my heart.

I want my children to be safe, happy, and healthy. I do everything that I can to ensure that this is the case. But there is a limit. There are things I cannot control, and will never be able to control. It could be a man with a gun. It could be a car on an icy patch of road. It could be a disease.

At the end, all you can do is hope, and pray, and love.

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Two weeks ago Duotrope announced that it is becoming a paid service. This is pretty big news for those of us who depend heavily on Duotrope for tracking our submissions.

If you’re one of the last three writers in America who doesn’t know, Duotrope is a website which has the most comprehensive listing of fiction markets on the web, together with features to allow you to record your submissions and responses. It then tracks your submission and response history, and aggregates those reported submissions into some very nice statistics about response times and acceptance rates.

As you might expect, this caused a lot of wailing and breast-beating among the impoverished writer set. Their Facebook page is filled to the brim with comments right now, some of them positive, some negative, and some downright nasty. There has also been rioting.. My personal take runs as follows:

  • $5/month or $50/year does seem a little steep. It seems like they could probably get away with $5/bimonthly and $25/year… though of course I haven’t seen their expenses and am totally making these numbers up.
  • Either way it’s a win for me, since I’ve had a recurring donation of $5/month set up for Duotrope for years now. I’ll probably go to a yearly subscription, though, which means that Duotrope will now be getting $10/year less from me than they did before.
  • People are rightly concerned about the quality of the stats, since many fewer people will now be adding their reports to the mix. Duotrope has some interesting counterpoints to this.

Overall, I wish Duotrope the best of luck. They evidently were never able to make ends meet with the "begging" model, and I suspect that the "charging" model will work better for them. It all depends on how many subscribers they actually get, but their early reports seem encouraging.

Good luck to them in the new year.

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So I changed plans (again). As a result of falling sick the week before Thanksgiving and the usual holiday madness, I fell significantly behind on getting my last story done. Even more difficult, though I made some progress in discovering what my planned story was about, I still didn’t have an actual plot, or a main character. That’s no way to operate when you’re under pressure for NaNoWriMo.

So I moved the goal posts again, and pulled out one of my unfinished drafts, this time for a story called George and Mr. Drake (an adaptation of the legend of St. George and the Dragon). And I got it finished! So now I’ve met my goal of finishing four short story first drafts.

Throws a little party.

I didn’t meet the word-count requirements of NaNo, of course, but that was never really an option. I met my self-imposed goal.

But there are still three days left, and a little story idea has wormed its way into my brain. It’s called What Yuri Gagarin Saw. I think it’s a flash fiction piece, only about a thousand words long, so it’s easily completable before the end of the month. This’ll be my bonus story, and I’m gonna get it done.

That’s why this update is short. I have writing to do.

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In my previous posts about toddler language acquisition, I’ve largely talked about my younger child, who is currently aged two-and-a-half. You might think this is because my older child, aged four-and-a-half, has already passed most of the more interesting milestones.

This is the opposite of the truth.

Our oldest son Ciprian has had severe language acquisition delays, for reasons that no one knows. For whatever reason, he never passed the linguistic level of a typical two year old, knowing about two dozen single words, and that’s all. He never progressed to simple two-word sentences, he acquired new words very slowly if at all, and his pronunciation remained idiosyncratic and difficult to understand. This was combined with a variety of difficult behavior issues, such as an obsession with running water (he would turn on the water in the sink and watch it for hours if we’d let him), and self-harming when he was frustrated or angry.

It’s hard to overestimate how frustrating this was. When he wanted something, Ciprian would simply shout "Give give give" over and over, and you would have to guess what he wanted from context. (He also didn’t know how to point to request things, an essential pre-linguistic skill that he never mastered.) If you couldn’t figure it out, then you had to prepare yourself for a bout of screaming and self-harming.

Earlier this year, shortly before his fourth birthday, we said enough was enough and sought help from his pediatrician, and then the child psychologist that she referred us to. Unfortunately, all we got was a bunch of negatives: he isn’t autistic, his hearing is fine, and he isn’t cognitively impaired. The technical term they deployed was just "developmentally delayed", without any suggestion of the reason. This was less than encouraging. Eventually, the best thing we could do was just to enroll him in a preschool to give him more opportunities for stimulation, and talk to the school district about special education. The local district offers pre-K special education for qualifying students, and after their assessment they quickly assigned him a speech therapist and an early childhood specialist.

This was the best thing we’ve ever done for Ciprian.

It’s now six months later. While it would be great to say that things changed overnight, the reality is that we saw only marginal improvements for the first several months. His self-harming behavior decreased and his overall mood improved, but we only saw incremental additions to his vocabulary and no significant breakthroughs in his overall language. That was, until about six weeks ago, when for some reason the floodgates opened.

It feels like his vocabulary has doubled or tripled. He’s added a variety of English and Romanian words, and has started to use them more appropriately, where before he would indiscriminately apply the few words he used to virtually everything, making it very difficult to discern what he actually wanted. He’s become scrupulously polite, always saying "please" and "thank you" when making requests, in both English and Romanian. But most importantly, he’s started actually using sentences. Now, he actually says "I want cookie" when he wants something, and life is good.

His sentences aren’t grammatical yet. For the most part they’re two- and three-word collocations. And there’s still a long ways to go—he isn’t remotely like a normal four-year-old yet, and his little brother is significantly ahead of him. But for the first time in years, it feels like we’re actually getting somewhere.

So what am I thankful for this year? I’m thankful for a fifty-item vocabulary, for two-word sentences, and for my awesome kid Ciprian.

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Having just sent in the contracts, I’m happy to report that my cyberpunk short story The Suffragette’s Election has sold to Crossed Genres, and will be appearing in their February 2013 issue.

This story has a long and tortuous history. Its first draft was written over four years ago, but I never sent it out because of obvious problems with the ending. Essentially, I knew how I wanted the story to end, but my first attempt at writing this ending was devoid of tension and drama, and the story sputtered out in a lame and unconvincing finish.

I put the story away for several months. Then I took it out again and rewrote the ending to see if I could make it work. It didn’t. So I repeated this process four more times.

Earlier this year I took the story out again and tried one more time—and finally got something good. (The key difference turned out to be not the ending itself, but the ordering of a few scenes before the ending.) However, by this time the beginning of the story had gotten shabby from so many partial rewrites, so I had to rewrite that, too. And then, finally, I had something that I was happy with from beginning to end, and just in time to submit to Crossed Genre’s “Cloak and Dagger” themed issue.

Evidently the muses smiled on me after all that effort, because the story was accepted on its first submission. Woo!

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This checkin is late. And it’s late because NaNo has struck down my hubric back at me with a vicious counter-stroke in the form of flu.

Yes, I got sick. I spent all day yesterday vomiting (fun!) and most of today slowly returning to the land of the living. My older son also got sick yesterday afternoon, but he made a quicker turnaround than me. So that means that nothing got written for the last two days, and I took the day before that off from writing to reward myself with some gaming time.

But the reason for taking that day off (which has since become three days off) was because I’ve made excellent progress on my NaNoWriMo goals. I have completed:

  1. The Heresy Trial of Friar Travolo at 4,000 words
  2. Mr. Yamaguchi’s Late-Night Janitorial and Demon-Hunting Service at 3,500 words
  3. There Is No Such Place As Canada at 4,300 words

That’s three stories, and we’re only halfway through the month. The only remaining planned story is The Blasphemous, The Cruel, and the Weak, which I now have two weeks to complete. That should be plenty of time, though I still have to figure out what the actual plot of the story is.

Good luck to all the other NaNoWriMo’ers!

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First week of NaNoWriMo, and I’m doing great.

Granted, my goal is modest. I have slated to finish four short stories this month, which is a significant step up from my normal writing pace, but still quite a bit less than the normal 50,000 words. That said, things have gone swimmingly so far.

Week 1’s project was The Heresy Trial of Friar Travolo, which is now complete at 4,000 words. There is another scene of about 500 words that I’ve omitted because to finish it requires some research that I haven’t finished yet. However, it looks like I may have time to do this at the end of the month, since I’m a little ahead of schedule.

Week 2’s story is Mr. Yamaguchi’s Late-Night Janitorial and Demon-Hunting Service, which is about 2/3 complete, at about 2,000 words. I expect to finish it in a day or two, which means by the end of the week I should be started on Week 3’s story There Is No Such Place As Canada. This puts me well ahead of schedule for the month, and makes me feel confident for actually getting all four done on time.

Also! I’m told there is some sort of election today. And since I’ve been saying it all day to anyone who will listen, you really should vote for no one.