Category: ephemera

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So I was going through some of my abandoned drafts, and I discovered that two years ago I had half-written a series of posts about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. I wrote a first post about the trilogy but never followed up on it, but I figure late is better than never. Look for the next three installments over the next two weeks.

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I’m about halfway through my current WIP, which means (naturally) that I’ve spent the last hour reading about placental abruption. This is what happens when you reach the point in your novel at which things must move from Bad to Worse: you get online and you try to find the worst thing that could possibly happen to your characters. Because you love them.

On the one hand, it’s amazing that I can ask Google to please tell me about complications in late-term pregnancy, and a few minutes later I’m looking at pictures of detached placentas. On the other hand, gawd this is going to be hard to write about. Really, really hard. And this isn’t even the worst thing that might happen in this novel.

But it’s like they say: Kill your darlings. Kill them with a detached placenta if you have to. Don’t flinch.

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Let me direct your attention to Terrible Minds, which has the list that you need to study. It’s great. Here’s my favorite tip:

Say it five times fast: momentum-momentum-momentum-momentum-momentum. Actually, don’t say it five times fast. I just tried and burst a blood vessel on the inside of my sinuses. The point remains: writing a novel is about gaining steam, about acceleration, about momentum. You lose it every time you stop to revise a scene in the middle, to look up a word, to ponder or change the plot. It’s like a long road-trip: don’t stop for hitchhikers, don’t stop to piss, don’t stop for a Arby’s Big Beef and Cheddar. Just drive. Leave notes in your draft. Highlight empty spaces. Fill text with XXX and know you’ll come back later.

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I really enjoy almost everything that Alan Jacobs writes, but I found myself in special agreement with this post about the triumphalism of some YA writers:

Laurie Halse Anderson’s comments are typical in this regard. “Books don’t turn kids into murderers, or rapists, or alcoholics. (Not even the Bible, which features all of these acts.) Books open hearts and minds, and help teenagers make sense of a dark and confusing world. YA literature saves lives. Every. Single. Day.” See? Salvific power, no danger. Even penicillin is dangerous for some people, but not YA fiction!

I was excited for a moment when Libba Bray acknowledged that “Books are dangerous.” Yes! But, oh, wait: “Yes, dangerous. Because they challenge us: our prejudices, our blind spots. They open us to new ideas, new ways of seeing. They make us hurt in all the right ways.” And, it seems, never in the wrong ones. So, not really dangerous at all. Not in any way.

(Another interesting theme in these comments is how much more trustworthy YA writers are than parents. Apparently, while books can only be good, parents are often bad.)

You’d do well to read to the end of his post, which covers most of the obvious ripostes. And really, it’s important to keep your head about this. In general I’m in favor of reading broadly and deeply rather than limiting yourself and your kids to “safe” texts. But it doesn’t follow that reading anything is automatically virtuous, or insisting that a book can never have a negative effect on a reader. In fact, if we take seriously the notion that books are powerful, we have to accept that books are a power which can be used for ill, and which can damage those who read them.

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We’ve bought a house.

The last four days have lasted approximately 3.7 million years, as my wife and I have done all of the following:

  • Closed on the house
  • moved in
  • gotten most of the utilities turned on
  • been informed that the gas (and thereby the heat) can’t be turned on until Monday
  • discovered that in this part of the country the first of May is an excellent time for a snowstorm
  • spent a few nights at Grandma’s due to said snowstorm in conjunction with lack of heat
  • bought a new wireless router
  • bought what seems like an absurd amount of food
  • planned how to redecorate the house
  • replanned how to decorate the house after a few minutes thought revealed the problems with our first plan
  • discovered a Trapdoor of Mystery in the floor of the upstairs bedroom
  • (I can’t tell you where the Trapdoor of Mystery goes, because then it wouldn’t be a mystery)
  • drove all over this town and the next on roads made icy by the snowstorm, and
  • slept, but not much.

I’m very tired, and now I’m going to bed.

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This was a superb article, as the lede shows:

My message to the 200-plus participants was an attack on the philosophic bases of modern economic theory: utilitarianism and the fact-value and positive-normative distinctions. I asserted that justice was necessary for the both liberty and economic order, and that the bases of a sane economy were justice, property, and strong families. Indeed, the whole purpose of the economy, as Aristotle noted, was to provision the family, and not merely to pile up wealth.

However, the real money quote is from about halfway through the article, from whence the titular quote is culled:

As near as I can recall, he said, “You are trying to drag us [the economists] off the pedestal of science into the mosh-pit of the philosophers.” Of course, he is absolutely right, and my only regret is that I do not have the wit to devise that metaphor myself. For it was a witty remark and instantly conjured up a vision of Aristotle throwing an elbow into the ribs of the sophists, of Plato poking the eye of a positivist, and Thomas Aquinas, that sumo-wrestler of the philosophers, tossing bodies out of the ring as if they were rag dolls.

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Via Baste Me With Your Corrosive Saliva, I find out that someone is complaining that straight male gamers don’t get enough love in Dragon Age 2.

That sound you just heard? That was my head exploding.

As one of these aforementioned straight male gamers, it has never occurred to me that the problem with gaming is that I’m not catered to enough. The entire genre is practically defined by its catering to the straight male gamer. Seriously, next time you go to a game store, pick one of the big-name games off of the shelf at random. Any one, it hardly matters. That game you picked? Caters to the straight male gamer.

The specific complaints leveled at DA2 in this case are twofold: (1) there’s too many men who are ready to get their lovin’ on with you, and (2) the female romance options are too “exotic”. Option (1) is easily remedied: shut them down. If Anders annoys you, then be an asshole to him. (This is how I recommend dealing with Zevran in DA:O.) Option (2) is akin to complaining that your food has too much delicious flavor and you’d like something more bland and predictable, but if that really is a problem for you then I guess I agree that you might not like the game. What’s really astounding, though, is the level of blatant entitlement that these complaints display. It’s not enough to have romance options for your particular preference. It’s also necessary that your specific expectation of straight, white feminine sexuality be met–a sultry darkie and an elf are not good enough–and that the options you don’t want to see are completely removed from the game so you don’t have to think about them.

Tycho ended his post with these words:

I just want to shake these people sometimes. Hey. That feeling, the one that you’re feeling?

That is the game.

Indeed.

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Via First Things, I find a wonderful article about Tolkein, the anarcho-monarchist:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people. . . .

Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. At least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediaevals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Grant me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you dare call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that—after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world—is that it works and has only worked when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. . . . There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.

I find myself in warm, wistful agreement with Tolkein in this regards, though such is a lately developed feeling. I wish I could say that I had gotten the idea from him (it would have saved me a lot of trouble if I had), but alas I arrived at this simple, old wisdom through a much more torturous route.