About a week ago, the historic middle school near our house caught fire spectacularly.

Some kid didn't study for his test and prayed for the school to burn down. And he got there in the morning and said, "God, what have I DONE?"

Anyway, here's some pictures.

I said, I said ARG.

This novel thing is frustrating me.

I think NaNoWriMo is made for other types of writers, you know, the kind who have confidence to leave their firsty first drafts alone. My idea of a first draft is usually something I wrote a week ago and have had time to revise since. I have a hard time just opening the document and picking up where I started.

Damn you people for whom this is fun!

My old agent boss Lori Perkins has a really good post about NaNoWriMo. I always liked Lori. She is one of the most outspoken, fun and life-loving people I've met. She's also completely insane and works about 16 hours most days, wheeling and dealing for 8 of them and reading slush for 8 more. I like what she says here quite a bit and I recommend you read it.

I sense a little bit of backlash against NaNoWriMo, and sometimes I can't blame the people who do so. I mean, I've heard NaNoers talk about blatant tricks to raise wordcount, like having one character say, "I didn't catch that," so another character has to repeat it. (Okay, I actually have somewhat of a trick to raise wordcount. There's a goblin annotating the manuscript and writing footnotes. It's meta.)

But when you add it up, why is a burst of creativity from a ton of people a bad thing? If you want to be a writer, nothing will stop you. Go ahead and vomit 50,000 words onto the page and fix it later. As a teenager, I typically vomited 150-250k words per giant Robert Jordan imitation novel. I think I've done all right for myself since. The sales are slow, but they come. Also, I write the occasional 4k short story now. (It's a gradual recovery from Big Book Syndrome. This little 75k-er I'm working on now is part of the process.)

I do have a major problem when people say, "I have no time to read because I'm writing so much." Sounds like "I have no time to drink water because I'm hiking so much."

mcjulie has been posting some deep thoughts on religion. Her last post got me thinking about some of my own breaks with my faith. I wrote this essay a few years ago to describe some of my feelings on homosexuality and Mormonism, and it ended up getting, I think, pretty deep.

Plus, there is man-love.

Enjoy.


True

A writerly maxim says that memoirists should “go for the pain.” Let’s go back to high school.

In a rural California high school, I was part of a group of devout Mormon kids who hung out only with each other and shunned the Gentile. (Okay, we didn’t actually say that, but it was the idea.) Also, my best friend was the most obviously gay person I've ever met.

So as you can imagine, there was a nice web of stories—I can’t call them lies—in place between myself, Mikey, and the others.

At first he told us he was secretly black. It did explain why he sounded like a black woman. When we were fifteen he let on… that he was bi. Little things trickled out, grains of reality in an epic flood. Can you pick them out? He’d had a sexual encounter with another guy in the group and they now had syphilis. He knew for a fact that the ladies’ man of the group was actually gay, because they had kissed. He was certainly not interested in me, he was interested in the possibility of being “cured,” staying in the Church and serving a mission. He was regularly beaten by his father—or the man who said he was his father.
( The rest.. )

I forgot to blog about this!

"We just adore this piece--it's funny,moving, quirky in all the right ways--and we'd love to publish it in Brain Harvest."

A rare piece of flash from me, Poster Boy For The Novella.

Yesssss.

Should be up December 6th. It's called "Mount Rainier Considers Its Mental Health" and it's about, well, Mount Rainier considering its mental health.

:)

This site was down for a while, but now it's back:

http://mormonsformarriage.com/

Believe it or not, there is a sizeable contingent of Mormons who fight for equal rights, including Steve Young (formerly of the 49ers) and Harry Reid, Democratic House majority leader.

I don't like it when people talk about the "Prop 8 Mormon millions" or lump all Mormons in with bigots like Mitt Romney any more than your average Catholic likes it when someone assumes they oppose abortion. The church leadership brought this stereotype upon themselves, yes, but it's still a stereotype, and those who use it are choosing not to think more deeply.

Anyway.

For your reading pleasure, the fanfic story that introduced the term "Mary Sue." Also, the Wikipedia entry on Mary Sues, which lists all the variations. Apparently Thomas Covenant is an Anti-Sue.

I am conducting a study of Mary Sues ever since someone critiqued one of the characters in my novel as "the biggest Mary Sue that ever Mary Sued." As much as it was an astute critique, I still think Mrs. Bella Sue Edward SparkleKins of Twilight beats this character. I mean, read that Wikipedia entry. Think about Twilight. Read it again. THAT'S A DESCRIPTION OF TWILIGHT.

Adia thinks every flying bug is a bee. So the other day a fly landed on her leg and just stayed there, probably throwing up or laying eggs or whatever flies do to delicious young children. Adia smiled and said, "Bee loves me!"

The writing goes slowly, despite the fact that my already paltry hours at work are being cut. However, yesterday I managed to crank out 4k to finish a short story that has been due at the writing group for about three weeks. They read the first half, y'see. This story had one false start in 2007, anther false start earlier this year, and now has a false bottom. Or something. In any case, it's really nice to end it. Now excuse me, I have to get back on my own false bottom (what, you didn't think a butt this good was real, did you?) and write some more.

Conversation with the brain-damaged guy I work with, as we ate burgers yesterday:

Me: How's the burger, Steve?

Steve: It's great, Matthew!

Me: My name's not Matthew.

Steve: Yes it is, f*ckface!

He's great. Whenever he's in a good mood, he laughs and says, "Yeah! Come on, kick me in the ass right now!"

At some point I got in this weird side career of taking care of mentally disabled people. Nothing in my education points to this, but I got a job to help put me through college taking care of three mentally disabled men, and then I managed their house,. I've been working this stuff ever since. Whenever I need to pay some extra bills, I go out and find a job taking care of some disabled folk.

These guys can be hilarious. I'll share with you one more conversation, this time with a schizophrenic man and one of my employees as they walked by the Provo River.

Employee: Brandon, are you keeping it real?

Brandon: I'm not a gangster anymore.

Employee: Brandon, you don't have to be a gangster to be keeping it real.

(At this point a man with fairly brown skin of indeterminate ethnicity passes by.)

Brandon: (to passerby) I AM NOT A GANGSTER ANYMORE!

 

In case anyone didn't see Jay's link:

Chuck Klosterman reviews the Beatles like he's never heard of them... and like he's an idiot.

The other day I asked Chrissy, "Which historical figure would you want to be?"

She thought about it for a while. "There aren't a lot of good girls," she said. "I mean, if I'm Joan d'Arc I get brutally executed, and if I'm Queen Victoria I get to be funny-looking and against women's suffrage." She thought some more. "I don't want to be some guy who had sex with lots of women, because, you know, I don't want to have sex with lots of women." She meandered over the possibility of Tycho Brahe, given that she would get a gold nose and a moose.

Then she got this weird good-Mormon-girl look and said, "Joseph Smith."

I said, "You might want to rethink that one..."

We took Adia to the beach again yesterday, so she could feed her rock-throwing addiction. After a solid hour of throwing rocks in the water (she didn't even quit when we offered her smores) she started chasing a seagull. "Look Daddy!" she said. "Duck!"

"Yeah, honey, a duck!" I said. I didn't want to disillusion her by explaining that it was actually a trash-eating flying rat. Luckily we didn't get too close or the seagull might have started swearing at her.

I hate vampires. This was a nice gift from Guide to Literary Agents back when I was agenting, to keep people from sending me faux cool black leather motorcycle sexy hanging out on streetcorners undead wanker stories and I want all those supposedly cool sexy vampires to go fall on a forest of sharpened stakes. Wankers.

But I am writing a novel with vampires in it. In my defense, they are all really ugly.

( Here's a rough sample from my novel in which the main character, Jane, is faking her way through a confession with a vampire priest. Jane is half-vampire and has never learned anything about her father. )

Actually, I didn't really get deep into the blackberry bushes and all scratched up and stained purple like I usually do. But I liked the title. So screw it. Yes, that's right. Screw it.

We went to the beach with Adia today. As usual, she threw rocks. In the water. I don't think you understand how FREAKING AWESOME IT IS TO THROW ROCKS IN THE WATER. Adia will tell you. Also, we saw crabs, who we identified as Sebastians. There is a Little Mermaid addiction in the house.

George R.R. Martin is teaching at Clarion next year. Whew. I don't usually apply unless I'm really taken with the instructors (I was shortlisted for 2005 with Octavia Butler and Gordon Van Gelder, but no one died, damn it) so I might have to next year. I love Martin's short fiction. Though most of his short fiction is still pretty long, so I'm not sure how he's going to do grading 4k stories.

I predict one of the writing prompts will be "Create a character you adore and kill them." Followed by "Write about something you always wanted to do with your sibling that you never did."

The Great Faerie Strike goes on. It's a lot of fun to write, and the one project that I don't get stumped on lately, not like the many short stories I've been doing. The idea for the GFS actually came from when I was agenting. I had gone through a huge batch of queries and I was, off the cuff, just trying to think of things I hadn't seen yet. One was, well, a great faerie strike in the Victorian period. Given that the 19th century was the founding age of real labor unions as we know them today, it seemed to work.( The query for interested... )

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Is homosexuality a sin?

I can't speak for Jewish or Muslim doctrine, but I have spent a good portion of my life studying the New Testament. It's true that Paul condemns homosexuality in Timothy 1 and 1 Corinthians 6. Considering that Paul also admonished that women keep silent in church and keep their hair long, it is clear that most congregations in America today, particularly Mormons, who have thrown their weight behind the anti-gay-marriage movement, take the NT in spirit, not in letter.

Mormons claim to take their leaders' words as scripture, but many of the admonishments--for instance, Joseph Smith's twice-repeated commandment to eat little or no meat--are also conveniently ignored. The modern-day prophets have condemned the gay marriage movement, but they also condemned the Civil Rights movement. Because Mormons believe their leaders to be fallible, and because there is plenty of evidence--Bruce R. McConkie, one of the Apostles of the seventies and eighties, repeatedly said that black men would never hold the priesthood and later simply admitted, "I was wrong"--one cannot really justify homosexuality as a sin based on any literal word.

So in order for Mormon politics of the moment to be justified homosexuality must be a sin in the spirit of Jesus' teachings. A far more complicated question. Or is it?

Matthew chapters 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount, are usually considered the summation of Jesus' teachings, with perhaps the addition of John 15-17, in which he instructs his apostles on the mysteries of God. The SotM is famous for repudiating the literalism of the Jewish law at the time; do not commit adultery of the heart, do not become angry with your brethren, do not observe the law while never really sacrificing anything for God. The Jesus of the SotM doesn't seem to care much about things like homosexuality unless it comes with hypocrisy and anger. So a homosexual who calls a Mormon a "faggot" as some homosexuals have done to some of my Mormon friends would probably attract Jesus' ire.

Jesus was FIRMLY against divorce save in the case of infidelity--and as I've heard, the infidelity clause was even added by later scribes. (I could be wrong about that.) So we know that Jesus 1) hates hypocrisy and 2) supports marriage. Now let's think for a moment. If two committed homosexuals are married and seeking to be meek, poor in spirit, kind and are followers of Christ, there is no reason to believe that Jesus would actually care about what kind of plumbing they were using for their committed, loving sex. The law of Christ is a law of the heart, meant to thoroughly change the nature of a man or woman from someone who looks outward at the world as something to be changed to someone who looks inward at their soul as something to be changed. The first law of Christ is sympathy and self-reflection.

Jesus' teachings can't ever say one way or the other whether the act of homosexual love is wrong in itself; they rather say "Why would you bother with whether someone else is sinning?"

A note that csinman  put on a story I wrote, which had one very short masturbation scene:

Spencer says: I like masturbation and it makes me happy to put it in every story ever, which makes me the happiest in the whole salty, gooey world! Masturbation makes my story literary and therefore it's going to win awards and can be published in places that end in "review" and I can die penniless and reviled by my peers, but hundreds of years later my work will be taught in English classes to torment students who really just want to make out with each other and, you guessed it, go home and masturbate.

I am done writing. This is all the recognition I will ever need.

Idioms in other languages. My very favorites: Cheyenne:My tapeworm can almost talk by itself = my stomach is growling. Honorable mention for French: I have other cats to whip! = I have other fish to fry! - I have other things to do

Also, a 111-year old veteran of World War I died in England today, and Radiohead wrote a song about it. I was very touched when he talked about going to Germany to meet the oldest survivor from the other side.

I am sad to be missing Worldcon. Mostly because at Worldcon 2006 I stared at George R.R. Martin from across the room at a party, thinking I should really go talk to him, I'm sure he just wants to shoot the sh*t like anyone else, I should talk to him... This time, I would definitely go right up to him and say, "Where's the next book already?"

Oh, and "What was your relationship with your siblings like?"

After a full week of ze Frenchman and almost no movement on the writing, I sat down and cranked 4000 words on Monday, and around 3500 yesterday. Take that, Frenchman. Today, I made 2500, scattered among different projects. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm working on a story for jennifer_brozek  's anthology abouot alien urban legends, and I was pretty lost until I started thinking about the California Aqueduct, over by my house in Lancaster, CA.

We used to go up to that thing all the time, crawling through the drainage tunnels underneath it and always threatening to swim in it (there were tons of stories about people drowning in the aqueduct). It was such a weird place, all elevated high above the rest of the town, like this permanent reminder that people were never really meant to live in the Mojave Desert.Anyway, it turns out that musing on the aqueduct makes a story. Let's hope Jen likes it as much as I do.

Yes, that subject line refers to Adia. Among other things.

It shouldn't be hard to let go of the crazy ideas you had when you were younger, but it is like pulling teeth out of my bellybutton for me.

See, when I was thirteen or so, I decided I would concentrate on writing. I liked music, acting and art, but I decided, of course, to do the most pretentious one.

And I decided that, of course, me being brilliant and not ashamed to admit it, I would be a famous published writer to rival Stephen King by the time I was twenty. A generous estimate gave me twenty-five, though by then I kind of figured I would be getting read to retire.

Around twenty-five I revised the estimate up to thirty. I'm twenty-nine now, and though I'm closer than I was--and I also got the sense to send out everything I have instead of sitting on it--but it's actually causing a little bit of a midlife crisis for me to admit that I'm actually normal. Hell, I write less than a lot of people I know, and I have dry spells, which was never in the plan. It's been easier to be prolific lately because I don't have a job.

This is sort of weird to admit. And painful. And I feel the need to broadcast it to the Internet so that I can get it out of the way.

Old dreams die hard, I guess, even when they're kind of silly (twenty, young self? TWENTY?)

The Scholes Clones Are Upon Us!

A thousand congrats. I'm very happy for them and their new transformed understanding of all things. Seriously.

(A quick PSA: There's this weird thing that some people do--oddly enough, the people who did it the most to me didn't have kids--when your child is first born. They love to tell you how you'll never get enough sleep, time to write, never have sex again, turn into slime molds... if you're tempted, please, for the sake of me at least, RESIST. It's meant in jest, but it drove me crazy, and I had to look really hard to find a place to bury bodies in Seattle.)

(Ahem.)

( Writing progress report, for the curious... )

I had a blast--both metaphorically and a blast of heat--celebrating my 29th (holy crap) birthday withkehrli ,criada ,csinman  and a bunch of former graduate students yesterday. We barbequed. For once in my life I let the briquets actually turn gray before I tried to cook on them. Keffy, Lisa and co. gave me Cherry Coke Zero and Peanut MnMs, which pretty much makes them the most thoughtful friends ever.

It's really, really, really hot in the Northwest. One of the few air-conditioned places in Bellingham is Starbucks. I plan to live there tomorrow.

maryrobinette 's beautiful pic of the Scholes babies, in case you haven't seen:



She can really work those baby photos. ( A pic she ever-so-slightly-touched up. )

http://douglascohen.livejournal.com/189645.html

The latest controversy on the Internet, after Walter Cronkite killed Michael Jackson, is, in a nutshell, boobs. (Boobs don't fit in a nutshell, by the way, so don't try.)

K. Tempest Bradford says, with a good point, that Realms of Fantasy favors covers that are booby. Doug Cohen defends his decision to feature boobs on the latest cover and insists that he is not the kind of guy who just puts boobs on everything. If he were, he would probably have a nice set himself. (He didn't say this in the post, but I think it's probably true.)

Tempest wants to cut the level of boobs and maybe bring in some penii, some man-candy.

Now, I'm no expert on boobs, but it seems to me that there is another side we haven't considered that could solve everything. We could have boobs and not-boobs if we want. We don't have to be limited. Ken Scholes can write all the stories he wants about hot redheads with boobs (has anyone else noticed this is a major theme of his writing? I see you, Ken, wink wink, nudge nudge).

This is how we will solve this problem:

They have to go Amazon.

That's right. Every Realms of Fantasy story with boobs in it has to cut one of the offenders off. If your right boob offends you, cut it off, or if your left, etc etc. Just get rid of one.

Keep one for Doug, cut one for Tempest. Keep one for Robert Jordan's women to still cross their arms under. Cut one for Arwen to more realistically draw her bow. Keep one and you can still get a side shot in a Boris Valejo painting. Cut one and you reduce the cost of a chainmail bikini by one-fourth. Keep one, dye your hair red and Ken Scholes will describe it lovingly. Cut one and the scar will still be kinky in a Jacqueline Carey or George R.R. Martin novel.

Oh, wait, she meant to metaphorically cut down the boobs? Huh. Never mind.





(I apologize if this was horribly offensive. My wife always says I shouldn't be allowed to talk without a filter.)

Some part of me wants to go get an honest job. NO... NO...

I don't know where this urge came from. I blame csinman , because he is the cause of most things that go wrong in the world. Just the other day he told me the meaning of life was sexual fantasies about Mormon missionaries. Yeah, if that's not a Doctor Faustus-style red flag, I don't know what is.

On that topic, I am so in love with The Cambist and Lord Iron. I listened to it twice. It's a rare story that makes me laugh out loud, but the ending of this one had me giggling while I was on my daily run. Which can make you swallow your spit and cough, by the way.

This has been a pretty good week, except I'm slacking a bit on the novel. I'm just not that excited about it. It's weird, since handwriting usually means that I'm really relaxed about what I write.

I did yank out a short story I wrote years ago and finished it, which is cool except I think the ending has problems--hence the leaving it alone for years. But it has an ending. Like many people's butts, it has problems but at least it's there. (You wouldn't want to go buttless.)

I've also been working on the only story I ever got a personalized rejection from Analog for (as you know, Bob, personalized Analog rejections are generally invitations to rewrite unless they say otherwise). It's killing me. It's a whodunit with lots and lots of science involved, neither of which is my strength. I checked out some mystery anthos at the library today to help.

One of the "mystery stories" consists of a girl holding her baby brother and climbing onto the roof. That's it.

THAT IS NOT A MYSTERY!

So I suppose I'll give up hope, cry, and eat a tub of ice cream.

And now, a picture of Adia naked in a baby pool, which you can use to blackmail her when she's a teenager.

Where do I get all these ideas? A two-year-old whispers them in my ear, of course.

I finished a short story that had been sitting unfinished since 2007 this week. In case you are interested, here is a snippet:
( Read more... )