Writing in the car is paradoxic and strange.
The car's engine is off. I wonder how long the car battery will last with the ignition key turned half-way, classical music playing on the radio and the car's clock counting down the minutes until I have to hop out and go to work.
A wireless keyboard rests on my lap; I'm staring at the iPad, which is propped up on the steering wheel.
This narrative I'm working on is moving forward, even though the car is still.
Later.
I'm trying to write, and it's a chore. I'm tired. My throat hurts. I give myself permission to rest.
But after the rest, which goes on much longer than I expected, I'm looking at the stack of revisions I have to do with a sense of weariness. I always seem to feel tired and rundown when I have a largish chunk of time to write. So here I am, trying to jump-start writing by blogging.
On the business side, the computer with my submission tracking software on it died. This isn't so bad, and I have a back-up, only runs on a different platform. I'll have to see about porting it somehow. And then there's that longish, wandering, non-fiction thing I wrote. I should do something with that--on one hand, I could serialize it; but on the other hand, it might be interesting to e-publish it and see where it goes.
Ugh. Business decisions. Quick! Start writing!
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essay. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Thursday, August 11, 2011
A Brief Survey of Faerie
The other day at Wordos, I was going to give a short presentation on Writing Elves and Fairies. I took copious notes from Tolkien's On Fairy Stories. I collected various research books, anthologies, and fantasy paperbacks. Alas, when it came time to give my mini-lecture, I discovered that my notes were not in my bag of Books about Fairies, and so I had to improvise wildly.
I said I'd post my notes. So, without further ado....
Dwarves, Gobblins, Dragons, Trolls, Elves and Fairies have been written about for a very long time. There are several approaches to take when writing about Faerie, Elves, and Fairy Magic, and each of them has their own merits. Tolkien writes that the words elf and fairy are equivalent, but that fairy is a Tudor word popularized by authors like Spenser, Shakespeare and Drayton. Tolkien makes a distinction between fairy stories, dream tales, and adventure, wonder- or marvel stories. More on Tolkien later.
One early source about fairies are the Child Ballads. The elves in these ballads tend appear suddenly and steal people away -- babes, maidens, queens and poets alike. Some are summoned by blowing horns, like Isabel's Fairy Knight; some appear beneath special trees, like the Queen of Fairy before Thomas the Rhymer; others pierce their victim's hearts with darts, like the Elfking in King Orefo.
Or these stories use the fairies as boogie-men in cautionary tales for children. One example is the Kelpie that takes the form of a horse and tricks children into riding it, whereupon it jumps into the nearest pool or river and drowns them.
The old stories present the folk of Faerie as strange to or unmoved by human morality or desires. They are elemental and tricky like thunder and lightning, or a rip-tide in the ocean.
Then there are the fairies of the Mabinogion, the Arthurian Romances, and the lays of Marie de France. In these, knights summon otherworldly lovers by blowing horns, ladling water out of fountains, or putting on rings. Typically these fairy women aid the knight in a quest or redress some wrong done by a mortal court. Or else the knights camp out in an old haunted castle and risk being eaten (or worse) by an ugly, riddling spirit woman who usually turns into a beautiful bride by the time morning dawns and the knight has solved three riddles.
These medieval stories present fairies as foils to the mortal courts, and even the Courts of Heaven and Hell. The fairies are both friend and foe simultaneously -- dangerous as chaotic beings living outside the walls of civilization and beneficial as magical helpers. Treating with them requires navigating taboos and prohibitions alien to mortal custom. Almost always, the mortal breaks the rule -- they open the forbidden door, they speak the fairy lover's name, they taste the brew in the cauldron -- and bring ruin, wrath and lamentation down upon themselves.
Tolkien theorizes that after the age of Enlightenment, Faerie began to be depicted in the language of rationality and science. Elvin glamour became finesse. This led to a kind of "domesticated" fairy, the Flower Fairy. He places the blame for teeny-tiny fairies dressed in flower petals with deelybopper antenna squarely on Drayton's Nymphidia.
Between Drayton, Spenser and Shakespeare, the fairies became agents of satire, allegory, and the author's plot needs (the fairies made him do it!). Sometime around this point, elves and fairies begin to be relegated to the nursery and peasant wisdom. In 1889, this (according to Tolkien) prompted Andrew Lang to complain in the Lilac Fairy Book, "these fairies try to be funny and fail, and try to preach and succeed."
Another rationalization is to explain fairies as "savage" Northern European tribes of pygmies or Picts, long ago driven into the hinter-lands by the Romans or other civilized peoples.
From the flower fairies and anthropological fairies, it's a short jump to Puck of Pook's Hill, and Rudyard Kipling's "Puck's Song." In the song, Puck sings about the rise and fall of human empires and cities. We get the sense that the fairies are long-lived, and will continue to exist long after the last human ruin has crumbled. Kipling's Puck is diminutive and pointy eared, and he appears by accident after some children perform A Mid-Summer Night's Dream on Mid-Summer Night.
Now we get to Tolkien. The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings. On Fairy Stories. In his essay, Tolkien says of the Elves: "Elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered..."
He says of Fairy Magic:
And of Faerie in general: Faerie cannot be caught within a net of words.
In Tolkien's works, Elves are so connected with Nature that they appear "supernatural." Their immortality sunders them from humankind, who is given the gift of death. This makes the Elves weary preservers of nature. Tolkien's Elves are also caught up in Tolkien's theme of the One Ring of Power, which is "Absolute power corrupts absolutely"; therefore, Tolkien's Elves have the unenviable choice of watching the nature and world they love and are intimately connected with fade away, or becoming corrupted by power that could preserve it.
Tolkien set the mold for the fantasy genre.
Since Tolkien, there have been a few other approaches to Elves and Faerie.
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fairies in The Mists of Avalon (1982) are beings that inhabit a kind of parallel world. Faerie, such as it is, is portrayed as an other-worldly haven for an enclave practicing the old ways of Goddess Religion. It is a mist-filled place removed from the advances of Christianity and male-centric civilizations. The Fairies who do appear seem part-and-parcel of a magical, parallel-realm accessible only to those with The Sight. This realm, or possibly The Sight used to see it, is malleable to observers' expectations or state.
More modern Faerie seems to have pushed the immortality, removal, and indifference so far that it suffers from a kind of stasis or arrested development.
Prince Shadowbow (1985), by Sherri S Tepper, shows a Faerie that is fragile and must seek renewal through the more vital mortal world.
In War for the Oaks (1987), by Emma Bull, the folk of Faerie seem drawn to human music and movies to such an extent that the mortal protagonist asks the Queen of the Unseelie Court if there isn't anything she hasn't stolen from a movie. They seem to not understand love and death.
Patricia C. Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red (1989) presents a renaissance England fairy court, with magical court intrigues. One of the story's arcs concerns the nature of the connection between the Mortal and Faerie realms. "Mortal lands are our stability," says Wrede's Fairy Queen, "Without them we would fade to mist and shadows."
Ellen Kushner, in Thomas the Rhymer, (1990) has the Queen of Fairy tell Thomas that Elves are drawn to Humans because they burn bright, with a kind of fire which sustains them. Later Thomas opines that Fairies are bad liars because living in Faerie has blunted their ability to invent. In one of her last appearances, the Queen reports that she cannot change (and possibly cannot love because that would require change).
These previous four stories share Terri Windling as an editor. All though they they are long-lived or immortal, partake of magic, and have a separate fate from humanity, "Windling Elves" do not appear to have the Tolkien Elves' supernatural connection to the natural world -- their magic stems from their removal from the natural world; their other-worldliness is rooted in by their inability to understand moral emotion.
I'm almost forgetting Charles de Lint -- his Elves of European descent are close to Tolkien's; his expansion on them is to have them interact with Native American nature spirits.
And I've almost forgotten Brian Froud's Fairies. I want to be flippant and call them Muppet Fairies because of Froud's influence on the movies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. I admit my own ambiguity of feeling toward Froud's Fairies. On one hand, I love Labyrinth for the stunning visuals, artistry, and costuming. But I used to have a friend whom I used to share the tag-line "Love me, fear me, do what I say, and I will be your slave forever" as a joke. I feel the same way about Dark Crystal, only I loved the intricate freaky magic -- even if it was hard to find just one joke in the overwrought melodrama. If I were pressed, I'd say that Froud's art in general is in touch with Faerie as wonder; Labyrinth is in touch with fairy as trickster; and Dark Crystal is in touch with a "wholistic" politics and aesthetic.
Oh yeah, and then there are the D&D Elves. And Hobbits. Um... I think these count as humans with pointy ears. With the copyright filed off.
To summarize, Faerie illuminates our relationships with and attitudes toward nature, civilization, modes of thought, and the human condition. The Realm of Faerie has ranged from the Elemental, to the Outlandish, to the Preserving Sanctuary. Faerie magic shows us how we love, what we fear, and how we die.
When I write about Faerie, I want to partake of the Tolkien essence of it. I want my Elves to shine a different light (and shadow) on the truth. I want them to reveal the wonder of the connected world. And I want the reader to risk peril in the hope of transformation.
I said I'd post my notes. So, without further ado....
Dwarves, Gobblins, Dragons, Trolls, Elves and Fairies have been written about for a very long time. There are several approaches to take when writing about Faerie, Elves, and Fairy Magic, and each of them has their own merits. Tolkien writes that the words elf and fairy are equivalent, but that fairy is a Tudor word popularized by authors like Spenser, Shakespeare and Drayton. Tolkien makes a distinction between fairy stories, dream tales, and adventure, wonder- or marvel stories. More on Tolkien later.
One early source about fairies are the Child Ballads. The elves in these ballads tend appear suddenly and steal people away -- babes, maidens, queens and poets alike. Some are summoned by blowing horns, like Isabel's Fairy Knight; some appear beneath special trees, like the Queen of Fairy before Thomas the Rhymer; others pierce their victim's hearts with darts, like the Elfking in King Orefo.
Or these stories use the fairies as boogie-men in cautionary tales for children. One example is the Kelpie that takes the form of a horse and tricks children into riding it, whereupon it jumps into the nearest pool or river and drowns them.
The old stories present the folk of Faerie as strange to or unmoved by human morality or desires. They are elemental and tricky like thunder and lightning, or a rip-tide in the ocean.
Then there are the fairies of the Mabinogion, the Arthurian Romances, and the lays of Marie de France. In these, knights summon otherworldly lovers by blowing horns, ladling water out of fountains, or putting on rings. Typically these fairy women aid the knight in a quest or redress some wrong done by a mortal court. Or else the knights camp out in an old haunted castle and risk being eaten (or worse) by an ugly, riddling spirit woman who usually turns into a beautiful bride by the time morning dawns and the knight has solved three riddles.
These medieval stories present fairies as foils to the mortal courts, and even the Courts of Heaven and Hell. The fairies are both friend and foe simultaneously -- dangerous as chaotic beings living outside the walls of civilization and beneficial as magical helpers. Treating with them requires navigating taboos and prohibitions alien to mortal custom. Almost always, the mortal breaks the rule -- they open the forbidden door, they speak the fairy lover's name, they taste the brew in the cauldron -- and bring ruin, wrath and lamentation down upon themselves.
Tolkien theorizes that after the age of Enlightenment, Faerie began to be depicted in the language of rationality and science. Elvin glamour became finesse. This led to a kind of "domesticated" fairy, the Flower Fairy. He places the blame for teeny-tiny fairies dressed in flower petals with deelybopper antenna squarely on Drayton's Nymphidia.
Between Drayton, Spenser and Shakespeare, the fairies became agents of satire, allegory, and the author's plot needs (the fairies made him do it!). Sometime around this point, elves and fairies begin to be relegated to the nursery and peasant wisdom. In 1889, this (according to Tolkien) prompted Andrew Lang to complain in the Lilac Fairy Book, "these fairies try to be funny and fail, and try to preach and succeed."
Another rationalization is to explain fairies as "savage" Northern European tribes of pygmies or Picts, long ago driven into the hinter-lands by the Romans or other civilized peoples.
From the flower fairies and anthropological fairies, it's a short jump to Puck of Pook's Hill, and Rudyard Kipling's "Puck's Song." In the song, Puck sings about the rise and fall of human empires and cities. We get the sense that the fairies are long-lived, and will continue to exist long after the last human ruin has crumbled. Kipling's Puck is diminutive and pointy eared, and he appears by accident after some children perform A Mid-Summer Night's Dream on Mid-Summer Night.
Now we get to Tolkien. The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings. On Fairy Stories. In his essay, Tolkien says of the Elves: "Elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered..."
He says of Fairy Magic:
- "The part of magic [faeries] wield is power to play on the desires of [man's] body and heart."
- Fairy magic satisfies the desire to survey space and time and commune with other living things.
- Fairy magic enables the realization of imagined wonder.
- The magic of faerie re-enchants the familiar with its wonder-ful connection to the natural, as opposed to mortal magic which is concerned with willing power over nature.
- There's a distinction between myth and history. Historical people and places become attached to mythic ones.
- Fairy stories are mythic tales.
- Fairy-tales confound Comparative Folk-lore's list of correspondences and story element concordances.
- Fairy stories are mystical toward the supernatural, magical toward nature, and the beings of Faerie regard mortals with pity and scorn.
- Fairy stories contain prohibitions.
And of Faerie in general: Faerie cannot be caught within a net of words.
In Tolkien's works, Elves are so connected with Nature that they appear "supernatural." Their immortality sunders them from humankind, who is given the gift of death. This makes the Elves weary preservers of nature. Tolkien's Elves are also caught up in Tolkien's theme of the One Ring of Power, which is "Absolute power corrupts absolutely"; therefore, Tolkien's Elves have the unenviable choice of watching the nature and world they love and are intimately connected with fade away, or becoming corrupted by power that could preserve it.
Tolkien set the mold for the fantasy genre.
Since Tolkien, there have been a few other approaches to Elves and Faerie.
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fairies in The Mists of Avalon (1982) are beings that inhabit a kind of parallel world. Faerie, such as it is, is portrayed as an other-worldly haven for an enclave practicing the old ways of Goddess Religion. It is a mist-filled place removed from the advances of Christianity and male-centric civilizations. The Fairies who do appear seem part-and-parcel of a magical, parallel-realm accessible only to those with The Sight. This realm, or possibly The Sight used to see it, is malleable to observers' expectations or state.
More modern Faerie seems to have pushed the immortality, removal, and indifference so far that it suffers from a kind of stasis or arrested development.
Prince Shadowbow (1985), by Sherri S Tepper, shows a Faerie that is fragile and must seek renewal through the more vital mortal world.
In War for the Oaks (1987), by Emma Bull, the folk of Faerie seem drawn to human music and movies to such an extent that the mortal protagonist asks the Queen of the Unseelie Court if there isn't anything she hasn't stolen from a movie. They seem to not understand love and death.
Patricia C. Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red (1989) presents a renaissance England fairy court, with magical court intrigues. One of the story's arcs concerns the nature of the connection between the Mortal and Faerie realms. "Mortal lands are our stability," says Wrede's Fairy Queen, "Without them we would fade to mist and shadows."
Ellen Kushner, in Thomas the Rhymer, (1990) has the Queen of Fairy tell Thomas that Elves are drawn to Humans because they burn bright, with a kind of fire which sustains them. Later Thomas opines that Fairies are bad liars because living in Faerie has blunted their ability to invent. In one of her last appearances, the Queen reports that she cannot change (and possibly cannot love because that would require change).
These previous four stories share Terri Windling as an editor. All though they they are long-lived or immortal, partake of magic, and have a separate fate from humanity, "Windling Elves" do not appear to have the Tolkien Elves' supernatural connection to the natural world -- their magic stems from their removal from the natural world; their other-worldliness is rooted in by their inability to understand moral emotion.
I'm almost forgetting Charles de Lint -- his Elves of European descent are close to Tolkien's; his expansion on them is to have them interact with Native American nature spirits.
And I've almost forgotten Brian Froud's Fairies. I want to be flippant and call them Muppet Fairies because of Froud's influence on the movies The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. I admit my own ambiguity of feeling toward Froud's Fairies. On one hand, I love Labyrinth for the stunning visuals, artistry, and costuming. But I used to have a friend whom I used to share the tag-line "Love me, fear me, do what I say, and I will be your slave forever" as a joke. I feel the same way about Dark Crystal, only I loved the intricate freaky magic -- even if it was hard to find just one joke in the overwrought melodrama. If I were pressed, I'd say that Froud's art in general is in touch with Faerie as wonder; Labyrinth is in touch with fairy as trickster; and Dark Crystal is in touch with a "wholistic" politics and aesthetic.
Oh yeah, and then there are the D&D Elves. And Hobbits. Um... I think these count as humans with pointy ears. With the copyright filed off.
To summarize, Faerie illuminates our relationships with and attitudes toward nature, civilization, modes of thought, and the human condition. The Realm of Faerie has ranged from the Elemental, to the Outlandish, to the Preserving Sanctuary. Faerie magic shows us how we love, what we fear, and how we die.
When I write about Faerie, I want to partake of the Tolkien essence of it. I want my Elves to shine a different light (and shadow) on the truth. I want them to reveal the wonder of the connected world. And I want the reader to risk peril in the hope of transformation.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Touch Something
A long time ago, when youth was forever, I read a collection of essays by Jane Yolen called "Touch Magic." The book shaped the way I think about story, and I find myself re-reading it every other year or so. Recently I was skimming through it to try to find the source of the words in this blog's masthead: mystery, BEGUILEMENT, portents, WONDER, awe, CONNECTION, majesty, SURPRISE. I thought if I could go back to the source, I would have a good starting point to talk about story and story critique.
Ms. Yolen does have a similar (shorter) list in her book, but it appears over the years I've changed some of the words when I adopted her list, or else my list is the offspring of "Touch Magic" and Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories." And it looks like I've gotten a little mixed up with the list from The Player: "Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mostly happy endings."
So much for sources...onto the critique process.
At the Wordos table, we do a lot of critique, and it is common for folks who are new to do "safe" critiques and focus on manuscript mechanics: syntax, formatting, and grammar. These are fine things to focus on, especially if critiquing manuscripts is a new pastime or you don't want to offend an older author. Folks with more experience will look at and focus on plot mechanics and plot logic holes. This works well for stories that follow the seven-point plot form, less so for stories breaking out of that mold.
To get back to Jane Yolen's "Touch Magic," what I want to address is a story's heart. A story works well when the reader discovers an Ah-ha! moment or when one of the characters (and by extension the reader) makes a discovery. A story's heart is bound up with the moral or message the story brings to a reader. Yes: moral -- a tricky word to navigate.
One of the subjects in "Touch Magic" is how the storyteller is telling a truth about themselves disguised as a truth about the world. And so my list: mystery BEGUILEMENT portents WONDER awe CONNECTION majesty SURPRISE. When a story works well for me, it reasonates with my list. It shows how a particular character, and by extension the reader, find their place in the world through the choices they make. Rather than publicly critique another's work, I'll make something up --
-- This is just a start. I can hear the critiques now, "The tone was distant," or "I wanted to know more about the characters, especially Nell." And I'm sure that I've done something wrong with commas. But the story can go on because the mother has knowledge about her daughter's future; and what actions she takes to help or hinder her daughter's marriage will not only reveal Nell's character, but speak to mothers' hopes, the nature of fore-knowledge, mother-in-law relations, and how the act of looking at the future "melts" it.
Yes; this story might not resonate with everyone -- and what story could? But a story spun poorly from this fragment will speak only to gold-diggers. Yes, most parents want their children to marry well and produce grandchildren -- but that's not a deep truth. (Oh, I'm going to get into trouble for using the phrase "deep truth," but let me defend myself by pointing readers to various market's guidelines and lists of worn ideas and say that it's harder to produce a resonate story starting from the ideas in these lists of don'ts.)
A well-spun story has a greater chance of resonating with a wider audience -- of speaking their truths. Speaking an audience's truth gives them a glimpse at a world map, one that has a "you are here" arrow on it -- a map that helps them to navigate morals.
When I critique, sure; I want the main character to solve their problems -- but I also to be awed by the majesty of the world. I want to be filled with wonder and beguiled by mystery. I want to be surprised by portents. And I especially want the story to say something about how the choices we make transform the connections between ourselves and the world.
And... okay -- I'll admit it -- a little well-crafted, artfully done sex wouldn't be so bad. Er -- sex scene. Scene. Written. Quick! Someone, give me a fade to black!
Ms. Yolen does have a similar (shorter) list in her book, but it appears over the years I've changed some of the words when I adopted her list, or else my list is the offspring of "Touch Magic" and Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories." And it looks like I've gotten a little mixed up with the list from The Player: "Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mostly happy endings."
So much for sources...onto the critique process.
At the Wordos table, we do a lot of critique, and it is common for folks who are new to do "safe" critiques and focus on manuscript mechanics: syntax, formatting, and grammar. These are fine things to focus on, especially if critiquing manuscripts is a new pastime or you don't want to offend an older author. Folks with more experience will look at and focus on plot mechanics and plot logic holes. This works well for stories that follow the seven-point plot form, less so for stories breaking out of that mold.
To get back to Jane Yolen's "Touch Magic," what I want to address is a story's heart. A story works well when the reader discovers an Ah-ha! moment or when one of the characters (and by extension the reader) makes a discovery. A story's heart is bound up with the moral or message the story brings to a reader. Yes: moral -- a tricky word to navigate.
One of the subjects in "Touch Magic" is how the storyteller is telling a truth about themselves disguised as a truth about the world. And so my list: mystery BEGUILEMENT portents WONDER awe CONNECTION majesty SURPRISE. When a story works well for me, it reasonates with my list. It shows how a particular character, and by extension the reader, find their place in the world through the choices they make. Rather than publicly critique another's work, I'll make something up --
High above the world, the snowflake began around a grain of dust. The wind buffeted it high and low, and from a hexagonal plate six triangular arms grew. Heavier now, the snowflake fluttered ground-ward. It fell onto the black mitten of Nell. She brought her hand close to her once-young eyes, squinted at the crystal and saw silver crowns. Good, but she must know more. With her free hand, she fumbled her glasses down her nose and peered over the lenses. White birds' wings entwined in frozen branches. Before she could look longer, the snowflake melted from the heat of her breath and hand. Nell knew her daughter would marry the old lord. But she had seen no bells or flowers, no natal stars. She hurried home.
-- This is just a start. I can hear the critiques now, "The tone was distant," or "I wanted to know more about the characters, especially Nell." And I'm sure that I've done something wrong with commas. But the story can go on because the mother has knowledge about her daughter's future; and what actions she takes to help or hinder her daughter's marriage will not only reveal Nell's character, but speak to mothers' hopes, the nature of fore-knowledge, mother-in-law relations, and how the act of looking at the future "melts" it.
Yes; this story might not resonate with everyone -- and what story could? But a story spun poorly from this fragment will speak only to gold-diggers. Yes, most parents want their children to marry well and produce grandchildren -- but that's not a deep truth. (Oh, I'm going to get into trouble for using the phrase "deep truth," but let me defend myself by pointing readers to various market's guidelines and lists of worn ideas and say that it's harder to produce a resonate story starting from the ideas in these lists of don'ts.)
A well-spun story has a greater chance of resonating with a wider audience -- of speaking their truths. Speaking an audience's truth gives them a glimpse at a world map, one that has a "you are here" arrow on it -- a map that helps them to navigate morals.
When I critique, sure; I want the main character to solve their problems -- but I also to be awed by the majesty of the world. I want to be filled with wonder and beguiled by mystery. I want to be surprised by portents. And I especially want the story to say something about how the choices we make transform the connections between ourselves and the world.
And... okay -- I'll admit it -- a little well-crafted, artfully done sex wouldn't be so bad. Er -- sex scene. Scene. Written. Quick! Someone, give me a fade to black!
Friday, January 07, 2011
Post Christmas Style
The way that early January weekends fell this year, we hadn't gotten around to undecorating the Christmas Tree until January 7th. I suppose that's not too bad, considering that we resisted putting the tree up until about the 20th.
While undecorating, we like to take a few moments to organize the ornaments. We've got Victorian (flower fairies, and 1890's Santas), and Celestial (stars and the Egyptian Horus), and Holly-Jolly (little mettle bells and green glass hearts), and Origami (paper doves etc. hand folded by Mark) and Goofy (The Christmas Gargoyle, Light-up Klingon Bird of Prey, and glitter encrusted flying pig). And the ornaments that may wind up on the Island of Misfit Toys.
And then we have The Country Cute Ornaments.
Mark won't let me call them "Homestead" or "American Gothic." "Arts and Crafts" would come close, except we're not sure if these ornaments are missing the art or the craft part. "Little Old Lady" might be close, but takes too long to say -- and besides, we don't have any little porcelain owls, Beatrix Potter prints, or miniature garden gnomes.
Usually, Country Cute ornaments look handmade from raw materials found laying around. The wooden ones look like they were cut from a plank with a jigsaw. Paper ones are made from recycled holiday cards or wrapping paper (canning jar lid optional). They frequently feature a star, a heart, or a flower in their design.
The most unsettling thing, however, about the Country Cute Ornament is the gradual and horrible discovery I made:
JOHN (holding up small pine cone on a red ribbon): "Do we have a natural group yet?"
MARK: "No." (Uses Perky Voice) "That's Country Cute."
JOHN: "Oh, yeah; you're right." (Puts cone into Country Cute Pile. Goes to tree and holds up sand dollar with red ribbons): "Oh, this is nice."
MARK (secretly smiling): "Put it in the Country Cute pile."
JOHN (slightly horrified): "But, this isn't... (holds ornament over the collection)... oh! It is." (Goes over to tree, picks up African shaker things). "These are not Country Cute."
MARK (opening smiling): "Country Cute."
JOHN: "Augh! No! They are!" (Looks confoundedly at the purple and green basket-weave design on the miniature shaker gourds) "How...?"
MARK (turning up the Perky Voice a notch): "They're African Country Cute!"
JOHN (noticing a stain glass angel created by Mark's mother): "What's this angel doing here? I like your mother's angels."
MARK: "John, that angel's holding a small, white ribbon rose! (Openly evil in his perkiness) "And John, you like Country Cute."
I looked more closely at the stain glass angel Mary made, seeing for the first time the rose for what it was, and then was struck by metal ribbon trim that was the angel's halo: like a Barbie tiara, it had a heart in it.
I turned to the brown Papier-mâché Solstice Deer (with pearl necklace), but it gave me no solace, being Gay Country Cute.
Mark was right. It was true. I liked the Country Cute aesthetic. Somewhere deep inside my fiber, I want to hang little red-painted, star-shaped pieces of plywood around the house. I want to stencil sky blue bird silhouettes along the upper reaches of our walls. And I want stain glass angels in the windows.
All I ask is this: By all that's holy, please -- oh please -- don't let me slide into The Little Old Lady Aesthetic!
Augh. I need to go get some lasers or chrome-plated gears or something...
While undecorating, we like to take a few moments to organize the ornaments. We've got Victorian (flower fairies, and 1890's Santas), and Celestial (stars and the Egyptian Horus), and Holly-Jolly (little mettle bells and green glass hearts), and Origami (paper doves etc. hand folded by Mark) and Goofy (The Christmas Gargoyle, Light-up Klingon Bird of Prey, and glitter encrusted flying pig). And the ornaments that may wind up on the Island of Misfit Toys.
And then we have The Country Cute Ornaments.
Mark won't let me call them "Homestead" or "American Gothic." "Arts and Crafts" would come close, except we're not sure if these ornaments are missing the art or the craft part. "Little Old Lady" might be close, but takes too long to say -- and besides, we don't have any little porcelain owls, Beatrix Potter prints, or miniature garden gnomes.
Usually, Country Cute ornaments look handmade from raw materials found laying around. The wooden ones look like they were cut from a plank with a jigsaw. Paper ones are made from recycled holiday cards or wrapping paper (canning jar lid optional). They frequently feature a star, a heart, or a flower in their design.
The most unsettling thing, however, about the Country Cute Ornament is the gradual and horrible discovery I made:
JOHN (holding up small pine cone on a red ribbon): "Do we have a natural group yet?"
MARK: "No." (Uses Perky Voice) "That's Country Cute."
JOHN: "Oh, yeah; you're right." (Puts cone into Country Cute Pile. Goes to tree and holds up sand dollar with red ribbons): "Oh, this is nice."
MARK (secretly smiling): "Put it in the Country Cute pile."
JOHN (slightly horrified): "But, this isn't... (holds ornament over the collection)... oh! It is." (Goes over to tree, picks up African shaker things). "These are not Country Cute."
MARK (opening smiling): "Country Cute."
JOHN: "Augh! No! They are!" (Looks confoundedly at the purple and green basket-weave design on the miniature shaker gourds) "How...?"
MARK (turning up the Perky Voice a notch): "They're African Country Cute!"
JOHN (noticing a stain glass angel created by Mark's mother): "What's this angel doing here? I like your mother's angels."
MARK: "John, that angel's holding a small, white ribbon rose! (Openly evil in his perkiness) "And John, you like Country Cute."
I looked more closely at the stain glass angel Mary made, seeing for the first time the rose for what it was, and then was struck by metal ribbon trim that was the angel's halo: like a Barbie tiara, it had a heart in it.
I turned to the brown Papier-mâché Solstice Deer (with pearl necklace), but it gave me no solace, being Gay Country Cute.
Mark was right. It was true. I liked the Country Cute aesthetic. Somewhere deep inside my fiber, I want to hang little red-painted, star-shaped pieces of plywood around the house. I want to stencil sky blue bird silhouettes along the upper reaches of our walls. And I want stain glass angels in the windows.
All I ask is this: By all that's holy, please -- oh please -- don't let me slide into The Little Old Lady Aesthetic!
Augh. I need to go get some lasers or chrome-plated gears or something...
Tuesday, January 04, 2011
What Boundary Do You Invoke?
In late December, I created an art display in Second Life. Unless you have a way to connect to the internet, you could not have visited it -- and in the spirit of keeping my computer clutter down, I removed it shortly after New Year's. So I will describe it for you.
There is a virtual brick library building -- neo-Grecian style -- near an electronic shore. Near one side of the library, wind chimes hang in the eternal blossoms of a cherry tree. Pentatonic notes ring randomly over rendered stone benches. A short way away is a large, perfectly circular labyrinth marked upon the grassy slope above the shore. These things remain in place; what follows was the installation.
Floating waist-high in a circuit around the labyrinth's perimeter were ten words: "What boundary do you invoke with the words 'Merry Christmas'?" To enter the twisting geometric path one had to cross the whirling words' orbit.
The installation was not a critique of the Christmas holiday. Words delimit concepts -- even as they attempt to bridge them -- and the intent of the installation was to raise awareness of relationships during the Christmas season.
"Merry Christmas" is short for "I wish you a Merry Christmas," or "May God send you a Merry Christmas." Hidden in the December salutation (and valediction) are wishes, hopes and prayers for others.
The orbiting words were a reminder that we stand in a personal intersection of faith, circumstance, hopes and wishes -- and that two words, "Merry Christmas" are chock full of hidden assumptions about ourselves, others, and our relationship as wish- and prayer-makers to the world.
So, as Twelfth Night and the Feast of Epiphany approach, I ask again: "What boundary do you invoke with the words 'Merry Christmas'?"
There is a virtual brick library building -- neo-Grecian style -- near an electronic shore. Near one side of the library, wind chimes hang in the eternal blossoms of a cherry tree. Pentatonic notes ring randomly over rendered stone benches. A short way away is a large, perfectly circular labyrinth marked upon the grassy slope above the shore. These things remain in place; what follows was the installation.
Floating waist-high in a circuit around the labyrinth's perimeter were ten words: "What boundary do you invoke with the words 'Merry Christmas'?" To enter the twisting geometric path one had to cross the whirling words' orbit.
The installation was not a critique of the Christmas holiday. Words delimit concepts -- even as they attempt to bridge them -- and the intent of the installation was to raise awareness of relationships during the Christmas season.
"Merry Christmas" is short for "I wish you a Merry Christmas," or "May God send you a Merry Christmas." Hidden in the December salutation (and valediction) are wishes, hopes and prayers for others.
The orbiting words were a reminder that we stand in a personal intersection of faith, circumstance, hopes and wishes -- and that two words, "Merry Christmas" are chock full of hidden assumptions about ourselves, others, and our relationship as wish- and prayer-makers to the world.
So, as Twelfth Night and the Feast of Epiphany approach, I ask again: "What boundary do you invoke with the words 'Merry Christmas'?"
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Halogen Mania and Information Essay
Today I replaced a 300 watt, 120 volt halogen bulb in a torchiere. Oh. My. Goodness. Words cannot express the exuberance that flooded through me this morning when I transformed our dingy gray morning kitchen nook into a Shrine of Brightness. I probably frightened a half-dozen Twitter and Facebook followers with my manic hymns of thanksgiving (and video).
All I can say is that last Winter's "creative slump" is very definitely connected with the light levels. So don't take away my electric Summer unless you want a reenactment of Psycho, directed by Ingmar Bergman.
In other news, Amanda on Facebook asked: "At what point does society decide we've collectively stored enough information about ourselves? We worry about losing any scrap of information, but, how much information has been lost to the sands of time already? Will what we save now really matter? Would it have helped us to know how many times a day Beethoven picked his nose or how he drank his tea?"
And my light-induced reply:
"Our storage habits are cheap right now; if they became more expensive they'd slow down. Yes; we're building a gigantic data Ozymandias -- but! Marketers take the information and use it to sell stuff. Google and FB make the storage cheap because they've tricked us into becoming data miners for our friends and family.
So sure: if you pick your nose at the same rate and in the same style as Beethoven, then Have I Got A Deal For You! And if you drink Lipton black tea an double strength, steeped for 5 minutes in boiling water, then may I suggest this Sri Lankan Assam tea pack and electric kettle? And we all know that the tea-drinking constituency is an important voting bloc.
Now add to that how Picasa and Google Pics can help you use facial recognition software to help you "organize" your pictures and we've all got a little virtual piece of the Panopticon right in our living rooms, dens, offices, and bedrooms.
So yes, electronic information hoarding is about vanity; it's also about money and power. Er, Yes; I love the freedom of a Net Neutral internet. Why do you ask?
So -- to apply a short essay I read about Wikileaks and how conspiracies manage information -- to stop the endless data collection, we need to make it harder for the conspiracies (Google, FB) to trade information with each other so they are unable to pursue their goal (selling stuff).
The essay posited that Wikileaks does this by forcing the conspiracies to tighten communication between cells in an attempt to control information, thus stifling themselves into ineffectiveness.
I don't know if this leads to a consumer (us) strategy of posting more Cat Videos (and porn) to fill up the networks' bandwidth, or of adapting a strategy of mis-information about ourselves, or of creating fake web surfing applications to use our accounts to surf random sites and make web browser cookies unreliable or what.
But here's where the vanity part of it comes in -- we want our friends and family (and potential readers for those of us who are writers) to be able to find us and see what's up with us. So there is little chance a Bayesian content generator FB app being written or widely adapted soon.
And of course, once Google and FB no longer can use our accounts to build marketable profiles of our consumer and voting habits, there goes "I can haz free InterNets Now."
All I can say is that last Winter's "creative slump" is very definitely connected with the light levels. So don't take away my electric Summer unless you want a reenactment of Psycho, directed by Ingmar Bergman.
In other news, Amanda on Facebook asked: "At what point does society decide we've collectively stored enough information about ourselves? We worry about losing any scrap of information, but, how much information has been lost to the sands of time already? Will what we save now really matter? Would it have helped us to know how many times a day Beethoven picked his nose or how he drank his tea?"
And my light-induced reply:
"Our storage habits are cheap right now; if they became more expensive they'd slow down. Yes; we're building a gigantic data Ozymandias -- but! Marketers take the information and use it to sell stuff. Google and FB make the storage cheap because they've tricked us into becoming data miners for our friends and family.
So sure: if you pick your nose at the same rate and in the same style as Beethoven, then Have I Got A Deal For You! And if you drink Lipton black tea an double strength, steeped for 5 minutes in boiling water, then may I suggest this Sri Lankan Assam tea pack and electric kettle? And we all know that the tea-drinking constituency is an important voting bloc.
Now add to that how Picasa and Google Pics can help you use facial recognition software to help you "organize" your pictures and we've all got a little virtual piece of the Panopticon right in our living rooms, dens, offices, and bedrooms.
So yes, electronic information hoarding is about vanity; it's also about money and power. Er, Yes; I love the freedom of a Net Neutral internet. Why do you ask?
So -- to apply a short essay I read about Wikileaks and how conspiracies manage information -- to stop the endless data collection, we need to make it harder for the conspiracies (Google, FB) to trade information with each other so they are unable to pursue their goal (selling stuff).
The essay posited that Wikileaks does this by forcing the conspiracies to tighten communication between cells in an attempt to control information, thus stifling themselves into ineffectiveness.
I don't know if this leads to a consumer (us) strategy of posting more Cat Videos (and porn) to fill up the networks' bandwidth, or of adapting a strategy of mis-information about ourselves, or of creating fake web surfing applications to use our accounts to surf random sites and make web browser cookies unreliable or what.
But here's where the vanity part of it comes in -- we want our friends and family (and potential readers for those of us who are writers) to be able to find us and see what's up with us. So there is little chance a Bayesian content generator FB app being written or widely adapted soon.
And of course, once Google and FB no longer can use our accounts to build marketable profiles of our consumer and voting habits, there goes "I can haz free InterNets Now."
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Short Story Business Model
Lately I've been thinking about the business model for writing and how it affects the short story form, writing as a vocation, and the publishing process.
It must be in the stars or something. For starters, KWAX is holding its bi-annual fund drive, Realms of Fantasy is closing (after a resurrection lasting 18 months), and I've just read about a web standard that would stream fonts.
For those of you just tuning in, there's a notion that writers write short stories, submit them to a market, the market buys the story and pays the author. The market turns around and submits a collection of stories it has bought to readers (and advertisers), and receives money for their efforts.
A writer at my level receives five cents a word from professional short story market sales. That's $50 for 1000 words. To put that into perspective, as a technology trainer and maintenance guy, I made roughly $20 an hour; so -- assuming I sold every story I ever wrote -- I'd have to write, edit, polish, and send out 400 words every hour (or, 2400 words in six hours every day) to make the same amount as I did helping folks with their computers (but without health insurance).
The short story submission process (at least for me) has a 90-95% rejection rate -- meaning in practice, I write ten times as much as I actually sell. (So to factor in non-sales, make that production rate 4,000 words an hour or 24,000 words in six hours in order to sell one 2400 word short story).
This is, of course, assuming that there are markets out there buying my short stories. There are, but if I limit myself to the science fiction and fantasy genres, the number of markets falls.
And this brings us to Realms of Fantasy, which is another sad statistic in the trend of paper publications versus electronic ones. Following the news of Realms' second death, the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, a free on-line speculative fiction market, Twittered that he was tired of being blamed for print media's death.
(As an aside, Clarkesworld pays ten cents a word. They publish two short stories a month and occasional collections. Authors may only be published in Clarkesworld twice a year. The stories I submit compete with those by Cat Rambo, Jay Lake, Mary Robinette Kowal, Robert Reed, Peter Watts, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman -- so it's sort of like Writers of the Future, only for seasoned writers; or the lottery.)
In summary: short story writers work hard to produce stories that have to be submitted multiple times before they're sold (if they sell at all) to a professional market. More experienced (and presumably better) writers sell more. And print markets are going away.
The question becomes: if the demise of Realms of Fantasy is part of a trend of subscription print publications giving away to free electronic publications, how should short story writers adapt?
The secondary question is: if the market shrinks so that only a few free on-line publications (i.e. Clarkesworld, or something like The New York Times) default into accidental monopolies, how can a new short story writer get published at all, much less make any kind of money?
One answer is: "Sorry, honey -- to quote Ms. Le Guin, 'writing to make money is a damn-fool idea.'" I think this is very true for the short story form. It seems to me the folks making a living writing are writing novels (except that only the Glam Stars of writing don't have some kind of day-job or sugar-spouse). So write because you like to write, because your short stories and a dollar will get you a cup of tea at the cafe.
Another answer is, in the age of the internet, writers (and other artists) might try to become their own editors, publishers, and debtors -- in other words, their own content providers.
Some folks post their writing and put an "electronic hat" at the end; a PayPal button and a text along the lines of "If you've enjoyed this story, please contribute whatever amount you'd like." I'm not sure how well this works. Based on my experiences busking at renaissance faires, it probably helps to be well known, have a little dog, or be five years old. And really loud.
Then there's the proposed streaming type face model. You pay me (the writer) a small monthly subscription fee, and that allows you access to my short stories. Bruce Holland Rogers does this -- he e-mails a short story a month to paid subscribers. I haven't spoken with Bruce about how well this works, but I do know that Bruce has a day job.
Of course, the difficulty with self-publishing is that one has to build a subscriber base. Which means marketing, social networking, and other business things that take away from time spent writing. Perhaps authors could band together to form a kind of "authors' web ring" -- in addition to the PayPal button at the end of a story, the author puts in a button that takes the reader to another story by another author in the ring. Your mileage with a distributed editorial board may vary.
To go in a different direction, I could widen my scope: write non-fiction (because, as Ellen Kushner notes, people say they only want to read The Truth), romance, or take a cue from Dan Brown and write cliffhanger-ending chapters in a thriller. Or would that simply delay the inevitable -- science fiction and fantasy are simply the first, but all the print markets are going?
Maybe in the age of the internet, the short story form and the written word are going by the wayside. Entertainment consumers want icons they can press, and content they can watch or listen to (and fast-forward through). I can see a hybrid web site with a story inventory like AnthologyBuilder only with Pandora's interface (wait, isn't that PodCastle, and Escape Pod?).
If written short stories are no longer in fashion, but audio-books and video are, perhaps I should create a training program that teaches people how to those. After all, isn't that what all those writing seminars and workshops are all about? Which isn't writing; it's writing about writing.
Or maybe I should just go work for Google.
Thoughts? Comments? Answers?
It must be in the stars or something. For starters, KWAX is holding its bi-annual fund drive, Realms of Fantasy is closing (after a resurrection lasting 18 months), and I've just read about a web standard that would stream fonts.
For those of you just tuning in, there's a notion that writers write short stories, submit them to a market, the market buys the story and pays the author. The market turns around and submits a collection of stories it has bought to readers (and advertisers), and receives money for their efforts.
A writer at my level receives five cents a word from professional short story market sales. That's $50 for 1000 words. To put that into perspective, as a technology trainer and maintenance guy, I made roughly $20 an hour; so -- assuming I sold every story I ever wrote -- I'd have to write, edit, polish, and send out 400 words every hour (or, 2400 words in six hours every day) to make the same amount as I did helping folks with their computers (but without health insurance).
The short story submission process (at least for me) has a 90-95% rejection rate -- meaning in practice, I write ten times as much as I actually sell. (So to factor in non-sales, make that production rate 4,000 words an hour or 24,000 words in six hours in order to sell one 2400 word short story).
This is, of course, assuming that there are markets out there buying my short stories. There are, but if I limit myself to the science fiction and fantasy genres, the number of markets falls.
And this brings us to Realms of Fantasy, which is another sad statistic in the trend of paper publications versus electronic ones. Following the news of Realms' second death, the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, a free on-line speculative fiction market, Twittered that he was tired of being blamed for print media's death.
(As an aside, Clarkesworld pays ten cents a word. They publish two short stories a month and occasional collections. Authors may only be published in Clarkesworld twice a year. The stories I submit compete with those by Cat Rambo, Jay Lake, Mary Robinette Kowal, Robert Reed, Peter Watts, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman -- so it's sort of like Writers of the Future, only for seasoned writers; or the lottery.)
In summary: short story writers work hard to produce stories that have to be submitted multiple times before they're sold (if they sell at all) to a professional market. More experienced (and presumably better) writers sell more. And print markets are going away.
The question becomes: if the demise of Realms of Fantasy is part of a trend of subscription print publications giving away to free electronic publications, how should short story writers adapt?
The secondary question is: if the market shrinks so that only a few free on-line publications (i.e. Clarkesworld, or something like The New York Times) default into accidental monopolies, how can a new short story writer get published at all, much less make any kind of money?
One answer is: "Sorry, honey -- to quote Ms. Le Guin, 'writing to make money is a damn-fool idea.'" I think this is very true for the short story form. It seems to me the folks making a living writing are writing novels (except that only the Glam Stars of writing don't have some kind of day-job or sugar-spouse). So write because you like to write, because your short stories and a dollar will get you a cup of tea at the cafe.
Another answer is, in the age of the internet, writers (and other artists) might try to become their own editors, publishers, and debtors -- in other words, their own content providers.
Some folks post their writing and put an "electronic hat" at the end; a PayPal button and a text along the lines of "If you've enjoyed this story, please contribute whatever amount you'd like." I'm not sure how well this works. Based on my experiences busking at renaissance faires, it probably helps to be well known, have a little dog, or be five years old. And really loud.
Then there's the proposed streaming type face model. You pay me (the writer) a small monthly subscription fee, and that allows you access to my short stories. Bruce Holland Rogers does this -- he e-mails a short story a month to paid subscribers. I haven't spoken with Bruce about how well this works, but I do know that Bruce has a day job.
Of course, the difficulty with self-publishing is that one has to build a subscriber base. Which means marketing, social networking, and other business things that take away from time spent writing. Perhaps authors could band together to form a kind of "authors' web ring" -- in addition to the PayPal button at the end of a story, the author puts in a button that takes the reader to another story by another author in the ring. Your mileage with a distributed editorial board may vary.
To go in a different direction, I could widen my scope: write non-fiction (because, as Ellen Kushner notes, people say they only want to read The Truth), romance, or take a cue from Dan Brown and write cliffhanger-ending chapters in a thriller. Or would that simply delay the inevitable -- science fiction and fantasy are simply the first, but all the print markets are going?
Maybe in the age of the internet, the short story form and the written word are going by the wayside. Entertainment consumers want icons they can press, and content they can watch or listen to (and fast-forward through). I can see a hybrid web site with a story inventory like AnthologyBuilder only with Pandora's interface (wait, isn't that PodCastle, and Escape Pod?).
If written short stories are no longer in fashion, but audio-books and video are, perhaps I should create a training program that teaches people how to those. After all, isn't that what all those writing seminars and workshops are all about? Which isn't writing; it's writing about writing.
Or maybe I should just go work for Google.
Thoughts? Comments? Answers?
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Writing Tarot Cards
It's that time of year when writers write about fortune tellers and the tarot. So I thought I'd post about things that make me wince when authors write about the cards in urban or historical fantasy.
The One-Card Spread. One mistake a writer can make is to reduce a character's tarot card reading into an interpretation of a single card. Focusing on only one card is akin to casting a horoscope based on a person's birth or sun sign, or assigning a character a personality based on hair color.
Most tarot readings involve dealing out about ten cards into what is called a spread. While some spreads have a card designated "the final outcome," not all spreads do. Remember, the final outcome card is always modified by the other cards. Generally, a spread will have cards for the recent past, the present, and a possible future; it will indicate resources and obstacles; and it will have a card that is indicative of the client's character or current state of mind.
An Excruciatingly Detailed Spread. This is the flip side to the previous pitfall. Unless you're writing a guide to giving readings, or a story for a tarot anthology, overly detailed readings are like overly detailed fight scenes. The more detail an author includes, the more likely someone familiar with tarot will spot a mistake (or at least a different interpretation). All the story's reader ultimately cares about is what the cards say and what they mean emotionally to a character.
Over-Specific Cartomancy. The fortune teller deals out the cards, looks at the client, and says, "Tonight, your boyfriend, Steve, will be hit by a red Matrix while he is walking back from Seven Eleven, sipping a Pepsi...." In the stories I've seen this level of detail in, the cards have been cursed to always foretell disaster.
Alas, the cards usually aren't that specific, and if you write them that way, the audience members will wonder why tarot readers haven't won the lottery. A lot.
Take a cue from the Pythia of Delphi and make any advice from the cards obscure (although if a character is convinced the King of Swords in the "obstacles" position is their mean old Uncle Ben, that's an entirely different matter).
Popular Misinterpretations. Probably the most common mistake authors make is forgetting that there are seventy-eight different tarot cards and focusing on one of the more famous ones. Unfortunately, the famous cards are commonly misunderstood because they have emotionally laden and misleading titles.
All Tarot Cards are from the Rider-Waite Deck. Most readers are familiar with the Rider-Waite deck, which is an author's freebie -- but don't forget a quick description if the cards are being used for those readers unfamiliar with them.
Tarot cards go back to medieval times (at least), and they looked differently than the Rider-Waite cards developed around the turn of the 20th century for the Order of the Golden Dawn. Remember to have your Regency, Elizabethan or Arthurian characters use precursors to the Rider-Waite deck. Older decks may have different suits. I've seen medieval (non-tarot) playing cards with suits based on hunting (leashes, horns, etc), and typically older tarot decks call the suit of wands or staves the suit of batons. I've also read a fantasy story where the suits were (I believe) ores, waves, flames, and clouds.
Contemporary decks may feature round cards, feminist themes, Art Nouveau aesthetics, collage decks, cat and dragon decks, and even a deck commissioned by Aleister Crowley (more on him below). There's even a deck based on the Rider-Waite deck where everyone is wearing clothing -- it's the sort of deck one could use to give a reading for one's grandmother and not have her have a heart attack when, say, The Lovers appear. (Assuming she didn't have a heart attack when the tarot cards were first mentioned.)
Aleister Crowley's Thoth Deck. Ah yes; I can already smell the stench of sulfur rising from the deck. Whenever an author wants to show that the tarot cards are evil, the card reader is evil, or that dirty work is afoot, out comes Crowley's Thoth Deck, with the Lust card (his version of the Strength card) right on top. It's the story equivalent of having a bad guy from a movie clack a rifle magazine, sell drugs, or molest children.
If you really want to show that the card reader is wicked, have them over-charge their clients, lead them on with promises of future secrets revealed at the next reading, and make them lie during readings to set the client up to fall in love with a fellow charlatan.
Remember, an ethical card reader will remind a client of the client's responsibility to make their own life choices, so if you want to show an evil reader, make their tarot reading style unethical.
The Tarot Cards Come Alive. This isn't so much wincable as it is has been done before in contemporary fantasy (and comic books), which is not too surprising since many modern tarot guides suggest that students have a focused daydream on a particular card as part of a meditation on its meaning.
Just, um, play nice with the card folks who are naked, okay?
The One-Card Spread. One mistake a writer can make is to reduce a character's tarot card reading into an interpretation of a single card. Focusing on only one card is akin to casting a horoscope based on a person's birth or sun sign, or assigning a character a personality based on hair color.
Most tarot readings involve dealing out about ten cards into what is called a spread. While some spreads have a card designated "the final outcome," not all spreads do. Remember, the final outcome card is always modified by the other cards. Generally, a spread will have cards for the recent past, the present, and a possible future; it will indicate resources and obstacles; and it will have a card that is indicative of the client's character or current state of mind.
An Excruciatingly Detailed Spread. This is the flip side to the previous pitfall. Unless you're writing a guide to giving readings, or a story for a tarot anthology, overly detailed readings are like overly detailed fight scenes. The more detail an author includes, the more likely someone familiar with tarot will spot a mistake (or at least a different interpretation). All the story's reader ultimately cares about is what the cards say and what they mean emotionally to a character.
Over-Specific Cartomancy. The fortune teller deals out the cards, looks at the client, and says, "Tonight, your boyfriend, Steve, will be hit by a red Matrix while he is walking back from Seven Eleven, sipping a Pepsi...." In the stories I've seen this level of detail in, the cards have been cursed to always foretell disaster.
Alas, the cards usually aren't that specific, and if you write them that way, the audience members will wonder why tarot readers haven't won the lottery. A lot.
Take a cue from the Pythia of Delphi and make any advice from the cards obscure (although if a character is convinced the King of Swords in the "obstacles" position is their mean old Uncle Ben, that's an entirely different matter).
Popular Misinterpretations. Probably the most common mistake authors make is forgetting that there are seventy-eight different tarot cards and focusing on one of the more famous ones. Unfortunately, the famous cards are commonly misunderstood because they have emotionally laden and misleading titles.
- The Death Card. Out of all the cards writers choose, Death is probably the most overused and abused tarot card in the deck. If a character has Death show up in their tarot card reading, that does not mean they are going to die; it means that they are going through some sort of transformation, like graduating from school. Repeat after me, "There is no death; only transformation."
- The Lovers Card. Second after Death, the Lovers card is the other most overused and abused tarot card. The Lovers is not, as its name implies, about falling in love, it's about choice. A character getting the Lovers in a tarot reading isn't assured of a good romance or love.
- The Devil Card. This card isn't about Lucifer, Satan, or the powers of Hell. It's about willfully being bound to things material and denying the spiritual aspects of the world.
All Tarot Cards are from the Rider-Waite Deck. Most readers are familiar with the Rider-Waite deck, which is an author's freebie -- but don't forget a quick description if the cards are being used for those readers unfamiliar with them.
Tarot cards go back to medieval times (at least), and they looked differently than the Rider-Waite cards developed around the turn of the 20th century for the Order of the Golden Dawn. Remember to have your Regency, Elizabethan or Arthurian characters use precursors to the Rider-Waite deck. Older decks may have different suits. I've seen medieval (non-tarot) playing cards with suits based on hunting (leashes, horns, etc), and typically older tarot decks call the suit of wands or staves the suit of batons. I've also read a fantasy story where the suits were (I believe) ores, waves, flames, and clouds.
Contemporary decks may feature round cards, feminist themes, Art Nouveau aesthetics, collage decks, cat and dragon decks, and even a deck commissioned by Aleister Crowley (more on him below). There's even a deck based on the Rider-Waite deck where everyone is wearing clothing -- it's the sort of deck one could use to give a reading for one's grandmother and not have her have a heart attack when, say, The Lovers appear. (Assuming she didn't have a heart attack when the tarot cards were first mentioned.)
Aleister Crowley's Thoth Deck. Ah yes; I can already smell the stench of sulfur rising from the deck. Whenever an author wants to show that the tarot cards are evil, the card reader is evil, or that dirty work is afoot, out comes Crowley's Thoth Deck, with the Lust card (his version of the Strength card) right on top. It's the story equivalent of having a bad guy from a movie clack a rifle magazine, sell drugs, or molest children.
If you really want to show that the card reader is wicked, have them over-charge their clients, lead them on with promises of future secrets revealed at the next reading, and make them lie during readings to set the client up to fall in love with a fellow charlatan.
Remember, an ethical card reader will remind a client of the client's responsibility to make their own life choices, so if you want to show an evil reader, make their tarot reading style unethical.
The Tarot Cards Come Alive. This isn't so much wincable as it is has been done before in contemporary fantasy (and comic books), which is not too surprising since many modern tarot guides suggest that students have a focused daydream on a particular card as part of a meditation on its meaning.
Just, um, play nice with the card folks who are naked, okay?
Saturday, August 28, 2010
The Downside of Electronic Submissions
I was speaking with some writer friends the other day about various professional markets which accept electronic submissions.
"Oh, it's wonderful," I said, "I love being able to send electronic manuscripts."
"Yeah," said somebody, "but the flip side is that I've heard people say, 'I was pretty sure that my story was bad, but I sent it anyway.' I mean, that's taking Don't Edit for the Editor a little too far." There followed tales of obvious first-draft stories submitted simply because submission was the click of a few buttons instead of a $5.27 visit to the post office. Then the conversation concluded with conjectures on which editor would be the last one to adopt on-line submissions.
At first I was going to comment here that sending sub-par manuscripts is simply disrespectful, not only to a magazine's editorial staff, but to yourself and your corpus of work.
Then I was going to say it seems like a good way to get slush readers to groan when they see your name at the top of a manuscript.
But the end result of writers too lazy to do another pass on manuscripts before hitting the Send Button-- the one that affects me and every other serious writer -- is that now when I get a rejection, I'm much more likely to get a form rejection.
Gee, thanks. Not that I expect editorial staff to critique, but it will make those very rare instances when they do take a moment to add additional comments all that more meaningful.
"Oh, it's wonderful," I said, "I love being able to send electronic manuscripts."
"Yeah," said somebody, "but the flip side is that I've heard people say, 'I was pretty sure that my story was bad, but I sent it anyway.' I mean, that's taking Don't Edit for the Editor a little too far." There followed tales of obvious first-draft stories submitted simply because submission was the click of a few buttons instead of a $5.27 visit to the post office. Then the conversation concluded with conjectures on which editor would be the last one to adopt on-line submissions.
At first I was going to comment here that sending sub-par manuscripts is simply disrespectful, not only to a magazine's editorial staff, but to yourself and your corpus of work.
Then I was going to say it seems like a good way to get slush readers to groan when they see your name at the top of a manuscript.
But the end result of writers too lazy to do another pass on manuscripts before hitting the Send Button-- the one that affects me and every other serious writer -- is that now when I get a rejection, I'm much more likely to get a form rejection.
Gee, thanks. Not that I expect editorial staff to critique, but it will make those very rare instances when they do take a moment to add additional comments all that more meaningful.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Meditations on Little Girl Protagonists
Blame it on Lucy Pevensie, Jill Pole, Polly Plummer, Sarah Williams and Lyra Belacqua, but once again I find myself resisting the urge to write an urban fantasy with Yet Another Girl-Child Heroine.
"Jill" is one of my default Jane Doe characters. When I'm jotting down a quick story idea, the first female name that pops into my head is usually Jill. Men are usually twenty-somethings named Fred.
[Oh Hell! I just realized I'm perilously close to re-writing Labyrinth (makes note to self on where not to take the story). And over the course of writing this entry, fifty year old infrastructure for downtown Eugene has caused an explosion and electrical fire in an underground vault in downtown Eugene. It's looking more and more likely that a large explosion is in my story's future.]
Back to child protagonists: A long time ago, a friend of a friend's child was the proto-typical bad little girl. We used to joke that she was a 35-year old divorcée trapped in an 8 year old's body. Her mother would dress her up as an angel for Halloween, and as soon as you could say Trick-or-Treat she'd ditched the halo and dressed up as a hooker. The next Halloween, she appeared as (I am not making this up) a vampire sex-goddess. Ironically, her mother was the head of the local chapter of Planned Parenthood.
The best thing about the proto-bad-girl was imagining what she would do as an adult: it involved seducing her good-girl friend to go riding off in a black halter-top on the back of a motorcycle with a leather vested, ponytailed, motorcycled dude named Snake for the benefit of giving the good girl's father an apoplexy.
And that underlies the dangers of girl-child protagonists.
"Jill" is one of my default Jane Doe characters. When I'm jotting down a quick story idea, the first female name that pops into my head is usually Jill. Men are usually twenty-somethings named Fred.
[Oh Hell! I just realized I'm perilously close to re-writing Labyrinth (makes note to self on where not to take the story). And over the course of writing this entry, fifty year old infrastructure for downtown Eugene has caused an explosion and electrical fire in an underground vault in downtown Eugene. It's looking more and more likely that a large explosion is in my story's future.]
Back to child protagonists: A long time ago, a friend of a friend's child was the proto-typical bad little girl. We used to joke that she was a 35-year old divorcée trapped in an 8 year old's body. Her mother would dress her up as an angel for Halloween, and as soon as you could say Trick-or-Treat she'd ditched the halo and dressed up as a hooker. The next Halloween, she appeared as (I am not making this up) a vampire sex-goddess. Ironically, her mother was the head of the local chapter of Planned Parenthood.
The best thing about the proto-bad-girl was imagining what she would do as an adult: it involved seducing her good-girl friend to go riding off in a black halter-top on the back of a motorcycle with a leather vested, ponytailed, motorcycled dude named Snake for the benefit of giving the good girl's father an apoplexy.
And that underlies the dangers of girl-child protagonists.
- They lend themselves to symbolism, and so we have the pure, faith-driven cypher, Lucy Pevensie, who triumphs over adversity solely by pluck.
- They become meditations on innocence, adulthood, and the loss of innocence, and so we have characters like Sarah Williams and Lyra Belacqua.
- Or, in my case, they become asexual, very clever adults trapped in a ten-year-old body. . . which, as I think about it, means I'm trying to re-write Anne Rice's vampire-child, Claudia.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
When Images Come to America...
My initial reaction was, "Yikes! This is scarily accurate."
And then... I thought the photo was a little too good to be true, did some research, and came to the conclusion that A) while the woman in this photo looks like the former governor of Alaska, it's probably not her, B) a lot of things come to America wrapped in the flag and waving a cross, and C) the Sinclair Lewis quote is misattributed. (Here's someone else's research
http://shii.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Fascism_comes_wrapped_in_the_flag )
I told some friends, and for the most part the reaction was, "Aw shucks." But then someone wrote words to the effect (the original discussion has been zapped into the virtual ether) that even if it wasn't a real photograph, it still spoke a truth and that "even if Sinclair Lewis didn't say it, he should have." (The quoted part is what I remember; I'm tempted to imply a tone, but tone is so difficult with electronic, text-only media.) Possibly they meant, "Even if he didn't say it, I wish he had." But then there were a couple of follow-ups along the lines of, "Yeah; it should be true."
Whoa. He should have said it? That's like saying, "Well, even if it isn't true, it should be." (Insert image of John trying to figure out which logical fallacy the previous argument is at http://www.logicalfallacies.info/ .)
The whole exchange bothered me, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it (and I was having difficulty turning away from logicalfallicies.info...). Was this someone's idea of Truth equals Beauty, Beauty equals Truth? Or was this line of reasoning some sort of sympathetic magic: it's true because I say it is?
And then I started thinking about this old New Yorker cover.
Right?
Are we talking historical truth , or mythic truth ? Because, you know, I've been here before when it comes to people insisting to me that a image is a record of a historical truth (and that I shouldn't doubt it), when all it really is an image that speaks with the power of myth to their needs, either for personal validation or to fulfill a political agenda.
Here it is:
Yes, I just made that last sentence up; nobody has actually said that to me. And even if they haven't, they probably should.
My point is -- yes, images speak to us and can resonate with us; but so do optical illusions. And satire is fun (I love satire); but it is only a first step toward truth.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Starhawk Says "It's Not About the Goddess."
I stumbled across this article by Starhawk the other day. It's about a decade old.
http://www.starhawk.org/pagan/religion-from-nature.html
Whoa! Starhawk is pissed off! At Charlotte Allen's article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/01/the-scholars-and-the-goddess/5910/
Most of Ms. Allen's article appears to be a paraphrase of Philip G. Davis's (very hostile) Goddess Unmasked and Ronald Hutton's (relentlessly historic) Triumph of the Moon. She points out that many Wiccans (at the time of the 2001 article's writing) came to the craft after reading Starhawk's (c. 1980) The Spiral Dance, which includes the accepted history of Neo-Paganism at that time -- that Neo-Paganism was an ancient, re-emerging, Goddess religion forced underground by a repressive Christianity.
Then Ms. Allen's gloves come off.
I can overlook how Ms. Allen includes the mandatory Aleister Crowley (BOO!) cameo of Neo-Pagan history (and that the cameo links to a somewhat unflattering dictionary entry for Crowley) and her impolitic use of the words "hookum" and "bunk." But then she writes "Practicing Wicca is a way to have Christianity without, well, the burdens of Christianity." (Gee did Ms. Allen read Catherine Sanders's Wicca's Charm, too ?)
Starhawk was right, Ms. Allen did miss the point of Neo-Paganism's spiritual underpinnings. Starhawk angrily asserts that Ms. Allen is too stuck in a Christian world-view to be an ecumenical reporter (maybe Ms. Allen and Ms. Sanders hang out together) and she missed the point of Neo-Paganism (or, to be more accurate, Wicca / Goddess Worship). I'd have to agree with her assertion -- although I am not sure I agree with some of her statements about archeology.
Starhawk's argument is that A) she's written more books on Neo-Paganism since The Spiral Dance, and B) her spirituality is based not on history or archeology, but on her experiences of natural processes today.
If I were Starhawk (pause to smile at the image)... I would have added that Ms. Allen's article was about as politic as someone writing about Christians needing historical proof of Jesus for their faith.
It all comes down to faith, history, archeology, and if a single Mother Goddess is at the heart of Wiccan belief. Starhawk says: no, while she talks about the Goddess, what choices she makes, how she experience the world, what actions she takes and what structures she creates as a Neo-Pagan are based on the cycles of Nature.
I am so looking forward to quoting Starhawk the next time I get More-Pagan-Than-Thou'ed for questioning the validity or need for Neo-Paganism's pedigree or for not focusing exclusively on The Goddess.
In the meantime, the crescent moon and Venus are in the sky....
http://www.starhawk.org/pagan/religion-from-nature.html
Whoa! Starhawk is pissed off! At Charlotte Allen's article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/01/the-scholars-and-the-goddess/5910/
Most of Ms. Allen's article appears to be a paraphrase of Philip G. Davis's (very hostile) Goddess Unmasked and Ronald Hutton's (relentlessly historic) Triumph of the Moon. She points out that many Wiccans (at the time of the 2001 article's writing) came to the craft after reading Starhawk's (c. 1980) The Spiral Dance, which includes the accepted history of Neo-Paganism at that time -- that Neo-Paganism was an ancient, re-emerging, Goddess religion forced underground by a repressive Christianity.
Then Ms. Allen's gloves come off.
I can overlook how Ms. Allen includes the mandatory Aleister Crowley (BOO!) cameo of Neo-Pagan history (and that the cameo links to a somewhat unflattering dictionary entry for Crowley) and her impolitic use of the words "hookum" and "bunk." But then she writes "Practicing Wicca is a way to have Christianity without, well, the burdens of Christianity." (Gee did Ms. Allen read Catherine Sanders's Wicca's Charm, too ?)
Starhawk was right, Ms. Allen did miss the point of Neo-Paganism's spiritual underpinnings. Starhawk angrily asserts that Ms. Allen is too stuck in a Christian world-view to be an ecumenical reporter (maybe Ms. Allen and Ms. Sanders hang out together) and she missed the point of Neo-Paganism (or, to be more accurate, Wicca / Goddess Worship). I'd have to agree with her assertion -- although I am not sure I agree with some of her statements about archeology.
Starhawk's argument is that A) she's written more books on Neo-Paganism since The Spiral Dance, and B) her spirituality is based not on history or archeology, but on her experiences of natural processes today.
If I were Starhawk (pause to smile at the image)... I would have added that Ms. Allen's article was about as politic as someone writing about Christians needing historical proof of Jesus for their faith.
It all comes down to faith, history, archeology, and if a single Mother Goddess is at the heart of Wiccan belief. Starhawk says: no, while she talks about the Goddess, what choices she makes, how she experience the world, what actions she takes and what structures she creates as a Neo-Pagan are based on the cycles of Nature.
I am so looking forward to quoting Starhawk the next time I get More-Pagan-Than-Thou'ed for questioning the validity or need for Neo-Paganism's pedigree or for not focusing exclusively on The Goddess.
In the meantime, the crescent moon and Venus are in the sky....
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Virtual Deportment
I've been thinking about blogs and twitter and Facebook, and the ability to post things because I can. I want what I write -- missives, Tweets and updates -- to be funny, or a step or two above "OMG, I just took a shower." Okay, maybe more than just a step or two.
Mark likes to point out how much time I spend hovering over the computer screen, checking for new e-mails and updates. On one hand, I'm checking to see if any markets have gotten back to me, and I enjoy the virtual connection to my virtual community. On the other hand, I can recognize a random positive reinforcement schedule when I see one, and its effects on my behavior. So: virtual lifeline to a community, or mindless stimulus-response for the benefit of marketers? I think I shall re-frame the question from either/or to both/and.
Right now we're in a reenactment of "Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water" and last night it "rained and it rained and it rained." Is the previous sentence indicative of a life well lived, and by well lived I mean a life examined ? Mark would probably add, and a life with exercise and leafy green vegetables out in the sunshine instead of hunched over a keyboard in a dark Pepsi-den. Do I get more "points" for an allusion to Winnie-The-Pooh than I would if I wrote, "OMG, everything's drenched and there's a stream running over our patio." ?
Ah well... to paraphrase Lincoln, "It's not the number of posts in a life, but the life in the posts."
And now, off to fiction writing.
Mark likes to point out how much time I spend hovering over the computer screen, checking for new e-mails and updates. On one hand, I'm checking to see if any markets have gotten back to me, and I enjoy the virtual connection to my virtual community. On the other hand, I can recognize a random positive reinforcement schedule when I see one, and its effects on my behavior. So: virtual lifeline to a community, or mindless stimulus-response for the benefit of marketers? I think I shall re-frame the question from either/or to both/and.
Right now we're in a reenactment of "Piglet is Entirely Surrounded by Water" and last night it "rained and it rained and it rained." Is the previous sentence indicative of a life well lived, and by well lived I mean a life examined ? Mark would probably add, and a life with exercise and leafy green vegetables out in the sunshine instead of hunched over a keyboard in a dark Pepsi-den. Do I get more "points" for an allusion to Winnie-The-Pooh than I would if I wrote, "OMG, everything's drenched and there's a stream running over our patio." ?
Ah well... to paraphrase Lincoln, "It's not the number of posts in a life, but the life in the posts."
And now, off to fiction writing.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Schrödinger's God Box
In the mid-90's, I used to bring a latex velociraptor puppet named Vaal to meetings, concerts and (to the dismay of my family) gatherings of relatives. I'd even have Vaal read tarot cards for people at parties. I was good enough at it that people would respond to Vaal as if he were the one giving the reading (and most people seemed satisfied with the fortunes they got).
Vaal certainly wasn't a "real" tarot reader in the sense that he wasn't a living being. So does that make him a virtual avatar? To get really existential, who was the author of the fortunes: the cards, me, or Vaal?
Which leads me to Second Life, the on-line game where people create virtual versions of themselves, or avatars, and explore an on-line world filled with virtual objects created by other players.
The latest conundrum is, of course, what are the spiritual and religious ramifications of building a virtual ritual space? If one of the strengths and virtues of Neo-Paganism is the use of imagination, does visiting someone else's virtually constructed ritual space take away from the visitor's imagination? I'd argue it doesn't erode religious imagination any more than visiting a real world church with a fairly set worship order of service.
The problems with a nature-based pantheistic religious event on Second Life are
But David pointed out that "virtual religion" is as old as Christian mass on radio shows. He has issues with the Sacrament of Communion being virtual -- in his view God can use the virtual realm to spread His message, but at this point in time virtual worlds cannot provide all the necessary ingredients -- the sound of bread ripping, the community of parishioners, the smell of the wine, a physical vehicle for the Holy Spirit -- for an efficacious Communion. Yet.
I can see David's point. But at the same time, I wonder -- his comments on radio masses got me thinking. We're used to listening to recordings and broadcasts of orchestral music. Hearing a concert changes my emotional and mental state; if the effects of hearing a piece of music live or recorded are similar enough, at what point does grace require physical reality, especially if outer physical symbols are merely pointers to an inward spiritual state?
For example, in Second Life, I created a magic circle -- a boundary of floating lights enclosing the sacred space of the ritual area. The magic circle in real life is an imaginary boundary, and visualizing it is a signal to Neo-Pagan participants that they are entering a ritual state of mind. A non-Neo-Pagan saw my avatar working on the space, and navigated her avatar closer -- but she stopped her avatar at the edge of the circle. So, an imaginary circle in a virtual world communicated its symbolic meaning to her and had an effect in the real world: she navigated her avatar to the circle's edge but no farther. In her mind, she was on the edge of something, something that looked like a sanctuary.
Which brings us to the locus of the self. Am I or Am I Not my avatar? Does my "self" stop at my skin? I'm legally responsible for my words, and my words can bring me legal tender -- which means in one sense my words are as real as my hands. So is an avatar me, a puppet, or simply "intellectual property"? Remember, puppets can give pretty good tarot readings. I conclude that the question is a bad one: I am my mind and my spirit and my body and my words and my avatar.
At this point, I think navigating an avatar through a set of virtual ceremonies qualifies as a prayer or meditation. What Diety or spirit does from that point on I'm unsure, and the whole thing feels like Schrödinger's Cat meets Deus Ex Machina -- if you don't look, nobody's dead. But of course I must look.
Ultimately, what would matter most is the feeback loop between one and one's religion. In my case, Neo-Paganism instructs me to participate and commune with the divine systems of choice, consequences and randomness entwined in the cosmos -- and as soon as soon as I'm done with this essay I should go for a walk in the woods, because Deity is the wind and virtual logos and flame and tree and leaves and ocean and flicking fishes and....
Vaal certainly wasn't a "real" tarot reader in the sense that he wasn't a living being. So does that make him a virtual avatar? To get really existential, who was the author of the fortunes: the cards, me, or Vaal?
Which leads me to Second Life, the on-line game where people create virtual versions of themselves, or avatars, and explore an on-line world filled with virtual objects created by other players.
The latest conundrum is, of course, what are the spiritual and religious ramifications of building a virtual ritual space? If one of the strengths and virtues of Neo-Paganism is the use of imagination, does visiting someone else's virtually constructed ritual space take away from the visitor's imagination? I'd argue it doesn't erode religious imagination any more than visiting a real world church with a fairly set worship order of service.
The problems with a nature-based pantheistic religious event on Second Life are
- the software that creates the world simplifies everything (so it can run on my computer) and being in second life is like being in a flat cartoon with no shadows, and, um;
- it's a virtual world with virtual avatars doing virtual things and the "participants" are really in front of keyboards typing commands.
But David pointed out that "virtual religion" is as old as Christian mass on radio shows. He has issues with the Sacrament of Communion being virtual -- in his view God can use the virtual realm to spread His message, but at this point in time virtual worlds cannot provide all the necessary ingredients -- the sound of bread ripping, the community of parishioners, the smell of the wine, a physical vehicle for the Holy Spirit -- for an efficacious Communion. Yet.
I can see David's point. But at the same time, I wonder -- his comments on radio masses got me thinking. We're used to listening to recordings and broadcasts of orchestral music. Hearing a concert changes my emotional and mental state; if the effects of hearing a piece of music live or recorded are similar enough, at what point does grace require physical reality, especially if outer physical symbols are merely pointers to an inward spiritual state?
For example, in Second Life, I created a magic circle -- a boundary of floating lights enclosing the sacred space of the ritual area. The magic circle in real life is an imaginary boundary, and visualizing it is a signal to Neo-Pagan participants that they are entering a ritual state of mind. A non-Neo-Pagan saw my avatar working on the space, and navigated her avatar closer -- but she stopped her avatar at the edge of the circle. So, an imaginary circle in a virtual world communicated its symbolic meaning to her and had an effect in the real world: she navigated her avatar to the circle's edge but no farther. In her mind, she was on the edge of something, something that looked like a sanctuary.
Which brings us to the locus of the self. Am I or Am I Not my avatar? Does my "self" stop at my skin? I'm legally responsible for my words, and my words can bring me legal tender -- which means in one sense my words are as real as my hands. So is an avatar me, a puppet, or simply "intellectual property"? Remember, puppets can give pretty good tarot readings. I conclude that the question is a bad one: I am my mind and my spirit and my body and my words and my avatar.
At this point, I think navigating an avatar through a set of virtual ceremonies qualifies as a prayer or meditation. What Diety or spirit does from that point on I'm unsure, and the whole thing feels like Schrödinger's Cat meets Deus Ex Machina -- if you don't look, nobody's dead. But of course I must look.
Ultimately, what would matter most is the feeback loop between one and one's religion. In my case, Neo-Paganism instructs me to participate and commune with the divine systems of choice, consequences and randomness entwined in the cosmos -- and as soon as soon as I'm done with this essay I should go for a walk in the woods, because Deity is the wind and virtual logos and flame and tree and leaves and ocean and flicking fishes and....
Monday, January 04, 2010
Heaven, Nature, & Hollywood's Religion
Recently, when I got to the end of an op-ed piece in the New York Times, a sense of "there's something missing from this argument" filled me.
The author had been talking about Hollywood's religious preference as expressed in the movie, Avatar, which he argued was pantheism. Pantheism was contrasted unfavorably to Christianity and monotheism. Humanity's participation in the biosphere's life-and-death-cycles was painted as a midway-point between Nature and God, requiring the transcendence of God to be borne. Pantheism -- "atheism sexed up" -- was portrayed as a way to drop out, a regression from the human state to a animalistic pre-consciousness.
After some reflection, I concluded what was missing from the piece were the flip-sides of the author's arguments. The first assumes that there is a Great Chain of Being stretching from Earth (Nature) to the Deity. In mediaeval and renaissance times this great chain was sometimes depicted as a ladder with -- in ascending order -- an ape, a man, the Perfect Man, and Angel, maybe an arch-angel, and Deity at the top. The other flip-side of the argument is the assumption that because we are self-conscious we are somehow apart from Nature and Deity.
It seems as if the author is stuck on the mid-point of his monotheistic ladder. He neglected to speak about an important aspect of pantheism: Deity is immanent in the material world, not transcendent to it. The entire Great Chain of Being is flattened -- God is the ape, God is the ladder, God is humankind, God is....
Yes, certainly every living thing needs to metabolize, and everything dies. Welcome to the second law of thermodynamics; there's no such thing as a free lunch. But our self-awareness demands a transcendent God to help us deal with it in order to be fully actualized as spiritual beings? I guess I prefer pantheism because using my conscious awareness to commune with universal processes reminds me that I am here, now, in body, mind and spirit.
And, hey -- it's only a movie.
The author had been talking about Hollywood's religious preference as expressed in the movie, Avatar, which he argued was pantheism. Pantheism was contrasted unfavorably to Christianity and monotheism. Humanity's participation in the biosphere's life-and-death-cycles was painted as a midway-point between Nature and God, requiring the transcendence of God to be borne. Pantheism -- "atheism sexed up" -- was portrayed as a way to drop out, a regression from the human state to a animalistic pre-consciousness.
After some reflection, I concluded what was missing from the piece were the flip-sides of the author's arguments. The first assumes that there is a Great Chain of Being stretching from Earth (Nature) to the Deity. In mediaeval and renaissance times this great chain was sometimes depicted as a ladder with -- in ascending order -- an ape, a man, the Perfect Man, and Angel, maybe an arch-angel, and Deity at the top. The other flip-side of the argument is the assumption that because we are self-conscious we are somehow apart from Nature and Deity.
It seems as if the author is stuck on the mid-point of his monotheistic ladder. He neglected to speak about an important aspect of pantheism: Deity is immanent in the material world, not transcendent to it. The entire Great Chain of Being is flattened -- God is the ape, God is the ladder, God is humankind, God is....
Yes, certainly every living thing needs to metabolize, and everything dies. Welcome to the second law of thermodynamics; there's no such thing as a free lunch. But our self-awareness demands a transcendent God to help us deal with it in order to be fully actualized as spiritual beings? I guess I prefer pantheism because using my conscious awareness to commune with universal processes reminds me that I am here, now, in body, mind and spirit.
And, hey -- it's only a movie.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Pre-birthday Ruminations
My birthday is coming up in a few weeks. I will be 45. (45 is still the new 35, right?) In a couple of ways, I'm not looking forward to it. I guess it's not so much an aging thing (although I would appreciate my body not spontaneously falling apart like it seems to be lately)... so much as a dark tea-time of the soul. OK, maybe that's "not-quite-as-light mid-afternoon snack-time of the soul" -- but instead of chocolate it's one of those "chocolate" snacks made with too much paraffin that make you fart at socially inopportune moments.
Yeah. That kind of crisis of the soul.
Various friends remind me that life is filled with ups and downs, and that for me 45 is the new 25. (15 was also offered, but I think I'll pass.)
Anyway, part of me recognizes that I have little to complain about, and that crises like this are a little indulgent. Still, late at night, I seem to be channeling my inner Antonio, the Merchant of Venice... and then I listen to Pink Martini sing "Jai déjà passé un bon moment. Un bon moment autrefois."
I need to work on changing that inner sound-scape to Miss Peggy Lee singing, "Is That All There Is?"
Or maybe something by the B-52's (do they do Peggy Lee covers?). And then I need to write something and limit my use of using social networking services.
And plan a birthday party. Something with dancing. Something with little snacks. Something with stars. Something with music taken from the Christmas tree growing music from The Nutcracker, the Aquarium movement from Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals, or Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
Or maybe a day spa... anyone know of a good John Mall I can visit?
Yeah. That kind of crisis of the soul.
Various friends remind me that life is filled with ups and downs, and that for me 45 is the new 25. (15 was also offered, but I think I'll pass.)
Anyway, part of me recognizes that I have little to complain about, and that crises like this are a little indulgent. Still, late at night, I seem to be channeling my inner Antonio, the Merchant of Venice... and then I listen to Pink Martini sing "Jai déjà passé un bon moment. Un bon moment autrefois."
I need to work on changing that inner sound-scape to Miss Peggy Lee singing, "Is That All There Is?"
Or maybe something by the B-52's (do they do Peggy Lee covers?). And then I need to write something and limit my use of using social networking services.
And plan a birthday party. Something with dancing. Something with little snacks. Something with stars. Something with music taken from the Christmas tree growing music from The Nutcracker, the Aquarium movement from Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals, or Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.
Or maybe a day spa... anyone know of a good John Mall I can visit?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Self-Therapy for Orpheus ?
Last night was the Wordos Halloween Short Story Party. After a quick round of business, we sit back, eat snack food, and read each other 1000 word stories. The theme this year was "parties" (I modified mine to include "gatherings"). Stories ranged from pretty funny, to macabre, to downright creepy.
My science fiction story surprised me. I'd originally thought I'd write a sarcastic send up of the recent Sedona Sweat Lodge Tragedy - something snarky about plastic shamans and prosperity theology. Partway through creating the manuscript I realized I was writing a diatribe and switched gears. The deadline loomed and I wrote snatches of the story between preparing for the Shrew's memorial and other family obligations. I forced myself to stop re-writing the beginning and get to the end, which I think I wrote very late at night in bed. Tuesday morning before the reading, I ruthlessly (sort of) chopped out 500 words to make the story fit the reading format.
Tuesday night. My turn at the podium came. I hauled my laptop with me and began the story. As I got to the end, and I started to choke up. I'm loosing voice control and tears are threatening. "Great," I'm thinking as I'm trying to read the ending. "People are going to not understand what I'm saying, and I'm going to look like one of those writers who is overcome with the brilliance of their own artistry. How professional."
Sometimes, a writer will put personal truth into a story. In this case, I drifted into a story resonance through a kind of word association game induced by focusing on the writing-under-deadline process. I hadn't had a chance to read it aloud in its entirety. I don't read my stories so much as perform them, which triggered a catharsis.
In some ways this seems worse - writing as self-therapy. I want my stories to get into the heads of other people, not be a vehicle for me to work through my own issues. But on the other hand, stories are supposed to have heart, an "ah ha!" moment, a place where they speak to a listener's truth. After some reflection, I'm afraid I wrote a typical John story: someone muddles into danger, but mystical music somehow (we're not quite sure how, but it was also a religious experience with dense and obscure philosophical meaning) saves the day by calling them back. But I hope I wrote a story about searching, a story about being lost, a story about family, a story about being found.
Sigh. I guess I have to go watch The Wizard of Oz and Moulin Rouge now....
My science fiction story surprised me. I'd originally thought I'd write a sarcastic send up of the recent Sedona Sweat Lodge Tragedy - something snarky about plastic shamans and prosperity theology. Partway through creating the manuscript I realized I was writing a diatribe and switched gears. The deadline loomed and I wrote snatches of the story between preparing for the Shrew's memorial and other family obligations. I forced myself to stop re-writing the beginning and get to the end, which I think I wrote very late at night in bed. Tuesday morning before the reading, I ruthlessly (sort of) chopped out 500 words to make the story fit the reading format.
Tuesday night. My turn at the podium came. I hauled my laptop with me and began the story. As I got to the end, and I started to choke up. I'm loosing voice control and tears are threatening. "Great," I'm thinking as I'm trying to read the ending. "People are going to not understand what I'm saying, and I'm going to look like one of those writers who is overcome with the brilliance of their own artistry. How professional."
Sometimes, a writer will put personal truth into a story. In this case, I drifted into a story resonance through a kind of word association game induced by focusing on the writing-under-deadline process. I hadn't had a chance to read it aloud in its entirety. I don't read my stories so much as perform them, which triggered a catharsis.
In some ways this seems worse - writing as self-therapy. I want my stories to get into the heads of other people, not be a vehicle for me to work through my own issues. But on the other hand, stories are supposed to have heart, an "ah ha!" moment, a place where they speak to a listener's truth. After some reflection, I'm afraid I wrote a typical John story: someone muddles into danger, but mystical music somehow (we're not quite sure how, but it was also a religious experience with dense and obscure philosophical meaning) saves the day by calling them back. But I hope I wrote a story about searching, a story about being lost, a story about family, a story about being found.
Sigh. I guess I have to go watch The Wizard of Oz and Moulin Rouge now....
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Twenty-Five Things
Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note (on your wall, go to "Notes" in the top row of tabs) with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you! (or b/c I want to see what you come up with)
A Likable, Active Character in an interesting setting.
1.
John was "Corvallis Nice," which was similar to but different from "Japanese Polite." Corvallis, at least the Corvallis he grew up in, was a place where you didn't come out and say 'no.' You didn't talk about cancer, diabetes, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, or being gay, either -- unless you unpacked a toolkit of euphemisms first. Unlike Japan, Corvallis had no hilarious books by Dave Barry explaining how the Japanese communication style was inspired by politeness. And although it must not be true, in John's childhood memories, everyone was white. Corvallis children had to learn social conventions by osmosis, and he suspected that "Corvallis Nice" was an outgrowth of a syndrome he'd labeled in his high school days as "Corvallis Smug."
2.
He studied his husband, Mark, who was "New York Loud." If pressed, John would say, "New York Direct." On a trip to visit Mark's family, John retreated from the raucous game of Trivial Pursuit and made his way to the television room in the back. The TV was off, the lights were low, and he found the spouses of Mark's family sipping tea and exchanging quiet conversation. A light went off in his head; "They've all married 'Corvallis Nice' people."
"Awh!" Mark said sometime later, "you're all instigators."
3.
"Oh look!" John pointed out an illustration in a childhood book to Mark. "There's Miss Kitty in the Riverbend parade; I always sort of admired Miss Kitty."
"John," Mark said, "You're supposed to identify with John Mouse, who rides a wind-up toy car.
"Well, yeah; I kind of did that, too."
"You can't fool me; you really wanted her crown and to ride on a float in a white dress."
4.
John sat back for a moment and wondered about his childhood. If, at age eleven, he couldn't consciously desire Captain Kirk's sweaty, shirtless body, would becoming like Mr. Spock enable him to sublimate inarticulate, forbidden desires? Naw, pretending to be a Vulcan insulated him from the emotional barbs of his middle-school peers. Besides, being able to Mind Meld and do the Vulcan Nerve Pinch was pretty darn cool. Not to mention the techno-toys.
5.
John wrote. In high school English class he wove the week's vocabulary words into a chapter for a semester-long serial. He wrote a spoof of Dante's Inferno. He wrote lots of bad poetry. His senior year, he started keeping a journal, and continued the process into college. Those things ought to be pretty funny by now. In college he wrote a spoof essay on Antigone, and a spoof of the Song of Roland. And he discovered e-mail. Somehow, the medium of e-mail swallowed his writing output, channeling it into missives sent to friends and relatives. Sort of like a message cast out onto an electronic sea.
They call it "blogging" now.
Professional writers warn about the seductive nature of e-mail and blogs.
6.
But this is supposed to be a narrative. This is supposed to be writing. There's a hopefully likable character (John) in an interesting setting (oh, wait!).
Eugene was the Hippy and Tie-dye capitol of the world. On good days, John said, "Eugene is the kind of place where artists live because folks with part-time jobs can afford to live here." On bad days, John repeated a joke he heard once, "Q: Why did the Hippy move to Eugene? A: Because he heard there wasn't any work."
On good days, he liked the cool grey overcast and the romantic fog. On bad days, he lamented that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was three thousand miles away and had to make do with surfing to the Museum's web site.
Sometimes he wondered what "New York Nice" or "Corvallis Loud" would be like.
A precipitating event creates a problem which threatens something the character loves and which the character tries to solve with common sense and only makes things worse.
7.
John entered Reed College with the intention of entering the 3-2 physics/engineering program.
At Reed, he read Sherry Turkel's book, "The Second Self." In it, a young girl, typing on a word processor, wrote, "The computer allows me to erase my mistakes. It helps me be perfect."
Sherry Turkel spoke twenty years later at the University of Oregon. "Cell phones," she said, "have tethered us to our community. A young person today experiences something and then posts an instant message about it. Growing up has changed focus from the question 'what do I feel about something?' to 'what do my peers feel about something?'."
John graduated Reed with a BA in Psychology. He stayed an extra year working for Reed's Academic Computing Department.
8.
For a while, John worked at the Carleton College Computer Center. He joined a text-only bulletin board group, called "The Fillard Stories." Authors, mostly Carleton undergraduates, took turns writing chapters in the narrative. The stories were meta-fiction; most of the characters were avatars of the authors.
Carleton was in Northfield. "Northfield Nice" made "Corvallis Nice" look like "New York Direct."
When he first moved to Northfield, the most common questions asked of him were, "Are you married?" and "Are you a student?"
John wound up with three avatars in the Fillard stories. They did things John couldn't -- like fly.
Eventually, two of the avatars merged into one and then became a machine.
9.
For some time, John wrote fantasy weddings. There were at least six. One was a Hippy wedding in a field; another was a Goth Wedding (before there were Goths); still another was performed entirely in the dark, with everyone wearing dark clothes and glow-sticks (before there were raves).
"Here," said John, rustling around a pile of papers and files. "I've got the weddings here."
"Weddings?" asked Mark.
"Yeah, I wrote a bunch out. People liked them; they thought the were romantic or funny. I thought they could help us plan ours." He shifted through a stack of old poetry.
"Um, John," said Mark, "Doesn't it strike you as a little odd that you were writing these things and you weren't even dating anyone?"
10.
John moved to Arcosanti.
He fell into the habit of asking the moon for a lover. Starting in May, when the full moon sailed over the Sonoran mesas, he'd slink out of his apartment and make his way to the pool. The white rails surrounding the concrete deck gleamed; shadows softened the basalt cliff on the pool's north side. Furtively, he slipped off his clothes and dove into the still reflection of the moon. Public nudity was technically Against The (unwritten) Rules and he didn't want to be caught.
Ripples from his passage painted lightning-like patterns on the bottom of the pool. Seen through the water's surface, the moon was a white light behind a silver fishnet of wavelets. He breached, whipping his hair and water out of his face.
"Hey moon," John whispered, "send me a lover."
Mark broke into the narrative again. "Did it work?"
John grimaced and looked at the ceiling. "Uh, not really."
"And you tried that for how long?" Mark asked.
John changed the subject.
11.
The concrete structures disappeared from John's rear-view mirror as he drove away from Arcosanti. It was instructive living in someone else's vision, but his internet access there was spotty. Decades later, he still dreamed he was in the prototype arcology of Italian architect, Paolo Soleri; in the dreams, his flight from Arizona was leaving soon, but the airport was a very long and very rocky road away.
12.
John put on his crown and typed into the computer: "Mirror, mirror, on the wall..." It occurred to him that the mirror might be one of those psychology mirrors like the ones they had at Reed College. He brought his eyes closer to the screen as if to catch the motion from any shadowy figures on the other side.
But the screen only showed a shadowy figure when it was turned off: himself.
The bed creaked and covers rustled. "What are you doing?" asked Mark. "Go to sleep."
Second Try: The character tries to fix this worse situation and digs her or himself in deeper.
13.
Mark looked over John's shoulder as John pulled back his hair and gazed in the mirror.
"Trust me," said Mark. "I have four sisters, and every night before the prom they were crying because their hair was ugly. You don't want to be worrying about your hair when you get your award."
John released his hair and it cascaded past his shoulders. "Are you sure?"
"How many Bad Hair Days have you had lately?" Mark asked.
John sighed. The electric shears waited in the bathroom.
14.
John's stomach growled during the writers' seminar. He been writing under a tight deadline and had neglected to eat anything other than breakfast, almonds, crackers, and carefully timed Pepsi all day. He thought dinner would be right after the deadline, but it (dinner) had been moved back to make room for a marketing seminar.
"It's very important to have a presence on the web," said the presenter. "You need a web page of some sort and you need to develop a fan base. In order to do that, you have to update your web pages regularly to keep your fans coming back."
John's first professional sale was "Mask Glass Magic," an urban fantasy set in Eugene, Oregon.
15.
"Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth," wrote Oscar Wilde. These words remind John of the passage in Jane Yolen's collection of essays, "Touch Magic" -- in it, she commented about the power of mask pins in Venetian society. A Venetian wearing a mask pin on their lapel is effectively incognito, and Yolen marveled at the mask's power to proclaim, "I am not I."
16.
John read a Twitter post from David Pogue, a technology writer for the New York Times. David Twittered that he had the hiccups and asked for a cure. Many fans Twittered back with various cures. A half hour later, David thanked everyone and confessed that he was demonstrating Twitter in a seminar. Many accused him of crying wolf. John couldn't help but think that David had somehow threatened his fans' virtual selves -- the fans saw themselves as caring people, and they had an image of themselves as helping David. David betrayed their virtual self-images by revealing that he (inadvertently) fooled them.
Or possibly they felt as if they had been cast by Pogue as the glyphed characters enslaved by the bad guys in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky."
17.
John wondered if this was real writing. He wasn't sure that he could make this piece work commercially; maybe he could make it work in a small literary press. Writing always seemed to come down to the dichotomy between "art" and "sales." He reminded himself that this piece was destined for a web page, which probably fell under the category of "marketing."
John shrugged, and endeavored to make the language as clear as possible without betraying anyone.
Do-or-Die: Thinking out of the box, the character comes up with a solution and risks death (or at least the destruction of the cherished object) to make things work.
18.
Mark crossed his arms. "You're not going to write about our sex life, are you? Because I don't want my saintly mother to have to read about it on the internet."
"Well..." John considered -- and then imagined how icky he'd feel reading intimate things about his own parents. "Hmmm, can I make stuff up?"
"No!"
19.
The stars wheeled in the sky and he was falling with them.
When the philosophers wrote of divine madness and gold they were drunk.
He came home with inspiration burning in front of him and he raced to capture the word that was written in his brain onto the screen. But he felt the drunkenness floating away from him and it was difficult to see the burning logos. He had to come across it sideways, like looking at a star with his peripheral vision. He sacrificed uncounted brain cells for the following:
20.
"Everybody thinks they're original," said Mark.
21.
"Would you be interested," asked the salesman from his booth, "in this nano-tech mosaic?" He held up a foot square matrix of small, white tiles.
John was intrigued. Usually the Eugene Saturday Market featured tie-dye or blown glass. "Hey, look Mark."
"Just stand here," said the salesman, "and, viola!" The white tiles fractured and pigmented. John's head and shoulders appeared in the mosaic. "Each tile is a little nanobot camera. They take your picture, then talk amongst themselves to make your likeness."
"Cool," said John. "But can I --"
"And that's not all," said the salesman. He picked out a tile. "And it's durable. The bots can regenerate themselves from the dirt in your home to replace any that get lost."
"Oh," said John. "I'm having a Bad Hair Day; can I take a new picture?"
"Yes; and if you want to go back, the 'bots will remember the way you used to look."
John turned to Mark. "What do you think?"
Mark shook his head. "We already have a lot of stuff in our house. What are you going to give up in order to have it?"
22.
John erased words from slips of paper and put the papers into a metal box. He buried the metal box late at night. No one would ever see those words.
23.
He re-read the instructions and saw that he was supposed to tag twenty-five people. He wasn't going to do that on the grounds that it was a kind of informational pyramid-scheme. The people behind the mirror were trying to distract him with his own image to see what he would do and whom he would betray.
Conclusion: Someone says, "He's dead, Jim" or "And they lived happily ever after."
24.
Undoubtedly, someone would confuse Life and Art and be miffed or feel left out. That wasn't his intention, and he offered preemptive apologies.
25.
At the end of the Symposium, the guests smashed the earthenware urns that had once held the wine and each took a piece as a memento of the night.
"Hey," said Mark. "What's with all the smashing? Who's going to clean this up; that's what I want to know."
"But it's Interstitial Art," said John.
"Well, listen, Art-boy; smashing urns doesn't get any stories finished -- so get to work!"
A Likable, Active Character in an interesting setting.
1.
John was "Corvallis Nice," which was similar to but different from "Japanese Polite." Corvallis, at least the Corvallis he grew up in, was a place where you didn't come out and say 'no.' You didn't talk about cancer, diabetes, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, or being gay, either -- unless you unpacked a toolkit of euphemisms first. Unlike Japan, Corvallis had no hilarious books by Dave Barry explaining how the Japanese communication style was inspired by politeness. And although it must not be true, in John's childhood memories, everyone was white. Corvallis children had to learn social conventions by osmosis, and he suspected that "Corvallis Nice" was an outgrowth of a syndrome he'd labeled in his high school days as "Corvallis Smug."
2.
He studied his husband, Mark, who was "New York Loud." If pressed, John would say, "New York Direct." On a trip to visit Mark's family, John retreated from the raucous game of Trivial Pursuit and made his way to the television room in the back. The TV was off, the lights were low, and he found the spouses of Mark's family sipping tea and exchanging quiet conversation. A light went off in his head; "They've all married 'Corvallis Nice' people."
"Awh!" Mark said sometime later, "you're all instigators."
3.
"Oh look!" John pointed out an illustration in a childhood book to Mark. "There's Miss Kitty in the Riverbend parade; I always sort of admired Miss Kitty."
"John," Mark said, "You're supposed to identify with John Mouse, who rides a wind-up toy car.
"Well, yeah; I kind of did that, too."
"You can't fool me; you really wanted her crown and to ride on a float in a white dress."
4.
John sat back for a moment and wondered about his childhood. If, at age eleven, he couldn't consciously desire Captain Kirk's sweaty, shirtless body, would becoming like Mr. Spock enable him to sublimate inarticulate, forbidden desires? Naw, pretending to be a Vulcan insulated him from the emotional barbs of his middle-school peers. Besides, being able to Mind Meld and do the Vulcan Nerve Pinch was pretty darn cool. Not to mention the techno-toys.
5.
John wrote. In high school English class he wove the week's vocabulary words into a chapter for a semester-long serial. He wrote a spoof of Dante's Inferno. He wrote lots of bad poetry. His senior year, he started keeping a journal, and continued the process into college. Those things ought to be pretty funny by now. In college he wrote a spoof essay on Antigone, and a spoof of the Song of Roland. And he discovered e-mail. Somehow, the medium of e-mail swallowed his writing output, channeling it into missives sent to friends and relatives. Sort of like a message cast out onto an electronic sea.
They call it "blogging" now.
Professional writers warn about the seductive nature of e-mail and blogs.
6.
But this is supposed to be a narrative. This is supposed to be writing. There's a hopefully likable character (John) in an interesting setting (oh, wait!).
Eugene was the Hippy and Tie-dye capitol of the world. On good days, John said, "Eugene is the kind of place where artists live because folks with part-time jobs can afford to live here." On bad days, John repeated a joke he heard once, "Q: Why did the Hippy move to Eugene? A: Because he heard there wasn't any work."
On good days, he liked the cool grey overcast and the romantic fog. On bad days, he lamented that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was three thousand miles away and had to make do with surfing to the Museum's web site.
Sometimes he wondered what "New York Nice" or "Corvallis Loud" would be like.
A precipitating event creates a problem which threatens something the character loves and which the character tries to solve with common sense and only makes things worse.
7.
John entered Reed College with the intention of entering the 3-2 physics/engineering program.
At Reed, he read Sherry Turkel's book, "The Second Self." In it, a young girl, typing on a word processor, wrote, "The computer allows me to erase my mistakes. It helps me be perfect."
Sherry Turkel spoke twenty years later at the University of Oregon. "Cell phones," she said, "have tethered us to our community. A young person today experiences something and then posts an instant message about it. Growing up has changed focus from the question 'what do I feel about something?' to 'what do my peers feel about something?'."
John graduated Reed with a BA in Psychology. He stayed an extra year working for Reed's Academic Computing Department.
8.
For a while, John worked at the Carleton College Computer Center. He joined a text-only bulletin board group, called "The Fillard Stories." Authors, mostly Carleton undergraduates, took turns writing chapters in the narrative. The stories were meta-fiction; most of the characters were avatars of the authors.
Carleton was in Northfield. "Northfield Nice" made "Corvallis Nice" look like "New York Direct."
When he first moved to Northfield, the most common questions asked of him were, "Are you married?" and "Are you a student?"
John wound up with three avatars in the Fillard stories. They did things John couldn't -- like fly.
Eventually, two of the avatars merged into one and then became a machine.
9.
For some time, John wrote fantasy weddings. There were at least six. One was a Hippy wedding in a field; another was a Goth Wedding (before there were Goths); still another was performed entirely in the dark, with everyone wearing dark clothes and glow-sticks (before there were raves).
"Here," said John, rustling around a pile of papers and files. "I've got the weddings here."
"Weddings?" asked Mark.
"Yeah, I wrote a bunch out. People liked them; they thought the were romantic or funny. I thought they could help us plan ours." He shifted through a stack of old poetry.
"Um, John," said Mark, "Doesn't it strike you as a little odd that you were writing these things and you weren't even dating anyone?"
10.
John moved to Arcosanti.
He fell into the habit of asking the moon for a lover. Starting in May, when the full moon sailed over the Sonoran mesas, he'd slink out of his apartment and make his way to the pool. The white rails surrounding the concrete deck gleamed; shadows softened the basalt cliff on the pool's north side. Furtively, he slipped off his clothes and dove into the still reflection of the moon. Public nudity was technically Against The (unwritten) Rules and he didn't want to be caught.
Ripples from his passage painted lightning-like patterns on the bottom of the pool. Seen through the water's surface, the moon was a white light behind a silver fishnet of wavelets. He breached, whipping his hair and water out of his face.
"Hey moon," John whispered, "send me a lover."
Mark broke into the narrative again. "Did it work?"
John grimaced and looked at the ceiling. "Uh, not really."
"And you tried that for how long?" Mark asked.
John changed the subject.
11.
The concrete structures disappeared from John's rear-view mirror as he drove away from Arcosanti. It was instructive living in someone else's vision, but his internet access there was spotty. Decades later, he still dreamed he was in the prototype arcology of Italian architect, Paolo Soleri; in the dreams, his flight from Arizona was leaving soon, but the airport was a very long and very rocky road away.
12.
John put on his crown and typed into the computer: "Mirror, mirror, on the wall..." It occurred to him that the mirror might be one of those psychology mirrors like the ones they had at Reed College. He brought his eyes closer to the screen as if to catch the motion from any shadowy figures on the other side.
But the screen only showed a shadowy figure when it was turned off: himself.
The bed creaked and covers rustled. "What are you doing?" asked Mark. "Go to sleep."
Second Try: The character tries to fix this worse situation and digs her or himself in deeper.
13.
Mark looked over John's shoulder as John pulled back his hair and gazed in the mirror.
"Trust me," said Mark. "I have four sisters, and every night before the prom they were crying because their hair was ugly. You don't want to be worrying about your hair when you get your award."
John released his hair and it cascaded past his shoulders. "Are you sure?"
"How many Bad Hair Days have you had lately?" Mark asked.
John sighed. The electric shears waited in the bathroom.
14.
John's stomach growled during the writers' seminar. He been writing under a tight deadline and had neglected to eat anything other than breakfast, almonds, crackers, and carefully timed Pepsi all day. He thought dinner would be right after the deadline, but it (dinner) had been moved back to make room for a marketing seminar.
"It's very important to have a presence on the web," said the presenter. "You need a web page of some sort and you need to develop a fan base. In order to do that, you have to update your web pages regularly to keep your fans coming back."
John's first professional sale was "Mask Glass Magic," an urban fantasy set in Eugene, Oregon.
15.
"Give a man a mask and he'll tell you the truth," wrote Oscar Wilde. These words remind John of the passage in Jane Yolen's collection of essays, "Touch Magic" -- in it, she commented about the power of mask pins in Venetian society. A Venetian wearing a mask pin on their lapel is effectively incognito, and Yolen marveled at the mask's power to proclaim, "I am not I."
16.
John read a Twitter post from David Pogue, a technology writer for the New York Times. David Twittered that he had the hiccups and asked for a cure. Many fans Twittered back with various cures. A half hour later, David thanked everyone and confessed that he was demonstrating Twitter in a seminar. Many accused him of crying wolf. John couldn't help but think that David had somehow threatened his fans' virtual selves -- the fans saw themselves as caring people, and they had an image of themselves as helping David. David betrayed their virtual self-images by revealing that he (inadvertently) fooled them.
Or possibly they felt as if they had been cast by Pogue as the glyphed characters enslaved by the bad guys in Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky."
17.
John wondered if this was real writing. He wasn't sure that he could make this piece work commercially; maybe he could make it work in a small literary press. Writing always seemed to come down to the dichotomy between "art" and "sales." He reminded himself that this piece was destined for a web page, which probably fell under the category of "marketing."
John shrugged, and endeavored to make the language as clear as possible without betraying anyone.
Do-or-Die: Thinking out of the box, the character comes up with a solution and risks death (or at least the destruction of the cherished object) to make things work.
18.
Mark crossed his arms. "You're not going to write about our sex life, are you? Because I don't want my saintly mother to have to read about it on the internet."
"Well..." John considered -- and then imagined how icky he'd feel reading intimate things about his own parents. "Hmmm, can I make stuff up?"
"No!"
19.
The stars wheeled in the sky and he was falling with them.
When the philosophers wrote of divine madness and gold they were drunk.
He came home with inspiration burning in front of him and he raced to capture the word that was written in his brain onto the screen. But he felt the drunkenness floating away from him and it was difficult to see the burning logos. He had to come across it sideways, like looking at a star with his peripheral vision. He sacrificed uncounted brain cells for the following:
"I am the wondering at the stories I tell myself. I am the map I am writing. I am addiction. I am lost. I am the sound of myself. I am the mask that falls off to reveal the smooth surface of another mask. I am the darkness behind the mirror."The gold of the evening turned to mud in the morning.
20.
"Everybody thinks they're original," said Mark.
21.
"Would you be interested," asked the salesman from his booth, "in this nano-tech mosaic?" He held up a foot square matrix of small, white tiles.
John was intrigued. Usually the Eugene Saturday Market featured tie-dye or blown glass. "Hey, look Mark."
"Just stand here," said the salesman, "and, viola!" The white tiles fractured and pigmented. John's head and shoulders appeared in the mosaic. "Each tile is a little nanobot camera. They take your picture, then talk amongst themselves to make your likeness."
"Cool," said John. "But can I --"
"And that's not all," said the salesman. He picked out a tile. "And it's durable. The bots can regenerate themselves from the dirt in your home to replace any that get lost."
"Oh," said John. "I'm having a Bad Hair Day; can I take a new picture?"
"Yes; and if you want to go back, the 'bots will remember the way you used to look."
John turned to Mark. "What do you think?"
Mark shook his head. "We already have a lot of stuff in our house. What are you going to give up in order to have it?"
22.
John erased words from slips of paper and put the papers into a metal box. He buried the metal box late at night. No one would ever see those words.
23.
He re-read the instructions and saw that he was supposed to tag twenty-five people. He wasn't going to do that on the grounds that it was a kind of informational pyramid-scheme. The people behind the mirror were trying to distract him with his own image to see what he would do and whom he would betray.
Conclusion: Someone says, "He's dead, Jim" or "And they lived happily ever after."
24.
Undoubtedly, someone would confuse Life and Art and be miffed or feel left out. That wasn't his intention, and he offered preemptive apologies.
25.
At the end of the Symposium, the guests smashed the earthenware urns that had once held the wine and each took a piece as a memento of the night.
"Hey," said Mark. "What's with all the smashing? Who's going to clean this up; that's what I want to know."
"But it's Interstitial Art," said John.
"Well, listen, Art-boy; smashing urns doesn't get any stories finished -- so get to work!"
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