Ableist, Racist, Elitist, Classist

That’s what I was called a few days back when I commented on changing “your” to “you’re” in a tweet someone made regarding homophobia. Yeah, I didn’t need to do that. And yes, it did not substantively change the message of the text.

That said, the deprecations made by the Facebook poster were for my temerity in correcting someone’s English.

Words have power. Without the right words, the power of expression is perverted, diluted, or rendered nonsense. It is none of the above to correct someone who otherwise seems to be able to create clear sentences.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

That pesky comma, misplaced, misunderstood, possibly an artifact of the many variations on the text written and edited by congress, copied imperfectly for ratification by states, recopied by scribes such as Adam Lambert, is causing Americans palpable, immediate grief.

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens suggested that the addition of five words would resolve the conundrum of ill-phrased English: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.”

So yes, words, and punctuation, have meaning and power. And no horde of “Social Justice Warriors” can reduce the important of correct language in support of clear communication.

On Putting My Babies to Sleep

I started writing pieces on in the Thippah’n universe since 2005. First a science fiction NaNoWriMo novel. Then a few really neat long scenes — expandable into shorts. Then another novel and another and another which needed shredding after I published the first online.

I’ve been sitting on editing the second novel for years. Light passes. Blocking and language passes. Rearranging for plot and twists. This last one is a back-to-front, word-by-word edit. And I want to stop.

Writing is about being ruthless. It’s about ripping out what’s not working. For non-writers, it’s like finding a knit where there should be a purl and yanking out six inches of knitting to make it right.

What I’m thinking of doing is like unraveling five sweaters because one doesn’t like the design. After they’re already up on hangars. But they’ve become my albatross, leaching energy from other projects I’d like to do. But it’s such a great universe! But its far more inchoate than almost every other project I’ve got on the drawing boards, in my drawers, under the table, and stuffed into cracks on my shelves.

So is stopping and not scheduling work on them cryosleep? Or euthanasia? I won’t be the same author if I return to them in a few years. Would that be better for them?

A post with many questions and no answers that I can see. Suggestions, however, are always entertained.

Stale Writing and Technology

The novel I mostly wrote back in 1985 can’t be finished now. Technological advances and political events have overtaken major story points so unless I want it to be an alternate universe fiction, it’s dead.

And that’s a good thing, I think. Writing the ten-year novel should be about the things that are unchanging: the nature of people, of personal growth. Wanna write science fiction? Write it and get it out there: dawdle and the po’on (POH-ohn, a Hebrew word literally meaning “‘here’ device”) is leapfrogged by the smartphone. And the Israeli-Palestinian stupidity has surpassed even the blackest of my noir fantasies. At least I got Syria and Jordan right.

I’ve been re-reading a slew of science fiction novels (latest: the Barrayan Saga books), and, as Lois McMaster Bujold has stated that most of the novels were written to stand alone, it’s been eye-opening to see how she avoids infodump in pursuit of establishing character and milieu when readers attempt to peruse them in order. Learn from all that’s been written, not just the latest.

Yearly Writing Prompt

CaptureSeeing Google congratulate me on my (purported) birthday gave me quite the startle. Not that I have a birthday: that I forgot that Google Knows All (even if the date it chose wasn’t quite right due to my obfuscation). However, it brings up a thought on writing: prompts. There are prompt generators [1][2][3] to help, but I’ve got two dates that I’ve used, more or less regularly, as starters for poems. Yom Kippur (the Jewish holiday commemorating the ‘sealing of the judgement’ of a person for the coming year), and my birthday.

The former invites reflective meditation. Frequently the subject is personal, based on my experiences that year. The latter is a poem, with the number of syllables equal to my age that year, and functions as a sort of momento mori for my life to that point. I’ve some really good ones and many that stretch and strain to syllable count instead of content.

But there they are: days for reflection based on a habit of {shudder} decades at this point.

Have you prompts? Please share!

Trainventure: Yet More Character Sketches

These were taken on the train ride from Chicago to Seattle.

Amish

Lots of Amish women and children wandering up and down the train on the way to Seattle. Didn’t see any going up to Chicago. Saw a few couples all sitting together in a coach car: stereotypical beards, shleykes (suspenders) on the men, white hats reminiscent of lampshades, crisp and pleated, on the older womens’ heads. Kids wearing what looks like it might be homemade clothing; if it is, there’s a business model somewhere that should be looked into.

Two men in their bowl haircuts and vests came in with a little boy in his little vest. He’s been coughing all over the place at his seat in the lounge. Hope it’s not the Black Plague.

Medieval Fatigues

Wild, wiry gray hair, a blouse-like shirt, slightly wild eyes. Wandered down the lounge car.

Nerds On A Train

Sat down with dinner with a 24-year old pre-med school, post-baccalaureate student, a nurse supervisor, and a retiree who ran a print shop. Within five minutes the former two and I were involved in a discussion about EMR software, which turned into a discussion about MUMPS and then IPT-10 code humor. W.TF.

The Stop Singer

John was the conductor working without a net – an assistant. Short, rotund, balding white hair with a short-trimmed beard. We started chatting in an open area in the crew/passenger sleeper downstairs, while I stretched in the open space. Like most Amtrak folk he was very passionate about what he did: a priest of the worship of the iron horse. He spoke with a moderate stutter. Nothing big, but certainly a sentence stopper when he got to certain words. Except when he got on the PA system to tell people about upcoming stops. Then his voice turned mellifluous and warm, smooth as cool honey pouring from ceramic ewer onto plush, steaming pancakes. No trace of a stutter in that well-modulated, cordial, ‘I own this train’ patter. Didn’t collect model trains. How odd…

Queen of the Lounge Car

Most of the Amtrak folks are, at least, perfunctorily polite. The woman running the bar downstairs in the lounge did her best to provide a comparative exception. Grimly professional, rising not to politeness nor small humor (okay, my humor can be very small, I agree). I asked about Advil™ and she looked at me as if I’d asked about buying meth: “Sir, we don’t sell any medications on this train.” Okay then.

Later… Was eating breakfast with two passengers: one a young man studying criminal justice, and another guy. The subject of the lounge car came up.

“What a bitch,” one said. The other nodded.

“I mean, I’ve been a waiter, and she’s just rude as hell.”

Quote from her on the PA system: “And please remember: shoes, shirt, and courtesy must be worn at all times in the lounge car.”

The Trump of the Train

The Seattle-bound train is built interestingly, to best suit the majority of passengers, and not the sleeper folks:

From my berth in the crew/sleeper car, the dining car is the closest car with tables on which I can spread out. I found an empty table and started spreading out. “What are you doing?” came the sharp question. The conductor.

“I can’t work here?”

“No,” she said, with a distinct Dakotan twang. “This is my office. I sit here.”

“Okay, I figured this was less of a deal than the tables in the sleeper car.”

“What tables?”

“The ones downstairs in my sleeper car. With the open space?”

“Well, that’s my office too. You can’t sit there.”

I forebore from asking if her last name was Trump. But only barely. I packed up as she primly spread a white towel on the seat I just vacated and carefully plonked herself down in front of the magazine or crossword puzzle – I didn’t stick around to see which was her next office chore.

Trainventure: Some Character Sketches

I recently took a vacation that was supposed to be a train writing adventure: Austin → Chicago → Seattle, get to Olympia, then again on a train to LA and from there back to Austin. My goals were:

  1. Finish a couple of stories
  2. Get some train experience for my writing
  3. Write a piece entirely on the train

12829496_10153794963230813_1653401339937989656_oThis… Did not go as planned. My PTSD precludes sleeping on moving vehicles unless I’m totally exhausted, and even then only for a couple or three hours max. I’ve known about cars and planes forever, but not trains. I figured they wouldn’t be an issue. I slept three hours en route to Chicago, then three 2-3 hour chunks as exhaustion allowed. The roomette (feels like closet) was just large enough for me — if I were 2″ shorter.

I was a zombie in Seattle, and in Olympia that night and the next day, although a good, hard sleep helped, but I was only operating at 80%.

774697_10153794963415813_744799248641000499_oThen I pulled a Shlomi, and realized Monday evening, after a day in Seattle and dinner with family back in Olympia, that I was supposed to be on a train Tuesday morning. I’d thought I had an additional day (me, not reading dates on ticket, oy!), and suddenly I realized that no, another four days of this and I’d be a zombie. So I canceled reservations and, in a fluster the next morning, just booked tickets for that day. Screwed up people’s plans to be with me, but, worst, left without having some more time with The Son. Stupid move on my part, driven, I see now, but exhaustion and wanting it all to stop (still felt like I was on a train even a day later). But I made the (bad decision). End of guilt trip. And by midnight Austin time I was back home, ready to enjoy several days of crazy jet lag, back pain, etc.

But.

I finished one short story, at least to the point where I could start on the rewrite. Got the train experience sticker, and several character sketches that I’ll publish. and made some great progress on Shabbat Queen, which I’m rewriting for the nth time.

I’ll post more character sketches in the coming days; here are the ones from my Austin to Chicago leg:

Preacher Man

Leather right eye patch, right leather and metal leg brace, long brown hair past his shoulders and a full white beard almost as long. Felt Stetson (dimple on the top, flattish brim). Tightly crocheted yamulka covering 1/3 of his head. With all the other damage, I first thought maybe it was an artificial skull covering.

First I see of him is drinking a cup of coffee a little noon as we chug through the rain. He raises his covered cup. “It’s better with Bailey’s though.”

“So,” I say, after chatting about the semi vs. pickup accident three years back that brought his trucker career to an end (“I’m retired now. Time to drive around, and healthy enough to do it now that I got my truck set up so I can drive it with one leg. Just not the money to enjoy it.”): “Is that a yamulka?”

“Yep.”

“You’re Jewish?”

“I’m a rabbi,” he declares. I hope I haven’t just given him a gimlet eye.

“Really? Where did you study? In a yeshiva?”

“Yep.”

“Which one?”

“I studied scripture in Seguin.”

I bit off the next five things I want to say. This is going to be a long train trip, and he and I are forced company all the way up to St. Louis.

 

Later that evening I’m talking with Cal. “Wow,” she says excitedly, “I want to be Jewish.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because all I gots do is be good to others and be nice!”

The next twenty minutes are my attempts to put Judaism in a scope unrelated to Preacher Man’s Messianic delusions of Judaism. And it bugs me, even as I write this, that I’m having to defend a religion I don’t believe in from the god perspective from an evil parasite that would weaken it further. And embarrassed that I’m not confronting this shill on his lies. “Lies.” Feel the cognitive dissonance.

8:30 in the morning: after an hour-long breakfast “dining, we’re dining,” Cal says when I say hi, he’s sitting with them an hour later, tippling at a bottle of Bailey’s, sans coffee.

Sunny

“Rain is for springtime,” she said. “It’s when everything comes back to life. But we can stop it if we do a sundance.”

“But it’s raining,” I said.

She takes a section of an orange and holds it up near the window. “See now it’s sunny out, we can do it!”

She’d appeared in the dining car the previous evening in full flapper mode, complete with hat, narrow, matching, eggplant-colored jacket over a dark purple top and a short pencil, but not fringed, skirt. Bright red hair, wide cheekbones and eyes a bit too wild to match the eyes. She works in a used book store, which, she says, gives her time to travel. Austin to Kansas City. But the Missouri side, not the Kansas side, she assures me. “It might be great for sunsets, but otherwise the Missouri side is better.”

Cal and Erin

Lesbian couple living in Michigan. They call each other their fiancée and plan on getting married “soon.”

Cal’s a black, 31-year-old woman with sport-style prescription glasses who lost 200 pounds after meeting Erin. She dresses in layers of clothing from neck down, still coyly disguising her (self-described) deflated figure.

Erin’s a curvy, outgoing woman (26) who confides that she’s got a bad case of shyness: she just can’t speak up in public. In one sentence she says she wants to work in particle physics and that she’ll never do it because she doesn’t have a degree. I try chivying around some assumptions. Afterwards Cal says “thanks for saying that: she doesn’t listen to me.” Then: “I’ve been working on her and you should have known her back then. Takes a village to build someone up, it does.”

Cal said “it’s great we’re both into boobs: it’s like we’re 13 year old boys!”

Meth Man

Taller than me, baggy jeans and maybe a pair or two more. Corduroy coat, a couple of t-shirts under a denim shirt. No teeth, flapping cheeks and wild eyes.

I walked past Cal and Erin later in the evening. “Oh thank you thank you thank you,” Erin says. “We thought he’d never leave.”

By morning he’d disappeared.

Mom & Daughter

25ish yo black woman in stretch pants with similarly attired 2yo daughter, who is smart, vivacious and outgoing if not very verbal. Mom is a chef, who started our conversation by talking about how much she needed to smoke, and how she would use the stroller hood so she could puff and how hard it was to smoke when it was raining out. When I said I was allergeric she said “what? Which are you allergic to?” “Both.” “Oh, wow,” she said, shaking her head. “Tough.”

When she was drunk later that evening she went circular on me for getting the best deals on travel by rail and chided me for paying too much, saying she was getting all the way up to Chicago for under $200 for them both, then the same to go from Canada down to Florida the next week and I needed to figure out to push them on prices and get discounts booking ahead or being part of the club. Much later that evening she and Cal and Erin were all talking at max volume with the daughter’s far overwrought tired whines as a counterpoint.

Pre-Navy Writer

First three time he walked past me I thought he was on the Autism spectrum. “Looks good,” he said, looking at my writing. 5’6”, intense, glasses. “Like the font,” the next time. When he settled down near me he showed me the laptop rest he fashioned from the back of a metal chair. Writes fan fiction, “but that’s not real writing. It’s all erotica,” he says. “Ever hear of Fallout 3? That’s where it’s at.” Lists several games. Seems nervous, discounts his writing. Talked to him about nanowrimo. Going into the Navy in May.

Retired Gummer

Retired 21 years ago, train lover. Took the train from Cairo to Alexandria with his son who’s a train buff because he is. Asked “so, you look like you know how to order meat. I don’t have any teeth – I mean, I’ve got dentures, but I don’t wear them. What’s the best way to order my meat so it’s easy to chew? I explained about aging and protein breakdown, but that medium would be the best for low quality meat. And wondered why I was the elected poobah for that. Also a self-taught computer guy, doing the apocryphal DOS->building computers to building them for family to linux guy. Self-effacing, polite, nice. Neatly trimmed beard/mustache, 5’4” hobbit-ish but balding, white hair.

Evie of the Trains

Black rubber boots, eminently practical, with a pink ribbon in pigtails in her dishwater blonde hair. A nose ring, pink cell phone charger cord. Piano pen case, a journal, three books, plastic bags. A rosy flush, possibly rosea, puts her age from anywhere from 17 to 25. Gray sweater tunic and stripy pink pants.

Tweed Couple

In their 70s, chatting while looking out the window. Woman mentions geospatial intelligence agency as they chat while downtown Springfield, IL passes by. Satisfied silences as they look at the window and occasionally continue the patter of a couple long familiar with one another and eminently comfortable with their silences.

Bashert: finally getting started

Finally! After an enthusiastic response at the writers’ workshop I attended almost a month ago, and after fiddling with outlines and time lines and all matter of silliness, I’m FINALLY getting actual words on paper. My goal is to turn a 5,000 word short story into a 110-130k novel — by September’s end.

It took getting
away from Austin to the amazing Canyon Of The Eagles Resort to get my head free enough to make the first few thousand words come. And now, as whenever I write, the outline and my characters leave me free to create the prose without worrying about where the plot might wander. Ah…

ArmadilloCon & Fast Drafting

 

ArmadilloCon 36 Logo

ArmadilloCon is one of those events I kept promising myself to attend, but for which I never chose to make time. I thought I had an out this year: I didn’t have any 5k word writing samples, which is the limit for the the workshop component of the Con.

Whew!

Then I rifled through my stories. Ah, From Generation to Generation. Fantasy. Jewish mystical fantasy… Oh, good: almost 6,000 words. Won’t work.

Good.

Um, well, maybe if I gave it another editing run-through…

It’d been long enough since I’d last read it not to wince at the trimmings of word and scene. A couple of ‘ritas later and 4,998 stood the word count.

Now I have no more excuses. And am looking forward to all manner of critiquing late next month.

Returning From a Posting Hiatus

I’ve been working a job, now a job search, and working on some cool software code that’ll debut on this site.

That’s come at the expense of writing. I’ve done precious little work on Infection (although I made some critical progress on some story arc issues to lock in the longer view). I don’t think I’ve written so few poems in this time frame.

Multi-tasking apparently gets harder as life stress levels rise. Time to take care of priorities: slow down to speed up.

On Focus (Again, and Again, and Again!)

Six months ago for some reason I had a clearer “plate” for writing. But third rewrites, frantically writing down scraps of ideas for new stories, and working on what is turning out to be a monumental task for a simple thing (Google Charts embedded in WordPress, with data updates), plus the flotsam and jetsam of life’s issues, had made for a plate of raw squid tentacles (calamari, for those trying to keep with the metaphor) entangled with angel hair pasta, glued together in a sauce of lost time and chores.

And on my ride to work my train buddies ask “how’s the writing going.” It’s about discipline, I want to say. “And if you find mine, please give it back to me.”

So today I finish the rewrite of Generation to Generation so I can give it to one LAST reader before getting a {sigh} cover together.