Massive Quantities!

Massive quantities of grading struck last night and this morning. (23 term papers and 32 essays.) You might say I'm having a gradepocalypse, and will certainly be digging out for a while. We also have faculty interviews today and Monday. That means I won't be able to visit blogs much for the next few days, probably until at least Monday or Tuesday. I will keep you all in mind, however.

In the meantime, the exceptional Ty Johnston,  over at life on the written page has reviewed the first two of my Fiction Techniques series of ebooks. And he said nice things!  I hope you'll get a chance to check it out. And have a look at Ty's own offerings of both print and ebooks. He's got a range of items listed HERE.  I've mostly read his fantasy stuff, which is excellent.

Take care.

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Irritated

I'm pretty irritated at myself these past couple of weeks. I was off three work days for Mardi Gras and wrote virtually nothing. I wasted that weekend as well, and part of the next weekend. I wasted this evening playing some video games and watching meaningless TV. I talked to my writing class today about "making progress" every day, but I've been doing the absolute minimum of progress most days when I could have been doing more.  And on Thursday I get 23 papers to grade from my writing class and there won't be 'any' writing time for me for at least a few days. I've come up with plenty of excuses even when I had time, though. I keep telling myself that I needed some rest after a tough 2012, but the excuses are beginning to sound a little hollow to me.

Time to put up or shut up, I'd say.
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Story Time versus Real Time

Although we have objective ways of measuring time with clocks, the human experience of time is very subjective. We’ve all had days where the minutes drag on endlessly, and we’ve had the experience of getting home on Friday and thinking of the great weekend ahead of us and then suddenly realizing it’s somehow gotten to be Sunday night and we have to go to work again.

I’ve been thinking that, in fiction, all time is subjective. I’ve been thinking that the passage of time in written work is indicated by the amount of prose assigned to an event. A battle scene is not fought in “real” time; it’s fought in story time. And story time is relative to the length of the tale. In a short story of 1000 words, a 200 word battle scene is a longgg time.  In a novel of a 100,000 words, a 2000 word battle is pretty short.

Writers dedicate story time to those things they find interesting, or at least to those things they think readers will find interesting. I personally enjoy reading battle and action scenes, and I tend to lavish a pretty fair amount of prose on those in my tales. On the other hand, I don’t believe I’ve ever had a character go shopping for clothes. I’ve seen works where story time has been spent on that activity.

In thinking about books I’ve read recently, mostly noir/crime novels, I can tell you that most story time has been dedicated to violence and sex. The violence often involved some kind of criminal behavior, of course, but mostly the writers dwelt on violence in defense of self or of innocents. The sex time was primarily spent in people trying to get it, and much less in actually having it.

Two other things that writers spent story time on were eating/drinking, and driving. The eating and drinking generally involved rich, delicious foods and fine wines or liquors. There was a clear sense of pleasure about these acts of consumption, and some of the descriptions were tied into sexual aspects of the story. The driving was often associated with the violent aspects, but there was at least some time spent on the aesthetic qualities of automobiles. I found that interesting and I don’t believe I’ve ever spent much time on this topic in my stories either, although somewhat more than with shopping.

One thing that almost no story time was spent on was bathroom activities, other than a character or two throwing up. No time was spent urinating or defecating. I’d have to say that most of my stories follow suite.

What about you? If you write, what do you spend most of your story time on?  And as a reader, what do the authors you read spend their story time on?  I’m curious.

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Mardi Gras and The Walking Dead

Google Reader is acting up this morning. It first showed me 223 posts from friends, but as I looked these were almost all ones I'd seen before. As soon as it gets straightened out I'll get around to visiting blogs. In the meantime, I thought I'd put up my own post for today.

Monday, February 11. This is the day before Mardi Gras down here and I'm off work through Wednesday. I'm certainly glad to be off, but I'm not a fan of Mardi Gras. I don't particularly like crowds and parades. I'd much rather stay home and get in some rest and reading. It sure was nice not to have to get up at a quarter to  six this morning.

I wasted most of the weekend. Watched a lot of The Walking Dead marathon before the new episode aired last night. I'm a big fan of the show and Lana has become a fan was well. She has even started reading the graphic novels that spawned the show and she brought me the first three volumes home from the library. I enjoyed them and the basic idea is indeed the same, but there are differences in characters that are a bit disconcerting at times. There's no Darrell or Merle in the graphic novels and I do like those characters quite a bit.

Today, I'm going to get back into the writing and see if I can make progress on Wraith of Talera. I was so busy at the end of last week at school that I got nothing done on the book so it's been almost five days. Let's hope I'm not too rusty.

Enjoy your day!
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Strange Fires

I feel like I'm skirting the edge of Twilight Zone territory. On Wednesday evening, a truck caught fire on the Causeway bridge and then managed to end up in the water. I didn't see it, as I had--fortunately--passed through a couple of hours before the event. I heard a lot about it though. When divers got to the submerged truck there was no one inside and so far I haven't heard anything else about it.

Although strange, it's not unheard of for such a thing to happen. That doesn't evoke Twilight Zone music.  BUT, Thursday morning, while I was going across the Causeway Bridge to work, I spotted a column of black smoke rising from the bridge ahead of me. Traffic soon came to a stop and we waited about 45 minutes before we could proceed. As I passed the sight of the accident I saw a burned vehicle pulled off to the side.

That's two vehicle fires in two days on the Causeway. A little weird.

Transport yourself to Friday morning. I'm on my way to work. I get off the Causeway Bridge safely and turn down Airline Highway toward work. I see smoke rising up ahead, but off the road, and as I pass an area along the train tracks I see a car on fire. There's no one around it but the engine is blazing pretty good.

Three car fires in three days!  Two that I witnessed personally and all three along routes that I take to work! The Twilight Zone music is ringing in my head right now. I guarantee you.

As I was telling my friend, Lisa about it, she looked at me strangely and said she'd seen a car fire this week as well, as she was going to Baton Rouge. She thinks it was Monday but wasn't absolutely sure, and the car on fire had been involved in a crash.

Four car fires in a week!  To heck with Twilight Zone music. My Spidey sense is tingling.
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When One Random Moment Becomes Critical

Everything was going the Ravens’ way until the lights went out in the Super Bowl.  When the lights came back on, the 49ers came back with a vengeance.  Ultimately, the Ravens won, but it got awfully tight there for a while. I’ve seen such things happen many times in other games. I’ve never quite understood it and wish I did.  To be cliché, something “sparks” a team at a critical moment and they come alive. I’d use fresher language if I understood the underlying factors that cause the change.  It seems to me that what happens is that the team suddenly begins to “believe” in themselves.  But why that should happen just because some lights went out for a while is beyond me.

I started wondering if this kind of random happening can spark critical moments elsewhere in our lives. I thought of one, perhaps.  By all logical considerations, the change to a new year on a calendar is a completely arbitrary event.  Yet, many people treat the beginning of a new year as a new “start.”  I’ve known people to jump start careers, reengage in their marriages, change their lifestyles, and do many other things because they decide that “this day” or “this moment” is going to be the critical one.  Nothing changes in the physical world; everything changes in the emotional one.

Of course, many times people try to make such changes with good intentions but fail. This just makes the whole process more mysterious. Why do some succeed and others don’t?  Why do we succeed sometimes but not others?  I have to believe it is a largely an emotional phenomena, but surely there are behavioral elements to it. I wonder what they are?  If I could only figure them out I’m sure I could make a lot of money

What do you think?

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Closing the Loop

Fiction gives the illusion of reality without literally depicting reality. A simple example of this is seen in dialogue. Real dialogue is much more open ended than story dialogue. In a story, good dialogue makes it “sound” like real people are speaking, but the dialogue carries weight and information that is not often seen in actual dialogue between real people.

Unlike real life, fictional stories and movies are self contained entities and pretty much every major aspect of said story needs to be self-referential to the story itself. For example, most of you are probably familiar with the statement that, if you show a gun in the first act, then that gun should be used by the third act.  Fortunately, this is not the case in the real world. A correlate of the “gun” rule in fiction is that the gun used in the third act should not be revealed only in the third act. It should be part of “setting the stage” for the third act.

The “gun” rule extends to other aspects of a story as well, particularly to characters. In the best storytelling, I believe, all the important characters in a book or movie should appear within the first half dozen or so scenes. I’d go so far as to consider it something of a cheat to introduce a new character halfway through or later that plays a major role in how the story ends. This happens in real life all the time, of course, but fiction and real life are not the same thing. If one must introduce a brand new character halfway through a book or movie, then I believe it becomes extremely important to tie that new character to someone who was introduced earlier. That helps, at least, although it doesn’t completely fix the problem.

All of these thoughts coalesced in my head this morning after watching the movie L o o p e r last night with Lana. If you haven’t seen it, you might not want to read further because I’m not sure if I can keep from giving away some spoilers.

There was some good stuff in L o o p e r, including some pretty good acting jobs, especially by this little kid actor who was awesome. It had some interesting ideas, but there were some huge plot holes that really took away from my enjoyment of the movie. It also had a violation of the “gun law,” which troubled me just as much as the plot holes. 

A number of characters are introduced early in the movie, and the viewer begins to make some judgments about them. As the plot unfolds, the viewer, this viewer anyway, begins to seek within the existing characters for the connections that will play out in the movie’s finale.  Then, halfway through the movie, two new characters are introduced, almost literally from left field. These characters have no relationship initially to ‘any’ character introduced before, but the whole ending of the movie revolves around them. The original characters come in contact with the new characters and the movie proceeds from there.  To me, the “gun,” the new characters, was introduced far too late to play fairly with the viewer and it left me feeling dissatisfied.

By its very nature, fiction manipulates the reader or viewer, but because of that the writer has to bend over backward to play as fairly as possible. Only in such a way will the reader or viewer feel as if they were part of the fun instead of being yanked around by a chain.

If you saw the movie, did this aspect of it bother you at all? Do you find violations of the “gun law” troubling?  I’d love to know.

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REVISITING TALERA

The Talera trilogy--Swords of Talera, Wings Over Talera, and Witch of Talera--was published in book form in 2007, although it was written years earlier. In 2008 I started a new arc in the Talera story, a novel to be called Wraith of Talera. I completed 21,000 words on the book over the summer, but when school started I had to put it away for various nonfiction projects that I needed to work on related to my professional career.  Various other fiction and nonfiction projects intervened in the ensuing years, and so the partial has lain dormant on my computer ever since.

Then, a few days ago, I was casting around for my next large scale project and I knew I had two in various stages of completion, the already mentioned “Wraith,” and a work called The Razored Land. The latter is a post-apocalyptic piece and is already at 33,000+ words. When I’d left “Wraith” I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to go next with the story. I didn’t have such a clear idea for “Razored,” so I opened my “Wraith” folder first and started to read. Within a few moments I was faintly misty-eyed as I began to recall all the hell I’d put Ruenn and Rannon through. And I realized how much I’d missed these characters.

The upshot of all this is that I’ve started working on Wraith of Talera again. To refamiliarize myself with the story thus far, I’m giving a very close read to what I’ve already got. I’m making some minor changes but not finding a lot that needs redoing. This should take a few days and then I’ll launch into the new material. I’m excited about it.

The book is about a third of the way done and my plan is to keep making at least slow forward progress on the book during the spring semester, then hit the accelerator during the summer and, hopefully, get it finished.  We’ll see if that happens. We are in the middle of a job search at work, and I’m on the committee. The IRB committee, of which I’m chair, has been busier than ever. And Xavier is considering restructuring our departments so that too has to go on the pile. This is not counting my classes. I’m teaching the Writing in Psychology class this spring, which is a major time commitment. If all goes well, though, a new Talera book will be in the can by the end of 2013.

Wish me luck.

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Reading Pet Peeve

I've been reading a pretty good book lately but the author occasionally does something that bothers me. I might even call it a pet peeve. He'll start a chapter with some great, eerie, description that clearly suggests that something bad is about to happen. But then he'll short circuit it with some phrase like, "Looking back on it now, we had no idea how bad that night would be."  There are couple of things about this that bother me. First, it's as if the author doesn't trust his prose to convey impending threat and has to "tell" us that there is a threat. This is the equivalent of showing AND telling.  Second, it clearly lets us know that, no matter how bad things got, the person who is "telling" us the story survived. This cuts the suspense.

Now, the story is written in first person so you have a pretty good idea that person survives anyway, but I'd still rather "see" that survival occur rather than making sure ahead of time that I know it.  I actually did this in Swords of Talera and didn't even think about it at the time. Later I wished I hadn't put it in. I don't think it's as big an issue with fantasy as with horror, but it's still something I don't really like.

How about you? Does this kind of thing bother you? Or do you not even really notice it?  If you happened to  read Swords of Talera, did you notice it? It's about mid-way through chapter 1.

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Grammar and Gardening

Those of you who have been hanging with me for a long time may know that I have a deep "disrespect" for the book Requiem for a Dream, by Hubert Selby.  All telling, no showing, and characters who I just wanted to die long before the story's end. In addition to these issues, Selby added extra problems for the reader by cramming multiple speakers into the same paragraph and by refusing to use quotation marks. The writing in the book is so pretentious that Selby even refused to use the apostrophe in such phrases as "I'm" and "You're," using Im and youre instead.

My review of "Requiem" on Goodreads still garners a stray comment once in a while. Recently someone else had chimed in that the grammar and punctuation issues made it hard for them to read the book as well. Another person responded that:, essentially, it has to be remembered that grammar and punctuation have "absolutely no implications on the actual story."

Wow, how wrong could that second commentator be?  No implications? I'm definitely not a grammar NAZI and my own grammar isn't top of the line. I make plenty of errors and have to do a lot of careful proofreading on those elements of my stories. But, grammar and punctuation have many implications for story because they provide the framework by which we access story. Imagine a wonderful museum without any kind of handicapped access. A person in a wheelchair isn't going to be able to enjoy that wonder, at least not without a lot of extra effort and inconvenience.

Here's another analogy that occurred to me. Flowers can be very beautiful growing wild,  but landscapers have long known that "arranging" flowers in certain ways increases their impact. The careful use of trellises and beds can enhance the viewer's experience. In the same way, proper grammar and punctuation can be used to better display a good story to its best effect. Grammar errors or problems with punctuation detract from that display. A few errors here and there aren't going to detract too much from a good story, but a lot of them will really throw the reader out of the story. At least they do me.

How about you?

Executive Orders

I like my colleagues. We work hard and I think we do a lot of good things for our students, but we also have fun.  When I was chair back many years ago now, I used to send out the occasional “executive order” addressed to the “Workers” of the Psychology Department. These might require things like posting a photograph of me on all walls, or the requirement that all members of the Department purchase a motorcycle for transportation, or 100 other things.  I often referred to my small red book of The Sayings of Chairman Gramlich. There were lots of German jokes, in keeping with my name.

Recently, our current chair, Elliott Hammer, was going to be out of commission on a couple of Fridays, leaving my friend, Lisa Schulte as acting chair one Friday, and me as acting chair the next.  Lisa and I got together and decided that she would issue an executive order that I would then rescind as soon as I took “command.” 

Lisa’s Executive order read something like this:

From the Office of Dr. Schulte-Gipson:

Day 1 of the New Departmental Order

To all workers of the Department of Psychology

Executive Order #1718A

"Henceforth and in perpetuity, all eggs used for any purpose, such as cooking, shall be cracked only at the small end of the egg."

 My executive order won’t go out until next week but will read:

From the Bunker of Dr. Charles Gramlich

Day 1 of the New New Departmental Order

To all remaining workers of the Department of Psychology, henceforth to be known as Department Q

Executive Order 78483838027817304721639964151

Part A: All previous executive orders issued by the previous chair in exile, whose name shall not be mentioned here, are rescinded.

Part B: Henceforth and in perpetuity, all eggs used for any purpose, such as cooking, shall be cracked only at the large end.

I don't know about you, but I got a laugh out of it.

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The Big Bang Theory

I've been a fan of the show The Big Bang Theory for a little over a year now. I've caught most of the episodes in reruns, although once in a while one pops up that I haven't seen. Lana is also a fan, and is the one that got me started watching it.

I heard yesterday that "real" Geeks and Nerds don't like the show because of its portrayal of them. I was pretty much amazed at that. I definitely consider myself a "real" Geek and Nerd and I like the show. What Nerd Cred do I have to show as proof?  I can watch the first two minutes of any Star Trek (original series) and tell you the title of the show. I can quote volumes of Kirkisms, Spockisms, Bonesisms, and even some Scottyisms. I know the difference between Trekkie and Trekker and think that "Trekker" is a bit pretentious.

I watch most of the SF/fantasy movies that come out each year, providing they come to our library where my wife, Lana, can get them for free. We had a free movie channel weekend this last weekend and I watched John Carter three times!  I've read just about every Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard book, and know what ERB, REH, CAS, and HPL represent. I was in a Robert E. Howard fandom group for years and wrote thousands of words about him. I just reviewed three REH related graphic novel projects for a scholar journal dedicated to Howard. I go to Science fiction conventions. I even write SF and fantasy and all kinds of weird stuff.  Ich bin ein nerd, and I'll take a back seat to no one in that regard.

Lana is perhaps slightly less Nerdy than me, but not by much. She likes Big Bang Theory too. She watched the John Carter movie this weekend even more than I did.  She's painted unicorns and dragons, for goodness sake. I do not question her nerdiness either, at risk of getting a Bat'leth to the spleen.

So, what is that supposed "true" Nerds do not like about the show? Of course it is not a 100 percent accurate portrayal of all nerds. Nerds are quite varied creatures, even if we do have much in common. No show could capture the whole breadth and depth of Nerddom. But what the show does is let us have a good laugh at ourselves while employing plenty of inside jokes that Nerds and only Nerds would snicker at.

I am a Nerd!  And I stand up for The Big Bang Theory.
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School and Writing

School has started again and I’ve been swamped. Classes actually don’t begin until Monday but there are many, many things teachers have to do before that first class period.  That’s why I haven’t been visiting blogs for a couple of days. I got around to some this morning since it’s been relatively quiet.  

The Fiction Techniques Freebies are over now. I gave away 255 copies of Fiction Techniques #1: Creating Suspense, and 297 copies of #2: Characters Wanted. Sold 9 copies of #3: The Twist Ending. I did notice that someone bought Write With Fire also. At least, the numbers improved on it for a while. I hope people find the articles useful.  For those of you who checked the “Techniques” articles out, tell me honestly what you thought of the covers.  I know they aren’t highly salient but I wanted to make the connection to the ebook publishing revolution so that’s why I used screen shots. I hope they don’t look too cheesy.

I have been writing since the start of the New Year. Most of this has actually been revision of earlier materials, though I have produced a couple of new flash fictions. In the next month or so I’m going to publish a collection of twisted flash fictions and my working title for that is “Micro Weird: Tiny Tales of the Strange.” After that I will turn my attention back to some short westerns, and then begin work on a longer project. I have at least two long projects in various stages of completion, although who knows where inspiration will take me.

Here’s hoping everyone’s New Year is off to a good start!

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Fiction Techniques #2: Characters Wanted is Free

Fiction Techniques #1: Creating Suspense, is no longer free (.99 cents), but Fiction Techniques #2: Characters Wanted, is free now for a few days. If you're a writer, these should be of interest to you. 255 free copies of #1 were picked up, so I hope I'll hear from some folks about it and whether it was helpful.  I also noticed that the numbers for Write With Fire, showed improvement so it looks like someone picked up my writing book as well.

I'm not planning on making Fiction Techniques #3: The Twist Ending, free. It's just 99 cents, though. It's a brand new piece that goes into detail about how to create twist endings, for both stories and for novel chapters that can be used as cliffhangers.

Anyway, if you are interested in writing and haven't gotten your copy of "Characters Wanted," it's up free right now, and will remain that way a couple more days.

Have a great day!

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Fiction Techniques #1 is Free

On my last blog I mentioned uploading three articles for Kindle in what I'm calling the "Fiction Techniques Series.  The first one in the series, Fiction Techniques #1: Creating Suspense, is free today and for the next two days.

The second one, Fiction Techniques #2: Characters Wanted, will go up for free after that for a few days. These are both expansions on material that was included in my nonfiction book on writing, Write With Fire. The third one, Fiction Techniques #3: The Twist Ending, is brand new so I probably won't make it free. It's just 99 cents, though.

If you're a writer, why not try the free one and see if you find the series helpful. If folks do find them helpful, I may write more.  And there is always Write With Fire, which has many other articles and essays on writing, including tip pieces and marketing pieces.



Happy New Year
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A Little Push to Start the Year

Someone new came to our writing group yesterday, although she is someone I’ve known for a number of years. She brought along a copy of Write With Fire, my book on writing, and asked me to sign it. I was surprised, flattered, and probably a little bit flustered since that doesn’t happen to me often. I had actually been thinking about Write With Fire for a while and trying to think of some way to give it a push since sales have pretty much flat-lined for it.

I decided last year to write a few “tip” articles and put them up for the Kindle as a way of promoting Write With Fire. I completed the formatting for these and did the covers over Christmas and they are now up at Amazon. There are three of them, each with more than 4,000 words of material, and I’m calling them the “Fiction Techniques” series.

The series includes:

Fiction Techniques #1: Creating Suspense

Fiction Techniques #2: Characters Wanted

Fiction Techniques #3: The Twist Ending

The first two, “Creating Suspense,” and “Characters Wanted,” are substantial expansions on material that actually appeared in Write With Fire. The “Twist Ending” piece is brand new. If they do what they are supposed to do, I’ll probably write more for the series. I enjoy doing this kind of thing and it really helps me clarify my own thinking and understanding about the writing process.

If you’re not a writer, these are almost certainly not of interest to you. I will make both #1 and #2 free for a few days at some point in the next week or so. (I’ll announce it here and on facebook.) That’s why they are published exclusively on Kindle for now.  So if you’re a writer and want to get them you don’t need to buy them. (I would appreciate some “likes,” though.)  I probably won’t make the third one free since it’s brand new.

As for the covers, I thought to do something to reflect our modern world of “Direct to electronic” publications and the ebook revolution. They’re basically screen shots of the works in progress. (I kind of thought it was inventive.) You can see the covers below, although not very well. If you click on the links, without having to buy the piece, you can see the images much better, and can use the "look inside" feature to get a flavor for the works.

Have a good un!

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2013 is Here

It seems weird in a way that I woke up this morning with such a lift in my mood of late. Rationally, the change to the new year is a completely arbitrary one that has nothing to do with actual reality. Yet, the lift is there, and I know it’s related to leaving 2012 behind and moving into a new year, no matter how arbitrary those designations are.

I’ve noticed in the past that something about the changing year initiates feelings of hope and reignites dreams in me. This year the feelings are even stronger, which is no doubt a tribute to how rough 2012 was. Psychologically, I think all humans need on occasion to experience a sense of rebirth, a sense of cleansing of the past and looking forward to the future. Or maybe it’s just us sinners that feel that way. J

I hope you all have a great year. I hope we have a great one together! The picture was taken by the incomparable Lana Gramlich at the Abita Springs Fireworks display last night. We had fun. 

Happy 2013.

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A Year In the Mirror

2012 is just about over. I’ll be glad to shake the last dust of it from my feet. After a rough 2010, where we lost my mom, stepfather, and brother-in-law, 2011 was  a year of recovery. I wrote more and more as 2011 went on and had a very productive summer. The fall of 2011 was tough at work and I had to slow down on the writing front, but I picked up over Christmas break and drove into the first couple of months of 2012 with enthusiasm and energy that I hadn't possessed in some time. Everyone who reads this blog knows what happened next and I won’t rehash it. I could have found the time to write after March, but my will broke for a while.

I've never kept word counts for my yearly production but I’d estimate that I've typically produced between 100 to 120,000 words of published fiction a year for the last decade. In 2012 I actually did decide to keep records. I only produced about 50,000 words of what I’d consider publishable material. About 10,000 of that was produced in January and February and has been published. Another 15,000 of what I did later in the year is scheduled for publication in various venues. In fact, much of that material was written because I had requests or contracts for it. I don’t know if I’d produced much of it without that motivation. The rest of my 2012 writing consists mostly of partials, most of which I hope to finish in 2013.

2012 has ended on a high note emotionally for Lana and me. Her cancer is gone and life is steadily getting back to normal for us. Despite that lift in mood, though, I have really just wasted my Christmas break as far as writing is concerned. I wrote one 1000 word short story, and that was during final exams. Since I've been home for break I've done virtually nothing. I’m not quite sure why. It just seems far easier not to write.

I see 2013 as an important year for me in writing. If I don’t do better than in 2012 I’m thinking I might as well just admit that I’m a dabbler rather than a writer. Fortunately, my production this year was so low that I scarcely have anywhere to go but up. I’m going to try and use these last few days of 2012 to re energize myself a bit. I've been overdosing on reading fiction in hopes of feeding my muse some stimulation. We’ll see how that works out.

What I need, and I know it, is the discipline that has served me well over previous years. I've never been a prolific writer and have always had many other work commitments, but throughout most of my life since graduate school I have written steadily. It might have been just a small amount, but it was nearly every day.  Even if I was tired, or sick, or depressed, or overworked at school, I produced a sentence, a paragraph, a page.  2010 knocked that pattern off kilter, and 2012 kept it off. But it wasn't the events in those years that did it. It was the change inside of me.

Maybe it’s time to shrug back into the harness. 

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Feed Your Head

It’s been a while since I've had a good alien dream but I had an interesting one last night. Earth suffered two alien invasions in succession. The first one involved a very human appearing species who could often pass for us unless you really knew what to look for. They were generally taller and thinner than us, and always had black eyes that held an unusual shine. They initially attacked right at Christmas and were able to cause tremendous disruption by attacking shopping centers and traffic hubs. Lana and I were getting gas in our car when one such attack occurred, and we were able to make a break through the resulting traffic snarl and escape into the countryside. I saw the police respond and shoot some of the aliens, but they had some kind of shielding that stopped the bullets. All you’d see was a kind of shimmer when the bullets struck them, like heat waves.

Although the aliens quickly took over most of earth, a large human underground resistance formed. We found that we could kill them even when they were shielded by using edged weapons that could be pushed slowly through their defense fields. We also discovered that they didn't wear their shielding all the time. At one point, I and another group of guerrillas broke into an alien TV station and were able to shoot up many aliens who were unshielded in what they thought was a safe area.

The resistance forced the aliens into a peace treaty and we found that, in fact, we could co-exist. Before long we were living with one another instead of against one another. In fact, when the second invasion came, I was at a football game with an alien friend of mine and was studying the program booklet, which told us which of the players were alien and which human. The tall, thin aliens seemed to be particularly prominent at the wide-receiver position.

As we were at the game, these small, crab-like aliens suddenly came floating down all over the place. One landed at our feet. It tried to snap my human-like alien friend with its claws and he stomped on it. We knew instantly that they were aliens and it was an invasion, but we laughed at how easily it was going to be for us to repel the new invasion. Then the crab creatures deployed their technology. Each was wearing some kind of machine harness around their bodies, and when they pressed a red button a virtual armored suit formed around them, kind of like what they used to call a Waldo. When they opened fire from these suits we realized we weren't going to defeat them so easily.

I woke up after that so I don’t know whether we won or not. I guess we did since I’m still here blogging this morning. What I did realize when I woke up is that the image/idea materials for the dream had been cobbled together out of stuff I've been reading and watching lately. Since school has been out I've been indulging myself with reading and movies. I've been “feeding my head,” and that’s what my brain was using to construct the dream. I’d watched the movie Arrival, about an alien invasion; I’d watched Avatar again last night. I've been reading some Star Trek and watching reruns. I read a book about terrorists trying to use biological warfare on the US. I noted there was going to be a remake of Red Dawn. I watched The Bourne Legacy, which involved a guy shooting up a research laboratory. I read a horror/western about spider-like (or crab-like) demons. Put all that together and you have many of the elements of my dream.

In other words, if you want to have weird dreams like mine, remember what the door mouse said: Feed your head.

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Little Known Facts

It seems lately that every time a tragedy occurs in the US, some people want to blame it on the most ridiculous causes -- Gay Marriage, Lack of Prayer in Schools, Obama's reelection, Women moving into Non-traditional roles, etc etc. My thoughts are that many of these people don't really believe what they are saying.  No, I believe that many of them are simply manipulating those that they see as their followers, and that's a pretty nasty thing to do. It's particularly nasty in the religious sense to me because, if it's true that God would let children die just because there is no prayer in schools, then that makes God out to be a vicious, petty thug. I'm not comfortable with that.

The truth is that natural disasters have been happening a long time in human history, and before human history.  The truth is that human beings have been killing each other in large numbers for a long time. If we are going to find answers to these problems, ways to mitigate natural disasters and to minimize humankind's more vicious tendencies, we have to give thought to real causes and potentially real solutions, not to distractions. Those who are throwing up these distractions at us are definitely part of the problem and not the solution.

I don't even know if its appropriate given all the crap we've heard lately, but sometimes a good way of calling attention to those who are adding to the problem is with humor. I hope you take what follows in that vein.

LITTLE KNOWN FACTS IN GAY MARRIAGE HISTORY

In 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa erupted, producing the loudest sound ever heard in the modern world. Over 36,000 people died as a result of the explosion. The cause has since been revealed as Gay Marriage!

Around 450 or so AD, Attila the Hun repeatedly attacked Europe, slaughtering thousands. It is said that Atilla constructed pyramids from the skulls of his victims. Only recently has it come to light that it was, in fact, Gay Marriage, that gave rise to Attila.

In about 72 AD, the Roman Coliseum was built. It was used for the execution of Christians among other things.  But do you know why the emperor Vespasian began construction of the Coliseum? You guessed it: Gay Marriage!

65 Million years ago, an asteroid (or two) slammed into the earth.  The dinosaurs went extinct. The fossil evidence is scanty but many suspect the impact was a result of Gay Marriage among the T-Rexes of the age.

GAY MARRIAGE – Triggering horrific acts of violence since before there were even people!

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