Monthly Archives: March 2013

Things I never believed I would see

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A lot of gay news blogs are sharing the video below this week. And to most people it probably just seems like a kind of silly video with these two guys talking.

But to folks like me? Gay men who no longer can be described as “young” by any definition? It’s amazing. I literally never believed I would see the day when someone would so casually create a show about them self that included the phrase “Your Favorite Gay Marine.”

The fact that Russ and Matt are just two adorable young guys in love, who just happen to both be in the Marines, and happen to be in love with each other, and how matter-of-fact they can be in this very public way is just mind-boggling for an old fart like me:

Keywords are forever

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A long, long time ago I was invited to take part in a meta-writing and meta-publishing project. This was before more people knew what the internet was. It was called an APA, for Amateur Publishing Association. There were tons of them dedicated to lots of different topics.

Everything was conducted via physical mail. At regular intervals you would send in your contribution, which was a minimum number of pages of writing (or writing and art) in which you would talk about your most recent challenges or successes in your writing and publishing projects, or ask questions, and respond to things the other contributors had sent in previously.

That sort of communication tends to happen on forums and blogs, now. Not unlike blogs, each person’s contribution tended to have its own personality. Rather than just call your contribution “Gene’s pages” or “Pages from Margaret” people often named their section, as if it were a syndicated column or a separate publication. My pages in this particular project were called “From the Desk of the Script Doctor.”

“Script doctor” comes from the movie and theatre industry. A script doctor or script consultant is a writer who is brought in to rewrite an existing script. Sometimes they call it “polishing.” Usually the script doctor is just fixing problems with structure, or pacing, or dialog before a script goes into production. Usually the script doctor is a more experienced writer who has gotten a reputation for being good at significantly improving a script while staying true to the original spirit of the story.

As a fiction editor, that’s what I’m particularly good at. I’m horrible at copy editing. I read right through all sorts of typos without them bothering me, for instance. But figuring out where your characterization is going off the rails, or finding holes in your plot and suggesting fixes, and similar things, I’m really, really good at.

So I used that as the recurring name of my contributions in that APA. And when I was invited to join another writing APA, I used the same name over there. Years later, when I started blogging on LiveJournal, I used the name there, and so on.

When I first set up my twitter account, for the short bio I wrote something like, “A script doctor reading, writing, and publishing in Seattle.”

My account all set up, I searched for and followed a few people. As most folks setting up a casual account do, I followed several real life friends that I knew were using Twitter. When I checked my account later, I wasn’t surprised to see that the friends had followed me back, along with one or two other friends whose accounts I hadn’t yet found.

The next day, there were a bunch of followers, almost none of whom I knew. The really odd thing was that they were mostly business accounts, mostly local, and all related to medical equipment or services. I clicked on one of the unfamiliar accounts that didn’t look like a business, and the bio had a URL for his private medical practice in a neighboring city. “That’s odd,” I thought.

The next day, the number of medically-related business or consultant accounts following me had doubled. And then I realized what was going on. Whoever was running these accounts was doing dumb searches on the keyword “doctor” and following every account that popped up.

I went through them all and blocked the ones whose streams consisted of nothing but advertisements for their business. Then I changed my bio to “A sentence wrangler reading, writing, and publishing in Seattle.” I figured that would take care of the spammy medical-services related accounts, right?

As time went on I got a lot of the obvious spambots following me, as well as the slightly less obvious spamming accounts for businesses or services. Don’t get me wrong: not all business-related twitter accounts are spammy. But there are a lot out there where the person running it just doesn’t get it. They either never post anything at all, or they post virtually the same statement again and again with a link to their business web site or an article about some service they offer, or they post random quotations/words of wisdom with a link back to their company website.

I really crack up at that last one. There either must be a manual out there “Tweet Your Business for Dummies” that tells people to download a giant list of these quotations and several times a day copy one out of the list, then tweet it with your link.

But I digress.

All those other kinds of thinly disguised advertising accounts follow me, yes. However, even though all mention of my old “script doctor” joke had been removed from my bio and any other information I see on my account, it was still the case in the following months that about four out of every five of these spammy accounts that followed my account were a medical services-type business.

Even now, when my profile reads “A typographer and sentence wrangler writing, dabbling, publishing, and analyzing in Seattle”, and when I’ve replaced my avatar with a cartoon unicorn, they still come for me.

What’s happened is that these accounts aren’t being set up by someone who is doing a manual search of twitter bios. Instead, during that week or so that my bio had the phrase “script doctor” in it, some data aggregator recorded my account into a database, along with the keywords it was searching for that it found in my information. And now, I’m in that database as a doctor forever.

My day job(s) have included being responsible for managing documents or contents for about 25 years, now. I understand from personal experience that one of the least pleasant tasks is to go through older metadata and clean it up. For example, when we released that new product in 1990, all of the documents that went along with it were applicable. When we released a newer version later that year, several of the documents were replaced with newer versions, but several of the previous version’s docs didn’t need updating, so they weren’t marked as superseded. As time goes on and more products are added along with new versions of old products, and as the business grows and more employees come along, you keep adding docs and no one has time to go back to comprehensibly review all the older data on documents that no one has touched for years.

So I understand that I’m forever going to be listed in various lists—as companies share, acquire, or otherwise mix their data together—as a doctor. One wonders if there are also databases that list me as a unicorn, now.

Tempts me to find excuses to put other words in the bio. I’ve always liked the job title, “Emperor.” What do you think?

Public notions

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My old bus route was replaced recently with a so-called Bus Rapid Transit. I say “so-called” because it’s still in with the rest of the traffic, which means it is not true rapid transit. It is merely slightly more rapid bus.

They achieve the faster trips through several clever tricks, one of which is having pay stations at several of the bus stop (it’s supposed to be at every bus stop, but they haven’t gotten them all installed yet), so people who have bus passes can just board through any of the three doors on the bus without waiting in line behind the people paying cash. It really does make loading the bus go much faster.

As I was taking a seat on one bus recently, a lady in a nearby seat was ranting to the guy next to her about how the new buses must be rampant with cheating. “Us honest folks are paying for the other riders! Look! Look! How can they tell which people have actually paid before getting on! It’s such a waste!”

Since I could hear her clearly through my headphones, I knew she was talking very loudly, so I didn’t feel that this counted as a private conversation. I leaned forward and said, “Random fare inspections.”

She looked utterly shocked that a stranger would actually talk to her, though the guy next to her just grinned and said, “See, he’s got your answer.”

She blinked and said, “What?”

“They have guys that come on board with a scanner and ask to see everyone’s card or transfer. I’ve had it happen several times. They can scan your card and verify that you paid. So cheaters get caught.”

She nodded. Then she said, “Wow. Don’t you think Seattle is getting too Big Brother? I mean, scanning your card…”

Just a second before she was angry because she thought people were taking advantage of the public transit she was paying for. But rather than get into an argument with a stranger (I really had just been trying to be informative), I said, “Oh, no! Not at all!” And pulled my headphones back up onto my ears.

She shook her head, said, “You don’t?” Then turned to the guy and went back to talking. But I couldn’t help but notice that she’d switched to an indoor voice. So I guess my attempt to enlighten had at least made her think about how loudly she was talking.

I understand that relying on an honor system means that some people will cheat. On the other hand, I have seen Fare Officers remove someone who hadn’t paid from the bus. I know that when they do that they write you a ticket and it’s handled like a traffic fine. So there is a penalty that cheaters risk facing.

I’m sure some cheating still happens, but similar systems in other transit systems collect an awful lot of fees matching fairly closely to ridership numbers gathered other ways, so the honor system isn’t a failure. And mathematic models have shown that the savings from the shorter trip times more than make up for the theoretical revenues lost through uncaught cheaters.

And in what way is verifying that passengers on the bus have paid through random sweeps “being Big Brother”? She had just been angrily ranting about how “they” have instituted a system that she thought wasted tax dollars because “they” weren’t making absolutely certain that each and every passenger had paid. “They” should do better!

It’s like the people who scream about “guv’ment regulations” hindering business, who then scream “how can they let people sell that?” if there is a salmonella outbreak and their favorite food is being recalled.

Confirming that someone has paid for the bus ride they are currently taking hardly counts as “Big Brother.” And if you think it does, I shudder to think what sort of aneurism you’ll have if I explain to you precisely how cellphone companies figure out which signals are coming from authorized phones. Or how quickly your position can be pinpointed, even on old, cheap phones that know nothing about GPS. Hint: In order to get your 9-1-1 call to a local emergency operator, they have to be able to figure out your position before you hear their first ring.

What’s it about?

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A friend recently asked our monthly writing group for advice about a novel idea that he had been struggling with. His specific question was whether the story was worth finishing. I asked him what the story was about.

He began explaining about the story’s setting, the history of the planet, and a number of complications. If I reproduced it here, it would have gone on for several paragraphs.

At a point when he paused for breath, I interrupted to say, “You haven’t told me what the story is, yet. All you’ve given me are complications. Who is your protagonist? And what problem is he struggling with?”

Another friend participating in the conversation put my same question a different way. Referring to a story we had just finished critiquing. “That story, even though it was only 10,000 words, had a lot of complications and subplots, right? But what the story is about is, ‘Ian gets suckered into delivering a stranger’s ashes to a temple.'”

That summary evokes a story. You don’t have to know who Ian is. You don’t have to know exactly what culture he lives in. You don’t have to know what sort of temple it is. “Character gets suckered into delivering someone’s mortal remains somewhere,” sets up a dramatic situation.

What will make the story interesting and uniquely yours are, indeed, all those background details—the character’s personal history, the importance his society places on funeral rites, the character’s acceptance or rejection of those expectations, any difficulty or surprises he or she encounters on the way, and so on—that make the tale an entertaining or enlightening experience.

But the spine that holds it all together is that central dilemma. In that particular example, the word “suckered” tells you that he is at least somewhat reluctant to be doing it. It also tells you that the person who tricked him into it must have had reasons they were even more reluctant to undertake the journey. The fact that it is someone’s mortal remains and there is a temple involved hint at some of the kinds of difficulties the character may face along the way.

When I asked the original question, this is what I was really looking for: did the author know what the spine of his story was? Exactly what the spine is doesn’t matter when asking whether the story was worth finishing. Neither do all of those other details, background information, and complications tell us whether the story is worth finishing.

What tells us whether this is a story that you need to tell, is if that central nugget is at the forefront of your mind when thinking of what the story is about.

From all the information he gave us, I could come up with such a central, one sentence, summary of what that story might be about: John receives a message from the heavens that reveals his whole life is a lie.

But that’s the conflict I pulled out of it. If that isn’t the story which my friend wants to tell—nay, needs to tell—then it isn’t his story.

And even after all that, the original question of whether the story is worth pursuing has to be answered by the author. Does re-evaluating the unfinished work he has now make some sort of central dilemma jump out at him? Perhaps a completely different central dilemma: maybe the story he needs to tell is the story of John’s sister, who is dealing with her brother’s sudden onset of insanity, then begins to wonder if he really is insane; or perhaps it is the story of a city elder who has to deal with this fanatic, John, who is trying to destroy civilization.

If such a dilemma jumps out at him, if he feels the need to tell that story, then yes, absolutely, it’s worth finishing. Otherwise, it’s probably time to set it aside to work on something else.

March Forth!

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It was spring of my first year in college. I walked into the Math Lab, where I worked, and the administrative assistant looked at me and declared, “March forth!”

“What?”

“It’s the only date on the calendar that is also a command,” she said. “March forth!”

Puns have never really been my thing. I find some of them cute—occasionally even clever—but I almost never think of them on my own. So the joke had never occurred to me. She was flabbergasted that I’d never heard the pun before.

That “March forth!” is an imperative was moderately amusing. I tried in subsequent years to think of something to do with it. Because just pointing out that the day sounds like a command lacks something. And truth be told, about half the time I don’t remember the joke at all until March fifth, by which time it’s too late.

I don’t remember anyone that I ever told the pun too having ever heard it before I mentioned it.

A few years ago, at my previous employer, I wound up on a committee charged with setting up some parties and other fun activities to prop up morale in the work place. Right after someone suggested some activity involving people wearing the shirts of their favorite football team, another co-worker suggested Combat Boot Day. None of us knew what it was.

“When I was in college there was this other girl in my dorm who got us all to wear boots—like Doc Martins or something that could pass for combat boots—on March the fourth. Because it’s March Forth Day. And you March in groups to classes together. And at the end of the day we had a party back in the dorm.”

I had to tell about the admin assistant at my college job who had first told me the March Forth pun and had acted surprised when I didn’t know about the day. But she also hadn’t told me anything to actually do to observe it.

The co-worker said her dorm-mate said it had been an annual thing at her high school. “It was weird, but kind of fun to march around and have people be confused. But now that I say it, I don’t know how we make that an office activity.”

Then I read this rather heartbreaking article: Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home. And I thought, “Okay, here’s something I can do.”

So, this March Forth, I would like to urge everyone to go donate to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

March forth, and spread the word.

Awkward topics

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In fiction, I have a wide array of tools for addressing sensitive topics. Writing a double-wedding scene recently, where one couple was male-female, the other male-male, set in the 36th Century on a star ship during an interstellar war was easy. The plot of the story was about how people will find ways to make normalcy and community in any circumstances. The casualness of a pair of best friends one—who happens to be gay and one not—who want to have their weddings together is the point, not legalities or cultural expectations.

Or a series of gags I wrote in a fantasy novel that was centered around an impending apocalypse. I kept introducing weirder and weirder religious groups, all engaged in pilgrimages because of the impending doom. None of them were overtly based on any existing religious group. I wasn’t attacking any doctrine. Each group, instead, was a manifestation of the various ways that real people react to a looming danger, and how they organize themselves into social institutions. It helped that I was writing in a cartoony talking-animals universe, so some of the groups could have names such as “the Predation Congregation” or “The Omnivoral Free Fellowship.”

And clearly, since I have been willing to write in places like this blog about topics such as marriage equality or bullying in a non-fictional way, there are other ways to broach awkward topics.

But it is harder to write or talk about some topics without offending someone—and sometimes not the people you expect. For instance, an amazing number of people will nod along sympathetically while reading a gay person’s opinions on gay rights in the abstract, but get angry if that same person has the temerity to support a political candidate who actively supports gay rights (and not support the candidate who actively opposes those rights).

The worst case was a former friend who, it turned out, firmly believed that all gay people are fundamentally mentally and spiritually broken. Which was why she had voted in favor of an amendment to her state’s constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman exclusively, had voted in favor of a ban an gay people adopting children, and had voted for a candidate who had openly talked about shipping gay people to camps (not prison camps, no, they were health camps! You can never leave, but it isn’t prison).

She didn’t understand how that made her not my friend (Hint: friends don’t vote for people who want to ship their friends off to concentration camps; that’s not a difference of opinion, that’s conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity). She was really upset, too, because she had been spouting her (always very polite) opinions on certain forums, and then when she was accused of being a bigot, mentioned me and a lesbian that she knew as friends to prove she wasn’t a bigot.

So, for instance, I get really, really tired of people referring to Barack Obama as liberal. He isn’t. His foreign policy is nearly identical to Bush’s. His health care reform was lifted almost in every detail from the 1996 Republican party platform (seriously!). He didn’t make a move to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell until after more than 70% of the general population thought gays should be able to openly serve in the military. I could to on and on, but the upshot is, he’s moderate, when compared to the population as a whole. On a few things he is slightly left of center, but on many he’s actually slightly conservative-leaning.

Bill Clinton was less liberal than Obama. He and is policies were all on the conservative side of centrist.

See, when a policy position is held by more than 50% of the population? That is the mainstream position, not liberal or conservative.

Polls say a majority oppose the health care reform law. Yet, in poll after poll, solid majorities approve of every single individual provision of the plan. Even the individual mandate, if the full description is given. Which means there’s a bunch of people who don’t know what the plan actually does, they’re just afraid of a vague charge of socialism. And none of them even understand what socialism actually is — remember the cries of “keep your government hands off my medicare?” Hint: Medicare is socialised health insurance for the elderly and disabled. Social security is socialized income for the elderly and disabled. Police, courts, and the jail system are socialised justice. The army, navy, air force, and marines are socialised national defense, for goodness sake!

My point, if you think Obama is liberal, and you think your positions are moderate or conservative in comparison to him? Well, since most of his positions are supported by between 60 – 70% of the population as a whole, that means that, at most, 20% of the population is more conservative. You’re somewhere over in the 15-20% of the population. Welcome to the extreme. And yes, I’m aware that the other guy got 47% of the vote, but please scroll back up at the paragraph about people saying they are against healthcare reform, yet they’re in favor of all its components. Same holds true for a lot of other things.

My other point: while Obama isn’t liberal. I am. My political opinions are to the left of his. If you’re the sort of person who thinks that Obama is left-wing and that left-wing is a bad thing? My positions are going to scare you spitless.

And I think I need to stop censoring myself for fear that awkward topics will scare people off.