There are lots of topics boiling away in the real world that I keep wanting to comment on. Some of them are about drama in sci fi fandom, some are about controversies in the community of writers, some are arguments about civil rights, some are arguments about police use of force, and so on. Each of varying importance in the scheme of things, to be sure, but all involving real people and real harm in one way or another; therefore all worthy of some consideration.
But I’m supposed to be working on some hefty writing goals for the month. And I’m supposed to be trying to spend less of my time and energy getting outraged and ranting about things. So I keep stopping myself from writing about them, and try to turn my attention back to my fiction writing.
But even then, I am confronted with some of those same issues. What are the stories I’m trying to tell, and why am I telling them this way?…Continue reading The stories I have to tell→
Another in my series of posts recommending web comics:
Recently a couple of different artist friends linked to this comic: BouletCorp.Com by Boulet and I suddenly had a new web comic I had to go through! I haven’t got through all of it because there’s a lot. And it’s hard to describe, because it isn’t a single series. From the artist’s FAQ: “I’m Boulet, a french cartoonist living in Paris. I’ve had about 20 books published, most of them for young readers. I also worked on two books of the “Dungeon” series with Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar (available in English, ask at your local comic shop).
This blog is an attempt to translate my french blog ” bouletcorp.com “. I started in 2004 and have drawn more than 1600 entries. I’m trying to catch up but it’s a huge undertaking!”
Some of the comics I’ve previously recommended:
I’m a big fan of “Deer Me,” by Sheryl Schopfer. This artist is also a friend. I have previously described this strip as: “Three roommates who couldn’t be more dissimilar while being surprisingly compatible.” Except in a recent story line Thomas has moved out! Eeek! Currently, the strip has traveled back in time to the high school days of one of the aforementioned roommates. In any case, if you enjoy Deer Me, you can support the artist by going to her Patreon Page!
I’ve long been a fan of: “Mr. Cow,” by Chuck Melville… and not just because the artist is a friend! A clueless cow with Walter Cronkite dreams presides over a barnyard of a newsroom. If you like Mr. Cow, you can support the artist by going to his Patreon Page. Also, can I interest you in a Mr. Cow Mug?
And I love this impish girl thief with a tail and her reluctant undead sorcerer/bodyguard: “Unsounded,” by Ashley Cope.
The Young Protectors by Alex Wolfson begins when a young, closeted teen-age superhero who has just snuck into a gay bar for the first time is seen exiting said bar by a not-so-young, very experienced, very powerful, super-villain. Trouble, of course, ensues.
If you want to read a nice, long graphic-novel style story which recently published its conclusion, check-out the not quite accurately named, The Less Than Epic Adventures of T.J. and Amal by E.K. Weaver. I say inaccurate because I found their story quite epic (not to mention engaging, moving, surprising, fulfilling… I could go on). Some sections of the tale are Not Safe For Work, as they say, though she marks them clearly. The complete graphic novels are available for sale in both ebook and paper versions, by the way.
This is Officer LuKe Wilson of the Toronto Police Department, taking part in Pink Day, a day to take a stand against transphobic and homophopic bullying. His story is in the links.It’s Friday. Is it really already the second Friday in April?
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared:
And Now, Political Virgins. “I’m working up to a point here. The nation is becoming more rational about gay sex and more irrational about heterosexual sex. Who would have thought?”
This bon mot from Jean Oram really captures how I feel right now.
Editing is like killing your story and then very slowly bringing it back to life.
My Camp NaNoWriMo project is to take the rough draft of what I had originally intended to be one book, and turn it into two books. And I don’t want to just chop it in two—not just because I have really disliked several series which have been built that way, but also because one of the problems the first draft has is too many subplots to easily follow. I still think it’s quite doable. I have about half the the characters and their plots pulled out and getting resolved in one book, then the bulk of the next book is the other half of the characters and their plots, with some of the characters from the earlier book joining in for the big battle at the end.
To make the earlier book work as a book on its own, I’m changing one important event in the battle which is its ending, in a way which I believe will later solve an issue which was causing my writer’s group to get bounced out of the story. I hope.
But it has involved a whole lot less new writing than I had expect, so far. I’m still doing more cutting and revising of existing scenes than writing new stuff to fill in gaps. On the plus side, as I’m making this group of subplots work on their own, I’m fixing a bunch of timing issues that had been plaguing the first draft.
So I’m not just killing a book and very slowly bringing it back to life, I’ve killed a set of conjoined twins and am trying to bring them back to life as two self-sufficent beings.
TheEqualityProject.NetGerman philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is very often quoted as saying, “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” I have usually personally preferred Mahatma Ghandi’s take on this from the point of view of a person struggling for freedom and equality: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Although I have also read that Ghandi probably never said that, or if he did he was quoting a speech by labor activist Nicholas Klein.
And I’ve been quite fond of the way that blogger Driftglass merged the two and customized it to refer to a particular gay conservative columnist: “First they ignored you. Then they laughed at you. Then they fought you. Then they got gigs in national magazines repeating as breathless epiphany things you had been saying for thirty years.”
Personally, I’ve always felt as if it was more, “They erase you through ridicule, harassment, hate crimes, and criminalizing your nature; then they ridicule and violently oppose you; then they claim you’re hurting them and try passing laws that claim to be about something else but whose effect is to essentially to re-criminalize you; then they pretend that they agreed with you the whole time (while privately still ridiculing you and cheering every time a “lone psycho” commits a hate crime against you).”
Now, you may think I’m talking about gay rights, but it’s a much bigger thing than that. My topic includes:
GamerGate trying to drive women out of gaming;
the Sad Puppies trying to “take back” sci fi fandom from women, people of color, and queers;
the Teabaggers trying to “reclaim our country” from women, people of color, people who aren’t fundamentalist christians, and queers;
the Reagan revolution trying to bring back “traditional family values”;
All of those things are part of the same reactionary movement trying to shut out the other and keep the old guard in power. And while I like the beautiful simplicity of Schopenhauer’s origin, “ridicule, violently oppose, accept,” I can’t quite embrace it as the truth. Violent opposition is evident in every stage. The only thing that is different in each stage is how the violence is talked about in polite society.
The truth is that humans are a diverse bunch. But that isn’t the entire truth. We’re weird, and we disagree, and we don’t all like the same things, and we don’t all thrive in the same way, and we have different skill sets (and strengths and weaknesses), and we are hardwired to be social animals. We can’t survive without communities. Whether we call those communities families, churches, social circles, or like-minded people, we need them to survive. But we also need the bigger communities, because surviving the thriving in this world requires sharing the world.
And it’s the sharing part that irks the people fighting us even more than the fact that we’re different.
Except I’m too tired to remember to say please.For the most part, I love living in the future. I carry around a computer in my pocket that is thousands of times more powerful than the computer that accompanied men to the moon, for instance. But one of the things I dislike about the current state of our modern capitalist society is that it is nearly impossible to buy certain kinds of over-the-counter medicine.
Because of all the corporate mergers, selloffs, partial acquisitions, and so forth, you can’t go to a drugstore or pharmacy section of the grocery store and quickly find a familiar medication. For instance, when you’re suffering a particular set of allergy symptoms that you know used to respond best to Comtrex. You may find boxes labeled Comtrex on the shelf, but now instead of having he ingredients that used to be found in Comtrex, they contain exactly the same ingredients that used to be found in Tylenol Cold.
Similarly, in the old days, I could buy Tylenol Cold & Allergy, and be certain that is contained an analgesic for the headache, a decongestant for the sinus congestion, and an antihistamine for the hay fever. It doesn’t, any more. Now it contains analgesic, decongestant, and an expectorant (to help you get mucous out of your lungs). Lung congestion is not typically an allergy symptom, it’s a flu symptom. They should have the expectorant in the Tylenol Cold & Flu… but they don’t. What they have in Tylenol Cold & Flu is a cough suppressant, which might also be useful with the flu, but what would be better is the expectorant which is over in the allergy-labeled brand for absolutely no good reason.
And don’t get me started on why you can’t buy a cold or allergy medication containing actual pseudo-ephedrine any longer thanks to misguided anti-methamphetamine regulations that did absolutely nothing to slow down the cheap manufacture of meth. Now we get “Sudafed” (the brand name belonging to the company that first patented pseudo-ephedrine and named by phonetically spelling the name of the active ingredient) that contains no “sudafed” at all, but rather phenylephrine, which clinical trials have shown is not an effective substitute for the vast majority of people.
On really bad hay fever days, as I’ve been having for about a week, what I need is a medication that contains acetaminophen, pseudo-ephedrine, and diphenhydramine or chlorpheniramine (analgesic, decongestant, antihistamine), in a tablet that is a nice, safe dose. And I do mean the safe dose. Back when I could find that combination, the recommended does of 2 tablets every 4 to 6 hours was seldom what I needed to take to get relief. One tablet every four hours was usually perfect.
The closest I found on the day last week I was shopping, was Nyquil-branded “Night Time Cold Caps” which contain phenylephrine instead of the pseudo-ephedrine. It’s close, but much more expensive that any generics.
I can buy plain acetaminophen, plain pseudo-ephedrine, and plain chlorpheniramine. To get the pseudo-ephedrine you have to wait in line at the pharmacy counter, tell them what you want, then wait for them to dig the giant notebook out of the secure location. They will then scrutinize your photo ID, fill out a form, make you read a statement and sign the form before selling you this drug which was FDA certified for over-the-counter sales decades ago (and is still perfectly safe if all you are going to do is swallow a pill every 6 hours as recommended). But here’s the thing: box of 24 generic cold tablets with two of the ingredients I want and one I don’t costs just a little bit less than the stand-alone pseudo-ephedrine. Likewise, the stand-alone chlorpheniramine, and the stand-alone acetaminophen.
In other words, to put together my manual version of the generic tablet that has the right ingredients costs a bit more the three times as much as buying any of the already packaged tablets with nearly the right ingredients. And I have three times as many pills to keep track of, and the real kicker? They often recommend different times between doses. So I’m trying to keep track of one pill that I’m only supposed to take every six hours along with some that I’m supposed to take every four…
The answer is, obviously, to buy the Nyquil branded stuff, which has most of what I want, is more expensive than generic but less expensive than the collection of stand-alones. Which I did. It annoys me that the box is covered with all these dire warnings about taking them at night because they might cause drowsiness. And they there are sold in enormous gel caps, which seem to degrade more than the regular tablets. At least I don’t have trouble swallowing the giant capsules. Unlike my poor husband, who gags on the big gel caps.
Not that the meds are helping as much as I’d like.
I set goals for the year and promised to update monthly. More or less. I’m doing Camp NaNoWriMo right now, so every minute I’m updating this blog, I’m not moving toward my goals with revising my novels, so I’m going to do a truncated check in:
My specific tasks for March were:
Finish the re-plotting of what was formerly book two into book two and three. Done.
Keep plugging away on the edits for book one. Almost no progress.
Write the fight scene I keep procrastinating on. Started it twice. Ended up writing a fight scene for book five instead of book four…
Write at least four blog posts about things I like instead of rants or critiques. Only managed two! But I also posted a little less often than usual.
Draw something. Failed miserably.
My bigger goals for the year are:
Write more, rant less. I mostly did well on this, though the craziness in Indiana and Arkansas (and other places) near the end of the month pushed me more into ranty than I’d like.
Take care of myself. Did mostly well on this one.
Enjoy time with friends. I did enjoy the time we spent, but didn’t make much effort to do more than the usual sorts of get-togethers.
Paint, draw, and make music. The closest I came was making a few new playlists.
My specific goals for April are:
Complete Camp NaNoWriMo: specifically, write 25,000 words worth of scenes to make 2 and 3 work as separate books, finish re-arranging the subplots for subsequent books in the series.
Finish draft two of the Cthulhu Ponies map.
Run episode three of the Cthulhu Ponies game.
Complete layout and upload that book to the on-demand publisher.
Write at least two blog posts about things I like, rather than ranting about things that outrage me.
DailyKos.comI admit, it’s heartening to see the outpouring of outrage over the latest so-called Religious Liberty laws and that clueless politicians are paying a price for pandering to the bigots. And it’s nice to see that some of the other bigots are starting to realize that pandering no longer works to their advantage.
The religious liberty bills are toxic. They address a non-existent problem. Freedom of conscience is already protected thanks to the Constitutions’s first amendment and loads of Supreme Court rulings. And the religious liberty bills can be used to discriminate against a whole lot of people, including trans* kids who just want to got to school and while at school sometimes they need to pee just like everyone else.
But these bathroom bully bills are just as toxic. They are also addressing an imaginary problem. It really is imaginary, and we can prove it:
None of those bathroom or locker room horror stories have a basis in fact. (Click to embiggen)Media Matters has a nice compilation of statements from law enforcement officials and other experts from the 12 states that have had laws protecting transgender people on the books for a while (some going back to 1993!) about whether or not all those predictioned sexual assaults in bathrooms and locker rooms have occurred. Shockingly, no such assault has occurred in any of those twelve states. Who would have thought?
Please look at that chart, and repeat this to any people who start repeating those claims about bathroom assaults: some states have by law allowed trans* people to use whichever bathroom matches their own gender identity since 1993, and not once, ever, has anyone used that law as a means to sneak into a bathroom and assault someone. Not once.
The problem is that while it’s pretty easy to get people worked up about a really broad-based license to discriminate law, it’s a little more difficult to get those same people to rally against these bathroom bully bills. Because a lot of people who think of themselves as liberal and open-minded, who label themselves “gay allies” still have problems with transgender people. And they still get irrational about anything having to do with “children.”
They wring their hands and say vague (but very emotionally laden) things like, “I don’t want my kids seeing… um…”
Here’s part of how you respond to that. “I get it. But think about it, none of us want to actually watch what people go into bathrooms for, right? You want to go in, do your business, wash your hands, and get out, right? Well, so do they.”
In Sir Terry Pratchett’s brilliant novel1, Hogfather, one subplot3 is that an excess of belief causes the temporary creation of a bunch of minor godlings/fairies, such as the Oh-God of Hangovers or the Sock-eater. And one of those beings is the Cheerful Fairy. She is said to “look just like your first schoolteacher”9 and wasn’t very good at her job. She kept trying to get the wizards of Unseen University to engage in party games and other activities suitable for Hogswatch Night11.
I am once again embarking on a Camp NaNoWriMo project12. I’ve recruited several friends to join my cabin14. I’ve had most success at NaNoWriMo and Camp NaNoWriMo where I had writing buddies to check in with, and sometimes have word count races with. Camp NaNoWriMo is supposed to be a low-key version of National Novel Writing Month, where you either set a lower word count than the standard 50,000 words in a month, or you work on an editing or revising project. So I’m going to try to be more cheerleader rather than competitor with my buddies17. Thus, Cheerful Fairy!
There are lots of topics boiling away in the real world that I keep wanting to comment on. Some of them are about drama in sci fi fandom, some are about controversies in the community of writers, some are arguments about civil rights, some are arguments about police use of force, and so on. Each of varying importance in the scheme of things, to be sure, but all involving real people and real harm in one way or another; therefore all worthy of some consideration.
Font Folly 