The Invisible Library

I was looking over the part of my novel that I posted earlier this week and decided that it needs a lot of work. It’s probably not a good idea to post something that’s a work in progress. One of these days, I’ll learn. So I’m taking it down for now. I’ll still work on it from time to time and throw around some ideas for your consideration but for now, I thnk I’ll sleep better at night if I just keep the actual words to myself, at least for now.

The first three chapters of The Tragic Circus are posted on an adjacent page. There’s a permanent link on the sidebar, under fiction. I had Haloscan auto-install the comments option, but they link doesn’t seen to have appeared there yet. But when it does, do me a favor and fill it up.

About a year ago, I finished writing the first version of a novel. Please, hold your applause. It was good. I liked the characters and most of the words were even spelled correctly. I passed it around to a few people who agreed to be my test subjects. They all liked the story, more or less but weren’t all that enthusiastic about it. I got a few notes back form these fine readers suggesting some improvements but mostly just comments along the line sof, “It was good.” Which is nice to hear but not very instructive on how to make it great.

Along about six months ago I had a revelation concerning the story. It’s major problem was the main character, a twenty something wannabe poet named Simon whose uncle, after disappearing mysteriously for twenty years, returns home, only to commit suicide. The existential crisis this event causes in Simon is resolved a little too quickly and then I move on to a larger section devoted to Simon’s sister, Lilly, a devout catholic teenager who becomes pregnant. The problem is, if Simon is the main character, why do I resolve his problems early on? This conundrum is amplified by the fact that he meats Inez, a mortician who has clairvoyant dreams and they start dating. Their relationship isn’t the problem, exactly, but what is is that she’s a much more interesting character. This is what I realised six months ago.

So, I decided to rewrite the entire novel, but make it about Inez Vespertine, the mortician. Simon is now a secondary character, as is his mysteriously pregnant sister. Their uncle still dies but his story, alas, is left mostly untold. He’s basically just an excuse for a funeral, where Simon and Inez meet.

I’m about thirty pages into this new draft and it’s going well, though at times, the story seems on the verge of splitting into numerous little subplots, Inez and Simon’s relationship (more rocky and unpredictable) being just one of them. There’s also Astrid, Inez’s best friend, a lesbian who has a crush on Inez and something happening with a man with a mustache who has a little notebook that he is writing something in, but what, I don’t know just yet.

At present, these are little mysteries. Part of the writing process that is most enjoyable, in my opinion, is finding out what will happen with them, seeing where they lead me.

A question for the regular and irregular readers out there in Interweb land: If I were to post a few sections as they were finished (but still rough, you understand) would you be at all interested in reading them and offering some critical feedback? The commenting of course is the key. I want brutal honesty. If a bit of dialogue sucks, tell me but also tell me why it sucks.

Let me know what you think in comments below.

CNN: Judge: Evolution stickers unconstitutional:

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) — A federal judge in Atlanta, Georgia, has ruled that a suburban county school district’s textbook stickers referring to evolution as “a theory not a fact” are unconstitutional.

[…]

“By adopting this specific language, even if at the direction of counsel, the Cobb County School Board appears to have sided with these religiously motivated individuals.”

The sticker, he said, sends “a message that the school board agrees with the beliefs of Christian fundamentalists and creationists.”

“The school board has effectively improperly entangled itself with religion by appearing to take a position,” Cooper wrote. “Therefore, the sticker must be removed from all of the textbooks into which it has been placed.”

Five parents of students and the American Civil Liberties Union had challenged the stickers in court, arguing they violated the constitutional separation of church and state.

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone in the Bush Administration or one of their bobbleheaded pundits dismisses Cooper as one of those “Activist Judges” turning our country all topsy turvy by looking at facts and reading the Constitution from time to time. However the right decides to frame this, it’s a win for us godless heathans who want our kids to understand science in the classroom, not be forcefed dogma.

My beautiful wife, Elvira sent me this story from Wired about Delicious Monster, a personal cataloguing program for Macs. It looks interesting and pretty flexible. If you’re like me and Elvira and have far too many DVDs and books and need a way to keep track of them, this might be the answer. We lost our first copy of Fellowship of the Rings Extended Edition and had to replace it. Since then we’e been cataloguing our DVDs in a spreadsheet and card catalog, so we know what we have and who has it. This program is far more sophisticated. Perhaps I’ll have more to say later, after I’ve tried it out a bit.

One of my fondest memories (and earliest conscious ones) was when I was four or five, sitting on the floor in the den with my father on Sunday afternoons, watching Sci-fi Sunday. This was a three hour window on Sunday afternoons, between hideously bad movies where one of the local affiliates (CBS, maybe? I seem to remember the eyeball popping up during comercial breaks) played Star Trek (TOS), Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. I lived for these hours because my dad would explain as best he could to a five year old the the finer plot points I may have missed and the technical aspects that the stories hinged upon. I had a pretty good grasp of the intricacies of faster than light travel, phasers, cylons in particular and robots in general. At five, I had at least as good a grasp as the writers of those shows I would later discover, much to my disappointment.

This is how I became a nerd. It’s my father’s fault and I thank him for it every chance I get (which isn’t nearly as often as I’d like).

Ever since this I’ve had a soft spot for cheesy science fiction TV shows. In the intervening years, this affection has been severely challenged, most often by the Star trek franchise. I’m now convinced that Berman and the gang at Paramount couldn’t hack out a decent series if they had Harlon Elison’s head in a jar and Stephen Hawking’s genes spliced into their computers. (Come on folks, the idea of a prequal-type series about the first Enterprise was a good concept but why did you have to screw it up so badly? Instead of all that nonsense with Zindis and pre-federation politics, why not just do a show about Captain Christopher Pike, the first Captain of the real Enterprise? Recreate the bridge and sets and get us all embroiled din the Klingon War, with Romulans and Vulcans and the whole backstory from the original series. But no, we’re stuck with the same old crap, warmed over from Voyager).

My Sci-fi spirits, however have recently been revived with the looming launch of the new Battlestar Galactica Series. There’s even a blog about the show, so we can all geek out together.

I was really impressed with the miniseries and am very much looking forward to the weekly installments. They’ve kept enough nods to the original series while ramping up the drama and science a hundred fold. Which is good because, after catching an old episode of BSG a few days ago, I realized how severely undramatic the series was. Here’s humanities last hope for survival and they’re a bunch of rather relaxed fighter pilots (all with immaculately feathered hair) who are only moderately upset over the fact that twelve planets and an entire interstellar civilization have been destroyed in the span of a night. The new series adresses the innate horror of this tragedy as well as some of the implications in a more realistic manner, all without cutting any of the cool space dogfights (which are really impressive. they make Star Wars look clunky by comparison).

Thanks to Xeni at Boing Boing for the link.

In my previous post on the subject, I pointed out that the religious Right was surprisingly quiet about the Tsunami and any relief that they might be arranging for the victims. Turns, out there’s a pretty good reason for some of these groups to not go bragging about their ideas for Tsunami relief. From WaPo (via Mustang Bobby and AmericaBlog):

A Virginia-based missionary group said this week that it has airlifted 300 “tsunami orphans” from the Muslim province of Banda Aceh to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, where it plans to raise them in a Christian children’s home.

The missionary group, WorldHelp, is one of dozens of Christian, Muslim and Jewish charities providing humanitarian relief to victims of the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami that devastated countries around the Indian Ocean, taking more than 150,000 lives.

Most of the religious charities do not attach any conditions to their aid, and many of the larger ones — such as WorldVision, Catholic Relief Services and Church World Service — have policies against proselytizing. But a few of the smaller groups have been raising money among evangelical Christians by presenting the tsunami emergency effort as a rare opportunity to make converts in hard-to-reach areas.

“Normally, Banda Aceh is closed to foreigners and closed to the gospel. But, because of this catastrophe, our partners there are earning the right to be heard and providing entrance for the gospel,” WorldHelp said in an appeal for funds on its Web site this week.

The appeal said WorldHelp was working with native-born Christians in Indonesia who want to “plant Christian principles as early as possible” in the 300 Muslim children, all younger than 12, who lost their parents in the tsunami.

Back when I was in high school, there was an incident in Va Beach where a Baptist Church sponsored a youth group outing for inner city kids. It sounded like a good idea– get kids off the street and let them play video games or checkers for a few hours so maybe they wouldn’t turn to gangs. Then it was discovered that the church in question was driving into downtown, picking up the kids and taking them to be baptized. If any of the kids objected, they dropped them off and told them to walk home.

The problem here is the walk back to Jakarta is a lot further than the walk from the suburbs back to the hood.

If your faith compels you to help the needy, that’s great. Reason should be enough to realize that these people, and others who are not as fortunate need our help but if you require that little extra push from the invisible man in the sky, fine. And hay, if you happen to strike up a religious discussion with an impressionable, scared, young Muslim kid while you’re over there handing out bowls of rice and wrapping bandages, that’s between you and them. But kidnapping kids and moving them half way around the world, brainwashing them into thinking that safety and sustenance is proportionate to how much you believe in some bullshit book of fairy stories, just to win points with some dead street preacher in your imaginary afterlife, well, that’s just fucking evil.

And they wonder why the Muslim world hates us so God damned much that they’ll hijack planes and use them as missiles with human warheads.

I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon and take the Fifty Book challenge. For those who don’t know, it’s more of a personal challenge, to read 50 books in 365 days. There’s no real reward, other than the obvious fun of reading a lot of books. I’ll be keeping track of them here, and since I’m already behind, I should get started.

Book #50: Mumbo Jumbo, by Ishmael Reed

I’ve read this book before (hay, it’s not against the rules to reread books! At least, I don’t think it is…) Frankly, I used to like it a lot more than I did this time. It still has some fun, jazzy prose and I like the basic idea: that the spirit of dance is sweeping across 1920’s America and an secret society of uptight Whites is trying to stamp it out while a group of Black Harlem Voodoo gurus are trying to find a way to encourage it. Along they way they liberate primitive art from museums and ship it back to where it belongs and thwart a 1000 year old Templar Librarian in the process.

What does it in though, is Mr. Reed’s sometimes hamfisted expository dialogue. Reading three page long monologues about the evils of western civilization and how its done the African people wrong is OK. If you like that sort of thing. And I admit, I have my anti-western civilization sentiments but blaming it solely on White men is about as oversimplified as completely ignoring Black culture because it wasn’t made by white people. And there is a healthy dose of self parody involved but it just didn’t have the same punch it did the first time I read it. A-

Book #49 will be Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake. This is a long one and could take a while so I’ll probably tackle something else in the mean time, and get back to this one periodically.