Category Archives: writing

Culture, an Analogy

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“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently…” – David Graeber 

Many years ago I had a sort of epiphany about what culture is, and how it works. At the time I chose to not write it down, in part due to my own laziness, and in part to see if it was a genuinely good idea. I often have ideas that fail to make it the full light of day before imploding. Such is the nature of creativity. The impulse is kind, but its offspring are not always lasting or well-thought. 

Over the years my little analogy grew to reflect changes in the outside world. I saw arguments in politics over the culture wars (which, far from being a recent phenomena, dates back to the beginnings of recorded history), I saw massive changes in the media that artists use (from vinyl to CDs, from DVDs to streaming, and from AOL to the targeted social media we have today), and I saw every day recommendations (over books or screen time, or the value of letting a child play outdoors), and they all struck me as somehow being connected.

The question remained: How? How are these seemingly disparate elements connected? My answer is the stone.

The evidence for my analogy comes mostly in the form of observation. I have no formal education into the nature of culture, and in fact have barely scratched the surface in terms of research. All of what you read comes from a simple yet central idea. What if all the things that humanity argues about were just variations on the same thing? What if this thing was something that grew over time, evolved as it were. Ideas battling it out with other ideas until eventually one was the victor. After all, we no longer argue over the divine right of kings, or assume that mental illness comes about from demon possession. Why is that? What made those changes happen? It was cultural, sure, but how? How does culture work? How does it evolve? 

It was in attempting to answer those questions that this analogy came into being.

…

The Stone

Imagine if you will, a massive wheel of stone that is hundreds of miles wide and perhaps equally as large in diameter. The stone travels slowly over a large flat plain, completing a single revolution once per year, so that the part which is currently at the very top will be on the top again in precisely 365 days. The weight of this stone is crushing, destroying everything in its path. Behind it is a transformed landscape marking its passage that goes back for millennia. The stone is almost inconceivably large, and is unstoppable in its rotation. 

Upon the face of this stone are people. We will call them sculptors, though they go by many different names: Artists, writers, painters, dancers, singers, songwriters, chefs, architects, musicians, scientists, etc. They are of all shape, sizes, color, nationality, and religion. Each day these sculptors work upon the surface of the stone, battering and hammering into the hard face with their tools. Their goal is to affect the stone in such a way that when it reaches soil below it will use its massive weight to stamp an impression into the dirt that will last year after year beyond its passage. Some sculptors work singularly, some work in large groups. The work is hot, heavy, and dangerous. The very top is the safest place to work, and that is where you’ll find most of the sculptors, but the stone remains underneath that area for only a short time. Those that wish to influence a particular section beyond that short moment, must invent ropes and pulleys and other contraptions to hold themselves to the ever rotating surface while they work. If you start too early you’ll discover that the stone, fresh from compacting the soil, is embedded in a thick layer of dirt. If you stay too late upon the other side you risk the very real chance of being crushed by your own work. Every year the stone in its undying rotation creates hundreds if not thousands of casualties. The price for inattention is high.

All of humanity is deeply interested in what the sculptors do, but the vast majority do not live upon the stone. Either they find the work disinteresting, too dangerous, or perhaps they have some other reason. Instead, most people live in the impressions left behind by the passage of the stone, for as the stone moves it leaves behind vast buildings made of compressed soil, some so large they become massive unending cities. Also left behind are sculptures, and trees, comfortably shaded benches to sit upon, toys for children and adults, pools, and roads, auditoriums, and churches, and cathedrals, cars and trains, musical instruments of every style, and vast platforms that twist and swirl for dancers to perform upon.  All that is needed is a little bit of scrubbing, and a little bit of digging, and the impressions from the stone can be made livable. Don’t like the house you’re in? Wait a year and try the next version. Hopefully, the architect up on the stone will listen to your requests. Of course, you can always pay them, for many of the sculptors are paid by the people below to create things for their use. Not all sculptors are paid. Some work for the joy, or desire. Some for the notoriety. It is said that one sculptor, by the name of Jesus, hit a crack in the face at just the right moment that it caused a massive avalanche of stone to fall. You can still see the impression of his work today. Some claim this Jesus was buried in the rubble of his own creation, and popped up, alive and healthy, three days later on the other side. His own work sheltering him from the weight of the stone. Alas, no one can travel back that far in the stone’s wake and check. 

This, then, is our culture. The stone. It is both something that concerns us all, and yet is something we can also contribute to. It is the most democratic of mediums, although some groups do in fact limit who among them can work its surface. Some people by hammering away find great success, but the vast majority of sculptors do not. Most know of the stone only by the impression it leaves behind. Some live so far from the stone that they have never seen its motion. By now, the entire surface of the stone has been marked by humanity, much of it for thousands of rotations. That doesn’t mean one cannot go in and try to reshape any area they desire, but the stone is hard, and the work is difficult, and there might be just as many sculptors wishing to carve the stone in the entirely opposite direction. The battle is the work, and the work is the battle, and all of us, all of humanity, are affected by the outcome. 

Deep in Rewrite land

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I’ve been deconstructing the first part of Mind The Slice, which is a slow and deliberative process. Part of it is replacing the first several chapters of the novel, starting it closer to the core action.
Lilah, of course, as opinions on this. I thought it would be fun to write a prologue in her voice, and she really ran with the ball. I don’t know if this is going to make the final cut, but I love how she has no fucks to give.



Prologue

Someone told me once what a prologue was. Honestly, at first I thought they were joking. Like why the fuck do you need to write about a story before the story? That’s just dumb. Can’t you just write it right to begin with?

But then they explained it was more about voice, and tone, and I was all, “Voice? Oh honey, I got this one.”

So here’s my fucking prologue.

None of you know what its like to be me. None of you. You think you know what the world is like, sitting there is your safe little houses with plenty of food to eat, and nothing to worry about. Do you know what its like to not eat for a week? Do you know what it’s like to hear the sound of helicopters and know down to your bones that someone around you is going to die? Do you know what its like to sleep out in the cold without blankets or coats because your house just got bombed, and all your belongings are buried under tons of concrete?

See, I know what your world is like. I lived in it too, up until your President decided that people like me couldn’t be trusted, and kicked my family out. I’ve been to your schools, shopped in your malls, I’ve seen your Christmas lights, I’ve gone trick-or-treating, I’ve been to your national parks. I was there, I had it all, I thought it was mine as well, but then it was taken from me, swapped for a country in the middle of a civil war, and all because my family worshiped Allah. 

I know what it’s like to be you, but you don’t know what it’s like to be me.

Did you think I started to hack for fun? Oh no. I turned to crime because there was nothing left for me to do. You saw to that. You and your people. So don’t go giving me that bullshit about being a criminal. YOU MADE ME ONE. I would have been happy pretending like I was one of you, but you decided that wasn’t enough. You’re the ones that made sure I couldn’t join your little club, so don’t go fucking crying to me when you have to hear what I have to say. You sent me down this path, mother fuckers. You made me what I am.

The only time you think about people like me is when you bomb us. And yes, you totally fucking bomb us. Don’t think we don’t know? Are you so lost in your own special world to not realize you paint your names and serial numbers on the outside of your ordinance? Sure, some of the bombs come from Russia, and even some from North Korea or even Iran, but we can read that shit too. Like you’re the only ones with access to goggle translate.

Discounts, discounts, everyone over there is looking for a discount. Well let me tell you something, dis-count, this count. I count too. 

I have dreams, I have desires, I am going to write my own path, and you cheap-assed mother fuckers are not getting in my way. I will go behind you, or over you, or around you, or THROUGH you, but you are not going to stop me. No sir. Not no more. I’ve had enough of your set backs. I am moving forward, and you ain’t gonna slow my roll. I am miles above, beyond you, inside you. You cannot stop me because I am in you. I have hacked into your systems, I am deep inside your code. You can’t get to me without first getting to yourself, and you can’t handle that. You can’t deal with your own criminal ways. You don’t want to hear it.

You hate me because I force you to deal with your own shit, and you cannot stand that.

But don’t you worry about me none. I’m gonna be just fine. You wanna know why? Just like you can’t deal with your shit, you also cannot stay mad at yourself either. There always another meal to eat, another tv show watch, another discount to buy at your stores, until you bury yourself so much cheap crap that you don’t hear our screams.

Well guess what, mother fuckers? Someone gave me a microphone, and you’re gonna hear me now, because I am LOUD.

From the Writing Desk

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Work on my next novel “Fight From The Inside” (aka Mind The Slice 2) is moving along at a healthy pace. This is how my work ended yesterday.

Note: this is slightly spoilery for MTS, and is entirely unedited. The person speaking, Amethyst, is looking over the data from something that happened near the very end of MTS, and they are NOT happy.

Here it is:

And then there was the data from the Gap Sampler. Apparently one of the two impossible pair-bounds had destroyed the device, and all the data within it. This was bad as the connection data from the machine would have been highly valuable in terms of verifying how tight they connected to each as, and how well they thought.

As it stood, Amethyst wasn’t even sure which half of the pair had destroyed the machine. Whoever they were, they had been quite thorough, going so far as to remove the delicate data cartridges from the Gap Sampler and atomizing them using a large piece of solidified quartz. Amethyst has seen the photos. It was an impressive amount of destruction, almost as if they had been trained to cover their tracks. 

The last half of that last sentence in interesting. It was a total surprise. I hadn’t even had that thought, right up until I typed it. And then, oh boy, the implications: This, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call a plot point, seen in it’s natural wild state. I’m going to have a lot of fun letting Amethyst chase it down. They will too.

Story idea from a Dream

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I had this idea in a dream a year ago. Had to look it up that morning to see if it was real. Sadly it wasn’t, though the origins of ventriloquism are disturbingly similar to this.

Still I have a universe I can probably tuck something like this into.

Faux Wiki

American Ventriloquism

American Ventriloquism was a rude style of entertainment started on the western edges of the US in the mid 1800s. Early practitioners were reported to make burping and other crude noises, that were thought to be funny, interpreting these sounds as human speech. This lead to small acts to toured in local areas. The humor was rough spun, some claim intentionally so. Men would pretend their stomachs were speaking, or that their belches and gurgles were their friends telling a story.

John Flannery of Stockton became the most famous of this style of ventriloquist, traveling up and down the state of California in the late 1860s with a small keg named Louis that was painted with a human face.

Reports of this style of entertainment last into the late 1870s before they were eventually overcome by entertainment groups traveling from the east coast on the newly developed railroads.

Must be a good night for dreams for me because 6 years ago I posted on facebook this idea:

I dreamed last night that a strange disease afflicted a group of astronomers, slowly turning their bodies to ice cream. By chance, a sample of one of these scientists, carefully kept in a freezer, was consumed by a young girl who became pregnant and gave birth to the most prominent scientist of our age.

2023

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Well I guess we’re at the start of a new year. If I sound uncertain it’s because picking a random day to be the start/end point of a year seems highly suspicious to me. I mean why December 31st and January 1st? It would make more sense to start the year on an actual astronomical marker like the winter solstice (or the summer one for that matter). I would even settle on something like either equinox. It’s not like people haven’t known how to find these particular days, regardless of how their calendar is constructed. It’s pretty obvious once you start looking, and our distant ancestors had nothing to do but look around.

I generally don’t do new years resolutions, figuring that if something is important enough to make a promise to yourself, then start that shit right away. No need to wait for a special day. Want to be kinder to animals, or tell your significant other they are important to you in a meaningful way? Then for Bog’s sake don’t fuck around about it. Do it now. All that to say don’t expect wisdom from me, except to point out the excellent resolution from a colleague of mine who every year resolved, “if someone offers me a donut, I will take it.” That still strikes me as good advice.

On a different note, I’ve been working on a novel titled “Mind the Slice” for a few years now. The darn thing should have been finished long ago. I would write and write, but for some reason I could not hit the dismount. In truth, the story would get bogged down on some minor point, and then I’d lose my nerve. To compensate, I would then spend days and days researching ways to plot a novel. Believe me, there is a lot of “helpful,” and not so helpful advice out there on the internet. All of which is fun to follow if one is feeling lost, but its not necessarily useful in terms of finishing a story.

For me, short stories are much easier to write because they are much easier to plot. You have clear beginning, middle, and end points, and I can hold all the salient parts in my head as I go. But once a story gets to a certain length then I lose that ability to keep it all up in my mind at once. Then I keep having to go back and look, writing myself little notes, like, “Kill the boy after she kisses him, not before.” That kind of thing. And all of that made me feel uncomfortable, like I am missing something, and once that kind of doubt creeps into your head, it’s hard to finish.

Because of this I have like four different starts to the novel, and a whole host of middle passages, much of which I need to prune. That shit is also hard. Some of the plot points that will not make the final cut are still glorious in their own way. They exist as a reminder that yes I can write, and no, not everything I write fits the goal.

Anyway, at some point near the end of last year I had a kind of epiphany, and figured out a passage through the muck. Since then I have been stitching my Frankenstein of a book together chapter by chapter. I am at the halfway point in terms of chapters and such, and much of the second half is already written. I just need to put it all together, and smooth out the transitions. That is the good news. There’s a good chance I will have something in a useful form by the end of this month, ready to send out to beta readers. The bad news is it looks to one longish, like 200k words or 400 pages.

I am so excited. I cannot wait to share this novel. Lilah Al-Marwin is a marvel of a young girl. She is so bad ass it makes me cry. She is smart, and laser focused, but also carries several dark secrets, including her other half. There’s the tall and handsome second son of an Earl named Aberdeen (who has his own secret). There’s Randal, the only child of a billionaire computer maker, who also has his own secrets. And finally there’s Wyoming Johnston, the child of the Senate Majority leader, who also happens to be politically ambitious, while somehow remaining both kind and human (and no secrets). All of them are delightful in their own way, and maybe a few of them get kissed, before they get killed. There is for sure more than one death.

Did I mention there’s a school taught by aliens from outer space? How about an overweight dolphin that teaches alien empathy, or the strange two-part creature that teaches programming and informs the students, “We are not an I, we are a we.” There’s even a mysterious captain, an Electronic Intelligence (who runs most of the show), and an alien who is both covered in strips of plastic, and yet is amazingly sexy. Each of them have their own secrets.

But that not all. The Earth has its own secrets, and those secrets might cause the planet to break into millions of pieces, which would be bad for everyone.

There’s love, and death, and destruction, and earthquakes. Computer get hacked, the planet gets cut in two, and teens get kissed. There’s amazing new alien tech, an end to our climate crises, and maybe even someone saves the planet. That is before they get blamed for everything that goes wrong, because you gotta know, things go wrong in this novel.

It starts with an explosion and ends with a scream. What more do you need?

Resurrection

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So this site was down for a while after it got inundated with malware. Part of this was pure negligence on my part. I just wasn’t checking it often, and when I started to see issues I basically ignored them. I kept telling myself, “I’ll get to that one of these days…” Well I finally got to a These Days, and cleaned the site up. It took a few weeks, and more money that I wanted to spend, but lesson learned.

Maybe. 😉

This is the place where I should pledge to you that it will never happen again and from now on I will be more diligent, but that would be more pontification than I can mange right now.

I have been writing, pretty constantly, and most of it is stuff I can’t share, at least yet. A novel got written last year and into this year, and several short stories, (some of which were quite long), and a few other bits and pieces. I will share them when I can.

Also, I got a cool shirt from Sista sci-fi. Very proud to wear. And no, I didn’t know all of them either when I bought it. Still learning.

Strange Dream

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Last night I dreamt I was meeting a friend that I had not seen in a while, and was trying to make a good impression, but was totally blowing it. It started with everyone at the gathering was wearing a costume, and I was just in regular clothes. And then later in an enclosed space i was talking to some woman at length and realized I wasn’t wearing a face mask and everyone else was. The look of horror on this woman’s face as I was speaking loud was amazing.

So I decided for some reason to show this woman a magic trick. Mind you, I don’t know any magic tricks, but that didn’t stop me. I knew I needed to make a good impression. So I took a book and started ripping pages out of it. At first I was pretending to rip the pages, but pretty soon I was taking out whole pages, and then clumps of pages, and then shaking the book upside-down and having confetti and small pieces of paper fall out.

The magic trick was I was going to make the book whole again, and it worked, the book was made whole, except…. Page 17 and 18 didn’t want to go to the right place. Page 15-16 was full of violent language, and page 19-20 was almost a war. The poor page just didn’t feel right being between those two, so it asked about and traded with page 57-58 who was bored of the staid and sedate place it was in, and was looking for more adventure.

And when I woke for the last time (for this dream was more like several dreams that worked together with me waking sometimes in-between) I thought to write a children’s book where one could rearrange the pages in different ways. So the story could be easily changed many time the child got bored. They could put all the exciting stuff right next to each other, or put all the stilly parts in the back, or whatever.

It should be an interesting project.

From the Writer’s desk

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I was 12 when I first laid eyes on a locomotive, and I will remember that moment to the end of my days. Those crazy unbelievers up in Sisko had invented a new engine that was supposed to be faster and more efficient. All the newspapers from up north talked about the new-coming passenger service which promised travel to any place in the Empire within a single day. This was easily twice the speed of the ancient 2 + 2s they ran before with their open tops and their rickety carriages. But where we lived no one paid much mind to that, as no one we knew had money for the fare. What got all of the farmers tongues to waggling was the freight version of that engine, which was even larger and promised to take produce from our fields to the ever hungry tables in the capital in 24 hours or less. So my dad hitched our two ancient mares to our old buckboard, and took me on the six mile journey to the closest passage of the tracks that we might see for ourselves what all the fuss was about.

We stopped some hundred paces from the tracks, and waited, not sure how close we could get. Later we would learn the engine had been held up in Delano, so that it reached us some three hours behind schedule. For some reason in my childish mind I equated tardiness of the train with a lessor size, assuming, like many of those around us, that the “monster engine” as they called it was just another product of the capital’s hyperbole. So as we waited my fear of the impending engine grew less and less, until by the time it finally arrived I was standing just at the bottom of the rocky ballast, close enough that if I were to lay out on the uneven rocks, with my feet in place, I could have touched the closest rail with the tips of my fingers. 

Our first hint of engine was a tiny white plume on the horizon, with a darker smudge underneath it, the darkly stained oil-smoke defining the edges of the white steam. As it slowly increased in size, faint trace of its passage were carried to us. The first hint I had of something larger than I imagined came when the rails near my feet started to vibrate like plucked stings on some massive fiddle. They sang and sizzled with impeding energy.

Then suddenly the engine was upon us, so loud and so encompassing that I could not hear my fathers shouted warnings to step away from the tracks. The sound was not just loud, but penetrating, you felt it more in your chest than in your ears. It was as if it was too big for your ears alone, but required the entirety of you body to hear.

As it zoomed by, piercing whistle blowing, a massive steel edifice towering some 15 feet over my head, and passing me at a pace faster than even birds could fly, I felt something in my head fall away. My earlier fears were overcome by the size of that great mechanical beast, leaving me fearless in excitement and wonder. I reached out my hands to the newly painted freight cars as they passed, not so much as to grab ahold of one, though I desperately wanted to, but just to feel the air of its passage. In my fevered excitement, that was enough for me.

There is a story in the Holy Bible that speaks of crippled beggars in Jerusalem so desperate to be healed that they stretched out their arms that they might touch the hem of the passing Jesus. Up until that moment the meaning of that verse had eluded my 12 year old mind, but by the time that train had finished passing I knew exactly what those poor souls were feeling. The smoke, the steam, the speed, and most of all the noise, had baptized me. I was forever changed. I knew then that I wanted more than anything else in the world to work on an engine like that. It didn’t matter to me if I shined shoes, or was the chief engineer, I just wanted to step onto that massive beast of a train, and take it anywhere it wanted to go. 

Five years later I did exactly that.

The Serial Killer

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There’s a serial killer and he is coming to your home. You spend the few moments remaining with your family frantically attempting to plan some kind of defense. The idea is you’re going to lure him into a room, and there together overcome him by striking him with things in your house.

So it comes that you find yourselves in an upstairs room looking out over the city at night, and pointing to the places he has struck before.

“Didn’t he shoot someone from that tower behind the Payless?” you say.

“I don’t think so,” a second voice says.

A third voice adds, “I think I remember that. It was a man wasn’t it. Coming home late from a bar? It was just past where he strangled that lady.”

The second voice says, “I did hear about the shooting, but I remember the lady. Was that last week?”

“Two weeks ago,” you say.

And in this way you bide the time until you hear the glass in your back door break, and he walks into your house. Downstairs you hear him prowling, then he grabs some item of paper from the living room and angrily rips it to shreds, and you realize that the last-minute plans you had made of weaponizing the meager furniture in the upstairs room are not going to work against all his anger and his energy, that you’re going to have to face him with almost no weapon and no plan.

So you turn to your partner/significant other, and you say, “When was it we were going to bring him up here?”

***

This is what it is like to write a novel. This is what it is like to get married, or have a baby. This is what it is like to lose a loved one. This is the metaphor of the living. You move, you plan, you think you have a bead on things, and then suddenly you find yourself overwhelmed by forces more elemental and powerful than you ever could have dreamed or expected.

Everything you know and love is at risk, you are quite sure you are not up to this task, but you do it anyway because to do nothing is unthinkable.