Entries from January 2003 ↓

I started my second class at the Writer’s Center yesterday, a workshop on Science Fiction and Fantasy. I came in very excited and very anxious, as I have with every writing class I’ve ever taken, and left crestfallen and a little depressed.

Why crestfallen? Because not many people signed up. There are only six aspiring scifi masters on the roster, and one of them didn’t show. That bodes ill, because the center has a minimum enrollment, and if mystery writer #6 cancels, they may kill the class. That would be tragic for me, personally, because I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, and because our teacher seems absolutely amazing.

Why depressed? Because everything I’ve been hearing about the decline of the short story market (fewer outlets and less money; editors besieged with hundreds of manuscripts a day; the great sucking sound of short-form fiction seekers being drawn away by television; the inability to make any kind of a living writing short fiction) was repeated and reinforced. I know all this, have heard it a hundred times, but it’s still profoundly depressing.

Novels are where the money is, of course — what money there is. Preferably nonfiction novels, preferably memoirs. Straight fiction otherwise. Sci fi if you must. Fantasy is at the bottom of the heap, only hacks and masochists need apply.

Sigh. I’m glad I have a day job, because I don’t think I could make it as a starving artist. For one thing, I don’t starve well. Hunger doesn’t awaken the ascetic in me, it doesn’t drive to me to new heights of artistic achievement, it just makes me irritable. For another, I’ve been making regular money for so long that the prospect of actually having to hunt around for my next paycheck is absolutely horrific. I wouldn’t last a week.

And one last, depressing thing: while going through the traditional and inevitable outline of the rigors of the craft (character then plot then theme, apply butt to chair and write every day and stop whining about writer’s block, put your first draft in a drawer for a while and come back to it much later with fresh eyes), our instructor made a passing reference to her belief that most authors have a certain “length” that they’re comfortable with, a wordcount sweet spot at which they produce their best work. The analogy she used was racehorses: some are bred for the steeplechase, some for the kentucky derby, and you can’t swap them around.

My sweetspot, as far as I can tell, is about 12K - 13K words. Any longer and I lose focus. Any shorter and whatever I’m doing seems rushed and incomplete. 12 thousand words is short story territory. There’s no money and no future in short stories (see above).

And so: sigh. We’ll get into actual story critiquing next time, and hopefully talk less about the business end of things. But it doesn’t change the fact: it’s not good enough to be good. You have to be good at the right thing. As our instructor said: the best buggy-whip manufacturer in the world is probably a very sad person indeed.

It looks like someone has figured out how to run Linux on an Xbox. Those crazy Linux peoples. One day, someone somewhere is going to decide to host Linux on a toaster. Which means you’d have to wait forever for your toaster to boot up, and then hunt around for and compile the right kernel extensions for every kind of bread you want to toast. And you’d have to use the command line to toast stuff. Like this: $ ls

$ shutdown now -f

The Tyranny of Crisis

There’s an old joke that’s been around forever that goes something like this: “Question: How do you approach a sleeping lion? Answer: Very slowly.” This are several versions of this old chestnut, and it’s been adapted to a host of different situations. Here’s one permutation: “Question: How do you take away people’s civil liberties? Answer: Very slowly.”

The Bush administration has taken this wise advice to heart. Case in point: their recent victory in the US Court of Appeals, 4th District. The judges there agreed with the government’s assertion that it is allowed to imprison American citizens indefinitely, without recourse to legal council and scant contact with the outside world, as long as those citizens are judged to be “illegal combatants”. How do we know if someone’s an illegal combatant? If the administration says he is.

Now this is several steps short of abolishing the right to a fair and speedy trial, but it’s a start. Bush and his cadre of CEO advisers seem to have reconciled themselves to the slow road in their quest to separate us from our civil rights, and it’s paying dividends. Yesterday’s decision, other court victories along the same lines, the justice department’s newly lax preconditions for domestic spying, the FBI’s PATRIOT-act-powered ability to secretly subpeona our reading records from public libraries, and many other recent developments have stayed largely under the public’s radar. And when people do notice, they tend not to care. After all, they’re not enemy combatants, and so need not fear the specter of indefinite detention. They have nothing to hide, and so don’t have to worry about the government snooping into their private affairs.

Besides, we’re at war.

And that’s the big one. There’s nothing quite like a national crisis to empower an executive branch bent on overstepping its bounds. Everyone was horrified and sickened by what happened on September 11, and acknowledge it to be a depraved and — dare I say it — evil act. But there are elements in our government who nevertheless see it as an opportunity, the carte blanche they’ve been waiting for to pursue an unpopular and jingoistic agenda under the guise of patriotism and concern for national security. The Rumsfelds and the Cheneys and the Wolfowitz’s are holdovers from the cold war, and they brought that paranoid, secretive mentality with them into the White House and into our lives.

The policies they’re pursuing now rely on a public and a press that is either ignorant of or insensible to the danger they pose. They tell us as little as possible and distract us from the issue at hand with chest-thumping appeals to our patriotism and our paranoia. They set up systems and pass laws that make it easier for them to peel away the thinning layers of our privacy. And all the while they chip away at our civil rights, slowly, piece by piece, like a prisoner digging a tunnel out of his cell with just an awl and a spoon. Except they’re not digging their way out of jail, they’re digging their way in. And they certainly won’t be using the tunnels they’ve made.

We will.

The Christmas Llama

I have a problem with boredom; which is to say I get bored very easily; which is to say I have the attention span of an ADD spider monkey whose Ritalin has been spiked with PCP. I fear boredom almost as much as I fear death, so whenever I go anywhere that threatens even the slightest chance of downtime — ie, when I have to go get my hair cut, or return something at any large department store right after Christmas, or, god forbid, do anything at all at the MVA — then I usually bring along a backpack full of goodies to help me wile away the time: at least two books (the one I’m actually reading, and the really difficult one I claim to be reading to impress the chicks), some RPG handbook, music, snacks, a laser pointer, an electronic flashing disco dreidel, and, of course, my inflatable “pin the scandal on the politician” game (Republican edition). I invariably wind up using none of it, but they’re nice to have.

Unfortunately, there are certain events that are virtually guaranteed to bore one out of one’s mind but nevertheless forbid the possession or use of boredom aids: graduations (your own or other people’s), weddings (your own or other people’s), company all-hands meetings, to name a few. But the worst — by far the worst — are the annual church Christmas pageants.

I don’t spend much time in church, for various reasons, but I am expected to attend these annual rituals, in which the real meaning of Christmas (which, as far as I can tell, is “God forgives bad taste”) is wrapped up in a two-hour long confection of cute-as-a-button caroling children, canned manger scenes, dancing angels, declaiming prophets in loose beards, and irritating teenagers reciting hackneyed religious cant in hip new modern lingo that manages to both alienate the old and irritate the young.

This year’s was no different. Due to the departure of the church’s longtime music director and chief Christmas pageant designer, it was also less outrageously overdone than last year’s (no parade of nations, no paper mache B-52s dropping cross-shaped bombs of faith on crowds of unbelievers, no rollerblading saints orbiting the proceedings in skintight white leotards and fluttering gold wings whose tips trailed long tendrils of confetti) but no less boring. I sunk down into my chair and closed my eyes and prayed for the sweet oblivion of sleep.

But then a hush settled over the crowd, and I heard frenzied whispers from the people around me. I opened my eyes. And saw the llama.

The creature was being tugged down the aisle, not quite resisting, but not quite cooperating either. Its handler, a man dressed in shepherd’s clothing, was leading it towards a stage outfitted for the birth and unveiling of the Christ child: straw and stable, manger and mule, virgin and child. The llama swiveled its head on its absurdly long neck as it moved, scanning the assembled masses, and its eyes spoke of confusion and dismay and the first inklings of llamic outrage.

I ransacked my scant stores of biblical knowledge for any mention of llamas (or any equine creatures of South American descent) and came up empty. I’m no bible scholar, of course, but it seems to me that you’d be far more likely to run into camels than llamas in that part of the world. And that must have been it: the pageant organizers had decided that the show lacked a certain level of verisimilitude, that the audience just wasn’t going to buy it. It needed something special to reel the people in, something new, something exciting, something dromedary. It needed a camel.

Of course, camels are difficult to come by on the American continent, and two men dressed in a camel-suit wouldn’t have comported well with the air of kitschy gravitas that reigned over the proceedings like a sequined tabernacle. There was, however, a convenient solution, literally just down the road — a llama farm. Llamas are definitely not camels, but they are members of the camel family (camelids, to be precise), and, though they lack humps and desert experience, they’ll do in a pinch.

Now, I’m not sure why someone decided to start a llama farm in the middle of suburban Maryland, but Stranger Things Have Happened. In fact, they were happening at that moment. The handler had reached the front of the amphitheater and was trying to coax his charge up a little ramp onto the stage, but the llama had apparently decided that enough was enough. It swayed backwards, glaring haughtily at the little biped tugging at its bit. I could almost feel its mortification: Do you know who I am, sir? I am a llama, not some vacuous ruminant to be bandied around your ritual set like a helpless circus thrall. My species dates back to the fifth millennium B.C; my ancestors were bounding nimbly about the slopes of the Andes while your kind were still cowering in caves, huddling beneath hyena pelts and gnawing on rat carcasses. Damn you sir.

Meanwhile, onstage, more livestock had appeared. A sheep was standing peacefully beside the wise men, chewing amiably and staring out at the audience, as if we were a movie he was sort of enjoying. There was also a mule. The mule, being a mule, had decided that it wanted to stand directly in front of the manger scene, obscuring Mary and Joseph and their child. A shepherd was pulling at it with everything he had, his body bent into a crescent, his feet scrabbling against the hay scattered across the stage, but the mule was quite happy where it was. It had a great view.

And, for a moment, the proceedings stopped. The whirling Bethlehemites on stage were still whirling, and the music was still blaring, but the pageant was definitely in treadmill mode now, a lot of movement and no progress. Some rogue elements of the crowd began to titter, the actors looked at one another uncertainly, even the most devout among us began to fidget. Disaster was in the air.

But it wasn’t in the cards. The mule decided to move, the llama trudged reluctantly up the stage and glared at us balefully, sheering its head from side to side as wise men danced by bearing gifts, the sheep munched. The baby Jesus was unveiled. Gifts were presented. Adulation ensued.

And, as the show settled back into its frantic yet glacial pace, I settled back into my seat and closed my eyes, bored again, yet strangely content.