Rocktober: The Hanging Gardens Of Hell

What I would come to name The Hanging Gardens of Hell coalesced into a story around a year ago from loose elements hanging around my notes. I combined these elements with a setting I'd created at the end of 2014, hoping to create a story that would introduce that setting and its characters. Last February I started a novella, running completely out of energy after around 11,000 words when my outline stopped supporting me. Ideally I should have re-outlined and continued. We'll see if I can pick up better habits this time.

In this post I'll summarize the story as I have planned it so far. Later posts will get into the outlining and restructuring process.

Rocktober: Live Outlining Project

I am not an intuitive writer. I can't start with a blank page and watch it take me through a novel. My imagination works in dream-logic, with poor illustrations and few words. Concepts and structure come to me more easily than personalities and relationships; the natural form of my storytelling is summary.

That's not to say that my writing can't take me in unexpected directions. It usually does. That's where I stop because the ramifications of those new directions are varied and interesting and I don't have the brainpower to work those out in real time.

The best compromise I've worked out is to outline in advance, to feel out my story as comprehensively as I can, to know how things are going to happen so I can riff off of that.

For the next month leading up to NaNoWriMo I'll be exploring my most advanced work in progress, a piece currently titled The Hanging Gardens of Hell. It's part of what I plan to be an ongoing setting, and was originally meant to be a novella, but from my first attempt at it in February it's obvious that it needs a higher word count.

This live outlining will be partly me thinking out loud, developing these ideas, connecting themes, building characters. It will contain spoilers. The ultimate goal will be for aspiring writers to have something to look at, a window into how I approach the writing process.

Literature For Heroes By Romantics

I wouldn't call it an inferiority complex, it's not something that's on my mind much, more an itching kind of curiosity that I've been reading the wrong books all along. See, I'm a smart guy, and that's not a moral judgment, just an observation that I was one of those eight-year-olds who thought he was hot stuff because he'd read Hitchhiker's Guide, and so there's a part of my identity based on being more literate, more aware than my peers.

As I've grown truly more aware I've had occasions to worry that I should have been reading Serious Novels like precocious kids in my genre novels. There's an idea rattling around in the back of my mind that I am to true Novel Readers as Baenkiddies and xianxia fans are to me, that by generally restricting myself to genre I'm cutting myself off from a world of beautiful truth, just because the few Novels I've read have been boring and slow.

I've never taken the time to test it, though. I have a few recommendations stored away for Novels that match one part or another of my experience or philosophy, but in general I just read genre, and not Serious Genre like Atwood either, the last few books I've read were Poul Anderson's Fire Time and the two translated Rocket Girls novels. I'm not likely to be mistaken for an excessively literate person like this.

Showing vs Telling vs Presenting

One book that's recently made its way to my hands is a book on criticism called The Rhetoric of Fiction, by Wayne C. Booth, and while it takes for granted a knowledge of Important Novels that this poor genre peasant just doesn't have, I've been able to glean some insights anyway.

Mr. Booth begins with a discussion of showing and telling, which has trickled down to our ghetto as a parody of itself, Show Good Tell Bad, and can be occasionally seen used as an attempted panacea for bad writing. Apparently it's a relatively new concept, about a hundred years in common use, and it was pushed dogmatically by the early Modernists until it's all we've got now, it's weird to read books where the author addresses us. Feels archaic.

PulpRev: Oda Nobuna no Yabou

There's a narrative in modern anime criticism that we're currently in a dark age, after the shock of the real estate bubble and a later, smaller crash in the anime market in general ended the days of high-budget, high-violence OVAs and 200-episode fantasy series, all lovingly rendered with hand-drawn backgrounds and three-toned faces. What's left are cashgrabs for the disgusting tasteless otaku who are willing to put money down for those shows that pander specifically to them, which are stereotypically cheap, ugly, and focus more on cute girls doing cute/sexy things than manly men doing manly things, as was common in days of old.

A commonly cited example is 2012's Oda Nobuna no Yabou. It looks like a perfect example of what's wrong with the world: The premise has a modern transported to the Sengoku era to find famous figures of the era transformed into cute girls. If you go no farther than the poster in forming your expectations, you might expect harem antics, boring and sidelined action, dirty jokes that fall flat, the protag walks in on a girl in the bath and gets slapped, a twelve-episode nothingburger that leaves a nasty taste in your brain if you push through it hoping for something good.

That description does not apply to Oda Nobuna no Yabou.

1000x1000 Challenge

I am going to write one thousand short stories of close to one thousand words each. This will produce around a million words and will take some time. Respond in the comments or in social media with pithy ideas and I will write stories based on those.

Note: This is an old version of this page. Go here for the current version.

Seasonal Anime Dropping Party: Spring 2017

My quadriannual ritual where I give new anime the three-scene rule.

FRAME ARMS GIRL
Apparently it's a card game anime or something.
DROPPED

SHINGEKI NO KYOJIN S2
The OP sucks, and the OP is the only reason to watch this.
DROPPED

GRANBLUE FANTASY
Lots of lights and sounds. A girly friendship or something. I don't care.
DROPPED

William Carlos Williams, with punctuation added and line breaks removed

According to Brueghel, when Icarus fell it was spring. A farmer was ploughing his field. The whole pageantry of the year was awake, tingling, near the edge of the sea, concerned with itself, sweating in the sun that melted the wings’ wax. Unsignificantly off the coast there was a splash, quite unnoticed; this was Icarus drowning.

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.

I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox, and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me. They were delicious, so sweet and so cold.

A stand of people by an open grave underneath the heavy leaves celebrates the cut and fill for the new road, where a man on his knees reaps a basketful of matted grasses for his goats.

It was an icy day. We buried the cat, then took her box and set match it it in the back yard. Those fleas that escaped earth and fire died by the cold.

Undated poem, recovered from an old water-damaged notebook (poss. Oct-Nov 2011)

King Arthur's prophet Merlin
Once moved backwards in time, as we
once met the prophets' King
Met him backwards, first the stern,
Red, Terrible Redeemer
As he dons the robes of Armageddon
Overwhelming and swift, next
Meet the Lord in glory returning keys
Last powers and strength
Then watch the Lord withdraw
And from a distance steal your toil
Shoulder your burdens, lift your labors
Exalt you quietly. But the promise said,
Fire, and water, and the Spirit, as
miracles become commonplace
a freshly resurrected Lord
closely guides his apostles' acts
move quick, step fast, of course
this time would come
the grove's ahead
now walk softly, past sleeping apostles,
to Judgment Day.

N-Words: When Your Metaphor Gets Away From You

Writing parables is a tricky business. No metaphor can survive intense scrutiny; if it could it wouldn't be a metaphor. When you do write parables it's good to write parables that don't undermine your point.

As part of an ongoing quest to locate a very strange short story I read in 2012 I've been getting my hands on various contemporary SFF short story collections. A story titled "N-Words," by Ted Kosmatka, caught my eye; I found it in Hartwell and Cramer's Year's Best SF 14.

It's told mainly in flashback, beginning with a funeral surrounded by protesters, cast from the Westboro Baptist division of the Straw Christian Agency. The narrator's sister wonders aloud what kind of people could do this sort of thing, and the narrator thinks to herself that you'd be surprised. This is a story about racism, and stories about racism are never about obvious racism. Kosmatka wants to make a point about real-life racism. This is important.

Short Fiction: Frontier Economics

"I don't like it," said Big Jim, and he took a swig. "We didn't move out here to smith. We moved here to get rich."

"Mind the liquor," said Mack. He made another swipe with his threadbare broom. He could almost see the floor now. "We need at least a finger to trade for laundry."

"We could have made more money smithin' in Cairo," Jim continued, with another deep gulp of whiskey. "We could have saved up. And bought some gold."

Mack scratched at the dirt with a fingernail. "You just need to be patient," he said. "Sure, we don't have much of a plot, but we've got something, don't we? The mayor's gonna give plots to as many folks as show up until the river's full, just the same as ours, and there's gonna be plenty of smithing work then. We'll get half the gold that comes out of that river, you just wait."

The Corroding Empire (NAME SUBJECT TO CHANGE) by Johan Kalsi (AUTHOR SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

(INSERT COVER PICTURE WHEN FINALIZED)

This book has drama attached, and it's pretty funny, latest rundown on it here. It's a parody of a book that was actually published the day before its subject, thrown together in a hurry more to show off the mobility of Castalia House's Kindle-first strategy than to poke fun at any aspect of Scalzi's new series. It's not a parody of The Collapsing Empire, it's a parody of Tor, who gave millions of dollars to an author to get, over a year behind schedule, a parody of a much older book.

In that respect it's great, just great. It's a sign of a healthy market, feuding companies playing pranks. It lets you know there's a human in charge. The issue, though, for someone wanting to spend their time in a book is is it good?

The Trial of Daddy Warpig

SCENE: A gray morning in Paris. Smoke rises from the wreckage of the Bastille and the Governor’s palace. A COURT has been set up in the main plaza, with planks set on barrels forming the benches. To the side a guillotine has been erected, by which an EXECUTIONER glowers. Surrounding is a horde of angry PEASANTS in rustic, picturesque clothing, clutching farm tools. At the center of the court, sitting on a fine velvet chair raised on a platform of cobblestones, sits the JUDGE, played by Jesse Lucas in a powdered wig. To the JUDGE’S left sits the DEFENSE ATTORNEY, played by JESSE LUCAS in a ragged officer’s uniform, chewing on a licorice-filled cheroot. To the right sits the PROSECUTOR, a disheveled aristocrat with an off-centered ascot, also played by JESSE LUCAS.

Enter BAILIFF.

BAILIFF: Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! May it please the Court and the Revolutionary Council that charges are to be brought against one DADDY WARPIG, also known as JASYN JONES, that said Mr. WARPIG has engaged in acts of treason against the Pulp Revolution, by knowingly and in violation of honored statute engaging in foul practices of declaring those who are having fun to be wrong, and by leading the public to believe that such are the acts of true Pulp Revolutionaries, by repeatedly and wrongfully declaring hard science fiction and its readers and proponents to be enemies of the revolution, thus casting out the very fans the Revolution was engendered to protect. Mr. 

PROSECUTOR, do you recognize these charges as those you are sworn to determine the truth of, before the JUDGE, the PEOPLE, the STATE, and ALMIGHTY GOD?

PROSECUTOR, closing a hand mirror: I do.

BAILIFF: And you, the DEFENSE, do you also recognize these charges on the same terms?

DEFENSE, sighing: Yes.

BAILIFF: Mr. WARPIG, how do you plea?

NOMAD

Night underfoot
Back creased, mouth dry
Clouds part, sun breaks
Won't stop

Overhead glory
Inferior are right and left
This temple is motion
This frame shifts

Madness writ gold
I speak with the tongue of holy men
My dust is the dust of ages
Worship crawls my skin

Afterward, fades
Crunch of gravel
Whistle of wind
Road, again, road

Day ends
Sun breaks, clouds close
Mouth creased, eyes dry;
King's progress.

The Stalin in the Soul

In light of the pernicious fiction that science fiction started with Mary Shelley and proceeded to oppress women until Ursula K. Le Guin, it's fitting that Le Guin is herself a prolific essayist, giving us eyes into the pseudogenesis of SFF in the 60s-70s. The collection The Language of the Night has essays that show Le Guin getting it in ways no one else has - "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" is the best explication of Fairyland from anyone not an Inkling - as well as laughably boneheaded mistakes ("Why Are Americans Afraid Of Dragons?").

What's most relevant to Pulprev (aside from "Poughkeepsie," which everyone who wants to write fantasy should read) are her observations on the state of SFF and what she wanted to happen to it. "The Stalin in the Soul," dated 1973-77 with snarky footnotes from 1989, highlights both her naming sense and the irony that Stalin isn't persona non grata in her circles anymore.

Why The Ender's Game Movie Failed

Somebody just read that and thought, "it didn't fail, I liked it!" They're probably coming up with reasons it was a good movie to try to prove me wrong, but they know there's just something off about it that they can't put their fingers on.

Let me help you with that. The novel was not a middling-good novel that barely broke even. It was a phenomenon. It's in every school library. It was put on military required reading lists. It won the double crown of Hugo and Nebula when those meant something the year it was released and shines so bright it overpowers everything else Orson Scott Card wrote, including its also double-crowned sequel. Fans were reading it and saying, "now this should be a movie" and putting it on top of their personal this-should-be-a-movie lists since it was released in 1986. To put that in perspective it's way older than me. And I'm an old man.

This is a AAA+ story. It was in development hell for so long some people said it was unfilmable. Maybe it is. I've got some ideas about it though.

Tokyo Ravens

Came across an article recently about the fall of Japan's Dragon Magazine from a trend-setting training camp for classics to a trend-following generic fiction magazine. I won't try to contest the main point, because I don't really know much about Japanese publishing, but I generally come out against what I see as nostalgic chauvinism in anime, which Mr. Cowan (who's giving up social media for Lent, so I guess this will be a spread-out conversation) uses to shore up that point.

Basically, if I may, he brings up a list of absolute legends - Slayers, Patlabor - incubated in Dragon Magazine, and then a list of duds that have gone nowhere that they're currently running. My contention is on the process of legend creation, and how much bearing that has on the quality of the original work. In particular, he mentions Oda Nobuna no Yabou and Tokyo Ravens, which I absolutely loved.

I firmly believe that both of these could have been legends if they had had Slayers resources poured into them. Oda Nobuna, while somewhat leaden and cliche-bound in print, was adapted by the fiery Kumazawa Yuuji and Madhouse Studios into a high-energy stampede through a color-bursting Sengoku period with enough manly men, cliffhangers, death-defying heroics, and real conversations about the morality of changing history to put it up there with the greats Cowan mentioned, if it hadn't been intended as a thirteen-episode light novel advertisement. And Tokyo Ravens, well, that's the sort of story that's so great even when it's not being great that I can't help but gush about it, so I will.

Transfigurism: Explanation and Response

Some time ago I published an emotion piece on transhumanism, passion in religion, and the lack of fire I felt from the Mormon Transhumanist Association. Much to my surprise, as I am not a popular blogger, I was contacted by two members of that society. Its founder, Lincoln Cannon, held a conversation with me via Twitter, and its current president, Carl Youngblood, left a comment. I found that not only had I failed to coherently express my feelings about those three subjects, I had underestimated the ideological distance between myself and the MTA.

I'm going to post some of their comments directly, attempt to express their beliefs as if they were my own, and then respond with, I hope, a more logical declaration of my thoughts on this matter.

Sword and Flower by Rawle Nyanzi

So. Right. Sword and Flower by Rawle Nyanzi. Rawle's a dedicated fan who seems to be coming to to the Pulp Revanchist movement from the 90s anime/D&D side of things, I see him on Twitter a lot, and now he's published a novella that has good claim to be the first direct literary output of Pulprev as such, not something backclaimed even with as much authority to do so as Jon Mollison.

If Mollison is Pulprev's kindly wizard figure, Rawle is its young protagonist. You'd especially think so if you look at S&F's Amazon reviews. They're all about his growth potential. I'm not going to talk about his growth potential, confirm or deny, I'm going to talk about his book, as she stands, and also about the movement some.

Wyrm's Bane by John Mollison

My good friend Jon Mollison seems to be some kind of kindly godfather to the PulpRev movement. He writes encouraging reviews for new authors, records audiobooks for Castalia, and does a lot of reading on his own - he once told me that if the big publishers were doing their jobs, he'd be content with just being a fan.

He's not just a fan, though, he's published a series of four loosely-linked dragon-themed novellas that are now bundled with an extra short story from the dragon's perspective as Five Dragons. I picked "Wyrm's Bane," the second story from that collection, to review for the 3/3 challenge.

Allo-industrial Aesthetics

Weird Western: Fangs of the Dragon by David J. West

 I don't know much about David J. West. We follow each other on Twitter and he posts on the Castalia House blog, so I guess he's one of us. Out of the three author's I'm reading for the three for three challenge he seems like the one who needs the least help, as this novella and his novel, Scavengers, are pretty highly ranked in the Western Horror section of the Kindle store. Maybe that just means there isn't much Western Horror, I don't know, if so that's a good section to write for, but it's no stretch at all to believe that people just like his stuff and pass it on.

"Fangs of the Dragon" is a Porter Rockwell story. If you're not familiar with Porter Rockwell he was a gunslinging Samson figure in the early days of Utah settlement. You can look him up, he's real, but this novella is a decent introduction to him. It's a nicely structured story of Porter coming to a frontier town to deal with a lake monster, with refreshingly straightforward twists and turns after it. It's 54 pages as Kindle sees them, so it's not a long read. It was previously published in the Monsters and Mormons anthology, but I didn't really get into that one.

The Edge of the World by Michael Swanwick

We did a lot of reading when I was growing up. If we had grown up on the set of a movie about precocious children we would have been reading classics to each other, referencing lines the audience would be able to pat themselves on the back for remembering, but I have to admit that a lot of what we read was pretty generic, all things considered, and while the Fantasy and Science Fiction shelves of the public libraries in the Kansas towns of Augusta and El Dorado held great treasures of wonder, there were greater treasures that I missed¹.

One library book, and I can see the bunk bed I read it on right now thinking of it, was called "Full Spectrum 2." There was another Full Spectrum close by but I don't think it hit me as hard. Two stories especially landed in my mind with such power that they still make their way to the front. One was about an RPG group (something we would have had if we had grown up on the set of a movie about precocious children in the 90s) that used drugs to hallucinate their sessions, and an Asian domestic servant who used their drug to astrally project instead; the other was about some Cold War Army brats and a bottomless cliff.

FeNoWriMo: A Retrospective

So I can't write 30,000 words in a week, even if I clear my schedule.

YET.

I made over a third of that target, a longer narrative than I've ever completed before. And this is Jesse Lucas copy, just excellent stuff, you're going to love it. It will be completed and it will be completed soon, this I promise.

FeNoWriMo: Not going to make it, also, going to make it

I'll put together a post on my thoughts on this experience, but right now my wrists hurt. I'm at 11,270 words, and the plot's come together much, much better than I expected it to. This is gorgeous, this is going to be a great book, it'll probably be 25,000 words max.

Punching Vs Not Punching

 I know this isn't an original concept and I would appreciate links that talk about it.

I'm currently taking a Sabbath break from my pig-headed vaunt to finish a 30,000ish-word novella in the remaining month of February (did I specifically promise that week? I don't want to check), and so rather than an update on my writing I'm giving some comments on writing in general.

FeNoWriMo: Saturday

I had hoped to have more by now. I suppose it's back to regular programming tomorrow, I'll try to transcribe my Sacrament meeting talk.

Goals for this week: not met.
February: not over.
Groundwork for a complete novella to be published before 3/3: laid.
Word count: 8,404.

It feels about a third done. 30,000 is a target, but I won't complain if it comes out complete at 24,000.

FeNoWriMo: Friday

I don't understand how I can have so much fun writing this but feel so burned out so often. The only way out is forward. 5,230.

FeNoWriMo: Thursday.

3,662 and a major breakthrough on the secondary viewpoint.
https://twitter.com/JesseLucasSaga/status/834968183547142144

FeNoWriMo: Wednesday

3142. Everything is fine.

FeNoWriMo: Tuesday

1600 words. Feeling good about tomorrow.

FeNoWriMo: Monday

Viewcounts are down. That's fine. I'm gearing up to pound out an incredible number of words incredibly fast. I should have done that today. Wordcount up to 1,069. Watch for the spike.

FeNoWriMo

I will write, procure cover art for, and publish a novella of at least 30,000 words by the end of February. The stars have aligned to give me the freedom to work on that this week and next, and I have a well-developed outline. Let it be done.

Current word count: 305

There Are No Girls On The Internet

Back in 2012 I had a final project I procrastinated where I needed to film a video presentation on... I forget. Anyway I pushed it back and pushed it back and finally I checked into a hotel in south Los Angeles, filmed it, threw up, and fell asleep for fourteen hours (there were other things going on).

Here's the script.

The Giant's Heart by George MacDonald

The second story in The Light Princess and Other Stories shows off MacDonald's skill in developing sympathetic yet evil villains. It's shorter than the others, and wastes no time in sending our two child protagonists into a child-eating giant's house. Watch MacDonald show us how the giant justifies himself:

To be sure he did eat little children, but only very little ones; and if ever it crossed his mind that it was wrong to do so, he always said to himself that he wore whiter stockings on Sunday than any other giant in all Giantland.

 

Child of Record Baptisms, North Las Vegas, June 2010

The meetinghouse was packed on a Saturday morning. Every child of record in the North Las Vegas Stake was there to be baptized, with their families and extended families and primary teachers and primary presidents and for one little girl the missionaries who had taught her, which was how I learned of this strange custom.

Reprint: John W. Campbell, Traditional Values

The following article was written by Mr. Campbell for the February 1970 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact just over a year before his death. His forceful personality and reductionist editorial style had long since divided and conquered SF; the Golden Age was long passed, New Wave was ascendant, and the cinematic pulp revival spawned by Star Wars was years away. Campbell here comments on the ill-planned destruction of tradition.


Traditional Values
an editorial by John W. Campbell

Any fundamentally sound idea can be carried too far and become a fanaticism - and the essence of any fanaticism is, simply, that there is Only One Right Way and We've Got It.

Even the objective physical scientist can get suckered on that one - because while his field of study may be objective and physical, he remains a human being whose mental nature is inherently subjective. As a scientist who bases his thinking on careful laboratory experiments - a sound method that has yielded immense and reliable benefits - he displays his human tendency to fanaticism by holding that only laboratory evidence is sound data. That something which cannot be confirmed by repeatable experiments in a laboratory is not usable information.

Transfigurism

 



I have seen visions.


The reductionist perspective, so helpful in seeking the mechanisms by which God effects change in our lives, would ask me: "Could those not have been mere hallucinations, not revelations from God but misfirings of neurons, drawing together vision and meaning and carving them into your fleshy tablets?"

Of course I'm sure they weren't hallucinations. They were daydreams. From time to time, and mostly years apart, an image cycles into my mind that resonates there, one that I cannot keep myself from contemplating. It will draw on available material from my imagination and memory and share traits with dreams and hallucinations, in that not only sensory data but semantics are encoded in it; a flash of enlightenment, you could say.

Boys' Life Comics: Gulliver's Travels

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game is our Great American Novel. The American story is most definitely science fiction, and it's fitting that a story of a gifted, stunted child describe us, a prodigy among the nations, old while young, spoiled by victory, a product of a great industrial machine that paradoxically regresses mankind to our basest, most animalistic emotions. It's understandable that such a work is so widely read, and so widely read intentionally. For many people, it's the only book they've read on their own.

I recently reread the three sequels, properly a trilogy in themselves, though lacking important context without Ender's Game. I found them to be breathtaking examples of one of our greatest storytellers acting in his prime, and I'm going to attempt to share with you some of my thoughts and emotions about them, in this and following posts. I will assume familiarity with the novels and their plot twists.

Sunday School: "What is the role of agency in learning the gospel?"

I taught the third February lesson from Come, Follow Me today. Seven kids showed up, we kept a decent focus through our class time, and we were able to cover the driving question pretty decently while touching on a few other relevant topics.

Notes on Alma 34

Alma 34. :9 hardened, fallen, lost,all things that fruit can be. Fallen = ripe before our time. Tough fruit. It takes a lot to put fruit back on the vine. How to avoid Catholic toppery? Infinite, eternal. It must fill the definition of sacrifice in every way for every thing. Follow the metaphor of vines. Much is sacrificed for the good of the vine. Branches are cut off, other life is fed to the roots. All of that is not enough to return fallen fruit to the vine. Of course this is impossible, not available in the terms we have used to describe it.

:11 Even if a man wished to take his brother's place on the gallows, the law could not properly choose to take that life, not if it were just. If the life were taken, justice would not be fulfilled. The law would still thirst for the murderer's blood, and we would be out an innocent man. Therefore

:12 Someone needs to stack-overflow the law. Jam the law with atonement. But justice doesn't want atonement. Justice is content. It's math, open-shut. There's no room for atonement. Somehow the wires are crossed, justice's mouth filled forever. Now our sins are in Christ's hands. Speculation: Christ's atonement applies to terrestrial realms, and if we follow him to celestial realms without being first cleansed then justice catches up with us. Not true, could be worked on.

:13-14 The law itself was written with an atonement in mind. It doesn't want your brother's life, but there is a place for the life of the lawgiver. Christ doesn't fight justice, he is justice, he is the law. He was all along. He condemns us for not following it. His atonement fulfills his own terms. He is ultimately the creditor as well as the mediator.

:17 Exercising faith is granted by God. Face value: assumption that the state of righteousness in all is declared from God. Alternative: Hope that God will still allow circumstances that enable you to seek faith, rather than turn you into an object lesson.

Commandments to pray. Linked with atonement. It is by crying unto the Lord that we apply for mercy. As we cry unto the Lord we begin to be/convince ourselves to be/show that we have become converted.

:29 The enemy of charity is forgetfulness.

:35 The gardener can reattach fallen vines, because he is the gardener. If we have not made good fruit, why should he? That would be stupid. Perhaps the hardened, fallen fruit caused a separation. If the gardener notices good remaining in us we can find a place on the vine again.

Short Fiction: I Do All My Own Stunts

We called him Lucky. He was our thirteenth. He was the last of the first batch cloned when our Prime was five years old and a successful child actor. He still walked with a limp from jumping off a building, but he had only retired as a stuntman after a close call with a rifle blank left a facial scar the doctors couldn't hide.

Kansas run, February 2014

This event was exactly three years ago today, and I composed the following at that time. The weather is, ironically, abnormally mild in most of the Lower Midwest right now.

    I left at ten minutes to three. I savored the quiet of the night and drove off, stopped for gas and prayed on the road. It was quiet till Parsons, when the snow began to fall faster, turning the semis into muddy comets, throwing slush on my windshield when I got too close. I pulled into a gas station and found one window cleaner with a puddle of cleaner. I passed a snowplow thinking, "I wonder where he's going." As I drove west I composed stories in an old style about the wonders of our civilization, where a man could go a thousand miles in a night but was very careful not to get too close to other travelers.

    The lines on the road grew dim. If a car passed the other way we had a sort of communication, an ad-hoc lane. For a while the highway expanded to a four-lane, with the snow on the left lane completely untouched. I pulled into that lane and felt the joy of first tracks, tapping my brakes to watch the cloud billowing behind me. Convoys of slow-moving vehicles would pass me eastbound. I saw a light ahead, as if a locomotive were stopped sideways on the highway, and as it stayed the same size as I traveled I discovered that it was a semi, and I followed it for a long time. Its lights were goblin faces through the comet's tail. I was in no hurry, and I was grateful for my traveling companion, ensuring that a lane was formed that I could be safe in. As light returned to the sky and I grew tired I noticed that ahead of the semi was a snowplow, which I had been following the whole time, and its snow plume and blade made curious reflections in the light of the semi.
I approached a rest stop around seven, at a most convenient time, and through the haze I found a parking spot, bundled up, read from the book of Jacob, and lay down in my reclined drivers' seat. I awoke to coldness and a white marble.

In Praise of Hypocrisy

Cognitive dissonance doesn't get enough credit. Why would our minds have the ability to believe contradictory things? That's certainly not how we train our robots. The ideal is to believe in no contradictory things, to never contradict yourself in speech, to shun hypocrisy. In practice, hypocrisy and contradiction are everywhere. I've seen this explained as an evolutionary priority to decisions being made and a sense of rightness being felt, no matter the truth of it, which leaves us as stunted, truthless beings. I'm going to argue the opposite.

We Don't Need Haruhi S3

We understand that the most basic needs of a story are a beginning, a middle, and an end, and we teach that to children. A child's story is a rambling stream of consciousness, referencing details only known to them. Why, for a species so dependent on storytelling, is it not more natural? We don't have as much trouble teaching children to understand stories. It's not like parents have to translate what they tell their children into child-style stories.

The Light Princess

The Light Princess is much shorter than The Day Boy and the Night Girl, and more whimsical in tone than it or the other two stories it's anthologized with. MacDonald takes up the ironic tone common to Victorian fairy-tale parodists of the time, eyes rolling as he tells you that of course everybody knew about fairy-tale rules but this sort of thing happens anyway.

This princess is cursed by a jilted aunt, also referred to as a princess (reminding you that princess status does not equate to goodness) to be unaffected by gravity. MacDonald's science fiction credentials are shown here, as well, as he works through the consequences of this anomaly. The princess is weightless, and does all the fun things we see astronauts doing in space, but not only is her body disconnected from all weight, in good MacDonald fashion so is her heart.

The princess can't take anything seriously. She's never sad, but she's never truly happy - her laughter lacks inertia. This is shown as a terrible disability, much worse than simple weightlessness, and there is a delightful cameo from a pair of Chinese philosophers attempting to help her father fix this. The princess is not massless, though, as she finds by accident that while submerged in the lake by the castle her weight returns, and she is able to think heavy thoughts.

Then she falls in love with a prince, and her wicked aunt gets even more wicked, and we reach a denoument that's all the heavier for the flighty, drifting introduction. Highly recommended.

This story was my introduction to MacDonald and seems as good a place as any to start with him.

Short Fiction: Native-born

The merchant was short and red-faced, with thick brown hair combed back in an unruly tangle. He was in the process of unhitching a tarp-covered trailer from a minivan as she approached. She put out her hand. "Jenny Siddiqui, special inspector."

He looked around, set the trailer's neck back on the van's hitch, and shook her hand. "Thomas Martin, Sony UK," he said, in a subdued American accent. He returned to the trailer and turned it. On the other side of the van an old man was attaching a trailer pull to a mule's harness. She had her badge out, but the two men were concentrating on getting the trailer attached.

The old man sighed in relief as he straightened up, and patted the mule's neck. "Now I want 'er to be a mule when I'm back," he told Martin. The merchant chuckled. "Key's on the dash," he said. The old man tugged a forelock to Jenny as he passed, with a hand cracked and wrinkled like the hills themselves. She followed him with her eyes as he drove off.

Limhi (Mosiah 7-22)

Let me tell you about Limhi, an ordinary man.

Here's a king's son, raised in the hollow courts of decadent Noah, in a degenerate colony three generations removed from their mother faith. He knew about his father's wickedness, his crimes and heresies, but just men don't get to choose if they love their fathers. When his father gave the command to evacuate Nephi, Limhi followed.

Sahara Boulevard, Spring 2010

Some days we worked our way up to Naked City. If we had dinner on the west side, we might stop in at a name nearby; occasionally we had dinner there. It had a bad reputation, which of course its residents were proud of that if only for the notoriety. The neighborhood felt somehow more sad than the rest of Parkdale, which I don't think was entirely my imagination. Street contacts were more rare and less fruitful. Above it all the Stratosphere towered, a needled tower like some kind of space ship, with a mirrored hotel at its base that dramatically reflected any clouds in the sky.

Elbow Room

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

 

It is the future, and Earth, humanity's home, is lost. Perhaps it was a disaster, an asteroid, solar flare, alien invasion; perhaps we used up all of our Resources and found none nearby, or were unkind to tropical forests, or used the wrong kind of spray can. Regardless, the remnants of humanity wander the universe, ever seeking for a new home - a new Earth.

We're wasting our energy making fun of go-go boots, gung-ho space captains and robots with vibrato voices. This is the dumbest, most dated artifact of primitive science fiction, and it needs to go.

Norby The Mixed-Up Robot

It's not like I ignored books that didn't have pictures in them, it's just that I went for the pictures first. And Boys' Life had pictures. I preferred the psychedelic art of Tom Eaton (Pedro the Mailburro, Dink & Duff, Webelos Woody) to the more realistic (and hilariously melodramatic) True Stories of Scouts in Action, but the gems were the comic books. My first encounters with the Odyssey, Treasure Island, and more came from the simplified, abridged versions in that magazine. Images from these comics share space in my memory with those from the Castle of Doctor Brain video game and Dunc and Amos short novels, a nostalgic place that doesn't make much sense but looks striking.

I recently discovered that the entire archive of Boys' Life through 2012 has been made available through Google Books, and so of course I've been tearing through it, again going straight for the pictures.

"Norby the Mixed-up Robot" was written by Isaac and Janet Asimov, with perfectly serviceable art by Ernie Colon. The "and" really shows. Apparently Isaac mostly had his name attached for publicity. The story takes place over eighteen chapters in seventeen months, each chapter only one page except for the double-page first issue. Jeff Fargo is a whiz kid who can hack into the Academy computers to find homework help but he's not smart enough to actually learn the subjects.

Seven Traits of the Pulp Revolution

In response to some misconceptions circling about the Pulp Revolution, I've taken it upon myself to write a few comments on the movement.

Disclaimer: This is my own perspective on the Pulp Revolution. Others with greater claim to the hashtag may have differing opinions.

1. Pulp Revolution is not New Pulp
They're doing their own thing. That's fine. We're not trying to claim their authors, style, or successes. At a basic level, New Pulp focuses primarily on the aesthetics of early 20th-century pulp magazines, while Pulp Revolution seeks to imitate the themes. I won't say more about New Pulp because I'm not trying to define them. I just want it clear that we're separate movements with separate goals and very little member overlap.

The Day Boy and the Night Girl

I don't like how unknown George MacDonald is today. I wish I could have had his books on hand growing up, that I could have grown up with them. His writing is packed tight with detail and personality, equally skilled at carrying me through lush, detailed dreamscapes and searing my heart with short sentences.

I can understand why he's not widely read. He's difficult, truly challenging, strangely exhausting. I still don't have my head wrapped around the Golden Key, and I'm sure I'm still missing things about The Day Boy and The Night Girl, which review follows.