I've more-or-less settled on what my November Novel is going to be. Here's the intro thingie:
Before the World Wide Web, people from across the country logged on to local computer Bulletin Board Systems. Computers and modems were far more expensive and less ubiquitous at the time and those who spent their time and social lives through a computer monitor and phone line were the smartest and strangest of people.

Casey Boone logged on to The Sanctum, a local BBS in Houston, and kicked his previously nascent social life in to high gear. In the ten years since, he's become a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and has watched what he once saw as a digital utopia commodified and dumbed down into something he barely could barely recognize. Through a chance encounter with a mysterious former BBS peer he is notified that Erin Henshaw, the benefactor to the BBS that redefined his life, was murdered.

The funeral evolves into a reunion of sorts for the Sanctum crowd. Neil Chambers, his former mentor, is days away from being elected to congress on a platform that is anathema to the Neil that he once knew. His old flame Shannon McBride, once the belle of the Sanctum ball, is living a lonely life in the suburbs. Many of the best and brightest people that he knew slipped into mediocrity or worse. Underneath his happy memories of a tightly knit community was something dark that some were unable to escape. Something that may have gotten Erin Henshaw killed.

I have decided that I will try my hand at National Novel Writing Month again. Four years ago I wrote Something So Perfect, which landed me in the top 10 most prolific writers of the event. What this means is that the blog will be shut down for the month of November as I unplug myself from the rest of the world (election day excepted, of course).

To be honest, I'm not sure in what will happen after that. I may start blogging again at full speed, but I haven't been blogging at full speed in months. I may extend the hiatus indefinitely. I may shut down the blog and delete its contents. I'm also going to keep an eye out for existing group blogs that might be interested in retaining my (scaled-back) services or I may try to start up another group blog (though that's unlikely). Those of you that have been reading me for a while know that I have shut down at least a couple blogs in my career and I always return in some capacity. It's not unreasonable to believe that will happen here.

Anyway, I have a week or so until that happens. I don't have any firm plans on what to post about, so I will give y'all the opportunity. If there's any issue or topic, be it political, social, or something else, that you are interested in my thoughts on, now's a good time to ask. If I get any such inquiries, I will try hard to get a post written up in time.

A little while back Aldahlia gave me a link to A Vindication of the Rights of Vampires, saying that it made her think of me. Not sure what to make of that last part, but I did find the point-of-view to be fascinating from a purely philosophical standpoint. The question is whether or not a vampire that could only exist on human blood would be entitled to individual rights. Murray Rothbard says no, Francis Dumouchel makes a case that they could co-exist peacefully under free-market capitalism.

It's labelled satire, but I actually think that Dumouchel really has a point. Though I can see good arguments both ways.

A while back I mentally drafted a backdrop with similar repercussions: Could a post-industrial democracy exist in a fantastical world that included humans, elves, hobbits, gnomes, and orcs. A lot of it depends on which incarnation of the above you use and in many it would be completely incompatible. The different races had different lifespans (which proved to be quite significant) and different reproductive rates that caused demographics to shift and political power and allegiances to shift accordingly.

On one side was the "old ways" mage party (actually a collection of parties in a parliamentary system, but a pretty consistent alliance). They reliably had upwards of 90% of the elven vote, 60-70% of the orc vote, 30-40% of the human vote, and less than 10% of the gnomes (hobbits/halflings were not an electoral power, though they leaned more favorably on the magens. They were generally a conservative bunch, supporting piety, environmental conservation, and federalism. Elves had the biggest sway in the party and they very much just wanted to be left alone to their families and their communities and their magic. They mostly just wanted the government to stop wars and protect their lands from being paved and built upon.

On the other side were the technologists. As elves are at the center of the mage alliance, gnomes are at the center of the technology alliance in part because their mining activities are more rewarded by technology than magic, in part because of their materialism, and in part because of animus towards the elves. The technologists are generally lead, however, by humans. Humans tend towards the technologists because they simply don't live as long as the elves and the beauty of technology is that it lets each generation build on the successes of the previous (rather than learning the magic ways from scratch, which they would never live as long to even be able to approach the elves).

The magen alliance held power throughout most of the span of the confederation. Uniformity among the elves and the sizable orc vote was enough to put them over the top. They generally went out of their way to rule by consensus, however, lest relations dissolve and wars resume. As time passed, however, the elves continued to hone their magical skill while the humans and gnomes procreated like bunny rabbits. The orcs repopulated quickly, but they had high infant mortality rates due to their lacking the social support networks that the other races had afforded themselves.

At the time of the story, the first technologist Prime Minister had been elected and government reform is sweeping through. As the tide shifted towards the techies, the mages lost their hold on the orcs. The orcs were never very ideological creatures to begin with and mostly gravitated towards the magen because they were in power. The new Prime Minister also made capturing the orc vote a priority and set out to extend gold benefits to the orc ghettos in the cities, which had long been neglected. With the orcs shifting and everybody but the elves reproducing in high numbers, many elven communities started relocating to the next kingdom down. The technologists were on the cusp of a perpetual majority in which they had little intention of being as conciliatory as the mages had been.

The the story opens with the last magen Prime Minister about to be ousted. The idea itself wasn't particularly political and mostly dealth with a team of government agents in charge of putting out potential insurrections and subvert the two neighboring kingdom's attempts to feed the flame, so to speak. But even that's sort of a backdrop for a human story of revenge, growing up, and making peace with where you come from.

I guess it's a longer leap from vampire rights to the Four Kingdoms story I plotted out (but lost my blueprint with a harddrive some time back) when written down than it is in my mind. And it's probably more fun for me to think about than it is for you to read.

I ran across an interesting blog called 63 Days a few days back. The blog purports to be written by an individual that was kidnapped and dragged in to Utah for 63 days before eventually make it back to safety. He posts as he gets his memories back.

The concept reminds me a great deal of the very first protoblog I tried to write. A long while back I got a LiveJournal site, but being uninterested in writing about myself on it (my how things have changed), I decided to write a fictional story written from the point of view of a young man who wakes up by the side of the freeway about ten miles outside of Conroe with no idea who he is. The few memories he has (and the skills he has, such as internally measuring and estimating things in CC's) lead him to believe that he might be an outlaw. He hitches a ride to a fictional east Texas town and figures out how to start a new life (and trying to figure out if he even wants to know who he used to be). He just got in to the town when I stopped writing it.

It was probably one of my better ideas. Short as it was, it actually helped out my writing skills considerably. It gave me a place to experiment in ways that I wasn't willing to with my "main" writing.

Anyway, so if you're interested in that sort of thing, check it out. I'm hoping to get caught up on it in the next few days.

The Deseret News has an article on the 'West Wing' TV show's fictional election.

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — Can Hollywood — vilified by the Republican right wing as the most liberal town in America — portray a GOP presidential candidate sympathetically and accurately?

That's the goal this season on "The West Wing," where the focus has shifted from the incumbent Bartlet administration to the battle to replace him — a battle that will pit the underdog, Hispanic congressman Matthew Santos (Jimmy Smits), a Texas Democrat, against the extremely likable, moderate Sen. Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda), a California Republican.

[...]

How hard is "The West Wing" trying to make this balanced? Before the Iowa caucuses, both candidates had a chance to stand up for what they believed or sell out to political expediency — Vinick stood up; Santos sold out.

Conventional wisdom has been that Santos will win, at least in part so that some of the show's current stars, who play members of a Democratic administration, can continue with the program. But Wells said that's not the case.

And what's more, when asked who will win, he insists, "I don't know yet."

"I'm not trying to be coy. What happens is that we actually watch what's happening between the cast members, the issues that are being presented, what's happening in the country, and try and follow what makes the most story sense," Wells said. "So it's really what's most compelling, what's most interesting, what's giving you the greatest amount of drama."

First a disclaimer: I haven't watched West Wing regularly in years. However, I know a lot of people that do and most of them (regardless of political stripe) have said the same thing: the portrayal of Alda's character is good.

That said, I have to say that (a) I have difficulty imagining the Republican winning because (b) the show will likely become even more offensive to Republicans if he does.

Politics and religion are two extremely difficult issues to write about fairly. I like to consider myself a pretty fair person. I can debate both sides of most issues adequately. Some of the most prominant characters in my writing have actually been Democrats (though I tend to keep such things out of my fiction, I have a lot of 'outtakes' in my mind that I could easily have written in an even-handed or even pro-Democrat manner).

But even despite all this, there is no way that I could convincingly a political show week in and week out from a Democrat's point of view. There are issues that I feel so strongly about that opposition is (at best) rooted in ideals so opposed to my own that I could not possibly give them a fair shake. If anyone else doesn't have issues that they feel similarly strong about, I'd suggest that they are not sufficiently thinking about issues. And they certainly have no business writing a show about politics.

So if you have a group of liberal writers, you have three options:

1) Try to write about a punch of people who espouse positions you deplore. By the time you're done you probably won't even like the characters you're writing and the writing will suffer greatly.

2) You write about a bunch of people whose views you disagree with, but they're open-minded and reasonable. As time progresses, 'open-minded and reasonable' will consist of a series of 'coming-to-Jesus' moments where they will do the 'right thing' and buck party politics.

or

3) You will have characters that agree with you most of the time.

I can't help but think that (3) is the most viable option in the long term. You can get away with writing characters that you disagree with for a while, but eventually it'll become harder and harder to find common ground or else just fake it.

And in a way it's sad that the political atmosphere has become so ancrimonious that we can't see things from each other's perspective. But honestly, thinking critically about the issues leads us to to beliefs, and a belief closes off conflicting beliefs. That's the way it works. And the alternative is that none of us ever honestly believe anything, which is not good.

The 'West Wing' is successful in part because of its passion. They could have gone with a president without a party and mushy beliefs, but they didn't and that formula worked for them. It even got people like me watching for stretches rooting against the protagonists every step of the way.

I'm not sure it's a really good idea to mess with that formula.

Unless, of course, they want Republican writers. In which case, I need a resume!

Kevin Rant makes the following declaration:

Real novelists make a living from their work. If you've not actually been paid for a novel, then please don't insult actual novelists by calling yourself one.

My first thought upon reading this was "Oh crap! Have I called myself a novelist?"

A quick scan of my blog answers the question "sort of"... I refer to myself as an "amateur novelist" at one point and at another referred to Oliver Willis as a "fellow novelist," implying that I am one. In the case of the latter, even if the title is wrong (as Kevin believes) the association is valid (neither Willis nor I had been paid for our novels).

So, with that aside, is his criticism valid? Part of me very much believes so. Even though I have written three (unpublished) novels, I don't refer to myself as a novelist except with the "amateur" disclaimer or when basically pitching someone else's writing. The truth is that I would consider myself somewhat of a poseur for calling myself a novelist because I have yet to sell and get paid for one. Further, the term "novelist" implies a professionalism that I do not presently have outside of my current lack of publishing success. My novels are of a very personal nature and were not written with publication in mind. Maybe some day publication will be my aim, but I'm not there yet.

On the other hand, a novelist is somewhat that writes or has written novels. By that definition, I clearly fit. I set out the huge task of writing a novel, plotted and planned it, and executed it. The brainpower and time involved in this is not insignificant. It's not writing a book of free verse poetry of ellipses seperating a bunch of depressing words in all lower case letters. It's not even a collection of short stories, which are more difficult but don't have the all-or-nothing stakes that a novel does. My computer is littered with the first 20 pages of novels started but never finished - that many pages in short stories encompasses several and an easy "accomplishment fix". It's 150 pages single spaced pages devoted to thoroughly telling a story with not-just-cursory characters, themes, and so on.

But back to the first-hand, replace the word "novelist" with the word "writer" and I have a grievance very similar to Kevins. I can't tell you how many people I know who have called themselves "writers" without actually going to the trouble of... well... writing anything (or writing aforementioned poetry). My ex-girlfriend Lisa and I actually got into an argument about this. Many so-called "writers" only documented creativity is coming up with reasons why they haven't written anything. Lisa's was that while she was certain whatever she wrote would come out to the satisfaction of everyone around her - including big-house publishers - she was so much a perfectionist that she would truly hate it and herself for writing something so imperfect. Hers is an extreme example, but a lot of would-be writers seem to prefer the sound of the wheels turning in the back of their mind to the sound of rubber hitting the road.

So in that vein, I can very much understand where Kevin is coming from. While technically if they've written so much an email the folks in the last paragraph are writers, I am technically a novelist . It may be true, but it's inaccurate.

I get the (perhaps inaccurate, certainly convenient) impression that Kevin's grievance is with those that are more loud and self-congratulatory about their hobby rather than those that are more humbly proud of their work (such as myself). But as annoying as the "novelist" thing may be to him and the "writer" thing to me, it's possible that the bigger loser in the exchange is the person that's convinced himself he's bona fide novelist/writer without fully living up to their potential. My annoyance with Lisa and others is only partly that they claim to be what they are not, but rather that some of them really could be great writers, but settle for simply developing the ideas in their head and never actually doing anything with them.

That makes me take a step back and look at myself. While three novels may in fact be quite the achievement for someone my age, I haven't made serious headway on a novel in two years. Furthermore, I have to wonder if a part of me is hiding behind the personal nature of my writing so that I won't have to face what is certain to be countless rejections from publishing houses in even a best case scenario (where I actually get published). Maybe in the same way that Lisa hid behind her perfectionism, I'm hiding behind the fact that I'm not a professional so that I can write what I want rather than what might be read beyond a circle of twenty or so.

Food for thought, anyway.

From page 90 of the 9-11 Commission's Report:

After the Watergate era, Congress established oversight committees to ensure that the CIA did not undertake covert action contrary to basic American law. Case officers in the CIA’s Clandestine Service interpreted legislation, such as the Hughes-Ryan Amendment requiring that the president approve and report to Congress any covert action, as sending a message to them that covert action often leads to trouble and can severely damage one’s career. Controversies surrounding Central American covert action programs in the mid-1980s led to the indictment of several senior officers of the Clandestine Service. During the 1990s, tension sometimes arose, as it did in the effort against al Qaeda, between policymakers who wanted the CIA to undertake more aggressive covert action and wary CIA leaders who counseled prudence and making sure that the legal basis and presidential authorization for their actions were undeniably clear.

That tension isn't nearly as exciting as the horrified president who realizes that the big, bad CIA just killed someone on his behalf, as seen at least once in just about any action movie I've ever seen involving the CIA.

Sssshhhh, no one tell all the hack writers around the world about this. It might deprive them of much needed plot-devices!

When I was nineteen or so, I was driving down Wheeler in the pouring rain. Out of nowhere there was this black SUV parked on the side of the road. I slammed on the breaks and turned left, hitting the SUV and punching out my right headlight. The other car was left undamaged. It's amazing how crystal clear this memory is.

It's amazing not because it was six years ago, but because it never happened.

It's a story I made up to explain the punched out right headlight of my car. What really happened is a bit hazier. It involved a crimson SUV in the University parking lot. I hit it when I turned in too wide to park. The other car wasn't really damaged, but it was not as unscratched as the fictional SUV that I hit in the rain. What's funny is that I can't remember what the weather was like in what actually happened, only in my dishonest reporting of it. I think I made the story up to forget about my little hit-and-run. If I changed the story up in more ways than the damage to the other car, then the cardinal sin actually becomes insignificant, doesn't it?

My motivations, however, aren't really at issue here. What I find most revealing about myself is that I remember what didn't happen a lot more clearly than I remember what did. That's not an isolated incident, either. I remember very clearly a lot of things that never happened. Some of the things that define me didn't happen the way that I now remember them.

To a degree, I think we all convince ourselves of certain things because we need to believe them or so that they just make sense. I may just be projecting, but I believe that a desire to make sense of things runs strongly within us all. I have doubts, however, that they run as strongly in other people as they do in me. Gifted with an extremely powerful imagination and an even more powerful desire to have the world make perfect sense, I am struck with an incredible ability to convince myself of just about anything so long as it smooths the narrative and explains the missing link, be it a matter of a punched out headlight or why I left her (or she left me).

I don't know many people that view the world quite the way that I do. In some ways my mind runs like the streaming binary in The Matrix: a collection of data just asking to be interpreted in a way palitable to the part of me that is experiencing it. If I feel something intensely enough - if I experience it intensely enough - it becomes more important and more real to me than the pesky details that diverge from the narrative in my mind. Simply put, it becomes more real to me than reality. It becomes hypereality.

It's funny and disturbing whenever new details or facts come forth that completely contradict the events before as I experienced them. Sometimes I can simply go back and correct my recollections. Sometimes I'm so deep in believing what I always have that I am incapable of correction. Just like facts that run contrary to an ideologues ideology, they simply get discarded. That I percieved something incorrectly becomes less important than the fact that I've been behaving based on my mispercetions for so long that they've defined me more than some anachronistic, irrelevent facts that have been missed along the way.

Audrey once told me that self-knowledge and self-understanding are two of the most important things in life. Our common belief in the desire to understand ourselves and be understood by others was one of the greatest sparks of our kindred flame. For her part, Audrey has fallen short in her quest for these things many times. For my part, I find myself wrapped in my own hypereality sometimes that my image of myself can be so different from my actual self that it can become nearly impossible to detangle.

Eel and I have been together for a year now. For the first ten months or so, we seemingly learned everything there is to know about one another. Over the past two months, we've managed to learn a lot more. It's interesting how some of the perceptions of who I am have come crumbling down as we've spent so much time together. The best sides of me that I could always put forth on the phone and the rare meetings can sometimes be crowded out by my ugly sides. Without the room to retreat, she's learned things about me that part of me would just assume keep hidden forever because they don't fit my hypereality. I am reminded over and over again that I am not who I think I am.

Yet there are parts of me that I can still keep wrapped under the illusions that I've created. There are parts of me that she may never know. In the four years I was with Anna, she discovered an avalanche of parts of me that she never saw. In some ways I wonder if she ever really knew me at all. How could she when I wouldn't let her? My hypereality is that she was never in a place to understand me. She and I were so different that she was incapable. Yet the same was true of Audrey throughout 2001 and the reason that she and I endured so much together was that we understood each other like few did. Meeting and talking with her again in 2003 and 2004 showed me all that we were missing. How could she understand me when so much of me was hidden in the hypereality?

When the masks were supposed to come off a little more than a year ago, the hypereality (though I didn't call it that then) was supposed to come to an end. When Eel came along, it was supposed to be the opening of a new chapter in my life where I would manage to deal with things more openly and I'd start taking a harder look at who I am, who I've been, and what I've done both good and bad. Yet as I've found myself peeling away layers of understanding the greater truths rather than the actual ones, I've nonetheless found myself slipping back to form here and there. I find myself in the same traps.

I am empowered with an elaborate imagination. The way I've seen things has enabled me to notice and discover things in ways that few others do. It's not just lies I tell myself to feel better. In fact, some of my hypereal interpretations present me in a more negative light than their true-to-life counterparts. It's all ingrained in who I am and who I've always been. The greater stories that I've written and the ones I haven't are, in their own unique way, one of the greater contributions I have to make to the world. If I strip myself of that I wonder what there is left of me. If I saw everything only as it is, what happens to all the great inspirations of the way the world ought to be and hyperbolic parables of how it remains?

Can one really see and correctly see the forest and catalogue the trees at once?

I'm not a remarkably methodical writer. I like to have my broad outline complete before starting a story and a vague idea of the theme, but I find that once I get going the story often takes itself in its own direction. It's a product of the fact that my stories are character exploration more than plot-driven genre stories. Regardless, I find this methodical approach to writing to be interesting.

If I ever get to the point that I am published (and therefore my opinion on "how to write") counts, I have various ideas for character and story development I'll probably put into... well... something.

[via Down the Writer's Path]

Chris Elam somewhat notes a Chron article about pop culture references in the new movie "Shrek 2" and disapprovingly says the following:

This time, the filmmakers solved that problem with all the pop culture allusions. These days, they are shamelessly trotted out in rapid-fire succession, but they are also a huge key to success with any TV sitcom or feature film. They make the audience feel "hip". It makes the viewer run out into the lobby and chatter excitedly, "Did you get the scene where... Did you see where... Remember when he started to sing..." It gives the audience a chance to brag to their friends about how culturally-literate they are. What a great marketing technique!

I'll have to make sure that he doesn't waste his time with No-Lyfe Productions, which spares no expense at quirky, obscure, and downright tired references to nerd culture.