For some reason, today I've been thinking about a story one of my teachers told me once. Some young relative of his had wanted to participate in an Invention Fair, but couldn't think of a real invention, so he just put a name card next to an empty space, with "Invisible Nothing Machine" written on the card.
I can just imagine his conversation with the judges:
"What's that?"
"It's an Invisible Nothing Machine."
"What's it made out of?"
"It's made out of nothing."
"What does it do?"
"It does nothing."
"Why would we need a machine that's made out of nothing and does nothing?"
"It saves a lot of time and money. Building it requires no resources and no work, and once it's built, it saves humans from having to do nothing all by themselves."
"Hmm. He's got a point. If we had a machine to do nothing for us, we could spend more time doing something. It would greatly boost our overall productivity as a species."
"I say we give him a prize."
According to my teacher, the kid actually did get a prize. An Honorable Mention or something. I suppose that says something about the world, but I'm not sure what.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Don't ask, don't tell... doesn't work
Okay, so now the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is coming back into the public eye. Frankly, it has always annoyed me. Clinton had some good ideas, but this was not one of them. And I think that kind of policy is useless not only in the military, but also in all the other places it's put into practice.
There are various possible kinds of "don't ask, don't tell" policies... including the one that is commonly used for interviewing anyone for any job. Of course, depending on the company, this policy may or may not apply to sexual orientation, but it generally does apply to such things as ethnicity, religion, marital status and disability. Questions on such subjects are referred to as "illegal" questions, but interviewers are not technically prohibited from asking them; they are just prohibited from requiring the applicant to answer them.
On the one hand, I can see why the law tries to keep interviewers from finding out things that might cause them to discriminate against the applicant. If you want to prevent discrimination, it's not enough just to prohibit choosing applicants based on religion, ethnicity, disability, etc. For instance, if a company refuses to hire a certain applicant who is known to have a disability, there is absolutely no way to prove that they did it because of the disability. You can't prove why people did something, because that information exists only in those people's heads... and sometimes it's buried pretty deep in there. They may even have convinced themselves they're doing it for an acceptable reason. There is only one way to make sure people don't discriminate against you: Make sure they never find out that you have any traits they might discriminate against.
But sometimes that's impossible. If an applicant refuses to answer an "illegal" question, it will pretty much always be assumed that the answer is something the interviewer doesn't want to hear, and that will be taken into account when deciding whether to hire the applicant. Obviously, the system doesn't work.
One could make it a little stricter, so that interviewers could actually be punished for asking such questions-- but that still wouldn't be foolproof, because lots of applicants wouldn't even know that the questions were illegal, and if one of them did decide to charge the interviewer with asking an illegal question, it would be very difficult to prove him guilty. And, of course, if the interviewer broke the rule and asked the question, an applicant who replied "You aren't supposed to ask that" would still be assumed to be gay, disabled, of an unwanted religion, or whatever the question was about.
One could try to deal with this problem by penalizing both "asking" and "telling"... not only making it punishable for the interviewer to ask the question, but also making it punishable for the applicant to reply either yes or no. The only advantage of this: if the applicant refused to answer the question, it could be seen as an attempt to avoid committing a crime, instead of an admission that the answer would be unattractive to the interviewer.
But it would create a lot more problems. Applicants would have to be constantly on guard to avoid mentioning anything that could give the answer away, even if it were not an unattractive answer. For example, if such a policy were used in the military, a male applicant who happened to mention his wife or girlfriend at any point in the selection process would essentially be stating that he was not gay, thus violating the rule against "telling," and earning whatever punishment the law provided for that offense.
The only conclusion I can come to is that it's impossible for any kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy to work worth crap. That's why so many people can't get hired for any job-- because there's no even remotely workable way to prevent discrimination. And it's especially impossible for it to work the way it's set up in the military, where the law requires discriminating against any applicant who gives the unwanted answer.
There are various possible kinds of "don't ask, don't tell" policies... including the one that is commonly used for interviewing anyone for any job. Of course, depending on the company, this policy may or may not apply to sexual orientation, but it generally does apply to such things as ethnicity, religion, marital status and disability. Questions on such subjects are referred to as "illegal" questions, but interviewers are not technically prohibited from asking them; they are just prohibited from requiring the applicant to answer them.
On the one hand, I can see why the law tries to keep interviewers from finding out things that might cause them to discriminate against the applicant. If you want to prevent discrimination, it's not enough just to prohibit choosing applicants based on religion, ethnicity, disability, etc. For instance, if a company refuses to hire a certain applicant who is known to have a disability, there is absolutely no way to prove that they did it because of the disability. You can't prove why people did something, because that information exists only in those people's heads... and sometimes it's buried pretty deep in there. They may even have convinced themselves they're doing it for an acceptable reason. There is only one way to make sure people don't discriminate against you: Make sure they never find out that you have any traits they might discriminate against.
But sometimes that's impossible. If an applicant refuses to answer an "illegal" question, it will pretty much always be assumed that the answer is something the interviewer doesn't want to hear, and that will be taken into account when deciding whether to hire the applicant. Obviously, the system doesn't work.
One could make it a little stricter, so that interviewers could actually be punished for asking such questions-- but that still wouldn't be foolproof, because lots of applicants wouldn't even know that the questions were illegal, and if one of them did decide to charge the interviewer with asking an illegal question, it would be very difficult to prove him guilty. And, of course, if the interviewer broke the rule and asked the question, an applicant who replied "You aren't supposed to ask that" would still be assumed to be gay, disabled, of an unwanted religion, or whatever the question was about.
One could try to deal with this problem by penalizing both "asking" and "telling"... not only making it punishable for the interviewer to ask the question, but also making it punishable for the applicant to reply either yes or no. The only advantage of this: if the applicant refused to answer the question, it could be seen as an attempt to avoid committing a crime, instead of an admission that the answer would be unattractive to the interviewer.
But it would create a lot more problems. Applicants would have to be constantly on guard to avoid mentioning anything that could give the answer away, even if it were not an unattractive answer. For example, if such a policy were used in the military, a male applicant who happened to mention his wife or girlfriend at any point in the selection process would essentially be stating that he was not gay, thus violating the rule against "telling," and earning whatever punishment the law provided for that offense.
The only conclusion I can come to is that it's impossible for any kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy to work worth crap. That's why so many people can't get hired for any job-- because there's no even remotely workable way to prevent discrimination. And it's especially impossible for it to work the way it's set up in the military, where the law requires discriminating against any applicant who gives the unwanted answer.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
No more Orson Scott Card
I once read a diatribe against gay marriage by the celebrated science fiction writer Orson Scott Card-- a diatribe that had a lot of big words and fancy language, trying to look intelligent, but had no real arguments. Assertions that children needed both a mother and a father, but no real explanation why.
And one overly literal interpretation of the law: "Gays already have equal marriage rights. Just like heterosexuals, they have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex." (Well, if we're going to be that sophomoric, we can even go a little further and say that men and women don't currently have equal marriage rights: unlike men, women have the right to marry men, and unlike women, men have the right to marry women. How unfair.)
But I was still able to read and enjoy his work, for the same reason I can enjoy Tom Cruise movies despite disagreeing wholeheartedly with his religious beliefs. The man does not equal the actor, and the man does not always equal the author, either. I enjoyed Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, and Shadow of the Hegemon.
Sure, he had some scattered references to "every living creature's natural desire to reproduce," and I would balk for a moment at his apparent assertion that I wasn't a living creature, but then I would ignore it and read on.
But when I got to Shadow Puppets, I drew the line.
(Spoilers beyond this point.)
Bean, the main character, because of a very disadvantageous genetic condition, has decided not to have children. His friend Petra wants to have his children, and she keeps pestering him about it.
Then, at one point, they meet a man who "has no desire for women." It is not 100% clear whether he is gay or just not interested in love and sex at all. But he clearly serves as a mouthpiece for the author.
He claims he is about to get married to a woman who already has some children of her own, and spend the rest of his life living with her and raising her children, despite having no desire for her.
And he gives them this long lecture about how the only way to feel truly fulfilled in life is to raise children together with a member of the opposite sex. They don't have to be your own children, and you don't even have to like this member of the opposite sex-- but raising children with a member of the opposite sex is the instinct that's programmed into every living creature, so if you don't do it one way or another, then you won't feel that your life was worth living.
And this convinces Bean; he gets all weepy and realizes deep in his heart that this man is right. That's where I stopped reading.
When I had read Orson Scott Card's essay on gay marriage, I had taken his comment about equal marriage rights as an over-literal interpretation of the phrase "equal rights," twisting it to fit his own views while choosing to ignore the fact that gays can't be happy being married to the opposite sex. But now I realize he's even crazier. He actually thinks gays will be happier in heterosexual marriages.
Furthermore, he thinks I am incapable of being happy in my own lifestyle-- a heterosexual marriage with no children. Never mind the fact that I panic, curl up in a ball with my hands over my ears, and rock like the stereotypical autistic, if I spend more than fifteen minutes trying to be in a position of control over a child. Never mind that screaming babies and whining toddlers make me want to physically smash something if I even overhear them in the supermarket. He actually thinks I would be happier if I were raising kids.
No more. I'm not reading his books any more. That's it.
And one overly literal interpretation of the law: "Gays already have equal marriage rights. Just like heterosexuals, they have the right to marry someone of the opposite sex." (Well, if we're going to be that sophomoric, we can even go a little further and say that men and women don't currently have equal marriage rights: unlike men, women have the right to marry men, and unlike women, men have the right to marry women. How unfair.)
But I was still able to read and enjoy his work, for the same reason I can enjoy Tom Cruise movies despite disagreeing wholeheartedly with his religious beliefs. The man does not equal the actor, and the man does not always equal the author, either. I enjoyed Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, Ender's Shadow, and Shadow of the Hegemon.
Sure, he had some scattered references to "every living creature's natural desire to reproduce," and I would balk for a moment at his apparent assertion that I wasn't a living creature, but then I would ignore it and read on.
But when I got to Shadow Puppets, I drew the line.
(Spoilers beyond this point.)
Bean, the main character, because of a very disadvantageous genetic condition, has decided not to have children. His friend Petra wants to have his children, and she keeps pestering him about it.
Then, at one point, they meet a man who "has no desire for women." It is not 100% clear whether he is gay or just not interested in love and sex at all. But he clearly serves as a mouthpiece for the author.
He claims he is about to get married to a woman who already has some children of her own, and spend the rest of his life living with her and raising her children, despite having no desire for her.
And he gives them this long lecture about how the only way to feel truly fulfilled in life is to raise children together with a member of the opposite sex. They don't have to be your own children, and you don't even have to like this member of the opposite sex-- but raising children with a member of the opposite sex is the instinct that's programmed into every living creature, so if you don't do it one way or another, then you won't feel that your life was worth living.
And this convinces Bean; he gets all weepy and realizes deep in his heart that this man is right. That's where I stopped reading.
When I had read Orson Scott Card's essay on gay marriage, I had taken his comment about equal marriage rights as an over-literal interpretation of the phrase "equal rights," twisting it to fit his own views while choosing to ignore the fact that gays can't be happy being married to the opposite sex. But now I realize he's even crazier. He actually thinks gays will be happier in heterosexual marriages.
Furthermore, he thinks I am incapable of being happy in my own lifestyle-- a heterosexual marriage with no children. Never mind the fact that I panic, curl up in a ball with my hands over my ears, and rock like the stereotypical autistic, if I spend more than fifteen minutes trying to be in a position of control over a child. Never mind that screaming babies and whining toddlers make me want to physically smash something if I even overhear them in the supermarket. He actually thinks I would be happier if I were raising kids.
No more. I'm not reading his books any more. That's it.
Friday, March 09, 2007
%$@#! new Starfleet Academy movie thing
Don't mind the following, I'm just ranting about the makers of Star Trek and their evident inability to let anything rest in peace.
(To the tune of Beautiful Wreck.)
All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Of all of those shows set in the Milky Way
TOS, you're the one I wish could have stayed.
You're the one that's least sub-par
What a beautiful Trek you are
Flying star to star,
Beautiful Trek you are.
They go crazy every seven years, you know
And so every seven years they make a new Trek show.
Except for TOS, 'cause you just got three,
Which is sad, 'cause you're still the best Trek to me.
I’m still sitting here waiting by my TV set
But there's been nothing good yet
But there's been nothing good yet
You've got Spock pon farr
What a beautiful Trek you are
You've got Kolinahr
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful
A beautiful Trek you are.
All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Yeah, I like the original Trek, I do.
I like the original Trek, I do.
Yeah, you've got T'Lar
What a beautiful Trek you are
But not Tasha Yar
And not Selar
But what a beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.
(To the tune of Beautiful Wreck.)
All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Of all of those shows set in the Milky Way
TOS, you're the one I wish could have stayed.
You're the one that's least sub-par
What a beautiful Trek you are
Flying star to star,
Beautiful Trek you are.
They go crazy every seven years, you know
And so every seven years they make a new Trek show.
Except for TOS, 'cause you just got three,
Which is sad, 'cause you're still the best Trek to me.
I’m still sitting here waiting by my TV set
But there's been nothing good yet
But there's been nothing good yet
You've got Spock pon farr
What a beautiful Trek you are
You've got Kolinahr
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful
A beautiful Trek you are.
All you newer Treks, I've given up on you,
'Cause I like the original Trek, I do.
Yeah, I like the original Trek, I do.
I like the original Trek, I do.
Yeah, you've got T'Lar
What a beautiful Trek you are
But not Tasha Yar
And not Selar
But what a beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.
What a beautiful, such a beautiful,
Beautiful Trek you are.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
There are 10 kinds of dogs. Those who know binary and those who don't.
Okay, remember the first dog toy I bought at Target? The creepy eyeless pig with only one front leg and one hind leg?
Well, I've found that it's not the only totally wacko dog toy they have.
The highlight of my day today was a dog newspaper.
But the absolutely awesome thing about it isn't the fact that it's a newspaper. Or the fact that it's really just a squeaky toy in the shape of a rolled-up newspaper. It also isn't the title "Doggy News," or the slogan "All the news that's fit to chew on." Nor is it the price (two dog bones), the paw-stamp with "edition" written under it, or the headline "Man bites dog" with the corresponding illustration.
It is the fact that the newspaper is written in binary.
Think of it! Dogs can read binary! Who'd have thought it? The headline in plain alphabetical characters was just to throw off computer-illiterate humans. Your dog can spend joyful hours poring through articles that you would need a decoding program to understand. Now you know why your dog gets jealous when you pay too much attention to your computer. It's because he wants the computer all to himself!
I suppose it says a lot about me that I actually went to the trouble of transcribing all those ones and zeroes into my text editor, and then went looking for online binary-to-text translation programs. But, alas, when you paste
01110110 111011011 1101 101110 111 0110 01 01101101 110110 110110 10 011 01101110 011 111011 0110 11010 01101110 11011011 1101 0110110 11011 111011 011011101 10 0110 1101101 01101 11101 0110 1101101 11101 011011101011 1101101 01101 0110 011 0010111 110110 11101 01101 01101 0111011 011011 0110101 011
into an online decoder, you get either an error message, or a line of characters that looks like this:
I guess dogs know something that I don't.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Abby and Norma updates!
My web comic "Abby and Norma" is now in color, and it's now weekly instead of bi-weekly.
Just letting y'all know.
Just letting y'all know.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Even skeletons need a hug sometimes
Maybe Romeo and Juliet really did make it to Mantua before they died.
And maybe they really lived in the Neolithic era...
article
And maybe they really lived in the Neolithic era...
article
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
This is even scarier than the two-legged pig.
Scary article, right here.
I don't know about you, but I am absolutely terrified by that whole bunch of new laws. And don't make the mistake of thinking that they're only going to be used against people who really are terrorists. If you read enough articles, you know that the government has searched and trashed people's houses, destroying their possessions, for reasons no more valid than "She was checking out a lot of terrorism-related books from the library. How could we know she was just doing research for something she was going to write?"
Still, this is kinda funny.
I don't know about you, but I am absolutely terrified by that whole bunch of new laws. And don't make the mistake of thinking that they're only going to be used against people who really are terrorists. If you read enough articles, you know that the government has searched and trashed people's houses, destroying their possessions, for reasons no more valid than "She was checking out a lot of terrorism-related books from the library. How could we know she was just doing research for something she was going to write?"
Still, this is kinda funny.
I cannot BELIEVE...
...that Coca-Cola stole the Ninja Kitten song! How did they think they were going to get away with that?
I mean, I'm sure that, if they'd just asked nicely, the awesome folks at Rathergood.com would have been delighted to let them use it for a price that would be almost nothing to a giant like Coke. But I guess nobody asks nicely these days.
*sigh*
I mean, I'm sure that, if they'd just asked nicely, the awesome folks at Rathergood.com would have been delighted to let them use it for a price that would be almost nothing to a giant like Coke. But I guess nobody asks nicely these days.
*sigh*
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Four legs good, two legs bad
Transition to the new Target store went very well. I have walked to work every day so far, with no trouble-- which is very good, since our car is, we think, permanently dead now after a small accident in a parking lot, in which the driver's side front wheel was bent to an angle that a wheel simply shouldn't be at. Fixing it would undoubtedly cost more than the car is worth. It was going to die any minute anyway, and I guess there were worse ways and worse places it could have happened.
Anyway, I love this new Target. And it's so much closer to home than the one where I used to work. Part of me is hoping that when my old store finishes its transformation into a Super Target, I can just stay here instead of moving back.
On break today, I spent $4.23 ever-so-frivolously. But it made me happy. See, I found the most bizarre, fascinating, vaguely creepy product I have seen in all (both?) my years stocking shelves.
Seen from the side, this toy looks more or less like a normal pig. But turn it, and you will find that IT HAS ONLY TWO LEGS. And not "two legs" in the sense of an anthropomorphic fairy-tale pig that walks on its hind limbs and uses the front ones as arms. This pig could never walk in a million years. That's right, it has just ONE LEG IN FRONT AND ONE IN BACK.
The idea for designing this creature, I imagine, started with the thought of making an outline of a pig seen from the side, and creating a toy that was little more than a two-dimensional cutout. But then they went too far in giving that cutout some realistic features.
You will note, seeing the pig from the front, bottom, or back, that the body is fatter than the legs. Furthermore, the face is carefully designed to look like a pig's face when seen from the front-- which, of course, encourages the viewer to look at the toy from the front, whereupon the eye will wander down to the single front leg, and the brain will go "WTF?"
And he only cost $2.99... in my opinion, the bargain of a lifetime.
(The rest of the $4.23 was a little tiny pool table from Target's dollar-store section, plus some sales tax.)
I'm naming the pig "Big Brother," in honor of the cartoon on Homestarrunner.com where Strong Bad draws a picture of a one-legged dog named "Li'l Brudder." I figure that since my pig has twice as many legs as that dog, he can be called "Big Brother." Plus the fact that George Orwell's two most famous books featured (a) a society ruled by an imaginary figurehead named Big Brother and (b) a farm ruled by pigs.
(Oh, and he has a squeaky thing inside him!! He's really meant as a dog toy, you see. But no dog would appreciate the Dada-ness of it all.)
Anyway, I love this new Target. And it's so much closer to home than the one where I used to work. Part of me is hoping that when my old store finishes its transformation into a Super Target, I can just stay here instead of moving back.
On break today, I spent $4.23 ever-so-frivolously. But it made me happy. See, I found the most bizarre, fascinating, vaguely creepy product I have seen in all (both?) my years stocking shelves.
Seen from the side, this toy looks more or less like a normal pig. But turn it, and you will find that IT HAS ONLY TWO LEGS. And not "two legs" in the sense of an anthropomorphic fairy-tale pig that walks on its hind limbs and uses the front ones as arms. This pig could never walk in a million years. That's right, it has just ONE LEG IN FRONT AND ONE IN BACK.
The idea for designing this creature, I imagine, started with the thought of making an outline of a pig seen from the side, and creating a toy that was little more than a two-dimensional cutout. But then they went too far in giving that cutout some realistic features.
You will note, seeing the pig from the front, bottom, or back, that the body is fatter than the legs. Furthermore, the face is carefully designed to look like a pig's face when seen from the front-- which, of course, encourages the viewer to look at the toy from the front, whereupon the eye will wander down to the single front leg, and the brain will go "WTF?"
And he only cost $2.99... in my opinion, the bargain of a lifetime.
(The rest of the $4.23 was a little tiny pool table from Target's dollar-store section, plus some sales tax.)
I'm naming the pig "Big Brother," in honor of the cartoon on Homestarrunner.com where Strong Bad draws a picture of a one-legged dog named "Li'l Brudder." I figure that since my pig has twice as many legs as that dog, he can be called "Big Brother." Plus the fact that George Orwell's two most famous books featured (a) a society ruled by an imaginary figurehead named Big Brother and (b) a farm ruled by pigs.
(Oh, and he has a squeaky thing inside him!! He's really meant as a dog toy, you see. But no dog would appreciate the Dada-ness of it all.)
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Bad brain! Nothing really rhymes with 'purple'!
My dream the other night was so weird and pointless that it is not even worth describing... except that at the very end, someone showed me a Spock doll, and I responded by singing, to the tune of the "Popeye" song,
"I'm Spockie and I don't laugh,
I live in a Spirograph,
I go 'round in circles while I draw in purple,
I'm Spockie and I don't laugh."
I think that is one of the weirdest songs I have ever made up in my sleep. And now I am not going back to sleep, because I think sleep has become a hallucinogenic drug for me.
"I'm Spockie and I don't laugh,
I live in a Spirograph,
I go 'round in circles while I draw in purple,
I'm Spockie and I don't laugh."
I think that is one of the weirdest songs I have ever made up in my sleep. And now I am not going back to sleep, because I think sleep has become a hallucinogenic drug for me.
Saturday, December 02, 2006
Scream Dream
Superman fans, please do not take offense. I have never read a single Superman comic, and my knowledge of him is pretty much the stuff that everybody knows. My subconscious mind, though, seems to want to analyze his psyche, as evidenced in my dream last night. And it did a pretty bizarre job.
So, I had this dream where there was a character named "Screamer" in the Superman comic. She was supposed to be Superman's girlfriend (in the dream Lois Lane didn't seem to exist) and she was a superhero whose power was her ability to scream-- but I got the impression that her screaming didn't actually do anything to the bad guys, it just boosted Superman's power so that he could kick their butts.
And no one ever saw Screamer. Superman talked about her a lot, but he was apparently the only person who ever interacted with her. When he needed her help, he would go someplace where no one could see him, and then people would hear a scream, and he'd come back and say that Screamer had done her job.
In the dream, it seemed that there was a common idea among Superman fans that Screamer wasn't a separate person of her own, she was in Superman's head. The idea was that Superman did the screaming himself, and just told everybody it came from his unseen girlfriend. But it wasn't like she was an imaginary friend, and it wasn't like she was an alien consciousness trapped inside his head with him... it wasn't even a split personality thing, either. It was that Superman was in love with a part of his own mind... apparently the part of him that liked to scream, I guess.
And since the rest of the world would find that very odd, Superman personified this part of his mind as a girlfriend that nobody saw.
I do NOT know where this dream came from... except that I'm writing a short story in which a young lady experiences a sort of identity crisis, wondering who or what she truly is... and the Superman character is mentioned a couple of times in passing. And it's also the time of the month when my brain produces the craziest dreams.
Maybe I should name that part of my mind "Dreamer." And, like, lock him up somewhere.
So, I had this dream where there was a character named "Screamer" in the Superman comic. She was supposed to be Superman's girlfriend (in the dream Lois Lane didn't seem to exist) and she was a superhero whose power was her ability to scream-- but I got the impression that her screaming didn't actually do anything to the bad guys, it just boosted Superman's power so that he could kick their butts.
And no one ever saw Screamer. Superman talked about her a lot, but he was apparently the only person who ever interacted with her. When he needed her help, he would go someplace where no one could see him, and then people would hear a scream, and he'd come back and say that Screamer had done her job.
In the dream, it seemed that there was a common idea among Superman fans that Screamer wasn't a separate person of her own, she was in Superman's head. The idea was that Superman did the screaming himself, and just told everybody it came from his unseen girlfriend. But it wasn't like she was an imaginary friend, and it wasn't like she was an alien consciousness trapped inside his head with him... it wasn't even a split personality thing, either. It was that Superman was in love with a part of his own mind... apparently the part of him that liked to scream, I guess.
And since the rest of the world would find that very odd, Superman personified this part of his mind as a girlfriend that nobody saw.
I do NOT know where this dream came from... except that I'm writing a short story in which a young lady experiences a sort of identity crisis, wondering who or what she truly is... and the Superman character is mentioned a couple of times in passing. And it's also the time of the month when my brain produces the craziest dreams.
Maybe I should name that part of my mind "Dreamer." And, like, lock him up somewhere.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Singing with the world's stickiest head
I could write a whole blog about the songs that get stuck in my head. Seriously. A typical entry would go like this:
First I got "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" stuck in my head and then I got "Oh Susanna" stuck in my head, and since I don't know more than the first couple lines of either of them, my brain merged them into a version of "Oh Susanna" that replaced the words "Oh Susanna" with "Argentina." But it still only had the first couple lines, so my brain grabbed the first rhyme it could think of and built it into something that went like this:
First I got "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" stuck in my head and then I got "Oh Susanna" stuck in my head, and since I don't know more than the first couple lines of either of them, my brain merged them into a version of "Oh Susanna" that replaced the words "Oh Susanna" with "Argentina." But it still only had the first couple lines, so my brain grabbed the first rhyme it could think of and built it into something that went like this:
Argentina, don't you cry for me
Cause my first name's Angelina and my last name is Jolie
which my brain found so clever that it considered adding more verses and making it into a satirical song about Angelina Jolie, but then realized that such a project would require knowing at least five times more about Angelina Jolie than I actually do, and I wasn't interested in doing that kind of research, so I just sang those first couple lines over and over in my head for the rest of the day.
I have the world's stickiest head. If only I could understand and remember enough of the words of any song that I could hum the whole thing sometimes.
Friday, November 24, 2006
My website
Just letting you all know that my website, which used to be at zekibaka.com, has moved here. That's why my picture on blogger.com is dead-- it was a link to a copy of a pic on zekibaka.com, and blogger keeps crashing when I try to change it. Hope it at least lets me post this.
Site still has pretty much all the same stuff-- my writing, my art, and information about my books and speeches. Some new stuff on the jewelry page.
Just thought I'd let you know. Now must try and get ready for bed.
Site still has pretty much all the same stuff-- my writing, my art, and information about my books and speeches. Some new stuff on the jewelry page.
Just thought I'd let you know. Now must try and get ready for bed.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Website downtime upcoming
Our website at www.zekibaka.com will quite likely be down for a day or so at some point in the near future.
See, zekibaka.com is hosted by Midphase, and our other site, johnanderikaspeak.com, is hosted by Bluehost. The renew deadline for Midphase is coming up and we can't afford the extra $100 right now, so we've decided to move zekibaka.com onto our Bluehost account.
It'll still be on the same domain-- you'll still get to it by typing www.zekibaka.com -- but it'll be hosted by Bluehost and covered under the same fee we're going to pay Bluehost in February, so we'll have both sites up for the price of one.
But it may take a day or so to get back up... just letting you all know.
See, zekibaka.com is hosted by Midphase, and our other site, johnanderikaspeak.com, is hosted by Bluehost. The renew deadline for Midphase is coming up and we can't afford the extra $100 right now, so we've decided to move zekibaka.com onto our Bluehost account.
It'll still be on the same domain-- you'll still get to it by typing www.zekibaka.com -- but it'll be hosted by Bluehost and covered under the same fee we're going to pay Bluehost in February, so we'll have both sites up for the price of one.
But it may take a day or so to get back up... just letting you all know.
"Christ won eternal life for you. It's a separate download."
I just got a spam email with one of those blocks of randomly generated text, which was pieced together from a religious essay and a set of instructions for some computer application... some of the juxtapositions are simply hilarious:
Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. sitemap files in your application. See Isaiah and the Gospel of John. This package is a series of sample ControlExtenders that attach to existing controls to do some really cool stuff. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. Your phone is "busy". Either you think there is a personal God, a superhuman Creator who made the world according to the Book of Genesis, or you are a rational believer in the scientific method. It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
It'll work most of the time," said Prosise. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. Initials instead of having to do it manually. It's still enjoyable to read.
God waits to be gracious to each person that knows they need to be forgiven. So the easiest way to do it is to split the string with a space character, and grab the first letter from each resulting string.
Of course, you can add a lot more information to your OpenSearch provider.
this is very important, Satveer.
Beats having to click a bunch of checkboxes, huh?
It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
Didn't you know, man? Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. Select the assembly, and drag it onto the Toolbox, in the tab you want the controls to be in. And it involves APS meetings and Fourier transforms, all intensely romantic.
com e-mail address instead. at some moment in time, yet? Take some time to get acquainted with this power-filled Jesus. He said He'd be back, and He said it first.
This is the us-versus-them trick.
"; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself.
Christ won eternal life for you and said so. It's a separate download from the main "Atlas" release, but I would assume that this would be rolled into the "Atlas" releases at some point.
This is the us-versus-them trick. Initials instead of having to do it manually.
no doubt with good wishes! sitemap files in your application.
Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. sitemap files in your application. See Isaiah and the Gospel of John. This package is a series of sample ControlExtenders that attach to existing controls to do some really cool stuff. Nevertheless, I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense. Your phone is "busy". Either you think there is a personal God, a superhuman Creator who made the world according to the Book of Genesis, or you are a rational believer in the scientific method. It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
It'll work most of the time," said Prosise. That is why I needed to get Einsteinian religion out of the way to begin with: it has a proven capacity to confuse. Initials instead of having to do it manually. It's still enjoyable to read.
God waits to be gracious to each person that knows they need to be forgiven. So the easiest way to do it is to split the string with a space character, and grab the first letter from each resulting string.
Of course, you can add a lot more information to your OpenSearch provider.
this is very important, Satveer.
Beats having to click a bunch of checkboxes, huh?
It is a welcome change for me, because educating my business partners on technology was a daily exercise in futility.
Didn't you know, man? Deliberately to confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason. Select the assembly, and drag it onto the Toolbox, in the tab you want the controls to be in. And it involves APS meetings and Fourier transforms, all intensely romantic.
com e-mail address instead. at some moment in time, yet? Take some time to get acquainted with this power-filled Jesus. He said He'd be back, and He said it first.
This is the us-versus-them trick.
"; this one is the Incredibly Agile Evasive God trick. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself. Get to know Him and know yourself.
Christ won eternal life for you and said so. It's a separate download from the main "Atlas" release, but I would assume that this would be rolled into the "Atlas" releases at some point.
This is the us-versus-them trick. Initials instead of having to do it manually.
no doubt with good wishes! sitemap files in your application.
Sometimes a lizard is just a lizard?
Forget Freud and his book of what things mean in dreams. Yes, dreams have symbolism, but it is different for every single freaking person.
The other night I had a dream where a lizard symbolized an aloe plant. Seriously. In the dream I had a couple of pet lizards that kept running around and getting their tails cut off in various ways. Like, I tried to keep them in my locker while I went to work, but I closed the locker on their tails and accidentally cut them off. I suppose they must've grown back, because they got cut off a lot of other ways too.
But the point is that when they lost their tails, the tail stump wasn't red, it was translucent green, like when you cut a leaf off an aloe plant. And then when I woke up, I noticed that my aloe plant had fallen off the shelf and was lying in a big pile of dirt on the floor. I mentioned it to my husband, who said that it had fallen off the previous day, but I hadn't noticed it and he hadn't gotten around to telling me.
So I must have noticed it subconsciously, and my subconscious mind was trying to let me know that my aloe plant was in trouble. Except instead of telling me directly, it had decided to symbolize it with lizards getting their tails cut off. Have no idea why it chose that particular symbol, except that I dream about lizards a lot, and I also have a lot of dreams about pets suffering horrible fates due to human neglect or stupidity. (I suppose that has to do with the fact that I had a lot of pets as a child, and some of them did get hurt or killed because of errors on my part or my parents'.)
Freud said that dreams use symbolism because there are things your mind can't handle thinking about directly. Supposedly almost anything sexual was in this category-- which is stupid, because people think about sex more than they think about anything else, and I'd certainly rather think about sex than think about lizards losing body parts. I personally think that dreams don't symbolize for any good reason, they just do it because they're confused and mix things up with each other.
Or maybe it was just a coincidence. But in any case I'm not asking Freud what it means when lizards lose their tails in a dream.
The other night I had a dream where a lizard symbolized an aloe plant. Seriously. In the dream I had a couple of pet lizards that kept running around and getting their tails cut off in various ways. Like, I tried to keep them in my locker while I went to work, but I closed the locker on their tails and accidentally cut them off. I suppose they must've grown back, because they got cut off a lot of other ways too.
But the point is that when they lost their tails, the tail stump wasn't red, it was translucent green, like when you cut a leaf off an aloe plant. And then when I woke up, I noticed that my aloe plant had fallen off the shelf and was lying in a big pile of dirt on the floor. I mentioned it to my husband, who said that it had fallen off the previous day, but I hadn't noticed it and he hadn't gotten around to telling me.
So I must have noticed it subconsciously, and my subconscious mind was trying to let me know that my aloe plant was in trouble. Except instead of telling me directly, it had decided to symbolize it with lizards getting their tails cut off. Have no idea why it chose that particular symbol, except that I dream about lizards a lot, and I also have a lot of dreams about pets suffering horrible fates due to human neglect or stupidity. (I suppose that has to do with the fact that I had a lot of pets as a child, and some of them did get hurt or killed because of errors on my part or my parents'.)
Freud said that dreams use symbolism because there are things your mind can't handle thinking about directly. Supposedly almost anything sexual was in this category-- which is stupid, because people think about sex more than they think about anything else, and I'd certainly rather think about sex than think about lizards losing body parts. I personally think that dreams don't symbolize for any good reason, they just do it because they're confused and mix things up with each other.
Or maybe it was just a coincidence. But in any case I'm not asking Freud what it means when lizards lose their tails in a dream.
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Moving and selling stuff
Random stuff:
Voptras and my pointy ear headbands, two of my inventions, are available for sale on my website.
I'm also selling my dollhouse and its contents on Craigslist, and I think it's worth what I'm charging for it-- at least I don't want to sell it for any less-- but I haven't had any offers yet. We'll see.
OK, I promised an update on moving into our new apartment...
Husband's parents and a friend helped us move at the end of September. It is a great apartment-- bigger than our old one, which means that we can actually walk in a reasonable fashion around our pieces of furniture instead of holding our breath to squeeze past them. Better than old one in many other ways too. Wonderful big French windows. Kitchen has a garbage disposal. Electric stove, as opposed to old apartment's ancient gas stove with pilot light that kept going out for no reason and flooding kitchen with methane. Old landlord wouldn't even try to fix it; said there was nothing he could do. We had to go in with a screwdriver and turn off the valve to the pilot light, and light it with a lighter every time we turned it on. Husband also had to improvise a stove vent out of a big plastic bowl and a length of duct pipe that led to the window, but the new apartment has a stove vent built in.
Has a pool that we'll be able to use come summer. Has a rental office on the property, and maintenance that reliably comes and fixes problems soon after we call. Laundry room has three washers and three dryers, unlike old apartment which, inexplicably, had three washers and two dryers. Washers don't unbalance nearly as easily as the old ones, too. And there's a quarter machine in the rental office.
And there's no extra price for all these improvements-- the rent is actually $50 less than the old apartment. Probably because it's on the freeway-- but we don't mind the noise, and we like the convenience.
A few little problems: the window is drafty, and the walls are not very thick (one neighbor complained about our video game noise all the time, even when we had it turned down so low we could barely hear-- until one day she knocked on our door when we weren't even playing video games, and we let her in and showed her that the noise she was complaining about wasn't even coming from our apartment, and since then she's been very decent to us). Our upstairs neighbor's footsteps sound like a dinosaur, and our downstairs neighbor probably thinks the same of us... the floors seem to amplify every sound.
Also, the bus routes to the Target where I work are not as good as from the old apartment-- they sometimes involve transfers at places where I have to wait up to twenty minutes. But that's okay because in January my Target is going to rebuild itself into a Super Target, and while it's rebuilding, the employees going to be moved, and I'll be moved to a Target that's practically in the backyard of where we live now, and I'll be able to walk to work. They might want to move me back when the rebuilding is done, but I bet I can get them to let me stay.
I was having a lot of stresses and obsessive worries, but stuff has calmed down lately. My mom says she'll help me with psychologist and psychiatrist visits if I need them, but for now I'm emotionally fine. Our financial situation still sucks-- any extra money we get always goes to buy necessities that we'd been holding off on when we didn't have enough money, so we haven't been able to save a cent-- but there are some promising career options occurring to my husband now, so things are looking up. Also the new publisher is going to start printing my book eventually, and I'm in the editing phase of my new science fiction novel, so at some point that will be at least a little source of extra money.
That's it for now. Got to go.
Voptras and my pointy ear headbands, two of my inventions, are available for sale on my website.
I'm also selling my dollhouse and its contents on Craigslist, and I think it's worth what I'm charging for it-- at least I don't want to sell it for any less-- but I haven't had any offers yet. We'll see.
OK, I promised an update on moving into our new apartment...
Husband's parents and a friend helped us move at the end of September. It is a great apartment-- bigger than our old one, which means that we can actually walk in a reasonable fashion around our pieces of furniture instead of holding our breath to squeeze past them. Better than old one in many other ways too. Wonderful big French windows. Kitchen has a garbage disposal. Electric stove, as opposed to old apartment's ancient gas stove with pilot light that kept going out for no reason and flooding kitchen with methane. Old landlord wouldn't even try to fix it; said there was nothing he could do. We had to go in with a screwdriver and turn off the valve to the pilot light, and light it with a lighter every time we turned it on. Husband also had to improvise a stove vent out of a big plastic bowl and a length of duct pipe that led to the window, but the new apartment has a stove vent built in.
Has a pool that we'll be able to use come summer. Has a rental office on the property, and maintenance that reliably comes and fixes problems soon after we call. Laundry room has three washers and three dryers, unlike old apartment which, inexplicably, had three washers and two dryers. Washers don't unbalance nearly as easily as the old ones, too. And there's a quarter machine in the rental office.
And there's no extra price for all these improvements-- the rent is actually $50 less than the old apartment. Probably because it's on the freeway-- but we don't mind the noise, and we like the convenience.
A few little problems: the window is drafty, and the walls are not very thick (one neighbor complained about our video game noise all the time, even when we had it turned down so low we could barely hear-- until one day she knocked on our door when we weren't even playing video games, and we let her in and showed her that the noise she was complaining about wasn't even coming from our apartment, and since then she's been very decent to us). Our upstairs neighbor's footsteps sound like a dinosaur, and our downstairs neighbor probably thinks the same of us... the floors seem to amplify every sound.
Also, the bus routes to the Target where I work are not as good as from the old apartment-- they sometimes involve transfers at places where I have to wait up to twenty minutes. But that's okay because in January my Target is going to rebuild itself into a Super Target, and while it's rebuilding, the employees going to be moved, and I'll be moved to a Target that's practically in the backyard of where we live now, and I'll be able to walk to work. They might want to move me back when the rebuilding is done, but I bet I can get them to let me stay.
I was having a lot of stresses and obsessive worries, but stuff has calmed down lately. My mom says she'll help me with psychologist and psychiatrist visits if I need them, but for now I'm emotionally fine. Our financial situation still sucks-- any extra money we get always goes to buy necessities that we'd been holding off on when we didn't have enough money, so we haven't been able to save a cent-- but there are some promising career options occurring to my husband now, so things are looking up. Also the new publisher is going to start printing my book eventually, and I'm in the editing phase of my new science fiction novel, so at some point that will be at least a little source of extra money.
That's it for now. Got to go.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Realism vs. believability
And here's a post about my novel, now that I've gotten to the end (at 182 pages) and am in the editing phase. Or rather, it isn't a post about my novel, per se, but about one aspect of being an autistic writer.
When writing fiction, it doesn't matter if any of the events in the story are based on fact-- what matters is whether the story is convincing, whether the reader is able to imagine the events being true. And this convincingness doesn't necessarily even have to do with whether the story is similar to reality-- often it just has to do with whether it fits what people expect to see in a book.
For example, my mom is an extremely intellectual and scientific person. In conversation, she speaks as casually and colloquially as anyone, and when you hear her, that casual way of speaking doesn't seem out of place with her intellectual mind. This is because we know that in reality, almost everyone talks casually and colloquially in ordinary conversation, including intellectual people.
However, for part of a writing project in college, I once had her tell me a family story and I wrote it down almost word for word as she said it. I was shocked to find that, to me, my professor and all my classmates, it read as if she were a socialite yuppie soccer mom with no interest in anything scientific or intellectual at all. The same words that had seemed completely in character when she spoke them seemed completely out of character when written down.
I realized then that written "voices" are not anything like the patterns of speech in reality. For a character in a written story to seem intellectual-- especially a female character-- she must speak in a stilted sort of way that no one speaks in the real world. If she talks casually, like a real person, readers will assume she is not intellectual, except in cases where she is actively talking about something intellectual. There was no way I could have quoted my mother telling me that totally unscientific, unintellectual family story and preserved both her patterns of speech and her impression of intellect.
Furthermore, when you write fiction about a subject on which most people have misconceptions-- like autism-- it isn't enough to say something that you know is realistic, or even something that is based on a true story. You also have to try and predict what misconceptions people will have when they read it, and add enough explanation to get rid of those misconceptions.
For instance, I once wrote a story for creative writing class that was almost entirely true. It was based on a conflict I had with a special ed worker in junior high school. But instead of using my real name, I told the story in third person, calling the main character "The Autistic Child." It was a statement about how people forget our true names and personalities as soon as a label like autism becomes known to them.
I showed it to my critique group, not telling them that it was based on a true story. And they tore it apart. They said it was completely unrealistic. An autistic kid wouldn't behave like that. An autistic kid wouldn't have the intelligence and the verbal eloquence of the character in the story, and someone with that amount of intelligence would never be as socially inept as that character. Basically, they felt the story was unrealistic because it didn't fit their own completely inaccurate idea of what an autistic kid would be like.
That was when I realized that you have to try and predict your audience's misconceptions. To avoid critiques like the one I got from that group, I would have to revise the story, mentioning somewhere in it that autism is very misunderstood, and that the main character does not fit people's stereotypes of autistics. It's sad that I would have to do that... nobody ever has to explain in a story why their characters don't fit racial or gender stereotypes. But people recognize that racial and gender stereotypes are often inaccurate. They don't recognize that about stereotypes of autistics, and writers just have to keep pounding it into their heads until they do.
The reason I'm thinking about this is that several main characters in my novel are on the autism spectrum, and I hope that I've learned enough by now that I can make them realistic without making ignorant readers think that they're unrealistic.
When writing fiction, it doesn't matter if any of the events in the story are based on fact-- what matters is whether the story is convincing, whether the reader is able to imagine the events being true. And this convincingness doesn't necessarily even have to do with whether the story is similar to reality-- often it just has to do with whether it fits what people expect to see in a book.
For example, my mom is an extremely intellectual and scientific person. In conversation, she speaks as casually and colloquially as anyone, and when you hear her, that casual way of speaking doesn't seem out of place with her intellectual mind. This is because we know that in reality, almost everyone talks casually and colloquially in ordinary conversation, including intellectual people.
However, for part of a writing project in college, I once had her tell me a family story and I wrote it down almost word for word as she said it. I was shocked to find that, to me, my professor and all my classmates, it read as if she were a socialite yuppie soccer mom with no interest in anything scientific or intellectual at all. The same words that had seemed completely in character when she spoke them seemed completely out of character when written down.
I realized then that written "voices" are not anything like the patterns of speech in reality. For a character in a written story to seem intellectual-- especially a female character-- she must speak in a stilted sort of way that no one speaks in the real world. If she talks casually, like a real person, readers will assume she is not intellectual, except in cases where she is actively talking about something intellectual. There was no way I could have quoted my mother telling me that totally unscientific, unintellectual family story and preserved both her patterns of speech and her impression of intellect.
Furthermore, when you write fiction about a subject on which most people have misconceptions-- like autism-- it isn't enough to say something that you know is realistic, or even something that is based on a true story. You also have to try and predict what misconceptions people will have when they read it, and add enough explanation to get rid of those misconceptions.
For instance, I once wrote a story for creative writing class that was almost entirely true. It was based on a conflict I had with a special ed worker in junior high school. But instead of using my real name, I told the story in third person, calling the main character "The Autistic Child." It was a statement about how people forget our true names and personalities as soon as a label like autism becomes known to them.
I showed it to my critique group, not telling them that it was based on a true story. And they tore it apart. They said it was completely unrealistic. An autistic kid wouldn't behave like that. An autistic kid wouldn't have the intelligence and the verbal eloquence of the character in the story, and someone with that amount of intelligence would never be as socially inept as that character. Basically, they felt the story was unrealistic because it didn't fit their own completely inaccurate idea of what an autistic kid would be like.
That was when I realized that you have to try and predict your audience's misconceptions. To avoid critiques like the one I got from that group, I would have to revise the story, mentioning somewhere in it that autism is very misunderstood, and that the main character does not fit people's stereotypes of autistics. It's sad that I would have to do that... nobody ever has to explain in a story why their characters don't fit racial or gender stereotypes. But people recognize that racial and gender stereotypes are often inaccurate. They don't recognize that about stereotypes of autistics, and writers just have to keep pounding it into their heads until they do.
The reason I'm thinking about this is that several main characters in my novel are on the autism spectrum, and I hope that I've learned enough by now that I can make them realistic without making ignorant readers think that they're unrealistic.
Return of the Novelist
I posted this to LJ a while back and forgot to post it here. But it's quite relevant.
I thought I should let you guys know why I've been so silent for a while. The fact is, I'm writing a novel.
It's the strangest thing. My interest in writing fiction pretty much disappeared some time ago. I hadn't written a novel since I was fifteen. I had been writing essays for my website, lots of them, and of course a few chapters for my published book. But writing for publication had gotten very, very hard for me to do. The new publisher wants to publish a book my husband and I are going to write together, about our relationship, and I'd been trying to write for that, but it always felt like a class assignment. I'd gotten almost none of it done, because I had to force myself to do it, and even then couldn't always succeed.
Then I got caught up in a project (making a lizard costume) and my husband got worried. Not at what I was doing, but how intensely I was working on it, and how snappy I got when he offered advice or tried to talk to me about anything else. We had sort of an argument, and it ended with him suggesting that I try writing fiction again. He felt that I was desperate for a project and was trying to fill that need with things that were insufficient.
I had a science fiction idea that had been sitting around in my head. At most, I imagined a short story, because I'd been pretty much unable to write anything long since years ago. But I thought I'd run with it and see what happened. My husband said he would help me with the science and some of the plot if I needed it.
It's over sixty pages already.
I'm stunned. I had no idea that ability was still in me, and I'm spending nearly every free minute writing.
But I have realized a few strange things about my writing style.
1.
I seem unable to invent an original character who is not like me. Maybe I just don't have enough theory of mind to write from the point of view of a person who doesn't think the way I do. When I create characters, either they're based on me, or based on someone I know very closely, or else they end up completely boring and one-dimensional. In this book, I have six main characters, and three of them are based on different aspects of my own personality, one of them is based on my husband, and the other two don't have much personality at all.
2.
When creating characters of my own and making them do stuff, I am lost when it comes to characterization. See, in the real world, characterization doesn't make sense to me, because I see real humans as immensely complicated and full of contradictions. Every person I know frequently does things that seem out of character to me. I can only understand those things when I realize that humans have many, many different parts to their personalities, and that any one of a huge variety of seemingly contradictory actions will be in character with one part or another. I know I myself have moods so different from each other that they seem like different people, and something that would be completely uncharacteristic of me in Mood 1 is totally typical of Mood 2, 3 or 4.
But when people read a book, they expect the characters to be simple enough that you can tell right off the bat whether an action is in character or not. So when I make my characters do wide varieties of things, some seeming contradictory, am I being more true to life than most books, or is it bad characterization?
That's all for now. Gotta go write more. Thanks for reading.
I thought I should let you guys know why I've been so silent for a while. The fact is, I'm writing a novel.
It's the strangest thing. My interest in writing fiction pretty much disappeared some time ago. I hadn't written a novel since I was fifteen. I had been writing essays for my website, lots of them, and of course a few chapters for my published book. But writing for publication had gotten very, very hard for me to do. The new publisher wants to publish a book my husband and I are going to write together, about our relationship, and I'd been trying to write for that, but it always felt like a class assignment. I'd gotten almost none of it done, because I had to force myself to do it, and even then couldn't always succeed.
Then I got caught up in a project (making a lizard costume) and my husband got worried. Not at what I was doing, but how intensely I was working on it, and how snappy I got when he offered advice or tried to talk to me about anything else. We had sort of an argument, and it ended with him suggesting that I try writing fiction again. He felt that I was desperate for a project and was trying to fill that need with things that were insufficient.
I had a science fiction idea that had been sitting around in my head. At most, I imagined a short story, because I'd been pretty much unable to write anything long since years ago. But I thought I'd run with it and see what happened. My husband said he would help me with the science and some of the plot if I needed it.
It's over sixty pages already.
I'm stunned. I had no idea that ability was still in me, and I'm spending nearly every free minute writing.
But I have realized a few strange things about my writing style.
1.
I seem unable to invent an original character who is not like me. Maybe I just don't have enough theory of mind to write from the point of view of a person who doesn't think the way I do. When I create characters, either they're based on me, or based on someone I know very closely, or else they end up completely boring and one-dimensional. In this book, I have six main characters, and three of them are based on different aspects of my own personality, one of them is based on my husband, and the other two don't have much personality at all.
2.
When creating characters of my own and making them do stuff, I am lost when it comes to characterization. See, in the real world, characterization doesn't make sense to me, because I see real humans as immensely complicated and full of contradictions. Every person I know frequently does things that seem out of character to me. I can only understand those things when I realize that humans have many, many different parts to their personalities, and that any one of a huge variety of seemingly contradictory actions will be in character with one part or another. I know I myself have moods so different from each other that they seem like different people, and something that would be completely uncharacteristic of me in Mood 1 is totally typical of Mood 2, 3 or 4.
But when people read a book, they expect the characters to be simple enough that you can tell right off the bat whether an action is in character or not. So when I make my characters do wide varieties of things, some seeming contradictory, am I being more true to life than most books, or is it bad characterization?
That's all for now. Gotta go write more. Thanks for reading.
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