Say Something

Platitudes echo in our minds, my Mom used to be fond of saying, " you can only kill a brave man once, a coward dies a thousand deaths." (Which, for some reason, unbidden, would come the reminder "better to be a live chicken than a dead hero"...)

It is indeed the old 'fish or cut bait' debate. If the brave die defending their convictions then who will remain to fight tyranny?

If not us, who and if not now, when?

Worse, there has never been a real 'consensus' on how human affairs should be managed. Our civilization is circling the drain yet few think there is a reason to panic let alone complain.

Which is to point out that there are always those who don't want the apple cart upset, which resurrects another platitude, "better the Devil you know" (which may be okay for Murphy but it's killing the rest of us!) My own kids are curious examples of this last attitude...seems like Peter Pan is everywhere!

Yet denial won't save what currently passes for a functioning society. How sad is it trigger happy policing isn't a 'new' problem?

Again belaboring the obvious is all discussion of 'rights' and 'freedoms' take place after the old regime is vanquished and the new regime moves into it's rotting corpse...bringing us to the deeply disturbing reality that most 'revolutions' are 'hijacked' almost immediately after they 'succeed'...leading us to that inevitable conundrum of the names have changed but nothing else has.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!

Um, writing is a solitary occupation and while one is composing, Silence is indeed 'golden', but this is a public forum and YOU are invited to share what you think.

The path forward is one we must share...let's try to flourish together rather than perish fighting over what is 'ours' in the first place...

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Thrilling news!

Amazon sent me a advertisement this morning and my title, 'Unplugged' was first on the list of works I might find interesting...

Now I know their marketing department tracks what you do on the Amazon site but I didn't go in via the retail side to look at my own products so I'm somewhat excited by the prospects that more than just myself received this e-mail!

We'll see if I receive a sales bump.

In more disturbing news, the hats are assembling in the 2016 presidential race and it's looking even more desperate than in previous years.

The only one running as a Democrat (and that's not saying she is one) is Hillary and if that's the best they can do they deserve to lose.

That said, it's no mystery that a majority of the voting public self-identifies as 'Independent'...not that this is true either.

As long as the process is dominated by R or D, it doesn't matter what you call yourself. Worse, there hasn't been a real Republican in politics since Eisenhower.

So who are these pretenders and how did they win political power?

They are the 'meat-puppets' of the one tenth of one percent and they want to re-establish monarchy! We all heard W when he declared (publicly no less) that this all would be 'easier' if he were 'dictator'...well good citizen, what's 'synonym' for dictator...starts with a K, come on, you can get this.

What I'd like to 'remind' you of is failure to obey the dictates of your 'king' results in 'death:personal'.

So, as I asked in this morning's comment on 'Some Assembly Required', there doesn't seem to be a nickels worth of difference between our so-called 'world leaders' and the criminally insane.

For today's rhetorical question, 'Choice, I wish we had one...'

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Fumbling & Bumbling is humbling....

Three weeks in now and I still haven't found an effective approach to this blogging thing (at least as far as promoting my books is concerned, I had quite a following under my alter ego when I blogged about politics.)

The average reader isn't much interested in the writing process so writing about the nuts and bolts of writing isn't gaining me much of a following, but I tend to doubt I can turn the politically disenfranchised into readers of my prose (despite it being laced with alternatives to the current fiasco we're saddled with.)

Which is to address the elephant in the room, if we don't actively discuss alternatives we won't be able to effect the changes we all desperately need.

Our civilization is colossally mismanaged and we, the victims of this mismanagement, are powerless to change it.

While those with the wherewithal to run for political office feign ignorance of what their constituents want (justifying their unpopular support for the agenda of their campaign's major donors...) The rest of us wonder aloud about how we can repair an obviously broken system, while ignoring that the first step towards addressing our problems is being denied to us by the profit driven wingnut (emphasis on the 'nut'!)

How we fix this without a rallying point is obvious...we don't. Those who bar rational discussion ferment revolt!

Which is to ask just how much of our current ride on the 'crazy train' is intentional?

The inability to organize leads to our collective doom at the hands of those who would take it all for themselves.

The premise of my first novel is what would happen if our government was seized by criminals and they decided to push us into our own sewer to cement their rule?

Understand, good citizen. You have already had your right to peacefully assemble revoked. Long ago your ability to petition your government was 'delegated' to 'aides' (whose job it is to placate you.)

More interestingly, YOU (nor your forebearers) asked for a 'representative' government...they thought they would have a 'voice' and it was only after the fact that they learned they had voted to let someone else speak for them without ever consulting them.

Problem is good citizen, we have no way to 'fix' this little 'unexpected' bit of treachery.

Will we sit helplessly as we watch the last vestiges of what used to be our freedoms snatched away from us in the name of 'national security?'

Remember good citizen, only rogues and scoundrels require the cloak of secrecy. Small wonder that conservatives are zealous defenders not of freedom but of 'privacy'...there's mostly...you can't be trusted.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

(Gegner)

Setting

Greetings gentle reader, this installment takes on the topic of settings, which, like your characters, calls for differing levels of specificity.

Setting, in most cases, is driven by the main premise. Some stories unfold entirely inside the main character's head and can be as fantastical as the writer's ability to express such fanciful places.

Otherwise we arrive at the question that devil's most writers and that is 'how much is too much?' If you have taken pains to establish the story takes place in the fall do you need to tell the reader that the leaves rustled (fill-in-the-blank) every time there is a whisper of wind?

Exposition is the art of timing when you tell a reader something pertinent to the storyline. Often what you share descriptively pertains to where the character is in the story.

Which brings us to the other side of it...is it necessary to tell the reader about the howling wind and the creaks and groans the shelter makes once you have established there is a storm?

You definitely go there if the character is being stalked by something (often being chased by personal demons can be more terrifying than a real life threat!) but choosing when and where to use the landscape as a vehicle to move the story forward is a tough call.

I'm sure I'm not the only one driven to distraction by Tolkien's endless description of the trek through the forbidden forest but it achieved the desired effect, by the time the spiders captured the company you were glad he stopped describing the ceaselessly falling and rustling leaves!

(I don't have a copy of 'The Hobbit' handy or I'd look up it's proper name and since Tolkien employed a lot of similar sounding place/character names, I don't dare guess.)

Which is to opine that Tolkien took a chance when he purposefully stretched the trek through trackless forest letting the reader become as nauseated as his characters were, trapped in an endless, unchanging landscape.

I'd advise against using a similar device (unless, like Tolkien, you're writing fantasy...just saying.)

But I digress, when setting up a scene you want to be sure the reader has enough information so they aren't left wondering 'how'd they manage that' because you forgot to include a specific item your character had access to.

But this is part of the 'loose threads' factor authors also combat routinely. (You can't include anything in a story that you don't 'pay-off'!)

When writing, one must be careful not to 'lose' the reader and you definitely don't want to raise more questions than you answer! (A very good indication something is tragically wrong...like your memory is shot!)

All of that said, I preach to the choir...

Thanks for stopping by!

The Embodiment of Evil....

As writers, we are all tasked to create 'believable' characters...even when they allegedly have ice-water in their veins. Your dialog is based on the characters inner compass. From there we encounter the first obstacle and that is how well do YOU read people? Can you channel your inner wimp or are your characters all over the map? (Let's not to lose sight of the fact that many stories 'track' a character's development but this is another factor entirely! I'm pointing at question 'are your characters multi-dimensional or are they monochrome reflections of one another?')

With that in mind, have you noticed the trend in 'unbelievable' characters populating screens both large and small? Or have you? (I once again allude to the tendency to simply absorb what the screen feeds us rather than thinking about what we're witnessing.)

This isn't so much a critique of an industry that has minimal time to develop and effectively transmit plot devices, we all laugh at sitcoms precisely because we don't personally know anybody who behaves like that! Perhaps it's funny because we all know someone we suspect would act like, that given a similar situation.

In writing your 'customer' only has a mental picture of the characters you create, their personality comes across through their words and deeds.

How effectively you flesh out the character is demonstrated in how 'memorable' they are in the reader's mind.

Some would opine that keeping your characters 'real' minimizes their memorability but to that I leave you with something to chew upon (al-la Kaiser Sozay) "The Devils greatest achievement is convincing everyone it is he and not they, themselves who are the embodiment of all evil!"

Thanks for letting me inside your head!

The power of Marketing

One day I came upon a plastic figurine of an Native American among my son's playthings and I immediately marveled over the fact that it had never once occurred to my son to murder that redskin!

I spent my youth playing cowboys/settlers and Indians and the poor natives NEVER won. To be fair, I also spent countless hours hunting Nazis and Japs but I was (not that I was consciously aware of it, especially at the time) a victim of my environment. We'd play all day and watch Rawhide, Gunsmoke, McHales Navy and Twelve O'clock High/Rat Patrol/Hogan's Heroes at night.

Ironically, when Star Trek/Lost in Space came along, didn't we channel our energy into killing aliens just as zealously.

So when I see how this phenomenon has been 'adapted' to our current cultural soup, I am alarmed to note the 're-imagining' of the past, where the facts are being 'massaged' to protect the guilty. (Perhaps the most glaring example of this is 'Morning in America', also known as the Reagan years (the worst presidency ever!) The only ones saying otherwise are those too young to remember what it was really like!

But I digress, the topic is how easily your perceptions are altered. Now what does this have to do with writing?

Everything, it all begins with ideas on paper!

One of my 'alter ego's' favorite questions is 'How can you be expected to make correct decisions without accurate information?'

Well, good citizen, this applies to you as well. How will we save ourselves/our children from those who control the eye that never blinks?

Maybe you should have a word with your congressman next time you bump into him/her...oh, that's right, they live in Washington, you NEVER bump into them! (and they've been re-elected how many times?)

Here's an idea, maybe you can write to them (not that they'll read what you communicate, they have 'people' for that...)

But once again I digress, let us return to that plastic figurine and how it never occurred to my son to kill it? (A decidedly good thing.)

Now reflect for a moment on how the 'eye that never blinks' is molding our children's tomorrow.

Can you say (anything but) "reality TV' But those young, impressionable minds don't know that, what, you kids watch Anime?

Now be afraid, be very afraid (because they're raising a bunch of 'Pollyannas' and we can only wonder why?)

Drop the pencil and nobody gets hurt...

I've been on a tear these last few posts about 'responsibility in writing.' What the author writes and what the editor publishes. The beauty of the net is it's the wild, wild west all over again. No rules (should say few rules, spew enough vile content and somebody, somewhere will take it upon themselves to land on you with both feet so writers beware!)

While it has calmed somewhat since the early days, there is still a 'divide' between the 'brick & mortar' world of publishing and the, er, 'independents' who are largely self-sufficient.

That said, let us direct our attention to that bought and paid for guardian of 'free speech', the Editor. He decides which projects get the green light and which ones get sent back for re-write until they meet his/her 'journalistic standards.'

Which is to shine a light on one of the many elephants on the room, the severe and persistent lack of attention being given to 'executive privilege'. This is not a shot at the President because he has no control over those who use their office to 'shield' their activities from scrutiny.

Our current 'can't get out of their own way' government is the result of this appalling 'lack of transparency'.

So how do we fix this? As long as we allow 'private ownership' of the media (with the one cutting the paychecks determining what you can and can't see) we can't. These are the same people who have 'muzzled' our representatives by making the revelation of their treachery...treason.

Since sanity is defined as what 'the majority of the public' regards as 'normal', you can see the Chinese handcuffs but you can't get them off!

I read in an online news source today that said the 'average citizen' should be, er, 'deeply concerned' about the billion dollar price tag attached to running for the Oval Office.

Logic dictates that ONLY people [read: sock puppets] owned by the One Percent (actually the one hundredth of one percent) can run for the nation's highest office (largely because of the artificially high cost of media coverage...go figure? Isn't the media considered a public utility?)

But we are once again faced with the question of 'what are YOU gonna do about it?'...(if you don't like it?)

Naturally, much more disturbing is the fact that ALL money is 'funny' (as well as being terribly mis-managed.)

Which is to point out that it's 'all on paper' for those pulling the strings and call the shots...shots YOU have to live with.

To paraphrase a famous quote, If not now, when and if not us, who? Yeah, Reagan said it but he didn't say it first, I believe it was most famously cited by Churchill.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,