The Police State and the Writer

Dr. Peter Watts, a Canadian native and excellent SF writer, was returning to Canada after helping a friend in the U.S. move. He was driving a rental car and got stopped by U.S. Border Guards who, after being asked why his car was being searched, beat him, pepper-sprayed him, and arrested him. He's now facing felony charges for 'assaulting a federal officer'. Peter's take is here.

There is no 'maybe he did something to deserve it' bullshit. In the society that America is supposed to be there is no reason, no excuse, no justification for a government official assaulting someone for asking a legitimate and reasonable question of authority.

Why do I firmly believe Peter was innocent in this matter? Lemme tell you a little story.

When I was 22 my brother and I were going to an Oingo Boingo concert in Oakland. I was a pretty straight-laced kid back then. I didn't do anything I'd be afraid to tell my parents simply because I wasn't interested in doing stuff I'd be afraid to tell my parents.

The streets around the venue were filled with angsty young punks and swarming with cops. Parking was almost non-existent and I'd been circling for several moments. As I started to turn a corner three cops converged on my car.

They proceeded to do everything within their power to provoke me so they could arrest me; a preventative arrest, if you will. They stuck their heads in the open windows, shined flashlights in our faces, demanded to know if I had had any alcohol and asked me about the ownership of my car.

My dad was a cop. I grew up around cops. I like cops. I'd never been subjected to this kind of behavior from cops, before. I was furious at this inquisition. I wasn't breaking any laws, all I wanted was a parking spot. My brother was nervous but quiet and I didn't want him getting hurt, either. I was polite, answered exactly two questions then said 'Hey, you know So-and-So?"

"Um... sounds familiar," the cop at my driver's side window said, puzzled.

"He's working Vice right now. He's a friend of mine." He was the brother of a friend but the comment did what I wanted it to do.

I was one of Them. Part of the family. The situation instantly calmed. He waved the other cops off and we shot the breeze for a few moments, comparing possible mutual cop acquaintances. Then he waved me on and went back to the jack-boot traffic stop.

I resented that I had to use the tactic. They shouldn't have stopped me and harrassed me. There were far more professional and non-confrontational things they could have done if they thought I was suspicious.

Instead, a situation of punks, concert and cops had them jumpy, scared and looking for reasons to make arrests.

I'd bet money that was the situation at the Port Huron crossing last Tuesday. Scared men having their authority questioned in a perfectly legal and appropriate manner. Instead of making a reasonable reply to prevent escalating the situation, they behaved in a shameful and sickening manner.

No person should have to kneel to authority to avoid violence.

A lot of folks are banding together to donate to a legal defense fund for Peter. If you're so inclined and can afford it, make a small donation and boost the signal. List the donation as a gift and make note it's for his legal defense fund. The link is for his cat rescue efforts but there's no other PayPal set up, yet, that I know of.

Even if I hadn't liked Blindsight, I'd donate. This kind of thing can't be allowed to pass unchallenged.

Fond Bookstore Memories

A link sent out by Tobias Buckell on his Twitter feed talked about B&N closing the last of their B. Dalton bookstores.

As a kid I was an avid reader going through a book a day, sometimes. The summer I turned 11 we moved and I was allowed two new books with the assurance I could unpack my books in a couple of days after the move. I chose two Nancy Drews, promising myself I'd make them last. A week later I still couldn't unpack the book boxes in my room, tantalizing me with their booky burdens. Those poor Nancy Drews got read three times each. I never read another Nancy Drew book after that.

That same summer I graduated from buying books at Toys R Us to buying them at B. Dalton. The first time my mother took me there I couldn't believe there was a store dedicated to nothing but books. It was better than a toy store. I drifted between the shelves, afraid to touch the books because they looked so clean and perfect.

I loved that B. Dalton. The floor was a creaky, crackly wood parquet. The smell of fresh printed paper filled the air with possibility. The shelves seemed to reach to the ceiling, an endless supply of reading material.

My mom knew she could leave me in B. Dalton by myself and I wouldn't wander anywhere else, captivated by the dragon horde of books. B. Dalton is where I learned to love Ellery Queen Katherine Kurtz, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula Le Guin and Patricia McKilip among many other authors.

Up until I went to college and discovered independent bookstores I faithfully patronized that B. Dalton. It was my gateway to a wider world, my own personal wardrobe leading me to magical lands more interesting and exciting than the one I inhabited.

To this day the smell of a brand new book takes me back the thrill of being let loose in B. Dalton with five dollar in my pocket*.

Goodbye B. Dalton. Thank you for all the lovely books and memories.

*Dating myself, here. I remember when books were .99¢.

Writer's Indecision

Recently, I struggled with a piece that was meant to be a short story. My normal practice is to journal ideas before I write a new story. This time I dived in with an ending and no other plan in mind. About 3,000 words in I realized the story had to do something different, cut out most of what I'd written, started again. 2,500 words later, I still couldn't get my characters to the end within a reasonable short-story-sized story. I fretted, picked at the ms, then escaped into the last disc of Mad Men season 2 to get away from the battle.

Better planning would have told me this wasn't a short story, it was the opening of a novel. It had too much back story; too many plots wanted telling; too many characters inserted themselves in the first 3,000 words . Dealing with this issue reminded me of a problem I have on and off with my writing.

For a long time I'd wanted to write the kind of stories I enjoyed reading. It got to the point I wanted to publish those stories so others could read them, too. In order to learn how to do that I read a lot of books on writing, as you do. Add to that my tendency to be a literal student when I undertake something new or deal with something I don't do often. I blame being Virgo for this fault. That's less embarrassing than saying I'm naive.

Writers spoke of their characters talking to them. They described stories taking wild detours from carefully prepared outlines. I thought I had to wait for my characters to speak to me, for the story to tell me what it wanted to do. After a childhood and young adulthood of prolific writing I spent fruitless hours staring at a blank page, waiting like a needy girl who hopes that ringing phone means a Friday night date. I'd half-heartedly journal about my writer's block and lack of creativity. I did a lot of whining. It wasn't attractive.

I wasn't suffering from writer's block. I was suffering from writer's indecision.

I got tired of waiting for the phone to ring. I started journaling story ideas in earnest. That's when I got it. I had to ask 'what happens next' then explore the possibilities. I had to poke at characters to see how they reacted. I had to look at what I'd written then extrapolate the logical sequence of events. I could decide what kind of obstacles to toss in a character's way. With the piece mentioned above, I failed to plan then fell into the bad old habit of waiting for the work to speak rather than telling the work what to do.

When I first figured out my issues with writer's indecision I felt at once foolish and liberated. Writing became a pleasure rather than a chore. I could sit down every day at the keyboard and know I had stories to tell rather than waiting for the stories to talk to me. The stories I did tell got easier to write. Not better, necessarily, but easier. The better will come with the practice of daily writing.

For myself I don't believe in writer's block, anymore. I know, worst comes to worst, I can drop a ninja in the room and see what happens. I may have to delete a bunch of stuff but it will spark ideas I can explore. That's a more satisfying than staring at a computer screen.

When Do Writers Get Their Ideas

There are myriad blog posts about where writers get their ideas. For me, I think it's equally important to understand when the ideas happen.

When I first started writing I’d get an idea or I’d see a scene in my head, or hear a character, or a think of a turn of phrase that interested me. I’d put each one in a separate computer file, hording these bits and pieces like a kid with a memento box.

The more time I spent not writing and wishing I was, I discovered something. Ideas for stories were slow to come. Interesting characters didn’t pop up and speak to me. I could see fascinating things and my mind wouldn’t ask the questions ‘what comes next?’ or ‘what if that was turned this way?’

I feared my ability to come up with ideas for stories had deserted me. That I would be stuck with dozens of files of bits and pieces I couldn’t fashion into stories because I had no idea (pardon the pun) how to put them together.

This lead to writing paralysis, as ugly self-talk does. Why write if I couldn’t think of anything interesting or unique to write? I would slog through a few paragraphs of a potential story and come to a shuddering halt, staring at the page and hating every word on it.

If you’ve ever participated in NaNoWriMo with an interest in crossing the 50k ‘finish line’ by the end of the month you know that there’s little time for hand-wringing over a lack of ideas. You get desperate to fill in word count, whether or not you intend on using the NaNovel for a serious bid to get published later. Any crazy-ass half-baked idea is suddenly fodder for the NaNovel. When all else fails ninjas crash through the door and attack everyone. That’s sure to shake up a story and get the creative juices flowing.

NaNo helped break through that initial paralysis. But it was a few years later that I decided to get serious again about a writing career. You can’t have a career if you don’t write. You can’t write if you don’t have something to write about. So the memento box was opened and I started picking through the bits and pieces, trying to forge stories out of them.

I discovered something else once I started writing regularly. Ideas came from everywhere. I couldn’t walk down the sidewalk without seeing or thinking something that might have potential to power a story at some point.

That’s when I figured out something else.

I have to be writing to have the ideas. I have to get into the nitty gritty of fashioning ideas into a story before new possibilities occur to me. It’s hard to keep working on one story when ideas for three or four others whisper seductively to me. I’m focused on writing short stories, right now, practicing and honing my craft. Even so, there are ideas for four different novels that are begging to be written, I'm excited by the ideas, interested in writing them. The nice thing is they’ll always be there, saved in the memento box of my thumb drive, ready to be written when the time comes.

I also learned that a story isn’t just one idea, but an amalgam of many ideas. My current work in progress combines a love of history, the story of a beautiful old mansion about to be demolished, and the heartbreaking picture of the head and torso of an angel abandoned in a field in New Jersey, taken from the old Pennsylvania Station.

My relief is huge. As long as I keep writing I will always have ideas I can write about.

Critique - It's Not All About You

A good friend recently critiqued a short story I'd given her. The short story is about a young lady who has been raised by a family of criminals and is now on her own, making her way in the world the only way she knows how, by committing crimes.

My friend is honest and she can say the hard things that others will hesitate to say. She's also good at spotting the weaknesses of a story. I value that about her. It's sometimes hard to hear your baby isn't properly dressed to meet the world. Better to hear it needs a coat and shoes than to send it out partly dressed.

I spent the day of the critique mentally girding my lions, ready to hear that the story was crap and I should hang up my fountain pen. I was surprised to hear that the story had some good bones. And then she pointed out the weak points. Some of them were things I'd feared myself. It was good to hear my estimation of the short comings confirmed.

Then she said something that surprised me at the time but, in retrospect, is both hilarious and true.

"I can tell you're not a criminal."

My friend is correct. What I know about committing crime comes from TV and reading, hardly the training ground for learning second story work or how to pull off a con. For a moment, though, I bristled mentally. It took an effort not to react to the statement. I had to make a concious effort to admit the truth. I was not a career criminal and I had not been Criminal McSlick in writing about the crime in the story.

Once I came down off the mental ledge, I could hear the rest of the critique in the spirit it was meant; making the story better. The story needs some work. I need to do some reasearch to make the character's behavior believable. The critique was invaluable and I am grateful to my friend for her effort. I think I can write a better story as a result.

It also taught me an important lesson about critiques. Critiques are meant to make the story better. It isn't a personal attack on my character or my intelligence. There's no hidden message that the inadequacies of the story translate to personal inadequacies. It's a relief to understand that. It'll make the critique of my next story easier to hear. It'll make the critiques that come from strangers easier to read.

There's a post at Warriorwrter's Blog that speaks to critiquing and the fear surrounding it. It's an invaluable post for aspiring writers.

Process Is Not Content

I'm the sort of person who plans out my errands based on distance from home. I go to the farthest point and work my way back. One of my prouder moments of efficiency comes from a Christmas shopping expedition where I went to two malls and two big box stores a week before Christmas, got everything I wanted on a long list of gifts, and did it in under 3 hours including parking. Each gift had a note about which stores to search and where those stores were located. Then I arranged the list by....

Don't look at me like that. There are some of you going "Yeah, that's how I shop!"

I also like it when I can perform a specific process that will give me a predictable result. Flip a switch and fill a room with light. Predictability is comforting in a world gone postal. The downside is it's boring as hell creatively and not conducive to writing.

I spent a lot of money on books about writing in search of this all-encompassing process. I was sure every writer who ever got published knew how to 'do it'. I was a mullet-less Robert Langdon*, hunting for the secret knowledge that would provide illumination.

I mistook the process for the content.

It took me a while to figure out there was no 'correct' way of writing a novel. Writing a novel is messy, unique, heartrending and exhilarating. There are some universal constants that every writer worth their salt follows:

• Write every day
• Practice by writing every day so you can get better at your craft
• Use proper grammar and punctuation
• Read the submission guidelines and follow them

This won't automatically get you published but it will put you a leg up on a lot of folks. The realization that the rest of the process was a matter of what worked best for the individual was at once frightening and freeing for me.

Some people outline their stories. Some people dive in the deep end and swim around with no idea where they're going. Some people have a beginning and know where they want to wind up but don't need to know more than that to get started. Some people have an idea and have to do the research before they feel like they can start. Some people say screw the research, they'll deal with it once the story is drafted.

I once heard an author on a panel call their first draft their 'vomit draft' because no matter what they came up with it all went on the page. No idea was too stupid, there weren't too many adjectives. I liked that. The beauty of the first draft is there's a second, and a third, etc.

The more I write the more I learn about what works for me. The result is wildly unpredictable (and not always in a good way), but knowing what works best for me frees up my mind to get creative and weird, to throw stuff at a page and see what sticks. The process provides comfort and the comfort provides the freedom to imagine. I finally figured out that it's the imagination that makes the content interesting to read, not how I get there in the first place.

*I've never read the books. I am embarrassed to admit I've seen both movies, at the behest of others I hasten to add. First and second time in my life I've napped in a movie theater.

Star Trek: Now With More Tired Gender Roles

Open Letter to Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman

A word of warning, there are spoilers in this post. At this point, though, it probably doesn't matter.

Dear Messrs. Orci and Kurtzman,

I remember when I got to watch my first Star Trek episode. It was the summer of 1970 and it was already in lucrative reruns, broadcast at a time when I was awake. I was fascinated by the idea of flying around in space and seeing new places. I thought the planet sets looked totally fake and sometimes the stories were silly but I was in love with the series. I'd act out some of the parts while watching; shooting the bad guys with my pewpew phaser and saving the Enterprise. To this day I still love the original show.

By now Paramount has made back the money they spent on Star Trek 11 plus an ass ton more. I'm sure you're bathing in the praise of the successful 'reboot' of the franchise. You're chortling about the bad reviews of your Transformers: Rolling on the Floor (as a friend calls it) movie because it has also made stupid amounts of money. You gentlemen have even confirmed that you're already working on ST 12, tentatively titled: 'OMFG They totally bought 'Red Matter'!

As for myself, it was a mildly enjoyable actioner with a large helping of handwavium. Not worth a full price ticket. Pro Tip here: Talk to real scientists when you write about Science! They're trained professionals. You're not. Even the original series made some effort to be scientifically sound.

On to the point of my post. Last time I checked the calendar this is 2009. Forty-four odd years after ST: TOS first aired. The original was a product of its culture and times. The men ran around buckling swash and, apparently, there were only three women in Star Fleet. We had Nurse Chapel, swooning over Mr. Spock; Yeoman Rand, whose job is never explained but the context is obvious; and the strongest of the group, the under-utilized Lt. Uhura.

So why did you see fit to have only five women with speaking roles in ST 11; one a doctor (presuming here), a mother who gives birth to the main character then disappears, a mother who dies as a plot device, and two booty calls?

This was your chance to give women a more prominent place in Star Fleet and a more prominent role in the retconned universe. Instead you stuffed them into the most antiquated gender roles available: Mother, Caregiver and Sex Object. Booty Call #1 is a green-skinned girl from Orion (ha ha, the whole Orion slave girl joke never gets old). The first time we see her, she's in chonies and bra about to knock boots with Kirk. If we see her again at the end of the movie, I don't recall. Booty Call #2 is Nyota Uhura. You give her even less to do than Nichelle Nichols had in ST:TOS. We get to see Nyota in her undies in the same scene as the green chick. Can we say pandering Messrs. Orci and Kurtzman? I knew we could.

You sink even lower when you set Uhura up as a potential point of jealous rivalry between Kirk and Spock. What. The. Fuck? I get the whole joke about how Kirk was a tomcat in the original show but in this movie he basically can't score. Who cares?

Weren't there other things women could do in the 23rd and a half century? Couldn't they be instructors at the Academy? Couldn't they captain starships (Hello? Captain Janeway?) What if Kirk's mother was the Kirk who died crashing the Kelvin into the Romulan vessel while his father was evac'd with the recently born baby James? Couldn't Uhura have done more in the movie than be a nag and sex object? Couldn't Uhura have been the one to clean James' clock in the bar for being boorish? I'd pay full price for that.

Another Pro Tip: Showing versus telling is important in novels. It's even more important in movies, a visual medium. There's a point where Uhurah explains something she heard when monitoring subspace signals (even the Wikipedia entry for the movie mentions nothing about the character in the plot summary) that relates to the Romulan vessel. It's apparently important to finding the vessel, but not really because you tell it rather than show it. Showing us her skill as a linguist and comm officer would have helped the audience relate to her as a person rather than a scold or a 'hawt chick'. Oh, that's right. According to Hollywood, men can't relate to women as people, only as a role.

You have an opportunity to give strong women more to do in ST 12. Let them buckle some swash, show them as strong, competent professionals. Let them punch stuff 'til it blows up! Otherwise this is one woman who won't be paying to see the next movie.