Gertrude Stein had a least one manuscript rejected, as you will see in this rejection letter. This is good.
Monthly Archives: February 2011
While I Was At the Conference
I don’t usually tell you what I do offline. I’m sure enough connections have been made for an investigator to find me, so maybe I’m just kidding myself about how much distance really have between here and, well, where I am. But I want to point out some articles I’ve written this week on the men’s conference I have been working.
CBMC held a great men’s conference in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, last week with several solid speakers and a moving prayer and communion meeting on the snowy battlefield. Read the overview here. There are other short articles and videos, which you can reach from the Good News front page.
Champion's Books For Writers
Ed Champion is a remarkable reader, critic, etc. (feel free to add to the list of how remarkable he is), and in this interview he recommends books for writers.
Ultimately, a novelist’s job — irrespective of whether she is writing speculative fiction or hard realism — is to understand how human behavior emerges from systematic consequence. If you can generate an atmosphere based on systematic consequence, then your novel will likely feel “real” even if it is set in a land populated by dancing elves or talking fruit.
For plot structure, “read Richard Stark.” For great openers, Burgess, Cain, and Murray have good examples.
Long weekend
I won’t be posting the rest of this week, as I’m going out of town today on a family matter. See you next week.
Tampa Burn, by Randy Wayne White
Tampa Burn, by Randy Wayne White, struck me as a fascinating study in excellent story set-up and development, capped by a middling resolution. The amateur psychological wiseacre in me suspects that the author himself must be ambivalent about the kind of stories he writes, and that ambivalence is working itself out in the reader’s sight.
If you’re not already familiar with him, Marion (“Doc”) Ford, White’s continuing hero, is a semi-retired US government commando and assassin, now living in happy obscurity in Florida, making his living as a marine biologist. His peace is frequently disturbed, however, sometimes by other people’s problems which can only be solved with his special skills, and sometimes by a call from his espionage handlers, who still keep him on a slack string.
In terms of creating and building dramatic tension, Tampa Burn is admirable. I thought, as I read, that I’d rarely come across a suspense novel so well plotted. At the beginning, Doc is contemplating proposing to his long-time on-again, off-again girlfriend, Dewey Nye. Suddenly his life is invaded by his old lover Pilar Fuentes, the one other woman he’s never been able to quite get over. She has recently informed Doc that her teenaged son Laken is in fact his (Doc’s) son. Doc has been keeping in touch with the boy, but Pilar has kept him at a distance. Up until now.
Now Laken has been kidnapped, apparently by a mysterious figure known across Central America as Incendiaro—the Burner. He has that name because he is horribly disfigured by burn scars himself, and gets pleasure from watching other people burn. Continue reading Tampa Burn, by Randy Wayne White
"Is the line getting gray? Or am I going blind?"
You’ve probably seen it on the web today. Secretly filmed footage of a New Jersey Planned Parenthood manager, repeating recent history by explaining (to a man and woman claiming to be a pimp and a prostitute) ways to get STD testing, contraception and abortions for girls as young as fourteen. According to the description given, these fictional girls are obviously sex slaves illegally smuggled into the U.S. from other countries. The manager seems to have no qualms about telling them she doesn’t want to know various things, and giving advice on how to fool the physician’s assistant on site. “We all hate her.”
I won’t disagree with most of the conclusions drawn by various commentators. Certainly this is further evidence that Planned Parenthood, which should never have gotten government funding in the first place, ought to be cut off.
But I think I detect a deeper problem.
I don’t think Planned Parenthood’s organizational management is actively supportive of child sexual slavery. Whether this manager’s attitude is typical, I have no way of knowing.
But I think her behavior ought to be no surprise, given the nature of the enterprise.
Why would a modern, educated woman—certainly a feminist, since that’s part of Planned Parenthood’s brief—collude so easily in the degradation of little girls?
My guess is that she came to this gradually. It’s the result of a desensitization process. One every one of us experiences, to some extent or another, in our time.
The first time she saw the results of an actual abortion (I would imagine) she was shocked. Probably had a few bad nights.
But she told herself, “I mustn’t judge. It’s not for me to judge.”
The first time she encountered a fourteen year-old girl impregnated by her fifteen-year-old boyfriend, she probably frowned. Then she told herself, “It’s not for me to judge.”
When a fourteen-year-old girl who’d been impregnated by her 26-year-old boyfriend came in, she was tempted to call the police.
But hey, how could she judge in this situation, either? She didn’t know these people. And anyway, somebody might ask embarrassing questions about the last fourteen-year-old girl she’d treated off the record.
And so it goes. At each stage, past compromises lead to new compromises.
Eventually, she can see no moral lines at all. “There ain’t no right, there ain’t no wrong. There’s just things people do. It’s not for me to judge.”
In our age, the greatest sin is judging sexual behavior. You can judge the wearing of fur, and smoking, and using “offensive” words, but hands off sex. Any kind of sex. The kinkier, the more sacrosanct.
This is the disease of our age, and it will kill us if we don’t address it and change our thinking.