Writers of the Future

The past two weeks have been momentous. I had the honor in the first quarter of 2012 to be picked from among thousands of worldwide entries as one of the winners of the Writers of the Future contest. From April 8 to 15 I was part of a group of 13 highly talented writers and 12 illustrators who experienced a week of intensive training topped off by an award ceremony (it's three hours long, I'm at two hours four minutes) that resembles the Oscars. The week of classes were taught by several of the top names in Science Fiction: Tim Powers, Dave Wolverton, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Todd McCaffrey, Robert J. Sawyer, Eric Flint, Mike Resnick, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta as well as past winners and now published authors Brad Torgersen, Jordan Ellinger, Eric James Stone and others. With such an outstanding group of teachers, the learning experience was unsurpassed.

The Writers of the Future contest is a chance for new writers in Science Fiction and Fantasy to get exposure and enter into the world of publishing. It is a showcase for new writers. I cannot recommend it too highly. The judging is blind and strictly on the merits of the story. Send in one with strong characterization, good plot and competent language and you stand just as much chance as the next person. I've been published locally but Writers of the Future, Vol. 29 (totally unsubtle plug for the book) is my first national publication. Submit your story. Among the many advantages of the contest is that it's free to submit.

One last point. If anyone is worried about the connection of L. Ron Hubbard and the contest and Scientology: the contest is separate from Scientology. Hubbard endowed the contest, but it and Galaxy press are under a distinct corporate entity. None of the judges, to my knowledge, has any connections to Scientology, and Scientology was not brought up during the week.

Why we never should have been allowed to marry

If you believe the proponents of Prop 8, then the reason the state sanctions marriage is for procreation. If this was the case, I should have never been allowed to marry since neither of us wanted to have children and took measures to ensure we didn't. By the same token, no one over 55 should be allowed to marry. No one who is infertile should be allowed to marry. Indeed, the primary requirement for a marriage license should be a pregnancy. Yet these same people only want pregnancy within marriage.

To say their arguments lack logic and merit is to give them far too much credit. The same people who do not want committed gay and lesbian couples to marry because it would sully the sanctity of marriage have no problem with multiply divorced hetero couples marrying. Why aren't they opposed to divorce? The fact the most marriages end in divorce is far more a stain on marriage than allowing same sex couples who love each other to enter into it.

I guess when you have the word from on high, you can ignore the failings of your argumentation. But wait: What is traditional marriage? In the Bible, all of the patriarchs had multiple wives and concubines. If you're looking for true Biblical marriage, there it is.

And Jesus does not offer a better picture of marriage. In Luke 14:26 he says: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple." Or Matthew 19:29 "And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life." Hardly what one would call a ringing endorsement of "Biblical marriage."

I am friends with a lesbian couple who have been together nearly thirty years and a gay couple who have been together nearly fifty. If marriage is about love, then they deserve to be married. It it's not about love, then what is it about? Certainly not what the Prop 8 proponents say. We can only hope the Supreme Court shows courage and forethought in their decisions.

How to save a life

It's been nine and a half years since we moved behind the Redwood Curtain and in that time I hope I've saved several lives. I'm a writer, not a fireman or policeman or member of a search and rescue team, so how could I have saved several lives? I donate blood. Today I gave the pint that makes my sixth gallon of donations since moving here. That's 48 chances to give another person the gift of life -- the victim of an accident, a person facing surgery, someone with a blood disorder.

Most of us never get the chance to perform a heroic act and I don't consider donating blood an act of heroism, but it does give me the opportunity to change another persons life as profoundly as any act of heroism. My small gift of a pound of myself is a more direct gift to another human being than any donation to charity.

For anyone who has never donated before, the process is fairly simple. Count on it taking about an hour to and hour and a half. You fill out a survey of health questions and then have your temperature, pulse and blood pressure taken. A finger is stuck and a few drops of blood taken for a test of the iron level of your blood and, if everything checks out, you sit in a comfortable reclining chair while a technician finds the best vein, swabs your arm and sticks a needle in for the extraction. The needle stick is the only part of the process I don't care for, so I don't look. Then you just sit back and let the blood flow into a bag. I always bring a book to read while that's going on. Once you've donated, you stop in the snack room for something to drink and goodies. You're not supposed to do any strenuous exercise or heavy lifting for 24 hours, so you can go home and have a pass to be lazy for a day.

And then your blood goes to work helping one or more people. That's a good feeling.

National Novel Writing Month

November is National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. I highly recommend it to anyone who is having trouble getting either the inspiration or the discipline to write. I've been feeling like an impostor since winning Writers of the Future (a feeling that seems to be fairly common among the winners) and needed to break out of it. NaNoWriMo proved just the thing. I took a new idea that had been rattling around in my head for only a couple of months and took off writing. Sixteen days later, I had a 40,000 word first draft. A month later, I'm working on a third draft and have the first chapters out to my highly tolerant and helpful associates in the two writing groups I participate in.

Which brings up writing groups and I can highly recommend them as well. The longer a writer stares at their prose, the less they see. It's the forest and trees metaphor. A fresh set of eyes will find the weaknesses in your story far faster than the author could. Too often we can't see our own assumptions within our writing and need a third party to honestly evaluate it. The group members should be supportive but not hold back on their critiques. I get some of the best comments on my writing from the people who hate it. It's difficult not to balk at criticism, but it is necessary to hone the work and it helps if the environment is supportive. If you write and are not part of a group, consider joining one.

Revolution review

I watched the new NBC Sci-Fi show Revolution until the logical anomalies became too much to handle. That took about 10 minutes. The show opened with a man dashing into his home and madly downloading something to a flash drive while trying to call a friend. The man accomplishes his task at the very last moment (of course) and installs the flash drive into an amulet. Never mind what he was trying to download or how he obtained the amulet - this is the mystery of our tale.

He contacts his friend who is driving along some freeway to warn him of the impending power failure but is cut off by the same failure. As the friend's car dies, he exits it and watches the lights of the cars behind him slowly die off. We pan to a shot of the world where the lights flicker off much faster than they did on that freeway. Finally, we go back to the home of the man with the amulet as he, his wife and two small children watch as a jet falls out of the sky to explode in a residential area. Interestingly, in spite of the fact that power is out, the landing lights of the jet are still working.

The next scene is 15 years later. The family lives in what looks like a suburban cul-de-sac whose yards have been converted to agriculture. A man is trying to teach the village children. A number of things about this post-apocalyptic village are of interest. First, the tiny fields would not be adequate to keep a couple supplied with food for a year much less a village. All of the houses seem to be in good repair. None has peeling paint after a decade and a half and none show signs of makeshift modifications necessary to accommodate fireplaces or wood stoves, the only possible source for heating and cooking. The men are freshly shaved - perhaps the beneficiaries of a cache of razor blades. One of the villagers must have been a hair stylist prior to the disaster since all are perfectly coifed. All of the clothes are manufactured, clean, well fitting and in good repair. One of the children whom the man is trying to teach is obese, not chubby, obese, as if children of a hunting and subsistence agriculture community would have the extra calories or lack of exercise to become obese. The man who is teaching wears glasses which seem to have the correct prescription, have not been repaired and show no signs of scratching.

The two children of the man from the first scene are now in their late teens. They are off on a hunting adventure. The boy, who was a brunette as a toddler, is now a blond. Tow heads often grow up to be brunettes, but not the other way around. The girl is carrying a crossbow that looks like it had only recently been taken off the display wall at Cabelas. On their trip, they encounter an RV that crashed during the blackout. This amazing 15-year-old vehicle shows no sign of rust or deterioration. I wanted to get the brand name so I could order one of these sturdy vehicles. The girl enters the vehicle through the driver's door window climbing down on the driver's seat which still has all of its upholstery and doesn't crack under the weight of two teenagers crawling over it. Inside, they search for useful items (as if any would still be there after this long). The boy opens a cabinet getting a face full of dust which triggers an asthma attack. His sister helps him run back to the village. For those of you who have never had an asthma attack, you don't have the breath to do any running.

By this time, I was starting to think of this little village in the larger context of the disaster. The village area is obviously close to a road or the RV wouldn't be within easy hiking distance. Judging by the number of houses and their close proximity to each other, it is in a suburban area. Yet there is no sign of conflict or defenses. Did all of the people in the town (and the town in the first scene looked like a major city) stay home and die without migrating out in search of food and safety?

I was willing to suspend disbelief and allow that all of the power in the world went out. I was even willing to overlook the fact that if the effect was so pervasive that even batteries didn't work then it should also affect the functioning of animal's nervous systems which are also electro-chemical in nature like a battery. What I couldn't overlook were all those well groomed, clean shaven, stylishly dressed and well armed people in a neat, tidy post-apocalyptic world. The illogic of the show was overwhelming before the first commercial. And the networks wonder why their shows don't get better ratings. The image of the plane spiraling down to crash and burn seems appropriate for Revolution.

Welcome to the next three winners.

One fun and unexpected part of winning the Writer of the Future contest is meeting the other winners and contestants. They've proven to be a great group of characters with the accent on character. The next three winners were announced this week and I've had a remote conversation with one and posted to the other two. Hopefully, we will all know each other and be anticipating meeting in person next April for our classes and award ceremony. It's always good to add to the collegial group of writers since it can be a lonely craft.

The Joy of Punctuation

If words provide the meaning for writing, punctuation provides the cadence and nuance. Like words, if the meaning is not common, there is no understanding.

In a recent submission, the writer punctuated the entire ten pages using ellipsis ( ... ). She used ellipsis in place of commas, dashes, colons, semicolons, periods, etc. Every time I encountered one of her ellipsis, I was forced to stop reading to try to figure out what she meant by it. It was the equivalent of writing in English and occasionally throwing in a gratuitous word in Sanskrit. It breaks the flow of the story and pulls the reader out of the reality the writer is trying to create.

There is a purpose for standardized punctuation. It isn't just a foible of anal retentive people. Writer's need to learn the basic elements of grammar and punctuation if they want their work to flow. I don't do it correctly every time, but I am trying to learn the rules. In addition to style guides, Lynne Truss's funny and informative book Eats Shoots and Leaves is an excellent source for learning how to properly punctuate.