Handles

Now I know everyone who has ever read this blog is wondering: how did you ever come up with such terrible name?

It has to do with my Youtube (Wentshow), Twitter (manfromfred) and Fanfiction.net (Madman Fred) handles, the town I used to live in, (Wentzville, hence the handle Wentshow) my broken confidence, the fact that writing horror was the only thing I had going on at the time (hence the "creepy" part).  I don't think the "geek" part requires an explanation.

To all of this, add the fact that I really didn't know what I wanted to do with this blog. It was a little too early in the game to promote my writing. I wasn't inclined then to do research for my opinion articles, I had sworn not to talk about my personal life, and I really wasn't doing anything anybody would find interesting then.

However, now that I'm writing every day and submitting work, the blog has a direction. More than that, I've repealed the rules on not talking about my personal life. So, they will some autobiographical posts.

Now that I'm posting here almost every day, there's a reason for whipping this blog into shape. However, I haven't decided on the new name yet. It'll change when I come up with a better one.

I'm tired and I'm getting depressed now. I've been cloistered in my apartment writing and reading since Tuesday. I've been working hard and I haven't been rewarded yet. But then again, I haven't been working hard for very long.

Attention Deficit (1) followed by Promises

With so many children being treated for attention deficit these days and the numbers continuing the grow, some people think it's an illness concocted by psychiatrists and drug companies to grow revenues.

About this, I have to disagree strongly. Granted, it may be over-diagnosed. So much psychiatry needs to be supported more in neurology the way theoretical physics grounds cosmology. We haven't reached that point yet. Psychiatry is behind other medicine in development.

Two psychiatrists have now diagnosed me with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. In neither case did I seek or suggest that diagnosis. The only thing I know is, I'm on a higher dose of the medication than ever. A much higher dose than the previous psychiatrist put me on (and subsequently, taken off when I lost my medical coverage and had to switch psychiatrist). I have to watch my blood pressure now, though Strattera is not in the same class as Ritalin, which is amphetamine.

The difference, though is so profound that I'm willing to take a larger risk of a heart attack. I hope readers noticed I've been keeping this blog daily now. That's only one thing that's changed. (Continue)

Violence in Stories (a ramble)

The first thing you learn about stories, the first thing they'll tell you in creative writing class, is that they're about conflict. As a general rule, the more that's at stake in the conflict, the more suspenseful the tale will be. In real life, however, conflicts that have a lot at stake are resolved either in violence or in the shadow of its threat.


So, of course, one way to raise suspense in a story, to tell your reader that there's a lot at stake is with violence.

So much has been written about the feedback between violence in the media and real life violence. On some boards, I've seen people compare our country to the Roman Empire for our violent entertainment. I had to point out one important distinction: the Romans actually killed people for entertainment, in their arenas and in their theaters. It was what we'd call today a "live" snuff film. But without film, whenever they wanted to have the experience again, they had kill somebody else.

We may have wrestling and various ultra-fighting leagues, but we don't actually kill people, nor deliberately and actually injure them (though we don't mind if  the risk is there). It's an important moral step between enacting simulated death and injury and really committing it-- and for entertainment.

Yet, is there a cross-over, a feed back? I'd have to do more research. I'd say there's apparently a feedback with some people. Hardly with all people. The Japanese have an awful amount of violence in their entertainment. But they have never had the crime rate we do.

I think it has to do with the amount of real-life fear. If the person absorbs violent entertainment worlds and unconsciously learns from those stories what the state of the real world is, then there can be a correlation between fictional violence and real life violence. In fact, it's correlated with a lot of other things. I believe all of the colorful conspiracy theories that spring up are the results of the level of fear, and also being informed by entertainment what is possible in the real world.

I do put graphic violence in my horror writing. Why? The unconscious being what it is, I don't think I'll ever know why, and I'm bound to deny it if I ever get close. My rationalized reason for doing so is it creates memorable images for delivering themes. They're also things far worse than what a reader will ever experience in real life, which by comparison, then becomes a relief. People need to be told how much things could be, and thank their luck. That is, presuming they don't see the fictional environment as the real one.

What I say there might be true of a particular violent event or act. However, a world where there are ghosts, vampires and werewolves is actually something of an improvement over the real one. At least in that fantasy world, an afterlife is unambiguously demonstrated, so it gives hope.

Now I'll get a little political. Vampires and werewolves are actually easier to deal with in most fantasies than corporate persons and global warming are in real life. At least you can put a stake through the heart of a vampire. If only we could have done that to BP after Deepwater Horizon fiasco, or to TEPCO after Fukushima.

No, in real life, we just have to live with the evil, and what's worse, it's not too different enough from us.

Sex in Stories

I was once shocked to be criticized in a writers' group for having a character (a ghost of a fifteen year old girl) talk suggestively about having sex with another girl. I was so surprised. My purpose wasn't to sexually entice anybody. The character was heterosexual, but was trying to describe, without any words for it, how violated something (non-sexual) made her feel. So she said it was like being groped by a woman, and she added a few other details.  My purpose was so at odds with the other writer's understanding, that when she said I was making unnecessary Lesbian suggestions, I had to ask, where? Because in my mind, the character was saying it repulsed her. (I want to make it clear that I have nothing against homosexuality. I just wanted to show that the character was repulsed at having another girl touch her intimately.)

This made me think about a few other issues. I'm a male, heterosexual, and I frequently write female characters. I have to be careful to be accurate enough that women readers don't put my work down in either disgust or disbelief. This might be hard to do, because even within a gender, there's a lot of variance on what's regarded as "normal," or even imaginable. Such as (and to switch genders for a second), a sex act that one hetero guy thinks is normal, and he runs in social circles where it's accepted enough. He could look completely offensive and alien to men outside his social group. I guess anal sex would be an example of this. With the female sex, it's the same way. Except I'm a male with a man's libido trying to figure this out.

The more important issue is: I must ask myself if I write a scene with sex if I'm writing it to indulge in my own pleasure. It's a serious question, especially when underage characters are involved.

The wider issue, though is you have to ask yourself sometimes how you're going to present sex in your stories. Except for characters who are medically asexual (or in sexual latency, such as children)  every person has some way of dealing, or not dealing, with sexuality.  It might not directly be in the story you're telling, but in real human beings, the libido is always there, and it's going to always exert some influence over a person.

I see absolutely no reason to avoid characters' sexuality, though I wouldn't go out of my way to get it in, either, and I especially wouldn't do that to gain readership.

Then again, if put it in, it's then my duty as a writer to make it interesting. Sex scenes are hard to write, and easy mess up. One false word and the whole thing becomes farce. 

Here's where another distinction is important: the difference between porn and any other class of writing. People say that pornography is hard to define. Bullshit. Obscenity is hard to define. Porn is easy. It's a rendered or written work that's meant or used to be a masturbatory aid. Porn is to literature what a dildo is to sculpture. Now, you could write a story with a scene that's pornographic, with the idea that the reader is going to stop after the scene for the orgasm. 

This is also difficult. Fact is, porn and story-telling don't mix well. A pornographic scene in the middle of a novel is a difficult way to advance plot and character. It's equally difficult, if not impossible, to prevent plot and character from interfering with the purpose of the porn, like a vibrator that's also an MP3 player

This is the real reason why pornographers have generally given up on trying to give their work anything but the weakest plots. I remember the days when Marlon Brando received an Oscar nomination for "Last Tango in Paris." That was back when movies tried to mix sex with plot and character. Anybody remember that movie today? It was really a big thing in 1972. It shows how well that movie succeeded.

That formula has mostly been abandoned now. It's too difficult. And if you succeed, it's still too hard to market. Sex has to be dealt within fiction, but unless you're a virtuoso, I'd stay away from anything but the most necessary sex scenes.
 

Letting Ideas Go.

Writers are often asked, "Where do you get your ideas?"

My answer:  that's how you know you're a writer; you can't stop the ideas. You have to write them down or it will depress you. Why? I don't really know. My guess is it's because your curiosity is then never satisfied, or that you never get to know the character you had in mind.

Unfortunately, those ideas usually come out like a puzzle with half the pieces missing, or (even worse) Swiss cheese. You've got to create the story, rewrite it and edit it to make it worthwhile. Your principal challenges are to put the ideas into words, and to fill in what's missing. 

I have this short story I'm writing, and I planned on finishing it in 5,000 words. As I've been outlining it by a modified form of the Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method, I realized halfway through that the story was becoming a novel. That's not where I want to go with this. (I must mention that Ingermanson developed the Snowflake specifically for writing novels. I did say I've modified it. I'll write more about the method in the future.)

This means I must go through and eliminate characters and plot elements. At least I'm culling it before I actually write the story, which in theory is faster, or perhaps saves you a lot of trouble. I know the story's there, I just have to figure out what is most important about it.

I didn't do anything like that in my fanfic novel, Ginger Snaps: The Feral Bond. No, I went with whatever idea excited me. As a result, the plot takes some strange turns, and has a lot of weird details. For example, werewolves have a super-human sense of smell, and they will try to form packs. So, how are the packs organized? By smell, of course. A werewolf is subordinate to the one that infected him, and in fact, feel a obligatory compulsion to follow their sires'. This dominance is communicated to their brains directly by smell.

There are a whole bunch of details like this. However, now that I'm on the last chapter of GSTFB, I'm now confident of coming up with ideas, and now I have to be concerned about telling a story as efficiently as possible. So, I'm not so desperate to hold on to all the ideas I get.

However, I don't actually throw them away, either. I could always recycle them into another story.

The Real Difference Between Atheists and Believers

God, or lack of One, isn't the biggest difference between Atheists and believers (specifically, modern monotheists of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths). The real split is on the importance of belief as a mental process, and its use in determining reality.

To an atheist, "belief" is a judgment or a guess, distinct from "thinking" in that it's not as rigorous, and from "knowing" in that it's not based on sensory information. Your mind uses judgment when there's something that cannot be confirmed through thinking or knowledge, so you use intuition.

For believers, there's "belief" and then there's "belief in." Unlike the former, the latter expresses a commitment or goal to maintain belief. "Belief in" isn't just a mental process: it's all important because it determines the outcome of a person's life for eternity, that is, forever.

"I am the Lord, thy God . . ." Modern monotheisms all require that the person "believes in" the Deity. Nobody appears to ask why this would be the most important requirement, but to conclude that there is no God, one must first stop thinking that belief can effect a change in your eternal fate. One has to be willing to come to the conclusion that one may not be a more worthy position than the other.

In other words, you have to be willing to stop corrupting judgment with expectations of reward or punishment. And that's where the real difference between atheists and believers turns. 

Neil Armstrong: He Defined the Hopes of the 20th Century

In the timeline of the 20th century, Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon represents the absolute apex of accomplishment and hope. Before that, let's face it, the century was woeful. Humankind had brought itself to two world wars that wasted and destroyed tens of millions of lives in two short bursts. In between, we had economic chaos caused only by greed. We had some huge acts of genocide, the largest, of course, being the Holocaust. There was constant ideological cleansing (Ideocide?) in the Soviet Union and associated countries.  At the time Armstrong stepped on the Moon, we were in the midst of an indefinite nuclear standoff, in which the US and USSR had already come close to blowing up the world up once. The Vietnam War raged on, so did protests, and so did race riots in most US cities.  There was oppression in Eastern Europe, which was still devastated and impoverished from World War II.


Neil Armstrong's step was exactly what the world needed. What followed the space program were inventions such as microchips and computer technology that energized the last two decades and completely altered human prospects.    

Yet, space travel is far more difficult than we thought in the naive age of the 1960s. Radiation, free fall, energy requirements, sheer distance and the problems of supply all keep the Star Trek dream from being realized. It wasn't the "giant leap" he declared it to be. As a result, we struggle with an overpopulated world lacking land, resources and struggling for energy sources.

It doesn't matter if we call it a "giant leap," though. It was still an improvement over what humankind had before.

Armstrong and the Apollo team accomplished something equal to anything described in an ancient epic. In one way or another, everyone alive now benefited in some way from the Moon Landing. So he and his crew deserve to be remembered at least as long as Ulysses.

So, today the man who went farther from our planet than any of us has gone much farther till. He's traveled more distance than any galaxy we can see with out best telescopes. Though he's not able to tell us of his first step on this expedition, a just universe would have him landing in heaven now.

Without him, where would I ever get that hope?

Attention Deficit (introduction)

One reason why it's far better I work alone is that my sleep schedule is so unpredictable. I've used alarm clocks, three at a time. Yes, I can get up, but it usually means going through the day mindlessly tired. I've made huge, embarrassing errors at work just from sleepiness.

It's almost as unworkable for me to try to go to sleep at a regular time. Usually, I get enthralled with something, and this tends to happen more when I'm tired. I'll fall into bed so sleep deprived I can't think straight. If I go to bed early, I'll end up being awake and restless.

So, with exceptions, I go to sleep when I feel exhausted and I wake up whenever I do and schedule my day from there. This usually entails planning to read and write  long after I'm mentally capable of doing anymore. In other words, I'll plan on being up working until 2 a.m. but I'm wear out by midnight, sleep, get up when I do (now, almost always by 8), writing out my schedule for that day and picking up where I left off.  

This might seem like luxury, being able to sleep as long as I want, but it also means always being out of sync with everybody else. That is to say, if you have a "real job" people have to be there at a certain time in the morning just to make sure they can work as a team and do everything as planned. Social cooperation is the main reason. In other words, there's the constant reminder that you are alone.

Lack of a predictable sleep pattern, and periods of sleeping few hours than is healthy, is a symptom of Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. I have a longer post coming up about this. Let's just say, it's better that I choose to work alone. 

On the Blink

Whenever I have a computer problem, it's impossible to tell if will take two minutes or two weeks to fix. As I was backing up this morning's work, my Documents library just vanished. To my relief, after 20 minutes, I found all the current data still contained in the My Documents folder, but my machine no longer saw the library. I restored everything from there.

Whenever this happens, I try to envision that what we're essentially doing with computers and  networks is wrangling electrons. These particles are so small and light they almost don't exist. Yet, we get them to dance the Heisenberg for us as though they're a chorus of Cabaret girls in Wiemar, Germany. These are a many orders of magnitude smaller than grains of dust and many times as ephemeral. By any logic, they should scatter if we so much as breathed on them, but instead, we make them do elaborate tricks. Electricity is for us what fire was in the prehistoric world. Our lives depend on it, depend on our training a TB^3 bunch of nano-fleas to jump in sync and in the same direction like one massive flea circus.

And they do it. They're domesticated electons, that sometimes get a little testy, or maybe they bump heads with each other, and cause bugs and glitches.

Thick of It.

I have my novel, Ginger Snaps: The Feral Bond up on fanfiction.net. I've made a lot of radical changes to it, including transposing the first and second chapters. (With two different sets of characters, it doesn't matter which one it starts with, but chronologically, the current first chapter happens first, but with the old arrangement, I had to introduce it as the second chapter by saying, "On the previous full moon. . . ." A little awkward.

I go into this because when I reversed the two chapters, I did it half-assed. The second chapter said "Chapter 1" and had an old author's note introducing it. Anyone reading the story would have thought I started the whole thing again. No wonder traffic dropped off!

Well, I've fixed it and the hits immediately surged.

As fanfiction, I can't really ever sell it, of course. I'm now in the first rewrite of Chapter 35. However, since I'm working on other short stories, (and other things like keeping up this blog) I can't say if I'll be finished by the beginning or middle of the chapter.

My shortcomings in writing still are, I can't judge how long a story is yet, how long it will take to write it, and crucially, I write too slow. However, these might not be too large a problem now that I'm on a high dose of Attention Deficit medication (Strattera, not speed). I've been keeping up a daily writing regimen. We'll see.

Password to Hell

Of all the unavoidable aggravations there are in the modern world, passwords have got to be near the top of the list. Every site you go on for any service whatsoever on requires you to get an account with a password. The average Internet user probably has between 12 and 80 passwords to "remember." I put those in quotes, because except for some Asperger's cases, hardly anybody has memorized that many. They either use one duplicated password, or they have them written down, or both. Both are considered poor practices.

Passwords are also inherently a weak link in security. I'm told by this article on Dailykos, and I'm sure it's factual, that password cracking technology has become very good, that is, they can test 2.3 billion passwords per second, or 828 trillion an hour. (I'm also aware, however, that few if any websites will allow trillions of log-on attempts. I'm sure there are methods that circumvent this.)

The best advice to prevent cracking now is: 1) don't use real words, or even variations of them in creating a password;. 2) Never use duplicate passwords for different sites; 3) Change your passwords frequently; 4) mix in special characters and capital letter; 5) Don't write your passwords down.

You might observe here that the exact measures you take to make a passwords resistant to cracking will also make them resistant to memorizing. This makes these measures unworkable for most people.

Forgetting a password, no matter for what, is inherently embarrassing. More so if you've reached middle age. Worse and more embarrassing, your mind might not go totally blank. You might just forget one part, like not typing a letter upper case. Since you can't see password as you put it in, you can't check on what you're forgetting. So, you'll end up changing it one letter at a time, having to answer captiva distorted letter puzzles forever, and still you might not succeed, and you'll never know why. Meanwhile, you'll get locked out of your account for missing too man Captivas. Try talking to a French Tech Support guy who discovers you can't open your encrypted file because you're using the wrong password."I recommend you use the right password."

So, in the article mentioned above, he recommends getting a password manager. These work okay, but with one gigantic  weakness the author admits: they are secured with one password you absolutely cannot forget and can't have stolen. This means you have to make it easy to remember, you thus make it weak, or you have to write it down. Once that password is cracked, the hacker has access to everything.

Why not add a second level of security here? Store your passwords in a encrypted text or spreadsheet file on a flash drive that you keep on your person. Only plug in that flash drive when you need to enter a password, then unplug it immediately. This way, you have more security than a password manager can provide, and yes, you have to use a master password, but not one that's stored on your PC or iPhone.

It's not perfect but it's the only thing I can think of. The hassle and dilemma of passwords are the few things that make me nostalgic for the early '90s.

Update (Afterthought) 8/22/12: Maybe I could have chosen a better name. Apparently, when we die and go to heaven, St. Peter asks you for your password. When you give it to him, he hands you a Captiva puzzle to solve. If you get only the Captiva wrong, you end up in Purgatory. If you get your password wrong, you end in Hell.

Boomers and Leaders

I could point to many differences between the world now and the one I grew up in. Definitely, computers and the Internet have changed things socially. However, the change that strikes me the most is lack of children.

I was Catholic and grew up in a Catholic neighborhood. It was odd if a friend didn't have at least three siblings. All my aunts and uncles had between four and eleven kids. Family get-togethers were just huge. I remember schoolyards and playgrounds were full. The schoolyard across the street had more children playing there in the summer than you see now during recess with school in session. Now it's empty, all the time. But it has a playground in it that's far better equipped than anything then.

Being so outnumbered, I think parents threw up their hands in resignation. So many kids to raise and socialize. When they reached adolescence, things went somewhat nuts.

Crime has been dropping for more than the last decade, but then it seemed to be going up like a raging fever. The Boomers were also the first generation to be raised on commercial television. As such, they were culturally distinct.

Now, Boomers are being blamed for a lot of things as things in our country have gone wrong, but I don't think that's fair. What's actually caused our problem is who we choose to be our leaders, and how those leaders end up acting. It wasn't a huge problem before, but the world has changed. So, now a human shortcoming is turning into an albatross.

Have to leave it there. It's one of those days where I really couldn't decide what to write about.

Hysteria Legislation

I was listening to Tell Me More on NPR yesterday when in the third segment, they brought up Missouri's "Prayer Amendment" which passed with 83 percent of the popular vote. What struck me was some claims made by MO Representative Mike McGhee. The way he made it sound, every school employee in outstate Missouri is an atheist suppressing religion. Here are the stories he told:  a girl was singing a hymn while on a swing, and a teacher made her change "Jesus loves me" to "Mommy Loves Me." A teacher told the student he couldn't bring the Bible into study hall. And I driver who wouldn't let a student bring a Bible onto the bus. In all cases, he gave no names, neither of the students or their oppressors. He followed these by saying that they had "numerous" people testify that students were told they couldn't bow their heads and pray. No names are given. Not of the school. Not of the students, and not of the prayer Nazis.

Rep. McGhee came out with these one after another, they were his entire argument that the right to pray was under attack. Because I would be surprised if any of this happened. I know something of Outstate Missouri. First, I know a school employee who did anything like this would be lucky to keep their job. Second, if they did this, it would end up being statewide, then nationwide news. It's that unusual.

Third, there may be secularists here or there who would try to enforce such a strict reading of the First Amendment, but not enough of them to create an entire wave of prayer suppression like this, and there aren't that many secularists to begin with, and not many of those who work in Missouri Schools.

I'd like to call Rep. McGhee this week for the missing details and check them out, because I would be surprised if any of this happened.  It doesn't pass the smell test. I can't tell who's lying and who's passing the lies along unquestioningly, but none of his claims passed the smell test.

So, in outstate Missouri, rumors are that Atho-Nazi Humanists are cracking down on Bibles and prayer. To remedy this wave of purported oppression, they come up with the cockamamie "prayer amendment." The people are smoking crack, buy the crackdown stories, and give it 83% of the vote.

And now were stuck with a more defective state constitution. One where the unlikeliest fears are addressed. But it's the way governing these days: either creating fear or responding to fear. Soon, the people are only responding to their fears with no input from reality.

There are no battles in the Culture War quite like the imaginary ones.

Poison Optimism

If I hear anybody say "bring optimism back into sci fi" again, I'm going to build my doomsday device and hold the world hostage.

In the fifties and sixties, optimism about the future made sense. Yes, we had the Cold War, but all we had to do was not blow ourselves up. Not as simple as it sounded: we almost screwed it up at least three times.

If you read between the lines of all those optimistic stories, in fact, even the dystopias, they had two presumptions for future societies: 1) unlimited energy, and 2) unlimited space.

It just so happens that the two big technological failures of the 20th century were 1) fusion energy, and 2) space travel. The first has yielded nothing despite billions of dollars in research. The second has given us a lot of return, but it hasn't given our excess population anywhere else to go, and meanwhile provides us with no practical way to get more resources.

If space travel isn't a total failure, it's much more daunting than the SF writers of an earlier age ever imagined. I remember a conversation about 2001: A Space Odyssey where I said, "Boy did we blow that deadline." I recall in 1975, SF fans were clamoring to get us a geostationary orbiting artificial space colony by 1995. It was called "L5 by 95." The fact that radiation and living in free-fall would be lethal to human beings has knocked that vision into the realm of Space Opera.

As it turns out, neither nuclear fusion nor space travel show any credible hope of a breakthrough in our lifetime.Those two failures guarantee that the future is going to be tough. I recall in the 70s even Asimov wrote an article saying that our future would be bleak without those two technologies.

When there are breakthroughs in those two things, I'll get optimistic again. In this day and age, it's not called for.

Besides, the SF writers did not set out to create optimistic stories. No, they wrote them that way because they were optimistic people. Optimism should be natural and unprocessed. The artificial version that's being forced on us now by ideological stooges is toxic, concocted with high doses of denial and magical thinking, and an inducement to political conservatism that makes discontent a sin.

One should feel optimism or pessimism when they're appropriate. They're emotions, part of natural signals our unconscious mind give us. Neither one is better than the other, and neither should be considered good or bad.

A writer should be free to write optimism or pessimism as their unconscious prompts them to. That's what separates hackery from art.

(I originally wrote the early draft of this as a comment on cracked.com, 4 Things Science Fiction Needs to Bring Back by Robert Brockway, under the username of leaveittobieber. Yes, I didn't steal it, that's me with yet another handle.)  

Fighting a Mood Change

Okay, if you don't see it, I get into posting and arguing online. My favorite place to do that now is The Democratic Underground, but I'm a little annoyed with myself over how much time I wasted there today in this thread. Under the name of caseymoz. Now something has come up for tonight, so really I lost most of a day's work, but I might be able to cheat a few hours of the workday back.

I hate it when I end up arguing with a feminist. I'm not a Men's Rights Activist. I could see how much women need to have their rights and equality put into practice. I hate to argue over terms like "objectification" or "patriarchal theory," but have some real qualms over the theory behind the terms. The hostility generated in the argument wears me out and leaves me down. To remedy this, I'm drinking Mountain Dew eating Chips Ahoy and generally jacking my blood sugar into the stratosphere. After this I'm going to quit the Chips. MD is going to be my only vice.

Anyway, I've been the Julian Assange story as well. But now I have to get back to my workday. I'm running over again. 

Pay in hope

"If we don't sell to many of these things, we might just break even." 
                                               -Groucho Marx

If you search through duotrope.com, you'll find that professional pay for a fiction writer is a nickel per word. Kij Johnson, and accomplished fantasy author, mentioned to me at a writers' workshop in 2002 that periodical pay for fiction writers hasn't changed in thirty years. In fact, writers' are so used to seeing a nickel a word as "professional pay" that publishers almost have no incentive to change it.

I've just about completed a novel that's 194,000 words long. I probably put close four to five thousand hours into it. Now I was learning and didn't know what I was doing, and I hope I'm getting faster. Even so, if I were paid a nickle per word my total, gross pay per hour would come out to $2.15. It's almost better it's a fanfiction and doesn't pay anything.

Thoughtdrift.

I stayed up late, got up later than I usually do, so I knew this was a day off. I then put together part of a work day. But it was light.

After all these decades, and only after being drugged with Strattera for attention deficit, I'm able to act as my supervisor and wear an employee hat as well.

My financial problems have eased somewhat from the last month, I still have to be extremely careful with what I spend.

Politics: I'm feeling a lot more optimistic about the Democrats keeping the Presidency, but it can be almost as big a catastrophe if the Repubs keep the House and Take the Senate. I don't want to spend another four years feeling the same way I did under Bush.

I'm drowsy. I find myself falling asleep. So, I'll close out this nothing blog now.

The F Word.

Of course, when I say the F word, I'm talking about our drought. The word would be famine. It's not that I want to scare people, but countrywide, our farms appear to have taken an epic beat-down this summer. They're talking about prices rising, of course. But people, like our leadership, should take moves now to prevent starvation. With our economy already devastated, we could see real widespread hunger in this country for the first time in memory.

No, I don't wish to spread panic, but people shouldn't be afraid of fear, either. If fear is awful, fear of fear is far worse. It leads to the double negation known as denial.

Where are we going to get the grain to make up for the shortfall? Do any other nations have surpluses?

What about other crops? So far, we've been hearing about the effects on corn and soybean. I can't help but think the effect on vegetables and fruits is just as negative.

Plus, I have a question that cannot be answered: is next year going to be the same?

A disaster like a famine usually brings about change, whether it will be to the better or worse, nobody knows. People might finally accept anthropogenic Global Warming as a reality, and finally acknowledge that the liberals were right, again. Then again, they might just blame the famine on the acceptance of gay marriage. Guess which answer the oil companies are going to promote.

Born Again Cheap

I'm probably going to change the name of this blog soon, now that I'm reviving it and taking it in a different direction. The question of course is, to what? The Wentshow handle I chose was never meant to be posted under. I just wanted to get an account opened on Youtube fast and didn't have anything ready. It's almost the same with Madman Fred, but I actually like that one a little more. Still . . .

I met my deadline to get the flash fiction "Last One Down" polished. So, every night this week I'm submitting it. BTW, the site duotrope.com (I'll fill in the link later) is just excellent for finding outlets. It's much better than Writers' Market and free, though it asks you for a monthly donation.

Speaking of donations, it's a hard thing when you're poor to turn down so many people and causes that need money. My parents taught me to be generous and careless with my money. I was generous to a fault, in fact, generous to a default. So, I ended up bankrupt. What can I say? My mother also spent my father into the hole. My sister declared bankruptcy. So, it goes in the family, unfortunately.

Not anymore for me. I've learned to be frugal. Whenever I eat or drink anything, it's in the back of my mind how much it costs me. I look for bargains. I buy in bulk. I cut expenses everywhere I can. Life as a writer means living on a shoe-string and using it for both food and clothes.

Fact is, though, I so far haven't cut enough. It's very hard to make ends meet on a disability income. I'm determined to do it. However, I'm aware that due to the drought, prices are going to jump next year.

A gender stereotype cracks.

I published the following article on the Democratic Underground this morning under my handle there, caseymoz. Yes, that's what I call myself there. On Twitter, I'm manfromfred, on fanfiction.net my name is Madman Fred, and on Youtube, I'm Wentshow. Someday I'll have to tell everyone how I came up with these handles.

However, this post at DU is about a report I heard on NPRs Talk of the Nation:

A few researchers at the University of Toronto and University of Arizona came up with an ingenious and simple little device: an audio recorder that turned itself on and off throughout the day. He had test subjects wear these, and the recorders would take little snippets of what the subjects were doing throughout the day.

http://www.npr.org/2012/07/12/156664337/stereotype-threat-why-women-quit-science-jobs

Most field studies in the social sciences rely on subjects self-reporting. However, that's been shown to be inaccurate and inadequate. So, he put many recorders on many subjects over periods of days, then played back the data and found a two surprising things about gender.

We all think that women talk more than men. I mean, this belief is old, widespread, it cuts across cultures, it's not even regarded as a stereotype, it's regarded as truth.

The results in this experiment indicate there is absolutely no difference in the amount women and men talk. None. Neither sex is more silent nor more loquacious than the other. If this is true, and we thought such a solid assumption was true, it shows how distorted the rest of our assumptions about the world may be, while still swearing up and down that our perceptions match it.

If that's not enough for one experiment, it uncovered details of something of more practical importance: why do so many women drop out of science?

Now, you might think it's because the men must treat them badly. According to Dr. Mehl's analysis, that's not what happens.

When male scientists talked to other scientists about their research, it energized them. But it was a different story for women.

"For women, the pattern was just the opposite, specifically in their conversations with male colleagues," Schmader said. "So the more women in their conversations with male colleagues were talking about research, the more disengaged they reported being in their work."

Disengagement predicts that someone is at risk of dropping out.

There was another sign of trouble.

When female scientists talked to other female scientists, they sounded perfectly competent. But when they talked to male colleagues, Mehl and Schmader found that they sounded less competent.

One obvious explanation was that the men were being nasty to their female colleagues and throwing them off their game. Mehl and Schmader checked the tapes.

"We don't have any evidence that there is anything that men are saying to make this happen," Schmader said.

But the audiotapes did provide a clue about what was going on. When the male and female scientists weren't talking about work, the women reported feeling more engaged.

For Mehl and Schmader, this was the smoking gun that an insidious psychological phenomenon called "stereotype threat" was at work. It could potentially explain the disparity between men and women pursuing science and math careers.

When there's a stereotype in the air and people are worried they might confirm the stereotype by performing poorly, their fears can inadvertently make the stereotype become self-fulfilling.

Steele and his colleagues found that when women were reminded — even subtly — of the stereotype that men were better than women at math, the performance of women in math tests measurably declined. Since the reduction in performance came about because women were threatened by the stereotype, the psychologists called the phenomenon "stereotype threat."

Stereotype threat isn't limited to women or ethnic minorities, Steele wrote elsewhere. "Everyone experiences stereotype threat. We are all members of some group about which negative stereotypes exist, from white males and Methodists to women and the elderly. And in a situation where one of those stereotypes applies — a man talking to women about pay equity, for example, or an aging faculty member trying to remember a number sequence in the middle of a lecture — we know that we may be judged by it."

Over the years, experiments have shown that stereotype threat affects performance in a wide variety of domains.

Note, if this is true, this doesn't take any chauvinism to drive women from science careers. All it takes is the smallest, inadvertent hint at the stereotype.

"For a female scientist, particularly talking to a male colleague, if she thinks it's possible he might hold this stereotype, a piece of her mind is spent monitoring the conversation and monitoring what it is she is saying, and wondering whether or not she is saying the right thing, and wondering whether or not she is sounding competent, and wondering whether or not she is confirming the stereotype," Schmader said.

All this worrying is distracting. It uses up brainpower. The worst part?

"By merely worrying about that more, one ends up sounding more incompetent," Schmader said.

Worse, even if you consciously disbelieve the stereotype, it can still affect you:

Now, most scientists say they don't believe the stereotype about women and science, and argue that it won't affect them. But the psychological studies suggest people are affected by stereotype threat regardless of whether they believe the stereotype.

These scientists are careful to emphasize, this is not the fault of women.

Mehl and Schmader said the stereotype threat research does not imply that the gender disparity in science and math fields is all "in women's heads."

The problem isn't with women, Mehl said. The problem is with the stereotype.

The study suggests the gender disparity in science and technology may be, at least in part, the result of a vicious cycle.

I'd like to add a few of my conclusions: the collapse of patriarchal societies into something more egalitarian does not do away with established stereotypes. Women have been nominally equal for years, but the stereotypes have a life of their own in our collective unconscious mind afterward and are much tougher to eradicate than we think. Also, like computer viruses, they can stay resident without any conscious support or malice. Women have had the vote for almost a century. Yet, you wouldn't be able to tell by the makeup of our legislatures, or by many other things in our society.

Second, our perceptions often mislead us about reality and give a biased account. We could have some basic assumptions that seem very obvious, collectively held, and they're dead wrong. We need to rely more on objective methods to collect data, especially in the social sciences. Don't rely so much on what people say about their behavior. Find ways to observe what they actually do.

Third, remember sometimes your unconscious mind simply fucks with you, and our unconscious minds [just as it] fuck[s] with everybody else.

Beggars' splurge

Writers' meeting last night, where we critiqued short stories that have been rejected repeatedly. It was informative, and fun. I went out with a few of my friends there and splurged, spending $6.50 on salad, water and the tip. On my budget and my meager disability, that was profligate indulgence. In fact, I shouldn't dine at all, but usually I can't resist some social time. Besides, I hadn't had a lot of variety in my diet.

I worked on Ginger Snaps: The Feral Bond this morning. I'm tempted to add another scene, but no, I decided to deal with the loose end there in the epilogue. So, I'm now on the last paragraph of the story.

Following the perpetual election: only the worst cynicism could explain a vote for Romney. I'm glad Claire McCaskill won the primary.

Typical day, get up, take meds, do dishes, feed the cat, have breakfast, write, exercise, shower, shave, brush my teeth, get dressed, call my dad, play with the cat, have lunch, write, clean something in the apartment, write, read . . .

That's about how it goes. I wish I could do away with the things besides writing and reading, but it's not practical. This morning I edited a flash-fiction. I want to be done with it by Sunday.

The state my family, the nation and the world might get me down these days, but I feel  optimistic about myself and what I'm doing. By Monday, I'll be submitting my stories. I brought my Facebook account back up, and I'm going to be bidding on freelance work.

  

New direction; a picture of me.

I know I haven't written here in the longest time. I couldn't decide which direction to take the blog, and I was busy writing fiction. I've been avoiding huge subjects in my life, such as family, but I'll do that no longer. You really can't understand me without understanding my family, and my family is tragic and difficult to comprehend.

I have a long entry coming on the subject, soon. I'm writing it up carefully. I've decided that what I'll do here is this: I promise I'll have an entry every day, though they may frequently be short. Intermittently, a long, carefully written  entry will go up on a subject that's really on my mind.

Anyway, I've been writing fiction a lot. I'm working on the last chapter of the Ginger Snaps "slipstream" fan fiction. I've written many other things, though, poetry and short stories which I'm submitting. I've changed gears and I'm now on a schedule for submitting them.

Meanwhile, something else has happened. A second psychiatrist concurred that I have Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. He put me back on medication at higher dose than I've ever been on. The difference in my daily life has been huge.

One change I will make now, I'm finally putting up a picture of myself. Not an easy thing for me to do. I am camera shy. I have a deadline on Sunday to get a short story ready and send it out.