Limbaugh

It sounds like Rush Limbaugh has finally gone too far. You could see it coming. Every month he'd say something cruel, hateful or racist, usually all three. As always, though, he would make it just ambiguous enough to where ditto heads knew what he meant while still giving it just enough of a cover meaning to protect him. As that kept happening, I could tell he probably didn't say them spontaneously, that he actually must have wrote them out and memorized them beforehand. Each time his audience thought he was saying the bold, brave thing, and could feel secure that the racism, sexism, or any form of hatred they felt was not really hate, but something reasonable.

It had to be tiresome for Limbaugh, shown by his recent ranting. It's his worst attack, and he sounds like he's totally come unglued. Demanding porn from a woman giving testimony about contraception? Does Rush realize how many people in the US use contraception, men and women? And how many of them are, otherwise, conservative?

In fact, there's a growing number. Teen pregnancies have fallen for a reason. Teenagers are finally getting the message. Hey, Rush, we don't have to pay for welfare or medicine for so many women and children who start out impoverished. He's pretty much outraged all those girls, who will enter their adult life knowing what a pig Limbaugh is. That's only one demographic of females he's angered.

So, he'll lose at least the twenty percent of his audience. (There can't' be too many women who still listen to him, and ones still remaining can't be very bright. Even they would recoil at this.) There's no cover with this one. Rush can't claim complain he was just telling a revolting joke, one where the whole humor is you can't believe even the biggest douche bag on earth would tell it.  

I recall his mockery of Michael J. Fox. It was during an election, and he probably booted away three Senate seats doing that. I remember his contemptible singing of "Ain't Got No Home" when a homeless advocate committed suicide, or as Limbaugh would say, "assumed room temperature."

I thought his racism would bring him down, not his sexism. Frankly, I don't know how he lasted this long.

And if he had, on the air, told a woman to suck is dick in 2003 and then said he was joking, he would have probably made it. But now things are changing. There's a general, conservative meltdown happening all over. Scandals every day, mishandled primaries where Repubs show they can't count votes. Gaffes by candidates, onerous anti-choice legislation getting shelved, Planned Parenthood being attacked and winning, Global Warming being confirmed in a study funded by the Koch Brothers of all people . . . Conservatives lose a lot of credibility with that one.

If things keep up like this for the rest of the year, Conservatism might not make it to 2013. In will become as fringie as the John Birch society that helped spawn it.


Even if I might be wrong about that, Rush will get his early retirement, and he'll live never taking responsibility for the damage he's done.

Home stretch with a draft

(If any of what's below doesn't come out well, I'm sick right now and I'm on several meds that have made attention to detail strenuous.)

About writing: Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method has helped my writing. I found that a lot of the blocks I've had have been due to coming to the end of a scene and not knowing where to steer next. I wrote an outline and a plot treatment for the last three chapters of Ginger Snaps: The Feral Bond, and now I can move through it steadily. I am talking about the second draft, the one I've been posting to fanfiction.net for the past three years.

It took a lot of arranging and re-arranging to get the outline to work, and then more as I began to write the treatment and realized certain scenes wouldn't work or wouldn't work in the order in which I put them. I ended up with a ten page treatment for the last three chapters that are probably going to run 75 pages.

I presented the Snowflake Method at a workshop last month. I like it because it organizes a story while it preserves the fertile interaction between character and plot that's lacking in straight plotting or outlining. It keeps your creativity organized and focused like an outline, without strangling it. However, I thought to add a few steps to develop setting, too.

I'm also eight chapters into the third draft, of GSTFB, but I'm going to retrofit it to a Snowflake as well. I've also been using a scaled-down version of  the method to write a short story. The third draft is running a lot shorter than the first two.

Why write fan fiction? Because it's where I chose to cut my teeth and find out if I had the discipline and skills to write. Turns out I did. When I sat down to do it, I swore that I would always finish every bit of writing that I started.  Maybe I should have sworn that after I quit writing the Ginger Snaps fan fiction, but it didn't work out like that.

This is like my training, my dissertation on novel writing. People pay to write dissertations. I'm writing mine for free.

But of course, I need to get this behind me so I could actually more publishable, and paid fiction.

So, why write Ginger Snaps fan fiction? Of course, because I'm a big fan of the original movie, though the sprequels were a letdown, and I think it deserved a much better sequel and back story than it has.

Why love Ginger Snaps? That's a subject of a whole different entry to analyze it.

After all I've said about the Snowflake Method, I would be amiss if I didn't tell you what it was. I've given a link to Randy Ingermanson's site above, and again here. But I'm also posting an outline of the method below (and hope that this editor doesn't make a mess of the format).

If you use it, try not to let it constrain any impulse you have to write. You can stop and write passages while you're doing the method. Also, remember I've added two steps to it for setting. Now it's a 12-step method, with three optional:

1. Write a one-sentence summary of your novel.
   1. Should take one hour
   2. Hints
      1. Under fifteen words
      2. No character names!
      3. Tie together big and personal pictures
         1. What character has the most to lose
         2. What they want to win
      4. Read New York Times Bestseller list to learn the format.
   3. If you write a book proposal, use this sentence in it, and early
   4. You may alter summary sentence as successive steps develops them more

2. Expand sentence into a full paragraph
   1. Take one more hour
   2. It should have
      1. Story setup
      2. Major plot points, chronological
      3. How's it going to end
   3. Ingermanson calls it “three disasters and an ending”
   4. Corresponds to conventional structure. Beginning, plot point, midpoint, plot point, end.

3. Write one page summary of each major character
   1. Take one hour each
   2. It should have
      1. Name
      2. one sentence summary of character's storyline
      3. Motivation, abstract desire
      4. Goal, concrete desire
      5. Character's conflict: What's obstructing him from goal
      6. Character's epiphany: How do they change, what do they learn?
      7. One paragraph character summary.
   3. Doesn't have to be perfect
   4. Expect to revise on successive steps
   5. Keep forward momentum

4. Take several hours each to expand sentences of plot description into a paragraph.
   1. Is the story worthwhile or “broken?”
   2. Can it be fixed?
   3. This can be used as a story proposal

5. (Optional from Haines) Give a one sentence description of each major setting, and a list of some minor settings.

6. Write a one page synopsis of each major character, half page description of each minor character.
   1. Take one or two days
   2. Different from summary: tell the story from the character's POV
   3. Should discover things, revise earlier steps and other characters as you do
   4. May use character synopsis instead of plot synopsis as book proposal

7. Expand one page plot synopsis (from Step 4) to four page synopsis
   1. Take a week
   2. Turn each paragraph of Step 4 into a page
   3. Figure out story logic and make strategic decisions
   4. Go back and revise information from previous steps as you learn more

8. (Optional from Haines) Expand major setting descriptions from one sentence to one paragraph descriptions, or more as necessary
   1. Should take one day
   2. Connect characters to setting if it applies
   3. Connect settings to plot
   4. Imagine the features the setting must have to connect to advance plot and character
   5. Give nuances that enrich the setting
   6. Revise previous steps accordingly

9. Create a character charts
   1. Spend a week
   2. Spreadsheet suggested, not required
   3. Boilerplate: birthdate, description, history, motivation, goal, etc.
   4. Most important: include character transition
   5. Use as many or as few columns for details as you deem necessary
   6. Purpose:
      1. Teaches you about your characters
      2. Helps you keep details consistent
   7. Don't constrain characters to a rigid plot
      1. Alter plot according to characters
      2. Important: put changes in writing, revise steps 1-7 as needed

10. Crucial: write a list of scenes
    1. You may take a hiatus before this step
    2. Expect to take a week or a little more
    3. Spreadsheet is very strongly recommended because
       1. You can see the whole plot at a glance
       2. It's easy to move scenes around
       3. Buy a book if necessary
       4. Expect it to take less than a day to learn what little you need
    4. Include these details
       1. Description of scene (wide column)
       2. Whose Point of View, if necessary
       3. Setting (Optional)
       4. Character(s) involved (optional)
       5. Add chapter numbers when you are finished
       6. Invaluable for analyzing a story
       7. Add other columns for info you deem necessary

11. (Optional from Ingermanson) Write a narrative description of the story
    1. Expect to take one week
    2. Use word processor
    3. Expand each line in spreadsheet (Step 10) to a multi-paragraph description of scenes
       1. Include any good dialog that comes to you
       2. Describe conflict. If there is none, add it or scrap the scene
       3. 1-2 pages per chapter
       4. 50 pages or longer, total
       5. Put into loose leaf notebook, rearrange chapters or add as necessary
       6. Put notes in margins, or put in sticky notes as ideas come

12. Write the draft
    1. Creativity still needed, expect there to be fun minor details to work out
    2. Expect to be pleased

Other notes:

• Total work hours in the pre-drafting stage will be about 100 hours by Ingermanson's estimate
• Total time to finish first draft after predraft: 50 hours
• You could expect subsequent drafts to take less time
• Method can be scaled down for short stories
• You do not have to follow it in complete order. If you inspired to write because you had a great idea for a character, then write that character description first, then start back with the one sentence plot description.

Prettiest cat in the state?

This is the Internet, and if you own a cat, it's a law in 41 states that you have to post a picture. [citation needed] So,I have this beautiful feline that has the oddest, most beautiful coat I've ever seen. Introducing Sashi:

Here kittykitty. Don't be shy.

I decided to take a photo shoot of her. My photography equipment being a string and a Cannon Elph. 

Sashi, we have company. Go wash your face.

She's a rescue. They had trouble placing her because she couldn't get along with other cats. Having seen how other cats react to her, I get the idea that she must look ugly to them. But I think she's a beautiful creature, and I think most people will agree. She has that bright, white main and dirty face.

It's not that easy being beige. So how about orange, black and pink, too?

She's as sweet as she looks. She's very friendly, loves children, but tends to be skittish, too. Very small for a five-year old cat, relatives she was kitten or a tweenie, but no, she was rescued nursing a litter and pregnant with another one. The poor thing then had to endure a year in a cage. But I think she's happy now.

Despite her solemn look

I do wonder what cross breeding led to this mix. As far as I can tell, her markings are most like a Russian. But she's too tiny for that breed. The tabby and calico markings are obvious. For the most part, her genetics look baffling.

What? Never seen one wearing half black and half pink lipstick before?

 Anyway, not that I expected any just yet, but the blog hasn't gotten much attention, so I thought I'd try cat porn. I'm lucky to have such a great subject.

Toothaches and Speeches

I have a toothache, so I went to the dentist today on an emergency, and for $85 she gave me a referral to somebody who actually does the root canal for $570 and then somebody else who does the crown for more than that. Plus, I have to wait for another ten days to go in for the appointment.

I need not ask if something is wrong with this medical system. Everyone agrees that there is something wrong with this, except for the wealthiest people for whom $570 is barely more than a 20th of a Mitt Romney impulse wager. Of course, given the US political divisions now, Repubs will say the costs and long waits are because the government won't get out of the way of the medical industry so it can be more efficient and less wasteful, even if no other country does it that way and every last industrialized country has a better, cheaper medical system than ours, and they don't have nearly the blind faith in the magic of the free market. 

Otherwise, we hear, and many believe it's because those damn patients complain frivolously to the courts, when studies show that more than 100,000 patients die of preventable accidents in hospitals every year. That doesn't indicate complaints about our medical system are usually frivolous.

The dearth of affordable dental care in this country is appalling. Even when I had company paid insurance, by a first-rate corporation, it covered dental pitifully. But dental has been known to be expensive and poorly insured for years. Add to that the pain involved, and many people in the purported premier nation of the industrialized world are going about with medieval teeth.

No functional society would run a medical system like this. No healthy society would even debate doing medicine as a free enterprise endeavor. I think Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley and the Cold War ruined this country and made it insane.

I know I've been terrible about this blog for a writer. Other things just take precedent right now, such writing fiction. That's my highest priority. Like helping other writers, particularly in my writing group. I'm trying to post in here more often, especially since, ultimately, I want to sell my writing and, therefore, I have to be known.

I'm impaired by my sleep being so fragged up. For years I've tried, but I can't seem to predict with any accuracy when I'll be ready to fall asleep, or really, when I'll wake up. Back when I had a "real" job I would force my body to wake up. However, I wasn't awake. I would make incredible errors and my mood would be uncontrolled, from concussions, I think. Now at least I can write whenever it suits me during the day. I just have to make sure I do it and not surf the Internet for hours.

On Wednesday, January 18th, I gave a speech at the local artists guild. The first time I've done any public speaking "in two decades" is what I said. Actually, that time was in front of a classroom. It was probably the first time I did any public speaking since the 80s, and that time I bombed. This time, I didn't. I killed them.

The talk was on plotting and outlining in fiction, and specifically, I presented Randy Ingermanson's "snowflake method" as a possible solution. I spent a week preparing for it, and it paid off. I put some humor into it. For the most part, the humor worked, but I shouldn't go on the club circuit yet. It was a good audience, who wanted to learn.

Other members of the panel did their part and were as well prepared. We were all surprised and pleased about the workshop overall. I thought it would be less coherent, less successful than it was, because it didn't seem like we were very coordinated in our prep, but the prep worked for me and my three cohorts. It went very smoothly, and members of the audience told us they were never bored.

A woman came up to me afterward and said she felt she had been inspired to write. Another woman, part of our writers' group, said she went right home and wrote. I am so gratified that we did such a good job.

However, I sacrificed a full week of work writing and preparing this speech. I don't know how I could have done this if I had a real job. Truth is, I couldn't have. I work so damn slow. It has always been a problem. I don't know if it's from years of depression, concussion or side-effects from medication, I'm generally too slow for any employer to tolerate now. Not to mention the fact that I work nervously making sure I'm not fucking something up.

No, I'm doing the job I should be doing. The one I'm perfect for, and I can't do much else.

How government deficits favor the wealthy.

From my post in the Democratic Underground

Handle: Caseymoz
 

Government deficits favoring the wealthy is not a topic I've heard brought up in any political forum.

If you have buttloads of money you can't possibly use but don't want to lose, how would you rather support government? With taxes or with loans?

And who has the most wherewithal to buy bonds at auction? The rich the middle class or the poor?

The wealthy of course, making a loan is far better than being taxed. The wealthy can collect a cut on their mature bonds, of course, and have then always have the option to sell the debt to recoup their principal.

Therefore, deficits turn the government into an investment for the wealthy. Now ask yourself how does the government pay on these loans? This has an easy answer: the greatest proportion comes from the taxes paid by the lower and middle classes.

Capitalism has its own force of gravity: money attracts money. (Money also has its own law of entropy, but that's a different topic.) Like physical gravity, it's something you don't notice until massive amounts of currency are involved. The key behind this gravity is compound interest.

Nobody yet has seen that it's in the interest of the wealthy to have government deficits. And though I can't prove this, my guess is that's the real reason why we have runaway government debt for decades. Meanwhile, lacking the reserves of cash to make significant loans, the lower and middle classes have an interest in supporting government through taxes. (No pun intended). Taxes favor the lower and middle classes, loans favor the wealthy. If the lower and middle classes would catch on to this, the Tea Party idiots wouldn't be clamoring for lighter taxes and "not punishing" the wealthy. By not "punishing" the rich, they reward the rich. It guarantees the rich will get richer, and definitely, they will get richer at the expense of everyone else.

However, there is a limit to how much a government can loan, and these loans only work for the wealthy if the government doesn't default. That's why you're hearing all these calls for austerity because default is becoming a danger. My guess is, propaganda and deliberate mis-education are behind those calls.

Austerity is nothing but the wealthy demanding they be paid no matter what. It never works for fixing the economy as the wealthy promises it will. Heinrich Bruning, Chancellor of Germany in 1930-32, forced through an austerity program. Bruning, a trained economist, and not a bad man. He and his Center Party stood against Hitler, but his austerity program discredited both. He became known as "the Hunger Chancellor." We all know how well that ended. Austerity is socially destabilizing.

However, then as now, austerity was considered a sound program, because more than half of economics is influenced by the interests of the wealthy.

My sense is that governments have become another investment bubble. Remember when housing was "safe?" These days, when word gets around that any investment is a safe bet, that's when you have to worry. They'll milk it until it's no longer safe, then they'll milk its blood until it's dead. That's what happened to the housing market.

The US government is a two-generation-old bubble. Now Europe's a bubble, too. So are most governments of the world.

So, don't fool yourself about class harmony. Class division is really what's behind the fiscal failure in our state and federal governments, and people need to see it and need to understand how harmful loans at compound interest can be, generally, and how they are particularly set to undermine government. Debt is the leading cause of slavery in the world now. What happens when whole governments are made into slaves?

You either have to default, or tax the rich to cover the debts that they own.

When is telling better than showing?

Unfortunately, beginning writers can come away from classes, workshops and books with the wrong idea about the guidelines being taught. They might not distinguish the hard rules, such as verb-subject agreement and correct use of punctuation, from rules of thumb, like using the active voice rather than the passive. The latter are principles and practices that will usually improve your writing. However, they also have exceptions, and if you don't use some judgment, the exceptional cases will either make your writing worse or put you in a straitjacket. 

I love my writers' group. Recently, though, member criticized me for saying "She was despondent." He said I was telling instead of showing. Never mind that the  character was in a place where she wouldn't have shown it, and it was important that the reader know she was feeling that specific emotion.

I agree that in storytelling, showing is better telling, usually. However, like the active vs. passive voice, where the active is preferred 95 percent of the time, you have to be alert for the other five percent.  Showing not telling, all the time everywhere, can cause you to commit fouls against more important writing principles, including clarity and word economy (or brevity).

This is most often true in describing human emotions. The body language that expresses emotions often doesn't translate clearly into words. Instead of "She was despondent," I could say "Her shoulders slumped." But is that clearer? Slumping shoulders can be things other than despondency. So, how to show it's specifically that emotion? I have to add other details. "Tears came to her eyes." But what if that's not even in character? Well, maybe I change my character so it is. Even then, what in that clause says specifically, "despondency" to the reader? It might be she feels tired and has eyestrain. So, it's necessary to add, "Her posture sank," and it's just as ambiguous. If I choose to show all three just to make sure the reader knows what the emotion is and knows it's significant, I come up with, "Her shoulders slumped and tears came to her eyes, while her whole posture deflated."  Never mind that the character was not going to express it visibly, that's fourteen words when I could have used three. Worse, I'm still not certain the reader would interpret it right. This tempts me to "Show and Tell," where after describing all of that, I still feel I have to add "She was despondent [you see?]. That's seventeen words. Also, using just the three word "telling" sentence gives it emphasis. If you're in the midst of showing, showing, showing, and suddenly you tell, the reader will notice it.

("But Fred," you point out, "shoulder slumping is part of posture deflating." You're right. It's a lazy example but speaks to the paucity of brief terms that might physically describe despondency, or something else. It's awfully hard to find one nearly as short as three words.)

Furthermore, showing here is all for naught. Unless the emotion compels the character to do something unusual, you're not showing readers anything they haven't seen. Showing the obvious gets boring fast. They know the physical signs of grief, disgust and happiness, and so on. In fact, readers can imagine it much better than you can describe it. Just tell them what to imagine. As long as you're usually showing, they shouldn't mind.

That is, unless they're coming straight from their creative writing class.

Overemphasizing these rules of thumb without mentioning exceptions and urging good judgment can spoil writing. The worst mistake a writer could make when resolved to show no matter what is to become convinced that if it can't be shown, it's not important. Outside of a spec screenplay, this is totally wrong. Don't limit your writing like that. Any "rule of thumb" should expand your ability to express, and if it doesn't, you're doing it wrong. Or the rule itself is wrong.

Why write horror?

When I took my recent getaway, I struck up a conversation with this middle-aged retired couple. They were okay until I said I wrote horror. Their reaction was immediate condemnation and disgust. If they had a cross, they would have pulled it out then, and if they had Bible, they would have started an exorcism. Next time I'll just say I write fantasy.

This wasn't the only time that happened. Back in 2002 when I was at an SF workshop, one of the three stories I submitted was horror. The published author and professor leading the workshop said he didn't like horror fiction, as opposed to optimistic SF, and proceeded with an acerbic review of it. He didn't say, “no horror," so how was I to know? SF and horror have a lot of overlap (see Alien) . At the time, I used an earlier version of OpenOffice, which by default saved in a file incompatible with Word. No one informed me it didn't print up right. So, included in the critiques, I got this truly inappropriate blame about the format by a woman telling me she didn't read horror, that it gives her nightmares. Her tone suggested I not only inconvenienced but actually abused her. Workshop rules said we couldn't defend ourselves or speak during critiques. So it was all very embarrassing. I still want my money back; this workshop cost a lot. I will say, though, one author, Kij Johnson, (creator of The Fox Woman series) took me aside and gave a me some very helpful suggestions, though it was to be years before I wrote again.

This goes to show writing horror marginalizes you, even more than atheism does. This poses another question: why would an atheist like me even write fantasies about supernatural beings that absolutely do not exist? The short answer: because reality gets boring. It's part of a larger question, though, why should any fiction author waste time writing characters that they know don't exist? There's a more lengthy answer is also more theoretical and philosophical. Reality weighs on us. Being conscious requires our minds to create a constant waking narrative. That narrative is our mind's interface with the physical world. To maintain it puts unconscious constraints and demands on our minds and emotions. Because that "real" narrative is strictly connected to events and objects we perceive in the physical world, a person's it is rigid and wearisome for us.Yet, consciousness must create, immerse or conform to narrative.

Dreaming shows that our minds do this as intrinsic function. My hypothesis: our unconscious minds crave a "vacation,"  a narrative it can create or escape to, one that has more imaginative freedom than the reality we live in. That is the whole reason for fiction and much of the reason for games. Meanwhile, the mind still craves the stimulation of the unexpected.

This hypothesis might explain the appeal of fiction, but it leaves horror as an anomaly. Why “escape” into something that frightens you? No doubt, enjoying a story or film that scares you is a paradoxical experience to say the least. Evolution has made fear unpleasant, thrills notwithstanding. Though nothing can jump off the page or out of the screen to kill the reader or viewer,  physical safety implies neither a feeling of security nor a psychological separation from the fate of the characters in the story. It's not that audiences are cowards, either. They simply can't see a reason to marshal courage for story they're supposed to enjoy, nor can the see the cause in withstanding the nauseating things described. Additionally, such bravery is futile; they can't change what's already written on the page, and when the story or film is finished, they might not feel relief. Many carry it to bed with them where it prompts nightmares. We all know somebody who has memories of the horror movie that traumatized them as children, and they have never checked the genre again as adults. Of course, such people can't see the point in horror, and their aversion is understandable.

More than any other genre outside of porn, horror isn't taken seriously as literature. Even more than fantasy, it's maligned as exploitative, sensational and shallow. People question the morality of its themes and motives of its creators. For a writer trying to sell his work, it's a niche with few outlets. In most Writers' Market fiction entries, the most common phrase you'll read is "no horror."  (This makes searching for horror with Writers' Market's clunky, inadequate search engine just that much harder. Every publication that says "no horror" comes up with a search for "horror.") It's largely segregated from more respectable literature. People don't want to see those disturbing stories juxtaposed with "real" fiction. Even many SF & F fans don't want it.

On top of this, there are religious and moral objections even to the lightest, most fun horror. Such as, for example, H. P. Lovecraft. (I know; not the "lightest" horror by any means, however, the stories are written on the same general theme that became a cliche fifty years ago. Hence, nothing's left but hydrogen).  Any of his stories are a challenge to any Christian dogma and doctrine. Yes, the Cthulhu universe is fictional, but its non-occult parts resemble ours enough to challenge believers. They have to think again about where the universe might have really come from. This line of thought, for Judeo-Christian religions can't lead to anything but blasphemy or weakening of faith.

Writers, especially for screenplays, are reluctant to confront religion directly. It hurts profits to have your movie banned, and it's painful to have your books burned. Also, many writers have not thought out the tension between horror and religion and are themselves religious. Sometimes the conflict between religion and secularism is played out within a writer, a skirmish in the culture war. A writer can be as torn as the society he or she lives in.

I knew all this when I first began to write. Yet, I was driven to write horror and it wasn't rational, wasn't commercially the best of choices. I tried to go against it, and results were decades of writers' block, which if you think about it, is commercially the worst choice.

And from here, I get to one reason to write horror: even with the low regard for the genre, originality in good horror is a way to challenge our deepest assumptions. In life only a trauma causes re-examination of beliefs. So, horror is like a simulated trauma. Perhaps, this is a way to illustrate the nature of good and evil, conscious and unconscious, spiritual and illusion, in a way that can't be managed in conventional literature, cinema, or in any other genre.

Horror has a long, fine, unappreciated tradition. For an example: the Bible is a horror story. I say this without any sarcasm. How? Look at the Old Testament objectively: a wrathful, unstable, vindictive supernatural being who says He's God, who probably is God, takes control of a small desert tribe. They proceed to massacre the tribes around them and create a thriving kingdom. But this "god" is both mean-tempered and jealous. They must make sacrifices to appease his constant bad temper, and He loves the smell of burning animal flesh and blood, making his altars, and later his temples abattoirs. Meanwhile, his subject people may acknowledge the powers of no other supernatural beings. But since the existence of God implies that others might exist, this proves to be impossible for the people. They incur their jealous God's wrath and he goes on regular killing sprees on His chosen. Finally He withdraws His protection and lets the surrounding kingdoms punish them decimate them.

Look at the psychological elements of using horror in Christianity: horror, original sin, the fear of Hell and of a wrathful, vindictive God is used to challenge people's deepest assumptions. The preacher hopes that these stories will convert people. And, when contrasted with the Christian “loving” God as a source of relief, it works. So, don't tell me that horror isn't effective.

Before I get sidetracked into making this a criticism of Christianity, I'll add horror elements are hardly unique to Christianity. Most religions have them. The Iliad and Odyssey: the Cyclops was a monster, of course. So was the Hydra in Heracles Twelve Labours, and Medusa, even the concept of such a thing is terrifying. There's always a monster, an evil to fight in any culture. Back to Christian literature, there was Dante's Inferno and Paradise Lost, with plenty of horror scenes in both. Then there are Indian myths. Modern horror stories draw on Kali a lot. Examine any of the Assyrian or Aztec gods, and they are monsters.

So, despite its ill-repute, horror is a refinement of ancient literary traditions, that go back long before Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. Take all the horror out of religious scriptures central to our culture, and they will make no sense. The difference today is that it has been segregated into a genre, and people are more skilled in writing it, and depicting it on the screen than they were. 

The reason why horror occurs in religious scripture is because fear makes people pay attention and remember. Of course the writer always wants that in any literature. If you're careful, you can sneak a theme in there that will make readers think later as they recall how scary the scene was. If you're clever and lucky, they will do so many times in their life, especially if you connect it with something commonplace. All writers desire this. As Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, said when asked why his stories were so violent, he said it because he was competing with movies, TV and video games, so he needed to use whatever he had in his arsenal. I never forgot that quote. Nevertheless, he understated it. With the Internet, there are literally millions of writers. If you feel you have something important to say, you pull out all stops to get noticed, get your point across, and get people to remember it. People remember being terrified. We all have memories to this day of that horror movie that scared us as child, made us hide behind the chair, and gave us nightmares.

But let's face it, when you're not in danger, an adrenaline rush is thrilling. Some travel the whole world for it, such as to surf fifty foot waves in the cold water next to a crumbling glacier. People desire horror for the thrill, but readers are not generally thrill seekers. If they were, there are greater ones in real life that entail real danger. They want to simulate the thrill in a safe way.

Moreover, horror stories create tingles just like spicy food, providing a morbid sense of humor, or creating shivers that one can later laugh about. Comical horror is not the brand of horror I choose to write in, however. Yes, my stories do have humor, but no gags. The people in my stories aren't generally laughing. They're too scared, too stressed, and too beleaguered. The readers, separated from the danger, have the luxury to be outside the situation looking in. They can laugh, and, I hope, (I am still a new writer) often do. The humor comes from characters responding to impossible situations, to creatures that "have no right to exist.”

Also, horror stories can and do inform people about life. They rescue us from the danger of too much optimism and remind us of how happy we should be for our good luck. This was the point Leonard Mlodinow made at the end of his non-fiction, non-horror book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives. If you're reading a horror story and not living one, you have every reason to be happy, and also something to learn from a horror story now and then.

So, I've made every point except one: any rational reason I list here is dwarfed by my unconscious mind. I “followed my muse” into horror. I went where my creativity was most fertile, after I resisted the call for decades only to spend the duration with writers' block. What I must put on the page starts deep within my unconscious. After it's out, I can embellish and alter it according to the themes that I think are important. Though even that process is a conversation with my unconscious, a difficult one because that part of one's mind is not verbal. I simply have to try different things until they feel right, while it speaks only with yes, no or maybe.

Experiments indicate that people act first, and then the part of the brain that thinks consciously kicks in to give the "cover story." Even with an electrode in their brain causing their hand to move, the person will claim that they moved it deliberately and will come up with reasons why. Our unconscious minds are really what control us. Our surface mind only provides the narrative to explain it. This implies nobody generally knows why they do things. Our conscious mind is a PR department; it makes our our actions socially acceptable. However, it's more than that. It provides the stories, the threads that makes our lives coherent.

For a writer, it's also an outlet for emotions that are too extreme to be appropriate to the situations of every day life. What if you have more excessive emotions about something than is socially acceptable? You do the best things, but still there isn't enough relief. When this happens, I find writing it helps.

I could resist it more, deny that I am a horror writer, but now that I've seen some of my writing, I know I'm onto something good. It's fulfilling, and I'm not going to garrote the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Update 12/20/2011: I'm sorry it took so long for me to notice it, but blogger cut off the first paragraph of this entry. I've put it back on. For people who have praised this essay and forgiving that glaring error, I thank you for your forbearance, and I'm glad the message came through despite the mistake. I've had so much trouble with the blogger interface, I'm tempted to switch to wordsmith.

Unexpected date.

I went on an impromptu date last night. I corresponded with this woman on a dating site. The chemistry wasn't perfect. She doesn't like horror stories, never read science fiction and seldom read fantasy, and didn't read books that often. So, the possibilities were limited and I told her that after the fourth email.

I get an email at ten giving me her number, saying she's in my neighborhood when she lives twenty miles away. So, of course, I decide to go out and meet her at one of the bars. We had a drink. It didn't come to anything. There was nothing wrong with her, it just wasn't a match, and wasn't a one-night stand. I know, I'm a guy, a stripped down, lean, mean libido. I'm atrocious, but something in me drives me to think it was a success only if it's one or the other. When I heard she had come to my neighborhood, I thought it was going to be the latter. I had my hopes up. I believed there was no way she would come out at ten at night unless she wanted sex.

Or, of course, the other possibility was that she did and I just didn't charm or impress her, but that goes back to the first problem: the chemistry was flawed.

But, on the bright side, it felt good to get out, even in the cold, night air. 

Held Up.

I've been writing as much as life allows me to. I completed another short story, which I read at my elite writing group, who gave great suggestions. I changed my other short story's name and submitted it to another outlet, an Internet site this time. I'm proofreading Chapter 31, 2nd Draft of Ginger Snaps: The Feral Bond, and it will go up on fanfiction.net pretty soon, I'm also putting the whole work up on Google Docs. I'm relieved the novel looks like it will end on Chapter 33 followed by an epilogue, not Chapter 36. One thing the writers' group has taught me, and that's how to write leaner.

Finally, I've been working on a blog entry which has me stymied for now entitled, Why Write Horror?  I think I've written everything I could on the subject, and now I have to cut it a lot.  I'm going to follow that another entry, "Why Love Ginger Snaps?" where I explain why the movie made such an impression that I would write a whole hybrid fan fiction novel based on it.

My new place has been just about perfect for writing. It's mostly quiet and secluded, has interesting things within walking distance. Of course, sometimes I feel too alone, but that's not too bad when I'm getting so much done.

The Occupy! Movement has me both impressed and anxious. I do want to join them, but I have a bad back, bad hip, permanently bad ankle, and medication requirements that would make jail a catastrophe. I wish them success.

Occupy!

It seems the rest of the Left has caught on to what I was said in my previous entry. Too many things have gone wrong, so many that you can't tell which issue is most important because the most serious ones have been left to rot by the system for so long.

Say you want a revolution, but when you talk about destruction . . . well, you know . . . if everyone is counted out, revolution doesn't happen. So, how do you have a revolution without destruction?

The only way would be to do what the Occupy movement is doing. Simply camp out and gain membership and support, and with every assault by authorities, it gains more sympathy. I realize it's not the most stirring way to have a revolution, nor is it really, any plan at all, but it avoids the bloodshed that marred previous revolutions in western civilization and made way for the conservative backlashes that always followed. These backlashes were, invariably, international even if the revolutions were local. The violence of the French Revolution made all of Europe and the US terribly conservative for seventy years. The Russian Revolution generated its own antithesis in international fascism.

Warfare and bloodiness traumatize people and make them insane anyway. I'm convinced that Vietnam wouldn't have happened if decisions weren't being made by leaders who suffered through World War II. War, real violence, they do something to people's minds, something that violent video games don't do. Take Vietnam, and Dean Atkinson, who worked in WWII under General Curtis LeMay. The general ordered firebombings of Japanese cities. Those firebombings took far more lives than the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The one on Tokyo alone killed 110,000 civilians. In Fog of War, a film documentary, Atkinson quotes LeMay as saying if the allies had lost the war, they (LeMay and Atkinson) would be up for crimes against humanity.

Just imagine giving the orders that kill tens of thousands of civilians a night, for a year or two. Imagine what that does to your thinking later. Maybe that's difficult to imagine, but I can illustrate it this way: then dropping Agent Orange doesn't seem so bad, even if it might (and did) kill 400,000 people and cause numerous birth defects. That's only one way. There's also paranoia. A people that oppose you look dangerous, even if they're opposing only your presence in their country, not to replace capitalism with communism.

What the Occupy Movement is doing is far better. It avoids the trauma that make people stupid and turns them into monsters. It will avoid the conservative backlash. I hope it continues. And of course I support it.