Rather than do my usual thing of reposting my blog post from 4th of July last year, I’m going to share with you John Green’s special on how this day, in which a bunch of colonial land-owners signed a document that basically flipped off their imperial homeland, became a national holiday. Next year I may do something entirely new! We shall see.
Category: Current Events (page 45 of 91)
The last week or two have been very difficult for me. I’ve been fighting off a pretty nasty bout of depression, and feelings of lethargy and frustration had been vying for my attention. I think I’m emerging from the other end of it, though, and taking steps towards a better future. This is improvement, even if it’s minuscule, and I’ll take it.
Cold Streets is close to finished, and I want to bear down and push through to the end of the draft. For weeks I’ve been saying I need to line up test readers. Well, to give myself a deadline, here’s what I’m gong to do.
The first draft of Cold Streets will be finished by August 27. By then, I will like to get at least half a dozen test readers to look it over after that. If you want to be one of them, drop me a comment here, email me, or reach out to me via any of the social media outlets I use. I’ll send you an invite to the Google Document once everything is set up. Thank you in advance!
I’m also going to outline Godslayer, get a character bio document together, and do some other world and universe building. If I’m going to do this epic novel thing, I think I just need to go back and rebuild some things from the ground up. I have most of the ideas lined up; I just need to get them on paper.
I really don’t have anything more important to say today than this:
DOMA is dead. Prop 8 was dismissed.
There have been a lot of vocal arguments on both sides of the issue. Equal rights is a matter of logic more than it is a matter of morality. Think about it. If you want a happy populace within your nation-state, those people should have equal representation. There’s also the fact that who individuals live with has literally zero impact on the forward progress of the nation-state. It doesn’t matter if the legislators or judges or executors of the government live alone or with a spouse or who that spouse might be, what matters is the laws they pass, enforce, and uphold. It is not the job of the government to impose a particular line of thought, a moral code, or a flavor of faith onto the individual. Hell, no one individual should try to impose that upon another. To do so is bigotry and ignorance and hate, and if we are going to survive as a species, we need to do better than that.
It comes down to this.
No matter what narrow-minded courts, bigoted legislators, or shouting troglodytes say, nobody can tell you how to feel or who to love.
And if someone does tell you how to feel or how to think or who to love, you tell that person to go straight to hell.
I still feel like I’m behind the 8-ball. I’m still running on less than my usual level of energy, with long days and longer nights racking up against me. It’s going to be a couple months until I’m officially on vacation, so I’ll just scrape together what rest I can until then.
Carving out time for writing remains one of my biggest challenges, and I feel I’m failing a lot more than I’m succeeding. Even this blog entry is coming in the middle of the morning the day it’s going up. That feels wrong, to me. I’m going to try and correct that going forward. Emphasis on ‘try’ of course.
Most of the other things going on are of a personal nature, and I do try to keep that stuff out of this blog. This is a space for fiction, discussions and criticisms of fiction, examinations of its inner workings, and the occasional update on where I am with things. So let’s just leave it there for now, shall we?
In the words of the inimitable Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast.”
I spent equal parts of this past weekend wrapped up in my Internets and staying away from them. I started watching Supernatural with the missus, got some chores done, played some Magic. I played some games, watched more Doctor Who, celebrated the release of The Avengers on Netflix. That last thing gave me more thoughts on superheroes, which I will share later this week. I fit in a little bit of writing, but didn’t get to Chuck’s latest Flash Fiction challenge. I will roll the dice tonight.
And I resolved to write more letters.
I think that writing actual letters is an art we are in danger of losing. It’s far, far too easy to just dash off an email instead. Or launch out a vindictive or pithy tweet. All you need is 140 characters! Fit in some swear words! Hashtag something relevant! Retweet! Reblog! Go, go, go!
Writing a letter forces you to slow the hell down.
You have to think about what you’re writing more when you’re writing it by hand. Not only do you want it to be legible, you want it to be coherent and lasting. This is especially true in letters. It can take days or weeks for your words to reach your recipient. The words that you write need to remain relevant for that entire time, if not longer. This takes time and consideration. There is actual art involved with this; don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
Life moves pretty fast. Sometimes, you just have to flow with it. Others, you need to take a deep breath, get some ink your pen, and start writing one word at a time. It’s the same for letters as it is for anything else we write.
Do other writers out there write letters? Do you still get them? Are “pen pals” still a thing?
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