Monthly Archives: April 2006

Treason

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Has every president this nation has ever had been recommended for impeachment? It seems like I keep hearing that word being bandied about lately. Whether or not impeachment is deserved and justified for our current president, one of the motivating factors behind the call for impeachment is treason. I admit I have been somewhat confused by this. Last I checked the charge of treason is typically leveled at someone who turns against their own nation with the intent of bringing it down and destroying it by delivering it into its enemies hands. I don’t see that happening. I guess I’m just confused by all this.

I realize that a lot of people are upset with the present administration. Seems like we go through this every four to eight-year cycle. As much as I support our president, even I have been dissatisfied with some of the decisions he’s made. ((Especially where it comes to fiscal responsibility.)) Despite all the criticisms, however, treason is _not_ one charge that I think can be honestly leveled at him. I do believe that his decision to go to war with Iraq and take down a vicious dictator, along with all the other military decisions he’s made, was done so with this country’s best interests and protection at heart. I believe our president loves this land dearly, else he wouldn’t have taken up the seat he has held for the last six years. However good or bad some of his decisions have been, I don’t believe that treason has played any part in it. Frankly, if people really believed it did, I doubt very highly that he’d still be sitting in the Oval Office today.

I’m still very disillusioned with politics and with the powermongers who claim to be doing their best to meet the needs of the people they represent. In no way, however, do I think that my attitude toward these men and women gives me the right to make unfair and untrue accusations against them, nor should it give anyone else the right to do so. If you are going to challenge the authority and integrity of our leaders, such challenges ought to be restricted to those issues that actually exist, not these fictional fantasies that are contrived just so that one can fuel the momentum behind their own power play. To this date, I’ve yet to see treason enter into any political argument with any kind of veracity and staying power.

Writing Contest

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“Jason Evans”:http://clarityofnight.blogspot.com/ is running a very interesting “story contest”:http://clarityofnight.blogspot.com/2006/04/two-lights-short-fiction-contest.html right now. Start with a photograph of two lamps, and in 250 words or less, create a work of fiction. The contest ends Thursday night at 8:00 PM (EDT), so if anyone’s interested, there’s still time to write something and submit it.

You can find my entry “here”:http://clarityofnight.blogspot.com/2006/04/entry-18.html.

Nerve-wracking

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It’s kind of weird – I thought I was immune. I’ve heard about other writers who, when they complete a story, discover they have trouble submitting it anywhere. The fear of rejection makes them nervous, thus making it difficult to send the story out in the first place. Some writers, I’m told, never get past that obstacle. I always scoffed, thinking to myself that if you never take the risk and submit the story, you’ll never really get started. I figured that I would probably never have trouble submitting stories of my own, once the time came.

I’m discovering, though, that the fear is, indeed, there. Granted, I’ve already submitted my first story and been rejected. Of course, this doesn’t really make it any easier to submit again, despite the fact that I knew it would have to be extraordinarily stellar writing in order for my first work to get accepted anywhere. Now, I have these visions in my head of the editors laughing as they read my story, mocking it and making fun of it, shaking their heads with tears of laughter streaming down their faces as they wonder why any writer as pathetically bad as me would ever imagine I might be able to get published. I picture them sending that rejection letter back to me with glee as they pronounce my story doomed, having fed it to some firy hellbeast, such being the horror of the work I produced.

Then again, I’ve always had an active imagination – both my greatest ally and my greatest adversary. The very thing that provides me my story ideas is the thing that makes it so easy for me to visualize my failure.

I’m actually very eager to submit another story somewhere, but I’m also nervous about the proposal of doing so. Story #2 is in its first draft form, and I still face the daunting task of figuring out where I should send it, once the final draft is complete. I’d love to submit it to the same place that Story #1 went – it’s a fantastic magazine – but fear says that the editors will see my name on it and trash it out of hand, without ever reading it, because they might remember how bad the first was. In actuality, they will probably be lucky to remember my name, given the number of stories in the slush pile they must read each month. Still, the prospect of submitting is a bit frightful, and there are lots of places out there that might be willing to give a new writer a fair chance. Guess I’ll just have to try a few out.

With

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It’s not until you run a search on a short story you’ve just completed that you discover just how strange (silly?) the word ‘with’ sounds.

Fairy Tale

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It was a chance encounter, one he never would have realistically expected. Dreamed about, sure, and he had on several occasions, usually for just a few moments after watching one of her films. They were little more than casual daydreams, really, and not the sort of crudities he would often hear the other guys spouting to each other. No, his were of the simple, boyishly charming variety – boy meets girl, boy smiles at girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy rides with the girl off into the sunset. Overly romantic and old-fashioned, maybe, but he’d seen the way most other guys looked at women, and he was disgusted at the way the majority of his own gender thought of women as little more than sexual playthings. There was so little room these days for seeing women with the respect and honor they deserved. It almost made him ashamed to be male.

Unfortunately, those Hollywood types weren’t much better. Here were high-profile people, living in the spotlight everyday, the details of their lives laid out there for everyone to examine, and they couldn’t manage to keep themselves out of trouble. Hollywood marriages were a joke, a farce to justify their indiscrimant sexual proclivities, and everyone but the celebrities themselves seemed to know it. Or if they did know it, they didn’t seem to care. Another wedding would be announced in the tabloids, and everywhere people were putting money down on how long _this_ one would last.

It made him sad to think about it, imagining some guy telling her that he loved her and convincing her to marry him, when he would probably only end up divorcing her later to move on to the next young thing that attracted his eye. And maybe he really _would_ love her to start with, or at least convince himself that he did, but it made him angry to think of her being treated with such casual disregard by so many of these men who noticed and lusted after her.

The probability of falling in love with and marrying someone with whom you work or associate closely on a regular basis is high – higher, even, in the case of those who grace the silver screen, since many roles involve some sort of romantic involvement with the movie’s characters. Somehow, that false, on-screen romance ends up translating into some sort of fanciful assurance of what real-life romance between the actors will be like. Only thing is, once the intial glow wears off, too many of them realize how much they dislike their spouses or prefer someone else over the one they supposedly made a lifelong promise to, and another Hollywood marriage disolves into bitter words and harsh accusations.

That was the reality of show business, he supposed. Too bad he would never get the chance to show her what it would be like to be loved by someone who would actually take care of her and look out for her best interests, even above his own. He was a sucker for those who needed protection, and somehow he thought maybe she was a woman with such a need. He wouldn’t treat her as just some possession to satisfy a physical need. No, he would look out for her, take care of her, and protect her from the kind of people who would seek to take advantage of her. She was beyond reach, though, outclassing him by far. He would never be able to demonstrate to her what true, self-sacrificial love looked like, to prove to her, to himself, to everyone else that there are actually men out there who know how to take care of the women they love with the tenderness and love they deserve.

The line in the little coffee shop he frequented had reached the counter by this time, and he absent-mindedly ordered his usual cuppajoe. He chided himself for getting lost so completely in his peurile heartache, but for some reason today he he just couldn’t leave it alone. So, when he turned away from the counter to search for a table, preferably near a window where he could set up his laptop and work, he was startled when he bumped his shoulder into someone, sloshing his coffee onto the floor and burning his fingers. He mumbled an apology, and it was only after he had grabbed some napkins and set his coffee down that he had a chance to notice who it was he had carelessly caromed off of.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” he stammered. Had it been just anyone else, that would have been the end of it – an apology and move on – but this _wasn’t_ just anyone. It was _her_, and suddenly he felt his knees go weak. She was hunched down, already mopping her own spilled coffee up from the floor. He just stood there, gaping, for a moment. It took a couple of very deliberate blinks just to make sure that he hadn’t somehow gotten so lost in his thoughts that they had taken on a life of their own.

“It’s no problem,” she replied without looking up. “It was my fault for standing so close.” His face flushed with embarrassment, and he shook himself out of his trance. Grabbing some more napkins, he bent down and started helping her clean up.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said.

“Sure, I do. If I hadn’t bumped into you, you wouldn’t have dropped your coffee on the floor,” he explained. “Let me buy you another cup.” She looked up at him then, smiling, and he almost melted onto the floor right there. She was even more beautiful in person than on the silver screen, and he felt like his tongue was suddenly tied in knots.

“Thank you; that’s very kind of you.” He just nodded, desperate for a diversion to cover up the fact that he was too flustered to speak. He didn’t trust his voice to not give away his emotions. His face burned, and he imagined that his cheeks were so red that she had already surmised his infatuation. He was pleased, though, that his voice sounded even and controlled when he ordered her a replacement coffee.

When he turned back, he found that she was standing just behind him, and he felt those butterflies twirl through his stomach again. One of the store employees had located a mop and was cleaning up the rest of the spilled coffee.

He handed her the coffee. “Here you go. I’m really sorry about making you drop your coffee.”

“Not a problem. Really. At least you didn’t get any on your clothes.” That smile again. It almost made him giddy to see it.

He chuckled, somewhat nervously. “Yeah, but I don’t think my poor fingers will ever be the same.” He shook his hand dramatically, even though the pain from the hot coffee had already mostly faded away.

She raised her cup to him slightly. “Well, thanks again for the refill.”

He shrugged. “Least I could do.” He turned and started to walk away when he felt a hand on his elbow. He turned his head to see her looking up at him, a wry smile on her face.

“Would you care to join me?” She motioned to a small corner table lit by the warm morning sunlight. “I’d love some company, and you seem the gentlemanly sort.”

He grinned sheepishly. “I’d love to.”

New Email Subscription Tool

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“Feedburner”:http://www.feedburner.com has finally added an email subscription feature that I like quite a bit more than the “FeedBlitz”:http://www.feedblitz.com tool I was using previously. The format of the email that Feedburner sends out is less graphicly heavy (and gaudy) than FeedBlitz’s, looking much more like the “feed page”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/WritersBlog that you see when you click on the link on my front page. As a result I’ve switched the subscription form so that when people sign up to receive new posts by email, it will now come from Feedburner rather than FeedBlitz.

For those of you currently subscribed, if you’d like to receive a simpler-looking email, feel free to subscribe to the new format (and unsubscribe from the other). Or email me and I can take care of making the switch for you, leaving you with just having to click on the link in the confirmation email for the new subscription.

Additional note: Make sure to check your filters and your spam folder before emptying it, as the confirmation email may get redirected away from your inbox, and no email will be sent until the address is confirmed.

Flogging the Quill: Don’t get me started

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Flogging the Quill: Don’t get me started

It’s always fun to find a good, constructive article pointing out some to-be-avoided subtleties that we all tend to unconsciously write into our stories. Ray Rhamey, over at “Flogging the Quill”:http://www.floggingthequill.com/flogging_the_quill/ touches nicely on two more things to watch out for in our writing – “started/began to” and “with.” I’m not sure about the first one – I’ll have to check over some of my stories – but I do know that I’m guilty of abusing ‘with.’ I’m definitely going to have to keep a sharper eye out for that. Ray’s article is a very instructive and amusing read. Go check it out!

Nothing More Than Feelings

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“Follow your heart.”
“Do what feels right.”
“If it feels good, how can it be bad?”

Do any of these sound familiar? And this one may _seem_ like it’s different from the three above, but it’s not:

“You have to do what’s right for you.”

These are some of the most common phrases heard in our culture today. Postmodernism has infiltrated just about every aspect of our lives. Truth is no longer conceived of in absolute terms, so people are free to determine truth for themselves. ((Do you see the irony in that statement?)) Ultimately, what happens is that people use themselves for their reference point, since in a relative-truth world there _can_ be no other reference point than one’s own experience. More specifically, people end up using their own feelings and emotions to guide them because feelings are powerful, salient, and readily available.

There are two major problems with this system. The first is that feelings are inherently self-serving. This is not necessarily a problem all the time, since our feelings are a prime motivator for protecting our hearts from emotional harm at the hands of another. Where the problem comes in is when following our feelings causes us to pursue our own wants and desires, everyone else be damned. I have seen many people hurt because someone else ‘followed their heart’, making decisions that were ultimately detrimental to other people around them.

The second problem leads logically from the first. Feelings are not always accurate reflections on reality. In essence, just because I happen to feel a certain way does not necessarily mean that the situation at hand fits well with that feeling. For instance, I can feel supremely confident about my ability to handle Situation B because I feel great about the way I handled Situation A (which is, in my mind, similar or related to Situation B). But I quickly find, upon taking on the tasks of Situation B, that I do not, in fact, have the ability to handle Situation B at all, thus I fail. The mistake here is in trusting my feelings to guide me because they were not giving me an accurate picture of the situation.

We live in such an individualistic society that pursuing our own needs, wants, and desires before those of others is simply a matter of course. It’s so natural and instinctive that we do it without even thinking about it. So, it’s logical that our philosophies have changed to more easily allow us to do this. Now, we justify our selfishness and self-involvement by urging each other to follow our hearts and to do what feels right, even when what feels right really isn’t. We are quickly losing any sense of what is true and good and right, except for what we determine for ourselves. Yet, somehow, we have failed to see that people are themselves flawed and prone to mistakes. So, how can people who make mistakes somehow determine what is true and right based upon their own flawed feelings? Yet we do so every day.

Feelings do compliment the decision-making process quite well. Yet, feelings are also unruly and fickle, changing almost at the drop of a hat. Feelings make terrific servants but horrible masters, and as such, they must be governed and controlled as best as possible. No decision should _ever_ be made exclusively at the behest of the emotions. Such a thing is risky because the emotions can, and will, deceive. Logic and rationality must win out when making decisions. They can, however, consult the emotions, but the message of the emotions must be taken with a grain of salt. That niggling sense of fear could tell you that something is wrong about your decision, that maybe there are other factors that need to be considered; or that fear could simply be the fear of stepping into a new situation. Emotions can provide indicators of what _might_ be, but they should not be relied upon to tell you what _is_.

Keep a short leash on those feelings. And whenever someone tells you to just do what feels right, remind them that there is a better way. Engage that brain and push the heart to the background. Letting your heart rule over your mind is surefire way to get yourself into deep trouble. ((By the way, following one’s heart can be good when pursuing one’s dreams. Just make sure that in doing so, you aren’t stepping on everyone around you, that you are considering more than just your own personal needs and desires.))

Respect for What’s Important

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bq. If you can’t laugh about your religion or personal beliefs on occasion then you need to take a serious look at what it means to you. You can find humor in any situation.

I ran across this quote earlier today, and it gave me pause. A lot of non-religious folk quip and make jokes (or simply snide remarks or witticisms) about various religions, laughing to each other over the punch line and nudging each other in the side as they watch the people about whom the joke was made vent and fume and react with offense. Then, they can’t understand why these people get so upset over what was so obviously a joke, telling them that they really need to learn how to have a sense of humor. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard this recently. Person A cracks joke about Person B. Person B gets offended and responds with words to that effect. Person A puts up his hands and says, Now hold on, pardner, itwasjustajoke. Person B is not placated because he cannot see any way in which the joke was funny. Person A chalks Person B off as being an extremist or having an underdeveloped sense of humor (or both).

What we actually have here is a failure for both parties to understand each other.

For Person A, who made the offensive joke, he fails to understand that Person B’s religious beliefs are _very_ important to him. They are, in fact, an integral part of Person B’s way of life. When Person B hears Person A making the joke about his own beliefs, what he hears is someone ridiculing and mocking his beliefs. What Person A is saying, by implication, is that Person B’s beliefs are stupid and childish. Even if Person B doesn’t know Person A from a stranger on the street, Person B is still hurt on a personal and emotional level because no one likes to be told that their beliefs are stupid, particularly when such a message is communicated via mockery. That mockery stings and hurts, and most people placed in such a situation are going to react defensively in some manner or another. What Person A fails to understand is just how important Person B’s beliefs are to him. Yet, when the roles are reversed, Person A reacts with offense whenever Person B (or Persons C, D, E…) make jokes about a belief that Person A holds particularly dear. Person A cannot find anything funny about Person B’s joke, just as Person B could not find anything funny about Person A’s joke. In both instances, the belief joked about was held dear by the joke’s ‘victim’, making it no laughing matter for that person. Unfortunately, Person A gripes about how unfair Person B’s joke was, often forgetting about how unfair his own joke about Person B was. Person B, on the other hand, fails to grasp how unimportant his own beliefs are to Person A and forgets that he should not take Person A’s joke personally. So Person B ends up reacting in a way that does little to make the situation better.

Sure, it hurts to have others make fun of you for your beliefs. But unfortunately, it is also a part of life. Lashing out because you feel hurt is not usually a good way to handle the situation and, in fact, typically only serves to justify the point of the joke. If you are going to address the joke at all, ignore the joke itself and discuss the _point_ of the joke. Make a good discussion about it, and don’t let yourself get all up in arms about it.

Water off a duck’s back, as they say.