Wellsprings of Inspiration Part II: Movies and Teevee

One of the cardinal rules of writing is read, read, read.  Read broadly and deeply.  Read everything you can get your hands on.  And there's this sense that, unless you're writing scripts, you should really turn off the teevee, avoid the theater, and just read.

But you know something?  This is weird, maybe, but I didn't really start improving as a writer until I started watching.  I hit a plateau and stayed there for a bit.  Yeah, friends and family thought I was some shit, but they're my friends and family - of course they liked my stuff.  Or at least were kind enough to say they did.

I think my problem was that I had a hard time visualizing things.  I'd have a few visual images, but a lot of what happened in my scenes was abstract to me.  But then I stopped watching movies and teevee as entertainment and started viewing it as work.  Really fun work, but work nevertheless.

A perfect storm of things came together when I was writing the novel inspired by C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy.  I wanted to write an anti-hero.  Not a hero in tarnished armor, but a really truly true anti-hero.  Didn't have any idea where to find one in my story world.  Then my best friend came out for an impromptu visit caused by his girlfriend's parents breaking up with him.  He brought the best of  Highlander.  He introduced me to Methos.  Something went bing! in my mind.  I watched a few episodes in a sort of stupor and then, while Garrett slept, went out for a walk in the dark.  And a voice started speaking to me, telling me the story of his life in a cultured British accent.  I'd found my anti-hero.  He's got Peter Wingfield's voice, Methos's survival instinct, and no real morals to speak of.  Readers loved to hate him and, by the end, hated to love him.  Perfect.


Don't ask me why, but Mission; Impossible II ended up being a huge goad to creativity while I was writing that book.  I had a routine established while I was finishing the book: get off work, go to the theater to see MI2, go home and write my heart out.  None of the characters are anything like my anti-hero.  None of the situations were even close.  But there was something about it that made the words flow.  The Muse is an odd duck.

But it really all began with...

Buffy and Angel.  A friend of mine moved in, bringing his collection with him.  I hadn't had cable for years at that point, had barely watched a movie, much less a television show, and didn't intend to watch this.  When he asked if I minded if he put it in, I humored him.  Yeah, sure, why not, if it'll make you happy?  Well, he knows me too well.  He put in that episode where Spike's up on a rooftop making fun of Angel, and it was all over from there.  Totally hooked.  I watched all available seasons for both series start to finish in the course of a couple of months.  I bought all of the DVDs.  I barely slept.  Because it wasn't just a couple of shows to me, it was a seminar.  Joss Whedon's a brilliant man.  He knows how to tell stories.  And if you listen to the commentary, he'll tell you how to tell stories, too.

I wrote his words o' wisdom down on notecards.  I took what I'd learned and applied it to my own writing.  Scene-blocking came much more easily.  The romantic bits that had to be there for the plot stopped feeling so awfully stilted.  The Big Bad (yes, I ripped that term from him) started looking a little less cliche.  I can point to that period in my life as one where everything changed.  My writing took off in a new and necessary direction.

Then came Firefly.  I'd needed some science fiction.  Sure, it's space cowboy stuff, but it's outstanding space cowboy stuff, and it's Joss Whedon.  That is all I need to say.

Even with Buffy and Angel's influence, though, I still sucked at the passionate stuff.  Until Alias.  Watching the way J.J. Abrams worked the romantic angles in to very face-paced storytelling helped immensely.  And another thing I learned from him that's proven hugely valuable: don't be afraid to reference off-camera events.  Do it.  Let your characters talk about things the viewer (or reader) will never directly see and won't really figure out.  It gives the sense of a whole huge world that exists when the viewer isn't viewing.  It makes the whole thing feel more real.  As long as you don't make a big deal over it, it's a great trick for fleshing out the world, and telling the audience your characters have lives that go on out of their sight.

I don't watch Alias anymore unless I've got a few months free, because I know what happens: I'll be working on the later books in the series.  There's just something about it that really unleashes the Muse on that time period.

But even Alias didn't do half as much for me as The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I knew Tolkien had inspired very nearly every fantasy writer out there, but I had no use for him.  Too wordy, too archaic, and I really didn't like Hobbits.  I went to see Fellowship because a coworker had no one to go with, and I'd heard it was good.  Came out of it hyperventilating.  That.  That.  That was it.  The sum total of everything I'd ever hoped to accomplish: the drama, the richness of the detail, the compelling characters and tough decisions and impossible odds, the beauty, the darkness....  I went out and got my hands on every book on Tolkien I could find, finally read The Lord of the Rings for myself, and tore down my world in order to rebuild from the ground up (a project still ongoing).  Seeing the differences between the books and the movies showed me a thing or two about revision.  There's no part of my writing that those movies, books and all the rest hasn't affected.  And yes, when you see pictures of me and see that ring around my neck, that is indeed the One Ring.  I wear it because I made a promise, and because it reminds me of what's most important in my life: the stories.  Always the stories.

Yes, I know.  I'm a tremendous geek.  Well, you would be, too, if your whole life had got changed like that.

Believe it or not, Batman Begins is the real driving force behind one of the most important characters in the series.  I'd loved Batman for a long time, mind you.  The idea of a fully-human superhero definitely informs my main character, who's got all of these amazing powers not by virtue of being born that way, but because, like Bruce Wayne, she works her ass off.  They're quite a lot alike, those two, and I've always known it.  But that was comic book Batman.  When I saw Batman Begins, it felt like looking at Sovaal in a mirror.  When you see the trajectory of his life and what he is now, you might catch an echo of it, too.  Their lives have been very, very different, but that melancholy intensity Christian Bale brought to the character of Batman is Sovaal to a T.  And, considering the series is, at core, all about Sovaal, that's important.  The movie gets him talking.  Considering how rarely he talks, that's an extraordinary gift.

I want to state something for the record right now: I wasn't watching House when I wrote up some of my main character's habits, like her propensity for scribbling on markerboards and hounding people for ideas.  I'd already written that scene when, one night, ill with labyrinthitis, I collapsed on the couch and decided to see what my roommate had on the DVR.  It turned out to be an episode of House, and I watched in slack-jawed amazement as Dr. House did the things Dusty does.  I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised.  Both of them are somewhat isolated geniuses and Sherlock Holmes fans.

Later, House inspired the psychiatrist character who occasionally pops in for a bit of perspective and random comic relief.  And the show has validated my markerboard scenes.  I shall let them stand, even though I'll be accused of imitation.

Finally, we come to the reason why I've spent a week pre-loading a month of blog posts in an effort to clear my calendar: Doctor Who.  And I would, once again, like to state for the record that I was not a Doctor Who fan and had never seen a single episode of the show when I was writing many of the scenes in which my main character displays a smart-ass sense of humor whilst leaping into chaos with manic delight.  Yes, she sounds very much like the Doctor, so much so that when I read out a few bits to my best friend a few weeks ago, he gasped in shock and then started howling with delighted laughter.  As he says, she is the Doctor for her universe.  That wasn't intentional.  It just happened.

That said, I'm finding enormous inspiration in this show.  The storytelling is so compelling that it feels simultaneously like an addiction and like falling in love at first sight.  And the reason it compels me so is that it's prompted me to look at my universe with new eyes.  The Doctor's eyes, even so.  Which has forced me to question long-held assumptions.  There are many bits I knew were weak, many places where there was a lot of hand-waving and a hearty, "That's just the way it is!" in place of a valid explanation.  There were assumptions I didn't even know needed questioning until I started viewing things through the Doctor's eyes.  It's poured new life into the stories I want to tell.  It's given me a new passion for storytelling, for figuring things out, for doing the hard thinking.  And I can no longer claim to be an atheist, as I am busy worshiping Steven Moffat. 

There are other shows and movies that have inspired bits and pieces, but the above are the main drivers.  They're the ones I can point to and say, "They made me a far better writer."  They keep me writing.  They allow me to experience my story worlds with all my senses.  And that, my dear flummoxed friends, is why I'll sit here obsessively watching them dozens of times over.  It's not entertainment so much as education.

Not to mention the most important thing: inspiration.

Wellsprings of Inspiration Part I: Novels and How-To

Glacial Till asking about how I became a blogger and Nicole asking about my long-term writing goals got me to thinking about inspiration.

Inspiration doesn't always come standard.  There are times when the magma chamber's emptied, and there's a dormant phase before the volcano's ready to erupt again.  I've gotten used to those phases, resigned to them, one might say.  But I don't sit idle.  Magma chambers don't fill all by themselves.  There has to be a source.  And I'd like to talk about some of those sources.

We'll skip childhood, although I reserve the right to revisit the authors who set my feet on this road in some future musing.  And we'll just have a shout-out to me mum, who spent a good portion of her young life feeding stories to an insatiable kiddo.  Without her, we wouldn't be discussing writing, because I wouldn't be a writer.

Right, then.  We should start with Robert Jordan.  I hadn't planned on writing fantasy.  Hated fantasy, in fact, until a friend forced me to read The Eye of the World.  When I finished that book, I knew what I had to do.  I had to write fantasy.  And the later books in the Wheel of Time have kept me on that road.  Robert Jordan taught me the importance of building a richly-detailed world with vivid characters.  And because of him, I don't fear writing maclargehuge books.

Another Robert, R.A. Salvatore, planted my feet further along the fantasy road.  You wouldn't think that a series of books based on a roleplaying game would be all that special, but if you think that, you haven't read The Dark Elf Trilogy.  Fiction, I learned, and particularly fantasy fiction, was an excellent way of exploring the really essential issues, the ones too tough to face head-on.  And yes, Virginia, you can write a pulse-pounding sword battle.  I once stayed up finishing one of his books by candlelight because the power had gone out right in the middle of one of those battles, and there was no way in the universe I was going to just set it aside until the sun rose.  That's how intense he writes 'em.

Another friend foisted Neil Gaiman's Sandman on me.  Before I read Preludes and Nocturnes, I wasn't a comic book fan.  After, I was.  Spent an entire afternoon in Phoenix going from bookstore to comic shop in search of absolutely everything he'd ever written up till that point.  Neil Gaiman showed me the power of myth and how to weave it through stories, and why it's so very important to do so.

When I made the decision to write science fiction and fantasy, I decided that getting a book called How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card might be an excellent idea.  To this day, it remains one of the most valuable how-to-write books I've ever read.  And since that had been so good, I picked up Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead to see how well Orson practiced his preaching.  Pretty damned well.  Speaker for the Dead remains one of my favorite books of all time.

The Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman taught me the value of a good anti-hero.  I still think it's one of the absolute best trilogies in all of science fiction and fantasy, and I feel very sorry for people who haven't read it.

Connie Willis blew me away.  Absolutely left nothing but scattered atoms behind.  One of my major goals is to become the kind of writer that writers like Neil Gaiman and Connie Willis read, because then I'll know I've made it.  I mean, we're talking about a woman who can tell you, the reader, something the narrator doesn't know when writing in the first person.  I didn't think anyone on earth had writing chops like that.  She also got me interested in science fiction per se, because in her hands, it's far more than just rivets.  She showed me it's possible to be funny and profound and tragic, sometimes all in the same page.  She's amazing.

Lynn Flewelling and her Nightrunner series showed me it's completely possible to write kick-ass, non-preachy gay characters.  I'm indebted to her for that.  And for the best brothel scene ever.  I love those books.  They make me feel that all's right with the world.

Terry Pratchett honed my humor skillz.  And showed me that it's possible to mix science and magic to excellent effect.  And created some of the characters I love most in this world.  Sam Fucking Vimes and Granny Bloody Weatherwax, people, that's all I'm saying.

Warren Ellis did things to my brain with Stormwatch and The Authority I'll spend the rest of my life sorting out.  His Jenny Sparks is one of the most hardcore female characters ever written by any author anywhere in the world.  And he did with superheroes what no one had ever done before: he dodged away from the tired old vigilante or forces-for-good wanker tropes and headed straight for, "We've got this immense power.  We're goddamn going to use it to make this world a better place.  Under our terms."

Which leads me to J. Michael Straczynski's Rising Stars, another superhero comic that went where no superhero comic had gone before.  That one forces you to face issues and questions and dilemmas that most superhero books are too busy beating up the bad guys to pause and consider.

And no comic book paen would be complete without mentioning Warren Ellis again: Transmetropolitan.  Killed my fear of taking characters to an extreme, that did.  And I want to be Spider Jerusalem when I grow up.

Back into regular books.... I love reading the gritty stuff, but I'm not particularly good at writing it.  What I really, really want to be able to do is write symphonies with words.  And there are a few authors who do a particularly fine job of that.

Robert Holdstock's Mythago books weave a peculiar kind of magic.  Incredibly haunting stuff.  Utterly mindbending.  And I had the bizarre experience of reading Lavondyss for a second time after years away, and it seemed like the entire book had changed.  I sometimes wonder: if I open the book again, what will I find?  What will it have become?

Patricia McKillip writes some of the richest, most lyrical books I've ever known.  Just read The Book of Atrix Wolfe.  That's all I ask.

And Guy Gavriel Kay.  Oh, reading him, it's like sailing a sea of sound and sensation.  It's like a voyage home through fantastic places.  When I read The Lions of al-Rassan, I knew, just knew, that was the way I wanted to write.  Not what, mind, just how.  I want my words to flow and dance like that.  I want to leave my readers with that feeling, a bit of delightful melancholy, a glorious uplift. 

But how to get there?

There was this one book on writing, the one single book I believe every aspiring author, no matter what genre, should read.  It's called Writing the Breakout Novel.  I almost didn't read it because the title sounded too much like that schlocky foolproof-method-for-writing-bestsellers! bullshit that's so often foisted upon the unwary.  But I picked it up, and read a few pages, and realized this was something altogether different.  It utterly changed my perspective.  Donald Maas isn't talking about a formula for flash-in-the-pan fiction.  He's talking about writing the kind of novel that endures for generations.  When I read that book, it forced me to reassess everything I'd ever planned to do, and put me on a new trajectory.  I was able to figure out what my stories were all about, really, at core.  And it gave me the patience to go back, strip everything down to the fundamentals, and start rebuilding from the ground up.

Finally (and you knew this was coming, didn't you?), J.R.R. Tolkien.  This is a nice transition from Part I to II, because I didn't like Tolkien until I'd seen Peter Jackson's masterpiece.  I mean, really, seriously, didn't like Tolkien at all.  But as you'll see, those movies got right down into my soul.  I saw on screen what I'd always hoped to do in print.  This led me to attempt The Lord of the Rings again.  This time, loved it.  But I didn't stop there.  I read other books by him: Tree and Leaf, Father Giles of Ham.  I read books about him: biographies, letters, essays by authors inspired by him, books on how he'd created Middle Earth.  I learned about his languages and his motives and all of the things he'd done to make that world come alive.  It was quite the education.  And that was when I went from being a two-bit hack to being someone who could actually begin to craft a story.

So there you go.  There's some of my major influences.  Next episode, we'll move on to the movies and television programs that have inspired me, some of which have filled the magma chamber to such a degree that we've ended up with VEI-8 eruptions.

How It All Began

Here we are, then: the first in the series of user-generated topics.  Glacial Till writes:

I think a post on your blogging history would be cool. What led you to blogging? Who are your inspirations and such. 

Oh, my.  Let's see if I can remember back that far...

Got me start on LiveJournal, actually, many years ago, babbling about writing with and for some excellent writerly friends.  Started me own (now-defunct) website after a bit, still writing on writing, but this was the height of the Bush regime and so some political rants crept in as my liberal tendencies were unleashed.  Because friends had forced me to sign up for a MySpace account and because it was easier to blog there, I migrated for a bit - you can still see it here, if you're that bored.

And those, you might say, are the prequels to ETEV.  So why did this blog start?

Because I couldn't take it any more.

The rampant political stupidity that made me want to howl from the rooftops.  The rampant IDiots, running about mucking up biology education and making hideous movies like Expelled.  Not to mention all of the other rank stupidity stampeding through the world.  MySpace wasn't a good platform for the full-throated rants necessary to counter it.

PZ's the one who inspired me to start this blog, and to celebrate science upon it despite the fact I'm no more than an interested layperson.  This post, right here, is one you should go read right now, because it explains everything this blog became.

Well, nearly.  Getting adopted by the rock stars of geology set ETEV on a whole new course.  Somehow, it had evolved from a foul-mouthed baby blog focused on political stupidity with a smattering of science into something that geobloggers recognized as one of their own, even if I couldn't see that.  But they inspired me to work me arse off delivering the goods.  And that's fostered my interest in science, which feeds back into my writing, and ever onward in an endless circle.

This is still very much an amateur effort.  Someday, maybe even sooner than I expect, I'll make the leap into full-time professional writing.  And I'll get there because of the bloggers like PZ and Bora who showed me the importance of this medium, and the geobloggers and other science bloggers who showed me that all it takes is hard work and passion to write something worthy of reading.  But they're only part of the equation.  I'll get there because of the inspiration provided by my favorite authors and fellow fiction writers/bloggers like Nicole.

I'll get there because of my readers.  Yes, you - the one sitting there reading this post right now.  Without you, do you think any of this would be possible?  Do you think I'd still be dedicating so much time and effort to these pages, if it wasn't for you?  Without you, I'd spend that time in front of the teevee, or tucked in bed with an improving book, or practicing karate with the cat, when I wasn't struggling on alone with a very difficult fiction novel.  And I'd be less of a writer because of it.  Not to mention, I wouldn't have half the motivation to go out and have adventures and take the very best pictures I can.

So, dear reader, when you ask where my inspiration comes from, the very first thing you should do is go find a mirror.

And now I shall take the opportunity to give a special shout-out to my geoblogging inspirations.  I read more geoblogs than I list here, but these are the folks who, combined, form the star I revolve around.  In no particular order, then:

Silver Fox at Looking for Detachment
Lockwood DeWitt at Outside the Interzone
Glacial Till at Glacial Till
Ron Schott at Geology Home Companion
Brian Romans at Clastic Detritus
Ann Jefferson and Chris Rowan at Highly Allochthonous
Dan McShane at Reading the Washington Landscape
Wayne Ranney at Earthly Musings
Elli Goeke at Life in Plane Light

I want to mention four bloggers in particular who have provided more support, encouragement, and food for thought over the years than I ever expected.  They're fantastic bloggers and even more fantastic friends:

Cujo at Slobber and Spittle
George at Decrepit Old Fool
Suzanne at Two Ton Green Blog
Woozle at The Hypertwins Memorial High-Energy Children Supercollider Laboratory and Research Center for the Inhumanities.  Okay, so it's not technically a blog, but who cares?  Especially with a name like that!

A special shout-out to the man who made me believe in bloggers, and who got me thinking and writing about politics so many years ago: Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly.  Before him, I didn't really take blogs seriously.  He's an incredible talent, a wonderful human being, and still the one political blog I turn to when I haven't got time for more.


And, finally, a very special shout-out to Karen, whose comments have so often given me that much needed prod in the arse necessary to keep me going.  How I wish you'd start a blog!

Kevin Smith on Living the Dream

If you don't know who Kevin Smith is, you've been living in a box buried in a caved-in cave.  He's the wildly-successful filmmaker behind Mallrats, Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma, among others.  He's done a run on Daredevil, and I have to say he's just as excellent at writing comics as he is making movies.  He may not be your thing, but you can't avoid the fact he's living the dream.

I've been in love with him since Clerks.  He'd captured life as a cashier perfectly.  So yeah, maybe I'm a little partial.  So sue me.

He's started doing #Smonologues on Twitter.  You can find the very first one here, and it's awesome, but the one I want to highlight is here.  It is a kick in the arse.  It is a reminder of the truly important shit.  And even if you're not a "creative" person, even if what you want to do in your life has nothing to do with writing or filmmaking or art of any kind, you still need to get your arse kicked, because sometimes buttocks need prodding before you're motivated to go live your dreams.

So here you go:

But before all of that, you gotta start with the idea - and not just the idea for the story/movie/novel/installation/song/podcast/whatever. You gotta start with the idea that you can do this - something that’s not normally done by everybody else. Since it’s not second nature to take leaps of faith, you have to SMotivate yourself. Even invent language, if you have to. Embrace a reasonable amount of unreasonability.

But nobody else can believe in you if you don’t believe in what you’re doing. I’ve willed almost all the stuff I’ve done into existence, and if I can do that, anybody can do that. So start your chatter: talk about what you’re going to do. Don’t pursue a role, LIVE that role. Like my sister told me, back when I confessed I wanted to be a filmmaker…

“Then BE a filmmaker,” she said. 

“That’s what I’m saying: I wanna be.”

And that’s when she gave me the million dollar advice…

“No - BE a filmmaker. You say you wanna be; just BE a filmmaker. Think every thought AS a filmmaker. Don’t pine for it or pursue it; BE it. You ARE a filmmaker; you just haven’t made a film yet.” 

And it sounded artsy-fartsy as fuck, but it was CRAZY useful advice. A slacker hit the sheets that night, but the CLERKS-guy got out of bed the following morning. 

So plant the seeds early & take as much time as it requires to will your goals into existence. Keep a few going, you’ll never get bored. Expect moments of discouragement, but don’t wallow in them. Remember that if an ass-hat like Kevin Smith can succeed at something like film or life, then what the fuck is stopping YOU from doing the same? I was not ‘to the manor born’. This shit was not manifest, nor was it ever offered.

And just remember that, when you read about some deal or project, sometimes that’s just some bluffy motherfucker trying to change his or her game by willing some shit into existence. 

Only guy I ever heard of who got an amazing life literally handed to him was Hal Jordan. Don’t wait for a dying alien to give you a magic ring: just do it yourself, Slappy. We can’t all be Superman, but we sure as shit can train hard, and with loads of practice, we can elevate our simple, non-Kryptonian selves to be the Batman. And who the fuck doesn’t wanna be Batman? Batman has an impeccable moral compass. He’s clever & mysterious. And when fucktards get sassy, he punches them in the face. Plus, that car.

Ideas cost nothing yet have the potential to yield inexplicably long careers & happy lives. So go ahead: dream a l’il dream. #SMonologueOff

Be it.  Live it.

This is your year.  No excuses.

BE.

The Wolf in the Fault and Other Stories

I have to admit something: I may be an atheist, but I'm also a complete sucker for Norse mythology.  When I shared my home with cockroaches, I even sacrificed them to Odin.  It's somehow more satisfying that way.

Every Thursday, I squee with glee, because I know it's Thorsday at Lockwood's place.  I love all of the old Norse gods and goddesses, their monsters and giants, their epic tales and their strange Nordic sense of humor.  A good portion of my writing has been inspired by them.  The imagery, the poetry, all of it's just perfect for creating something fantastic.  Seeing Lockwood's posts on the subject brings back all the delight of discovering that non-Greek and Roman mythology kicks serious arse.

Last Thorsday, Lockwood had a bit up on Loki, which inspired David Bressan to delve until he came up with a connection between Norse mythology and earthquakes.  The rest, as they say, is the History of Geology, which in this installment shows the mythical connection between the dire wolf Fenrir (Fenris, if you prefer) and earthquakes (and sparks a little reaction of its own).  Before professional geologists, earthquake science went to the wolves, eh?

Ragnarök obsesses one of my main characters, Chretien Pratt.  The twilight of the gods provides a fitting metaphor for what the world faces in this series (I'm not nice), and imagery of Fenrir swallowing the sun at the end of all things haunts him in his unfinished origin story, where he's learned he's fated to speak the world's eulogy:

I dream of nuclear winter, ash like snow covering the bare branches of blasted trees and shrubs, broken walls of houses, pitted concrete and melted asphalt where streets and cities used to be.

There are no people here, just the great wolf Fenrir swallowing the sun.  When I look at him, I see that he has Jusadan’s gray eyes, and he is weeping.

***

Fenrir’s mouth burns from the heat.  The sun is halfway down.  Only a sliver lights the landscape now, and it’s thin and cold like watery gold moonlight.  Ash drifts down; heavy, silent, bitter.  I smell charred wolf flesh, old decay from a billion rotted bodies, the burned-ozone tang of radiation.

Shades of the dead fill my vision for a hundred thousand miles.  I only see a fraction of them here in this charred shell that used to be a city park, but they represent the totality.  Through them, I see all the rest, and all of them hear me.  I stand on the crumbling edge of a fountain whose statue melted into the pool halfway through the war, hand clenched around the handle of a scythe sharp enough to slice the quarks from a photon.  I have to speak, but I still don’t know what the words are.

I never wanted this.  I never wanted to be the last, and now I am forever.

Someday, we'll talk about Odin as well, who has the unfortunate fate of being munched by Fenrir there at the end.  Did I mention I'm not nice to my characters?  Well, the Norse were really not nice to their gods.

That's probably why I love them so.

It's Not ADD! It's Creativity!

So Jonah Leher at Frontal Cortex has this post up: Are Distractible People More Creative?  Well, being a distractible person who likes to believe she's creative, I found myself clicking through - after, of course, getting distracted by a few other things, like making dinner while watching Head Rush and trying to catch up on Pharyngula.

Turns out there's good news for the terminally distracted:

Consider a recent study by neuroscientists at Harvard and the University of Toronto that documents the benefits of all these extra thoughts. (It was replicated here.) The researchers began by giving a sensory test to a hundred undergraduates at Harvard. The tests were designed to measure their level of latent inhibition, which is the capacity to ignore stimuli that seem irrelevant. Are you able to not think about the air-conditioner humming in the background? What about the roar of the airplane overhead? When you’re at a cocktail party, can you tune out the conversations of other people? If so, you’re practicing latent inhibition. While this skill is typically seen as an essential component of attention – it keeps us from getting distracted by extraneous perceptions – it turns out that people with low latent inhibition have a much richer mixture of thoughts in working memory. This shouldn’t be too surprising: Because they struggle to filter the world, they end up letting everything in. As a result, their consciousness is flooded with seemingly unrelated thoughts. Here’s where the data gets interesting:  Those students who were classified as “eminent creative achievers” – the rankings were based on their performance on various tests, as well as their real world accomplishments – were seven times more likely to “suffer” from low latent inhibition. This makes some sense: The association between creativity and open-mindedness has long been recognized, and what’s more open-minded than distractability? People with low latent inhibition are literally unable to close their mind, to keep the spotlight of attention from drifting off to the far corners of the stage. The end result is that they can’t help but consider the unexpected.

One of the reasons I write at night is because I'm so very bad at filtering out distractions.  There's less of that in the wee hours - noisy neighbors go to bed, Twitter and email slack off, phone doesn't ring (not that I keep my ringers on anyway), cat's usually mellowing on the couch and friends aren't begging me to head out for some fun.  I still manage to lose incredible amounts of prime writing time haring off after tangential factoids, spelunking the intertoobz for things unrelated to my original query, and ten thousand other things unrelated to what I should be doing.  For instance, this paragraph just took me several minutes longer than it should have because I kept messing around trying to rid myself of minor discomforts, pulling up various and sundry songs, and thinking about a zillion other things.

If the research is right, that sort of distractibility is one of the reasons I can build worlds and tell stories.  Instead of cursing it, I should probably be reveling in it.  However, I got distracted on the way to the celebration.  Well, "The Human Stain" is an incredible song.  And my hair needed adjusting.  And Yoshitaka Amano and Michael Whelan are incredible artists, so of course I had to spend a moment appreciating their works on my walls.  Did I ever tell you about the time I talked to Michael Whelan's wife?  She'd called in to order business forms for their gallery back when I worked for the printing company.  When I found out who she was, I asked her if I could ask a very personal question - how old is Michael?  (This was back before the intertoobz could answer each and every trivial question without having to embarrass oneself.)  She told me.  And I said, "Oh, thank the gods.  I wanted him to still be alive so he can do my cover art when I'm finally published!"  She laughed and said Michael would be delighted to oblige.  She's a lovely person, and one of my fondest memories.  And yes, I still want Michael's art gracing my novels.

Where were we?  Oh, yes.  Distracted people and creativity.  Righty-o.  So, this is the article I shall shove at anyone who accuses me of having ADD.  Look, it's not illness, it's inspiration!

Now if you'll excuse me, I've just gotten distracted by something else...

Tip o' the shot glass to Brian Romans.

In Which I Tell You About That Time I Read the Koran

George has this habit of making me think.  Last night, he voiced every thought I wish I had the eloquence to voice on the whole Koran-burning-pastor kerfluffle.  If you haven't read it, go now and do so.

Sums it up rather wonderfully.  And then, there's his promised response, Protesting Xenophobic Ignorance.   Yes!  That's how it's done!  Counterpoint to useless drivel, beautifully-delivered, and without hyperventilation.  Now, if only the religious folk would learn how to react so productively, we might have a dialogue going, and might even enjoy doing it - even when we point and laugh at each other.  Far better than overheated threats of violence and/or howls of "Help!  Help!  I'm being repressed because these people don't agree with me!"

So, that, together with PZ's take, pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter.  Besides, if the First Amendment's to mean anything, some outrageous idiot has the perfect right to burn mass-produced copies of a book on their own property.  Hell, Christians do it to Harry Potter all the time, and I sincerely hope they'll do me the same favor.  Might I suggest marshmallows with that religious frenzy?  Seems a waste of a good fire otherwise.

Anyway.  Due to the fact I had to be at work for twelve fucking hours today, I missed the whole Koran-reading thing.  That's not to say I haven't read many bits of the Koran, and actually appreciated several.  I'll cannibalize anything for inspiration, thee knows.  Back in the days when I had a desk, I used to have the self-same edition George was reading sitting by the computer.  When I got blocked, I'd have a good flip through its pages until something caught my eye.  And I thought I'd share some of those moments for Day-After-Read-a-Koran Day.

Wanna know how an atheist finds inspiration in religious literature?  Then read on.  There's even some religious conflict!

Things That Made Me Go, "HOLY FUCKING SHIT!"

This:

Literally knocked the breath from my body, that did, and then just when I'd got it back, lost it again because Lockwood's advice on how to get to Mars (but not Venus!) was so funny.  Then some more wonder.  Then - well, go read the whole post.  You'll see.

Suffering for my Art

I mean, really suffering.  Unfortunately, I do know what possessed me to watch Never Been Kissed - we're on a chick flick kick, it was on teevee, and it's got Michael Vartan in it.

Words cannot express how much I love Michael Vartan.  I just wish they'd cast him in an actual decent movie.  This movie was decent by a strict definition - as in, not pornographic.  As for having a good script or much of anything else to recommend it (outside of Michael Vartan), not so much.

I have, fortunately, survived this experience.  But I'm left wondering just why the fuck that got played Valentine's week, while a movie that, by all reports (thank you, dear readers), is one of the greatest chick flicks of all times isn't being played on teevee anywhere.  These idiots are going to force me to extract my butt from my house and go rent the fucking thing.

Next time I purchase a computer, I'm getting one that will actually hook up to the teevee so I can get a Netflix account and not have to wait for movies to arrive by mail.  Argh.

Tomorrow night, thankee gods, we have Solaris.  I know it's not a chick flick.  I'm fucking grateful it's not a chick flick.  I can't wait to watch something that's not a chick flick.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch a scene or two from Alias to try to get my inspiration back.  That is, after all, the reason for the endless chick flicks and other movies. 

The things a writer must suffer in order to get the Muse babbling.  I'm starting to wonder if it's really worth it.

And a Chaser

Must Love Dogs.  What a thing to follow up American Psycho with, eh?

Look.  I needed a genuine chick flick.  All right?  Anybody got a problem?  So what if it was predictable and cheesy as hell.  And it's work.  Really.  It is.  I'm, uh, researching what not to do when it comes to telling the Greatest Love Story of All Time. 

And you'll hear no complaints from my end.  I got some mapping work done and got hit with a major revelation.  Not bad for a movie night.

But if anybody wants to recommend some actually really good, well-written, well-acted romantic films (if such a thing even exists), I will not be ungrateful if you should mention them in comments.

My Co-Bloggers Are Too Modest

They could've come here to do their own shameless self-promotion, but no. They tell me they're doing amazing things and never even think to stand on the cantina bar and share their news with the patrons.

So your cantinera's up here bellowing the news instead.

My own heart-sister and mother of the greatest nephew in the world is now the official Orlando Creative Writing Examiner! She's got excellent advice for ye on writing, the universe, and everything. If you're a writer, someone who's curious about writers, or one of those folks who thinks that they may have it in them to maybe someday possibly become a writer, you owe it to yourself to visit her pages. She's my inspiration - let her be yours, as well. Fair warning: you will never ever be able to make excuses for not having time to write ever again. Not with a clear conscience, anyway.

And Kaden has a short story up at Life As I Play It that contains simply the best opening line that I've read all year:

Let it be said that the Honorable Judge Corso was holding up remarkably well with a gun pressed against his head.

Go indulge. And then come back here and let him know what else you'd like him to write about. He assures me he's always willing to put up a post for us, should you have a topic you'd like him to opine upon. His areas of expertise currently include attempting to find a non-crap job in today's economy, video games, creative writing, world building, and a variety of other things he probably doesn't even realize he's competent to discuss until he's forced to provide an opinion. He's one of the smartest people I know, so force away!

I'm very, very proud of my two co-bloggers. Between the patrons and the staff, this cantina holds some of the most talented people in the world. Salud to all of you!

Franken Defeats the Angry Mob

See, this is exactly why Minnesota needed to elect a policy wonk who learned crowd control from a long career in comedy:

This clip of Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) was making the rounds yesterday, and it's well worth watching. According to the person who posted the video, Franken was "staked out" by Tea Party activists at what looks like the state fair "and confronted him loudly when he arrived."

What's impressive about the 10-minute clip was the quality of the discussion about health care reform, and the fluency with which Franken addresses policy details. Most, but not all, of those pressing Franken on the issue were opposed to reform, and chances are, Franken probably wasn't able to change their minds. But notice how the senator guides the discussion, lowers the temperature, and deals with complex issues in a way non-wonks can understand.

No one screamed; no one compared reform advocates to Nazis; no one threatened anyone else. We're setting the bar a little low, but Franken's exchanges with his constituents was a good example of how political discourse is supposed to work.

But one other angle occurred to me while watching this: maybe Franken could take a higher profile among Democratic lawmakers?

Yes, please!

If you don't get a chance to watch the clip, at least read Dustytrice.com's description:

I got to witness something really special the other day. About a dozen tea party activists had staked out Sen. Al Franken’s booth at the Minnesota State Fair and confronted him loudly when he arrived. But within minutes, he’d turned an unruly crowd into a productive conversation on health care. The discussion went from insurance reform, to the public option, to veterans benefits, to cap and trade. He made a few laugh and even told a touching story that moved a few to tears. A whole lot of common ground was found.

I’ll try to post the rest of the video soon. It was a great discussion!

I think he's gonna be one of the greats.

He's a Con, but We Likes Him

More of this sort of talk, please. And not just because it pisses off the Faux News fanatics.

Rep. Bob Inglis weathered a storm at a town hall. And no, it's not because he's a Dem facing down the angry Teabag Mafia. No, it's because he's a Con who had the balls to tell people to stop watching Glenn Beck.

Seriously. He did. Responding to an audience member (inaudible beneath the screams of "I'm afraid of Obama!" and "socialism!" and other such Pavlovian responses instilled by the rabid right), Rep. Inglis said, "The suggestion was 'Glenn Beck.' Here's what I suggest: turn that television off when he comes on." You can hear it for yourselves right here.

Of course, the screaming ninnies didn't like that much, poor babies. Think Progress has a clip showing the reaction: boos, jeers, and a bunch of them stomping out in a huff.

Later, he called a South Carolina blogger and held a good long discussion. Mind you, he called a Daily Show/Colbert Report-watching blogger, and actually carried on a conversation. I'm just highlighting the bits pertaining to this post, but you should read the whole thing to get a sense of what conversation with a non-insane Con can be like (h/t):

Just to make sure, I asked him if he used the specific term “fear-mongering.”

“Probably,” Inglis said. “That’s what he does. That’s what Glenn Beck is all about. And Lou Dobbs. I’ve had the misfortune of listening to those shows a couple of times.”

[snip]

Since we were on the subject, I asked him more about Beck.

“I don’t listen often to Glenn Beck, but when I have, I’ve come away just so disappointed with the negativity… the ‘We’ve just gone to pot as a country,’ and ‘All is lost’ and ‘There is no hope.’ It’s not consistent with the America that I know. The America I know was founded by people who took tiny boats across a big ocean, and pushed west in tiny wagons, and landed on the moon. That’s the America I heard on the streets of Boiling Springs.”

He continued: “The America that Glenn Beck seems to see is a place where we all should be fearful, thinking that our best days are behind us. It sure does sell soap, but it sure does a disservice to America.”

[snip]

“What you saw tonight was people who had been convinced of this negativism, and are detaching from the communities and institutions that hold us together,” Inglis told me. “And I believe in the importance of strong institutions. I’m not an anarchist. And I’m not a Libertarian. I believe in a strong, smart federal government that is able to meet challenges like 9/11, and figure out how to correct its mistakes from Katrina…”

He lost his signal. (He was, after all, on Highway 11.) He called back and we wrapped up.

“I hope to convince people that there’s every reason to be optimistic, and there is a way forward. And I hope to help position the Republican Party as the party that presents a message that America can fall in love with, rather than a message that would drive fear in order to win votes."

I'm marking this one on my calendar, because it is a rare thing for a Con to inspire me. But Rep. Inglis did. If more Cons were like him, we'd be having spirited debates on which road we should take to get where we're going, but there would be no argument about actually getting to the destination somehow. There'd be a lot less selling of fear, hate and paranoia, and a lot more healthy opposition. Bipartisanship might even be possible.

Cons will always be with us (as long as the whole party don't implode through terminal stupidity, which is looking more likely by the day). That doesn't mean they all have to be ridiculous fearmongering shysters.

More like Bob, please.

Genealogy of a Dream

You will shortly understand the reason for this illustration:


Tonight, for the first time all week, my cat did not shove her dear little face into mine whilst howling, or use the bed as a trampoline, or do any of the other things designed to wake Mommy up from her nap because Kitteh wants to go hang out on the porch. This allowed me to dream. I dreamt of Edward (is that his name?) from Twilight.

Now, ordinarily, this would have been a traumatic experience. I haven't read the books or seen the movies, but heard just enough to realize that reading the books or seeing the movies would induce terminal vomiting. However. This dream answered an important question: why the fuck would a vampire want to afflict himself with perpetual high school?

Enter Desmonda. I'm not sure what she was. Some kind of immortal, not a vampire, who as a tween (apparently before becoming immortal, or discovering she was immortal, or whatthefuckever) had been taken in by Edward during a runaway episode. Apparently, he raised her right. The dream opened with her, and she was h-h-hot and Einstein-smart. Picture her, dressed in skin-tight jeans and some sassy red shirt, purse flung casually over her shoulder, dark hair flowing, and striding up the sidewalk with an attitude destined to leave you awestruck. K? Got her envisioned?

She was going back to high school.

She was posing as a teenager specificially so she could go back to high school.

And my brain supplied the backstory: she was posing as a teenager so she could go back to high school in order to make being a nerd so irresistably sexy, so unutterably cool, that all the kids would of course strive to become nerds themselves. She was going to influence a generation to believe brains = beauty (which they do, but how many kids believe that?). And she wasn't just preaching it to the kids, because we all know that talking to teens is rather like telling your cat to go play trampoline somewhere else.

Desmonda meets Edward coming up the sidewalk near the school from the other direction, and lo, he has independently reached the same conclusion. He, too, is returning to high school in order to make nerd the ideal every teen wishes to attain. And I can guarantee you that reason for endless high school is so much more awesome than whatever excuse Stephanie Meyer cooked up that they can only be fit onto one graph if one uses a logarithmic scale.

I may have to write this as a fan-fic story someday, just for shits and giggles. It delighted me. It puzzled me for a moment - I mean, WTF? But then I discovered the genealogy of the dream.

My friend Raji at work had been yammering about having to get New Moon soon, which made me want to cry. I can't believe so many of my friends are so tragically coming down with this Twilight disease.

And the second element was PZ's post, in which he immolates Mooney and Kirshenbaum's vapid new book, then lights a thousand candles from the flames:

In order to be what it is, though, science must live. It's a process carried out by human beings, and it can't be gagged and enslaved and shackled to a narrow goal, one that doesn't rock the boat. Imagine they'd written a book that tried to tell artists that they shouldn't challenge the culture; we'd laugh ourselves sick and tell them that they were completely missing the point. Why do you think some of us are rolling our eyes at their absurd request that scientists should obliging accommodate themselves to a safe frame that every middle-class American would find cozy? They don't get it.

Somehow, they think that Carl Sagan's great magic trick was that he didn't make Americans feel uncomfortable. I think they're wrong. Sagan's great talent was that he showed a passion for science. People made fun of his talk of "billyuns and billyuns", but it was affectionate, because at the same time he was talking about these strange, abstract, cosmic phenomena, everyone could tell he was sincere — he loved this stuff.

[snip]

Our next generation of great science communicators should be flesh-and-blood people with personalities, every one different and every one with different priorities, all singing out enthusiastically for everything from astronomy to zoology, and they should sometimes be angry and sometimes sorrowful and sometimes deliriously excited. They shouldn't hesitate to say what they think, even if it might make Joe the Plumber surly. If you want to improve American science and the perception of science by the public, teach science first and foremost, because what you'll find is that your discipline is then populated with people who are there because they love the ideas. And, by the way, let them know every step of the way that science is also a performing art, and that they have an obligation as a public intellectual to take their hard-earned learning and share it with the world.

Thus you have Edward and Desmonda, headed back to high school to turn science into chic.

Hi, My Name is Dana, and I'm Addicted to House

Don't watch much fiction on the teevee. Not since that splendid summer where I told time by which program was coming on next - back in the day when titles were longer and shows were, well, 80s: Hardcastle & McCormick, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Simon & Simon, Magnum P.I., many others whose names now escape me, possibly because they were too long. That was the summer when short-lived True Blue taught me more practical jokes than I'll ever have the time or cojones to use, and started my love affair with New York's Emergency Services Unit ("When citizens are in trouble, they call the cops. When cop are in trouble, they call the ESU"). Good times, good times.

For years, I didn't have cable, and thus no fiction. Well, not quite none. My best friend, Garrett, brought his Highlander videos and got me thoroughly addicted (Methos is teh awesome). Justin, who's lined up to become my Professional Layabout should I become rich and famous, hooked me on Alias and Firefly. Chaos Lee and Justin together turned me into a rabid Buffy and Angel fan. Through the kindness of other peoples' DVD collections, I didn't completely lose touch with excellent teevee shows.

But for the past several years, I've used my television as an extension of my research (when my ex-roommate wasn't monopolizing it, that is). People told me about shows I just had to see, and I shrugged. Too busy with writing, too disinterested in most of what's on offer. Even the truly good stuff - Heroes, Numbers, other shows that should've been right up my alley - couldn't hold my attention. Give me the Science Channel or nothing. Well, aside from the occasional episode of House.

I first saw House whilst suffering from an ear infection that left me incapable of doing anything other than lying on the couch while the world spun and my stomach heaved. My roomie had it recorded. I turned it on for reasons unknown. Writers will understand what happened next, as I'm sure all of them have had the spit-take experience of seeing one character basically embody one of your own. Turn Dr. House into a female FBI agent who is manifestly not addicted to Vicodin, and you've pretty much got Dusty. Although she's a shade more diplomatic when it comes to forcing people to follow her prescribed course.

Old friends are on that show. Hugh Laurie, who played Prince George on Blackadder, is of course genius. He shocked me with his range. You don't really equate an 18th-century British doofus with a brilliant American doctor. Anyone else have to look on IMDB before you believed it was really the same actor?

Robert Sean Leonard played one of my favorite characters in Dead Poets Society, Neil Perry. I still think of him as Neil. It's good to see him playing an utterly awesome character on one of the best shows on teevee - he deserves a lot more recognition than he gets.

But it's not those two who addicted me to House, as good as they are. It's Jesse Spencer, who plays Dr. Chase. He's brilliant. Don't even know how to 'splain it, but I'll sum up this way: were I dying of some mysterious illness, I'd want him to be the one treating me (and House, of course, diagnosing, although I'd request they didn't follow his first few treatment ideas). Watch how he interacts with patients in crisis, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

(No, it's not just because he's cute. I'm not into blonds. Hell, I didn't even fall for Orlando Bloom until he went back to being a brunette.)

Sometimes, a character will captivate me. I want to study everything about them: the way they move, the way they speak, their expressions, all of it. What this usually means is that they're reminding me of one of my own cast members. And I'll watch obsessively until I can place exactly who. Even if the show or movie's teh suck, I'll watch it repeatedly - hell, I suffered through that hideous made-for-teevee Merlin movie. That was because of this guy:


He made me realize that a minor character was actually the center of my universe. And no, it's not because he's a brunette. Geez, people, I'm not that shallow. And no, the character's nothing like Mordred. Quite the opposite, in fact. They don't even look much like each other, aside from the dark hair and gray eyes, and the slim build. That's all beside the point. He was just enough like that character to get the Muse a-whippin'.

Whoever Dr. Chase is reminding me of probably won't end up having more than a passing resemblance, either. Doesn't matter. The plain and simple fact is that something's trying to tell me somebody.

I'm just grateful that this time, it's using an excellent show to do so.

While I feed this House addiction, any of the writers in the cantina want to tell me about the weird ways you find inspiration?

J.K. Rowling Saves the World

I think J.K. Rowling must be a literary superhero. Check out these moves.

THE HARRY POTTER EFFECT....Via Dan Drezner, the NEA has released its latest survey of reading habits, and the news is good. Fiction reading among young adults is way up, and overall reading is up too. More than 50% of adults read a piece of literature last year. Huzzah!

Check out the angle on that slope! She almost got us back up to the reading level we enjoyed before cable, video games, and the intertoobz all became awesome wicked cool.

But that's not all she's done. She's badass at fighting terrorism, too:

In fact, the interrogator who successfully brought down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — and who has written and spoken publicly about how torture doesn’t work — told Laura Ingraham last month he broke one insurgent after he gave him a copy of Harry Potter.

That's right, bitches. She's all that.

Perspective

Captain Future has an absolutely gorgeous diary up at Daily Kos telling the story of how this photo was taken:

The Apollo 8 mission was to just orbit the Moon, not land. The astronauts had been concentrating on the lunar surface, when Frank Borman caught a glimpse of color on the gray horizon, a conspicuous glow of blue and white against the black sky. It was the Earth. While he excitedly snapped photos in black and white, Bill Anders loaded his camera with color film, and got the shot that became historic. We know it as "Earthrise."

And it almost never happened. But you'll have to head over there for the full story, and the full-size photo. I invite you to read the story, and then just spend a few moments gazing at that cloud-swirled blue marble. That's home, rising in a lunar sky.

There's another photo, not quite as famous, but just as awe-inspiring:


Carl Sagan named it "The Pale Blue Dot." It was Voyager's Valentine's Day gift to Earth, a portrait. The distance was so vast - nearly 4 billion miles - that Earth filled less than a pixel, bathed in a ray from the sun.

Seeing Earth like this places everything in a different perspective:

In a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996, Sagan related his thoughts on the deeper meaning of the photograph:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Exactly so.

Bugger This. I Want A Better World.

Just past the winter solstice, on the cusp of a New Year, my thoughts inevitably begin to play the retrospection game. I hate it. All of those end-of-year "Best of/Worst of" lists drive me crazy, my New Year's resolutions are always the same, and it's not like things magically change on January 1st. Every year I am firm in my determination not to indulge in the sillyness.

This year, the failure doesn't sting. Gazing backward leaves my jaw agape. Just a few highlights: we found water ice on Mars. We learned that America's government approved torture at the very highest levels. The world's economy imploded with horrific speed. Barack Obama became America's first African American president, and gave us all something to look forward to in 2009: a future.

And I became a blogger, joined forces with other brilliant bloggers, and started Carnival of the Elitist Bastards. This is of a piece with voting for Obama. I did all three things for one simple reason: I want a better world.

We can make that happen.

Several years ago, I read a graphic novel series called The Authority. You all know about Spiderman's schtick - "with great power comes great responsibility." Well, Jenny Sparks, leader of The Authority, takes that to its logical conclusion. If you have the power to change the world for the better, that's what you do. No whining, no excuses. Do the job. Fix the world.

Together, we can do that.

We all have our special talents, areas of interest and expertise. We've put them to good use in these last many sailings, battling ignorance, expanding knowledge. We're taking back the word "elitist" and making it respectable again. And it's working. Have you seen the Elitist Bastards Obama's stocked his Cabinet with? There's a Nobel Laureate in there, for the first time ever.

Okay, so maybe we can't quite claim responsibility for that. Not completely. But every one of us who voted for him has played a part in bringing wisdom back to Washington. I claim this year in the name of Elitist Bastard.

We have a chance now to make this a better world. Time we seize it with both hands.

This year, we shall make it our business to spread the love of learning. We shall ensure that the word "elitist" is once again a mark of distinction rather than a cry of derision. We will continue to beat down ignorance wherever it raises its dribbling head.

But we can go further.

Are you fed up with poverty? Act. Support the politicians who are working to eradicate it, volunteer, donate, train people for new and better jobs.

Fed up with ignorance? Act. Watch what your school board does. Push for better education standards in your country. Promote childhood literacy. Educate.

Fed up with war? Act. Push politicians to reach for diplomacy before they turn to armies. Get involved with programs that attempt to bring enemies together. Make people all too aware of the cost of war.

Fed up with global warming? Act. Get the facts out there. Support environmental groups. Plant a tree, green up your house, protest pollution. Roll up your sleeves and clean up a neighborhood.

We can do much more than we think, just by taking action. Signing a petition may not seem like much, but it adds one more voice, turning a murmur into a shout. Donating a few dollars may not seem like enough, but as we saw with Obama's campaign, enough small donations add up to plenty of money for change. A few hours of your time may not seem like much, but a few hours may be all that's needed to change someone's life. Don't hold back just because you can't do much. Become a snowflake, as my character Ishaarda Telsuun recommends:

“The answer is leverage. Place a thousand snowflakes in precisely the right places, and you cause a thousand avalanches.... A thousand snowflakes can reach half the world.”

Ghandi said we must be the change we wish to see in the world. We don't even have to become fabulously rich or powerful or prestigious to do it. All we have to do is add our snowflake's worth of weight to the scales: enough of us together will make them tilt.

And then we change the world for the better.

Corporate Responsibility: BoA Gets It Right

Sometimes, just sometimes, corporations do things that make me proud:

This summer, after months of conversations, some top executives from Bank of America agreed to accompany NRDC staff on a fact-finding trip to Appalachia. In July we flew them over moonscaped mine sites in West Virginia, took them to Kayford Mountain for a closer look at mountaintop mining, and introduced them to several local residents/activists who are fighting to save their beloved homeland from reckless coal mining companies.

Today, BofA released its revised coal policy, which will have the immediate effect of curtailing commercial lending to companies that mine coal by blowing off the top of mountains in Appalachia. The policy states, in part:

Bank of America is particularly concerned about surface mining conducted through mountain top removal in locations such as central Appalachia. We therefore will phase out financing of companies whose predominant method of extracting coal is through mountain top removal. While we acknowledge that surface mining is economically efficient and creates jobs, it can be conducted in a way that minimizes environmental impacts in certain geographies.

Why is this so important? Bank of America still stands as a pillar of our country's shaky financial system. In fact, the trying economic crisis has only served to strengthen this behemoth bank unlike other once proud and stable institutions. All the more reason to engage BofA in using its investment power and influence to affect positive environmental change.

There are some corporations that realize you can run a successful company without being a total ratfucking bastard, who don't believe that "good corporate citizen" is just a useful lie to tell the citizens you hope to suckerpunch. I saw that in action with Target, which does more charity work than I've ever seen another company do and also runs a forensics lab that helps out police agencies without charge:

Turns out Target has one of the most advanced crime labs in the country at its headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was initially set up to deal with things like theft, fraud, and personal injury cases in their stores. Now, Target also helps law enforcement agencies nationwide solve crimes, even murders. Target has worked with the Secret Service, the ATF, and the FBI, to name a few.

Target does the work for free, seeing it as a kind of community service. It doesn't advertise its crime lab services, but word started spreading and law enforcement agencies started asking for help. Some government agency labs aren't as well-equipped as Target's. In other cases, Target can get results faster because of logjams in agency labs.

I've seen the pictures. The place is straight out of CSI, and if it wasn't in a frozen, landlocked city like Minneapolis, I would've been getting my forensics degree and joining the lab. It was pure awesome. They also had safe communities programs running that had an enormous impact in some dangerous areas. I've had jobs I enjoyed more - taking phone calls from angry credit card customers isn't fun no matter how great your company is - but I've never been prouder of the company I worked for than I was with them. They truly did put a huge effort into making a positive difference.

I'd love to see more of this. Most corporations do just enough community service to make themselves look nice, but it's the rare few that actually devote substantial time, resources, and attention to doing right by the world.

Bank of America looks to be on its way to true good corporate citizenship. It's much appreciated. Here's hoping others will follow these companies' leads.

It's Official. The Republicon Party Is Not Smarter Than a Seven Year-Old

I heard earlier today that Obama has sent a thank-you letter to a seven year-old blogger, but I didn't think there would be any substance to the story. I thought wrong.

I now think we may be looking at a future Democratic president, and no, I'm not being condescending (h/t):

Here is why I'm asking grown-ups to vote for Barack Obama. I am 7 years old so I can't vote......

My mom told me that I shouldn't base my election analysis on "feelings" (I like him/her) or "beliefs" (I share his/her beliefs) but on logical arguments. She asked me to create my own rational explanations for my support of Obama. Here is one of my arguments:

McCain and Palin are not be qualified to be President / Vice President of the U.S. The President's job is to do good for the country and the world. To do good for the country, the President must make smart decisions on important situations.

Governor Palin believes the world is 6000 years old. This is absurd. This is not a rational belief. This is a mistake. Scientists, experiments and evidence have shown this to be completely false. Therefore, she is not rational. If she is not rational, she should not be allowed to be President or Vice President.

Please vote for Barack Obama.

No, he's not just regurgitating his parents' views. He researched both campaigns for a school assignment before coming to a reasoned conclusion. He really is that amazing.

It didn't surprise me to learn that young Mr. Stas Gunkel is in the gifted program. I hope he never loses his passion for politics. This country needs people who can think this clearly - and if he's this much smarter than the average Republicon politician at seven, just imagine what he's going to be like when he's old enough to hang out at the cantina.

A heartfelt tip o' the shot glass to his parents, who are teaching their son the value of thought. And a hearty tip o' the (non-alcoholic) shot glass to Stas for showing us all how it's done. You ever need me to work for your future campaign, Stas, I'll be ready.