Month: August 2013

The answering of the questions continues. As Samuel L. Jackson said in Jurassic Park, “Hold onto your butts!”

Local activist Christopher Byrd asks:

Barring a cataclysmic event, would you be interested in being a judge at next year’s Buffalo’s Best Pierogi Contest?

Wow, that sounds fun! I know next to nothing about pierogi, so I hope I don’t have to talk like some pompous-arsed foodie — “I find the flavor profile of this one particularly fine, the interplay between the duck spleen and the Jamaican garlic.” Let me know how this works!

Reader Josh asks:

What’s your opinion of the work of T. H. White?

I only know White by one book, The Once and Future King. I love that book dearly and am probably due for a re-read. It’s one of the finest treatments of the Arthurian legend ever written, and it is full of wonderful, beautifully poetic prose, with what may be the most gorgeous closing paragraphs I’ve ever read in any book. Other than that book, though, I’m entirely unfamiliar with White. Any recommendations?

Roger, who always asks a ton of questions, has one very pressing one among all the rest (to which I’ll get in posts to come):

Who is going to win the NL Central? And will the Pirates, who have the best record in baseball at this moment, FINALLY have a winning season, first since 1992?

Longtime readers know that when I was a much more of an active baseball fan than I am now (my baseball interest is basically on life-support), my team was the Pittsburgh Pirates. I inherited this fandom from my father, and during their last run of success — 1990 to 1992 — he and I had some pretty nice bonding experiences watching Pirates games at local taverns. Alas, after 1992 and a money-induced purging of the roster, the Pirates went into a period of rebuilding, which failed. So they started rebuilding again in 1996 or so, and that one failed. And so on and so on, to the point where the Pirates have literally not had a team finish the season with a winning record — minimum, 82 wins — since 1992. Twenty years. That’s not only a baseball record, it might well be a record for all sports.

The last couple years, the Pirates have started out well each year, giving the impression that maybe that was the year, but each time, they faltered badly down the back half of the season to still end up losing more than they won. This year, however, they’ve been consistently good for just about the entire year (after a slow couple weeks to start out). So, as of right now, this writing, their record is 74-52. They are 22 games over .500, and more importantly, in order for them to finish this year with a losing record, they would have to lose 30 games before they manage to win 8. (Well, technically 7, since a record of 81-81 is neither winning nor losing.) That would be a collapse for the ages. The sports poets would sing of that for generations to come. So, I feel somewhat confident in saying Yes, the Pittsburgh Pirates will finish the year with a winning record.

Now, as for their division…that’s tougher. The Pirates currently own a one-game lead in the NL Central, over the St. Louis Cardinals. That’s mostly on the strength of their pitching, which has been excellent this year. But I always have a hard time picking against experienced teams like the Cardinals. They’ve been in the playoffs nine times since 2000, and they were World Series champions just two years ago. I’d love to pick the Pirates, but I tend to be of the mindset that you don’t pick against the defending champ until someone beats ’em. So my pick has to be the Cardinals.

I have a Twitter bet with a Braves fan, by the way: if the Braves and Pirates meet in the postseason, the fan of the team that loses has to post ten positive tweets about the team that wins. I’ll have to say ten nice things about the Braves, who were, once upon a time, my baseball equivalent of the New England Patriots. Wow. How do I get myself into this stuff?

All for now! The answers shall continue!

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Just one today! But first a little backstory. Someone arrived upon my blog today by way of a search string that…well, here’s what I tweeted about it:

That awkward moment when someone finds your blog using a search string that could only be used by someone searching for pr0n….

I refused to divulge the exact and icky search string (but I did admit that it had nothing to do with Star Wars, power tools, cats, overalls, or pies-in-faces). This led a friend of mine, Scotty, to get clever:

So, for my ask me anything question-if I ask what they searched for will you answer?

Well, this is Ask Me Anything!, so I must answer the question, just as Scotty asked it. So here’s the answer to the question, exactly as he asked it:

And thanks, Scotty, for the loophole!

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UPDATE: Grammer fixed to make a sentence say what I meant!

Continuing the answering cavalcade! (And you can still ask stuff!)

Earl has a couple:

Which Do you find more offensive to pledge; one nation under God” or “with liberty and justice for all”?

That’s an interesting and challenging question. In truth, I don’t find either concept particularly offensive at all, although I am always struck by the way the Pledge was co-opted by conservative evangelicals in this country some years ago. I’m still astonished at the way George HW Bush managed to somehow hang the freaking Pledge of Allegiance around Michael Dukakis’s neck like a damned dead albatross. Wasn’t that weird?

I like the idea that we are one nation, and I like the idea of liberty and justice for all. Now, we can differ on what “liberty” means; one of the big reasons I reject libertarianism is because I think the notion of “liberty” that they hold dear is deeply suspect. But that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish, innit? I also have trouble with “under God”, mainly because the days of Americans being able to go through life assuming that everybody around them was Christian are pretty much over. Arguing over whether the Founding Fathers intended America as a Christian nation or not strikes me as generically unproductive, since I’m increasingly of the view that what the Founding Fathers wanted really shouldn’t be terribly relevant to us today. Besides, there’s the fact that the original version of the Pledge didn’t even have “under God” in it; that was added later by Congresscritters who didn’t want to appear too Red.

Ultimately, though, I find the idea of a pledge a bit daft in the first place. What’s the point? Why do we bother making kids recite this thing each and every morning? My love of my country has nothing at all to do with the Pledge of Allegiance, and I generically find oaths of allegiance to be generally a waste of time.

Would you consider switching genres in your writing? Why or why not?

I fear that last night’s post may have dampened this question a little, but I hope not. The answer is, obviously, yes. Or no. Ha!

It all depends on how we draw the lines of genre. Science fiction seems quite different from fantasy, although where the dividing line between the two lies has been an eternal source of debate for fans of either and both genres for decades. One of my beta readers for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) indicated her belief that the book is actually a fantasy rather than SF, and I can see the argument; for me, it’s SF but it’s pretty solidly in the Star Wars end of the pool. So, did I write SF or fantasy?

Now, The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy (not the actual title), the book I started but set aside because I hadn’t thought through the backstory enough, is most certainly fantasy. Or is it? The world and history are completely imaginary, but there is no magic in that world at all. None. Zero. So is it still fantasy? Hmmm!

And then there’s GhostCop (not the actual title), which is, as I indicated, a supernatural thriller. Or, it’s horror. Thing is, many folks put horror in with SF and fantasy! I’ve read quite a few horror books that are definitely horror but which are also quite proper SF. (The Stand is one good example.) So, what genre is that? I don’t know.

Historical fiction is a genre that interests me, but I don’t know if I’ll ever have the patience to do the necessary research. There are topics that could work, though…the romance of Robert and Clara Schumann, for example, or the life of Hector Berlioz, which is a wildly cinematic life, indeed.

Last night on Facebook, a friend of mine named Mark said this:

After I saw your rewrites of movie dialogues, I thought that you might try writing a script or a play sometime.

Screenplays or plays? That’s interesting. My first creative writings that I took seriously were scripts, written in grade school. They were also fan fiction. I haven’t written in script format in years, though; I made the switch to prose in the late 1990s when I finally decided it was time to leave fanfic behind for good, and I’ve never looked back.

Well, almost.

I wrote a script a few years ago, which I often consider deleting entirely. I wrote it in an attempt to exorcise some personal demons, and…well, I’m not going to elaborate much on that. I think I could be a decent screenwriter, but my sense of things is that screenwriters have even less general chance of seeing their work produced correctly than novelists. I respect screenwriters and playwrights immensely and I like to read and study their work for storytelling insights, but I doubt I’ll ever count myself among them.

OK, that’s it for tonight! More answers to come!

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All right, people, let’s get this ball rolling! And remember, you can still ask stuff!

A longtime reader who prefers anonymity gets us off:

Would you like to be a writer full time, or is a mix of writing and some other job ideal for you?

I desperately want to write full-time. Writing is the thing I’m best at, and if I have one major regret in life — under the general notion that I don’t really do ‘regrets’, as I think that most of my screw-ups have taught me something I needed to know — it’s that I spent an awful lot of time not really attacking writing all that seriously. Or when I was, I was doing it wrong. I spent too much time focusing on wrong projects, or sitting with Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in my head on the notion that “I wasn’t ready” yet for that one. Princesses is an idea that came to me in two parts, the first coming in 1999 and the second coming in 2001. I wasted ten years dragging that story around in my head. Now, maybe if I’d written it back then it wouldn’t have turned out like it did…but heck, I don’t know that.

I’ve also wondered if I spent too much time fiddling around with short fiction, which tended to dominate my writing life back in the early 2000s. My short stories tended to be long, and I remember one time I posted something to a writing-based newsgroup on USENET, along the lines of, “I can’t seem to write genuine short stories! Every one I write ends up being well over 10000 words!” To which one woman, a published writer, responded, “Sounds to me like you’re a novelist at heart. Write books.” Did I listen to that advice? Well…not so much.

I believe that we should figure out what we’re best at, and then focus like a laser on being that. I’m late to the party on this philosophy, and now I’m paying the price in terms of not being published yet. I’ll get there, though.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to a point where I can write full-time. But that’s the goal I’m going to move toward until the day I can’t write anymore. The incentives are too great. I want to do what I’m best at; I want to tell the stories that are in my head; and I want a job where I can wear overalls every single day (and let’s be honest, farming and construction are unlikely at this point in my life, as much respect as I have for both).

Do you read non-fiction (e.g., history, science and nature, biographies)? If so, what do you read? Do you wish you read more?

I always wish I read more! Always always always. In fact, I’m planning to start setting limits on my Internet time and start turning off the Wifi when I need to be working — and I’m planning to include reading time as working. It’s the only sensible thing to do. No, I’m not planning to drop offline entirely, because I like the social networking stuff too much, and I also tend to think that by the time I get a book out there in one form or another, I’ll have a built-in audience to start with!

As for the non-fiction I read: I always try to have some kind of nonfiction going. I like all of it, but I especially like writing that is narrative based: nonfictional storytelling that gets the factual stuff in by way of other tales taking place in and around the history. Good travel writing is wonderful for this. Reading nonfiction is essential because it gives me ideas for stories, and it gives me details from the real world that I can incorporate into my stories. Quite a lot of stuff I’ve read has gone into the two Princesses books already.

You know what I really don’t do enough of, either? Blogging about what I read. I need to do more of that, too.

Bonnie asks:

Did you ever finish your “Battlestar Galactica” rewatch? I was wondering what you thought of the series as a whole, especially the ending.

I’m sorry to report that…no, I have’t finished it. I took a break from the show, and then way lead on to way, as it does. I absolutely intend to return to it, though! I was about halfway through Season Two, I believe; they had just recovered the Arrow of Apollo and used it to find the way to Earth. I didn’t stop for any reason other than I wanted a break — I’d been watching two or three episodes a week, and I generally don’t do intensive rewatches where I do marathons. I did not intend the break to get this long, though.

More answers to come! And feel free to ask more, if you like!

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