You have until tomorrow to put your name in for one of three advance copies of A Star Shall Fall up for grabs on GoodReads, and until the 15th to submit a non-alcoholic drink recipe for the launch party (with a signed copy of Deeds of Men as the prize). Time’s running out!
Edited to add: Remember, you don’t have to be coming to Sirens to enter the drink contest; it’s open to everybody. (The costume contest, for obvious reasons, requires that you be there.)
Making a new post here because it’s easier than replying to everybody who brought up the same points.
Thanks for the input from everybody. I can’t give you the reason why my characters want a second baptism performed, as it would be too much of a plot spoiler, but the short form is that this is a fantasy novel; the reason for it is metaphysical, and can’t be solved by that character going to confession. You’ve given me what I need, though: the reason why baptism isn’t repeated, and then the conditional form that the priest would use once they convince him, against his better judgment, to do it. (I suppose I could have the characters perform the baptism themselves, but it loses a bit of that ritual and narrative oomph, which they would be very eager to have on their sides.)
So now I can write an argument about whether there’s any other power in the world capable of annulling the gift of God’s grace, and that was what I needed. Once I have the scene written, I’ll find somebody who knows the specifical historical Church practices to read it over for me and tell whether it works. (If any such person reads this post, do let me know; the scene takes place in 1884, post-Vatican I but pre-Vatican II.)
To my Catholic readers, or anybody else familiar with the nuances of Catholic policy regarding baptism, especially nineteenth-century policy on same:
1) If an adult converts to Catholicism, do they receive a Catholic baptism? Is the answer to that question dependent at all upon whether they were previously baptized in a different Christian denomination? Does age affect it, and if so, what’s the cut-off point for different treatment?
2) If there were, for plot reasons, a character who had originally been baptized into the Catholic church, who really really needed to be re-baptized in the same tradition, how would the argument about that go? (As I understand it, re-baptism isn’t something that’s supposed to be done, but there’s an unusually compelling reason for it in this case; what I’m asking for is basically a run-down of the objections the priest would make, that my characters can then overcome.)
3) Does anybody have a handy link to the text for the baptismal rite Catholics used in the nineteenth century?
For no explicable reason, I slept until 1:30 today.
Apparently I was really, really tired?
Sometimes I think it might be refreshing to break my arm.
I don’t want a broken arm, of course. But if I’m going to injure something, it might be a nice change of pace to have it be something on the upper half of my body, instead of the lower.
What brings this on? Oh, the little toe of my left foot, which I have just broken for the third freaking time. Also the middle toe of that foot, which is sprained: a nice companion to the sprain in the big toe of my right foot that I suffered last year. And the ankle surgery when I was nine, and the ankle surgery when I was twenty-nine — same ankle, natch — not to mention the countless sprains on that front over the years. And (for a minor change of pace) the damaged cartilege in my left knee, and the problem with the saphenous nerve in my right leg that never did get explained but eventually went away.
But I suppose between me and my brother’s four broken arms*, we balance out. Whoever was responsible for dealing out injuries to my family really needed to shuffle the deck better.
Anyway, in the grand scheme of things this is minor; I probably won’t even get it x-rayed. (There’s no point unless the fracture is displaced enough to potentially cause mobility problems later on, and at the moment there’s no particular reason to think that’s the case.) It is certainly not truepenny‘s recent catastrophe with her ankle. But I gotta say that it’s bloody annoying.
*That is, he’s had a broken arm four times. He does not have four arms that got broken.
Today has not started off terribly well, but it’s at least partially ameliorated by the fact that I got author copies for A Star Shall Fall! They are so very shiny. (Okay, they’re actually not shiny at all; the cover is matte, not glossy. But you know what I mean.)
In celebration of this, and of the A Star Shall Fall contest, and of the discussion for Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie, I’m giving away some more copies on GoodReads — three this time, actually. Plus you still have one day to put your name in for a copy of In Ashes Lie. So it’s Yay Book Day here at Swan Tower, and you’re all invited!
I promise I won’t keep going on about this forever. But if you want a one-stop shop for the highlights of Judge Walker’s decision on Perry v. Schwarzenegger, this one’s pretty good; for bonus points, you can read about what’s up with those “strict scrutiny” and “rational basis” things.
I am so very much not a lawyer, so if there are flaws in either of those posts, I cannot point them out to you. (Actually, can anybody explain to me what’s up with the way the material from this trial will be used going forward? I’ve gotten the impression that the testimony offered there, and the way Walker approached the decision, is going to be really important to how the appeals process goes — i.e. it’s a really, really good thing for the Prop 8 opponents that Walker was so thorough from the start, because it will make it harder to defend Prop 8 in the future — but I don’t really know how that works. Back to my original point –) Those two posts did a lot to help me understand what the points at stake were, why Walker shot the defense down, and what kind of standard(s) will have to be met in order to deny sanction to same-sex marriage. If you need clarification, those two posts seem a good place to start.
With various responses to the Prop 8 decision floating around out there, I was particularly struck by this tweet, which articulates a divide I’ve been chewing on for some time: Californians knows that marriage is a civil right, not a privilege.
“Privilege” is a word that’s seen widespread use lately, in the context of society’s treatment of different groups of people: white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, able-bodied privilege, etc. There are many lists out there pointing out what kinds of advantages a person is likely to enjoy if they fit into the preferred group, and how many of those advantages aren’t even the kind of thing you think about in your daily life (unless you don’t have them). But I think there’s a blurring that happens in some of those lists, which I want to look more closely at: the difference between privileges and rights.
Privilege is, literally, private law. It’s a special exception made for favored individuals or groups. Centuries ago, a nobleman might be given the privilege of hunting deer on the king’s land; today, I pay for the privilege of checking books out from Stanford’s libraries, which is otherwise reserved only to their students and staff. If the king decides he doesn’t want anybody shooting his deer, or Stanford decides they don’t want to deal with outside users, then they can take that privilege away.
A right, on the other hand, is something everybody has, unless we permit laws or behaviors that exclude disfavored individuals or groups from it. Voting is a right belonging to all U.S. citizens, unless they’re children (excluded on the basis of immaturity) or incarcerated felons (excluded as part of their punishment). Freedom of speech is a right. Fair trials are a right. You can’t take somebody’s rights away without a damn good reason.
The distinction is important because it affects how a problem can best be solved. One of the white-privilege lists I saw mentioned the privilege of being able to walk around in a store without the employees watching your every move to make certain you aren’t going to steal anything. I had a visceral reaction to that: for god’s sake, that should be a right! Our default should be to assume that a given customer is not a criminal, unless we have evidence to the contrary. (Evidence other than skin color, which doesn’t count.) You don’t fix that problem by telling your employees to give every customer the hairy eyeball; you fix it by telling them not to discriminate against the black (or Latino, or etc.) customers. On the other hand, being able to make an offensive joke about a member of a disfavored group and not suffer any consequences for it? That’s a privilege. You fix that by calling people on it, making sure there are consequences; the privilege harms other people, and so you take it away.
Both of these are important things. But I don’t want to lose sight of the rights, in all the talking about privilege; it downplays the importance of the former, while creating the sense that the only solution is to take things away from the advantaged groups. Sometimes that is the solution — but sometimes it’s better to share the advantages with everybody. Improving the world doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
In the case of Prop 8, you don’t resolve the situation by making civil marriage a privilege, granted by the government to those (heterosexual) couples of which it approves. You resolve it by acknowledging that marriage is a right, which cannot be withheld simply because the couple is same-sex — or mixed-race, or one or both parties are incarcerated felons, to choose a few of the relevant legal precedents. Nobody has to lose anything for other people to gain.
The decision on Perry v. Schwarzenegger has come down, and the ruling is that Proposition 8 (declaring that California only recognizes marriages between a man and a woman) is unconstitutional.
Which is hardly going to be the end of this; the case will end up in front of the Supreme Court eventually. But it’s good news for equal rights.
I’ve been following the court case off and on. If you haven’t, you really ought to take a look — because it’s astonishing, how incoherent the Prop 8 defense is. The incoherence starts with the proposition itself, I suppose; California only recognizes marriages between a man and a woman as valid, except for those same-sex marriages performed prior to the enactment of Prop 8. Why do those get exempted? Because the odds of it passing would have dropped precipitously if its supporters had tried to invalidate thousands of existing marriages. Then you get things like the motion the defense filed before this decision, trying to delay enforcement of the decision (which tells you they knew how it would go), wherein they claim in a single document both that “Same-sex relationships […] neither advance nor threaten this interest [of procreation] in the way that opposite-sex relations do,” and that “Not only would redefining marriage to include same-sex couples eliminate California’s ability to provide special recognition and support to those relationships that uniquely further the vital procreative interests marriage has traditionally served, it would indisputably change the public meaning of marriage.” So which is it, guys? Does same-sex marriage threaten the procreative function of marriage, or not? And that’s not even touching the point that we don’t exactly require fertility tests before letting people tie the knot; as the judge overseeing the case pointed out, he recently married a pair of geriatrics long past their procreative days.
To quote the decision, “Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same sex couples.” That’s the coherent thread running through all the defense’s arguments. Every time they were pressed to cite evidence that same-sex marriage would cause material harm to children, the institution of heterosexual marriage, or the fabric of society itself, they failed — and tripped over a mountain of contradiction in doing so. You can cite religious arguments against the idea, and then we can have a theological debate, but when it comes to state and federal law, there is no defensible basis for this discrimination.
Here, have a ridonkulously cute picture of a kitten in a shoe.
So apparently it’s been standard practice since Kennedy’s day to pick one official White House photographer, who then hires a flock of other photographers, and the minions shoot various public events but the head guy is the one allowed to wander around behind the scenes, snapping pics while the President is in meetings or on the phone.
According to this Daily Kos diary, Pete Souza is the current White House photographer, and previously held the post during Reagan’s second term. What’s different from Reagan’s day is twofold: first, Obama has apparently given the guy much more extensive access, and second, the White House posts his photos on Flickr.
Looking through them, what gets me is the role Souza’s work has in creating the narrative of a presidency. He’s not the only guy taking photos of Obama, of course, and photos are far from the only record we’ll have. But no matter how much you remind yourself that photos can be just as biased as any other form of art — timing, framing, post-processing — there’s still a subconscious tendency to accept them as “the truth.” And behind-the-scenes photos, doubly so: when the president is out in public, then of course we understand he’s performing a role, but surely in those moments when he’s alone, you see the real person behind the mask.
Except he isn’t alone, is he? The photographer is there. And just as the president is deciding, consciously or unconsciously, what face to show, the photographer is deciding — consciously or unconsciously — what to record.
There’s a startling amount of power in that.
When we see a shot of Obama with his feet on the Oval Office desk, it both frames him as a “regular guy” and connects him with a photographic tradition of other presidents. When we see his marked-up speech, it tells a story of intelligence and thoughtful preparation. When we see him standing alone before an event or while talking on the phone to some foreign leader, it reminds us of the burdens our nation’s leader bears; when we see him in a crowd, it connects him to the people. All of these things create a narrative, but a narrative always has a narrator, and in this case, it’s Pete Souza.
Let me be clear: I’m not bringing this up because I think it’s sinister. I think it’s an excellent idea to document these things, and given the circumstances, it’s amazing enough that one guy gets to run around in meetings and private moments, let alone the prospect of opening that up to multiple photographers. But it’s worth remembering that any documentation is always, always inflected by the person doing the documenting, and so it’s interesting to know who that person is.
Over on the community, they’re doing GoH book discussions leading up to the conference in October. In an excellent bit of timing, this is month my books are up to bat: Midnight Never Come and In Ashes Lie are on the table, and the first questions have been asked.
I don’t think you need an LJ account to comment over there (though it would probably be helpful to put some name on your posts). And I doubt they’d object to input from non-Sirens attendees — not everybody can make it to the conference that wants to. So if you want to jump in, feel free!
For those who don’t check LJ over the weekend, I posted the soundtrack for A Star Shall Fall, along with a partial mix on iTunes.
Also, don’t forget the drink contest for the launch party at Sirens in October. You don’t have to be a conference attendee to submit a recipe; that prize is open to anybody, and the prize is a signed copy of Deeds of Men.
After a few days’ break, I’m back on the horse. And how; in addition to 1,142 words to kick off Part Three, I backtracked to add a couple of necessary scenes to Part One. 1,874 to cover one, and 942 to start the other, for a total of 3,958 today.
Why so much? Because I wanted to hit 90K, dammit. So I did.
The additions are important. For something so central to this book, the Underground really hadn’t appeared onstage properly, so one of the additions is basically Cyma Rides the Train; the other gets the Academy onstage faster and more clearly, which will help with the Part Three scenes I’m about to write that feature it. As for Part Three itself, I waffle between trying to figure out how I’m going to fill all forty-five thousand words, and panicking that there’s no way I can get everything necessary into a mere forty-five thousand words — which is a pretty good sign that we’re about to leave the Middle and move into the End. Once that happens, I doubt I’ll have trouble meeting my daily quota.
Word count: 90,001. (Yes, I hit my goal and stopped. At least I finished the sentence.)
LBR quota: When your protagonists are kinda trying to kill each other, it’s blood.
Authorial sadism: Aside from making Cyma ride the train? Making Dead Rick be too vulnerable to hide it.
Tell me if you think these words belong together: “Victorian,” “supernatural,” “grave-robber,” and “comedy.”
If the answer is “yes,” go rent I Sell the Dead. Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan) is a resurrectionist about to be executed for his crimes; Francis Duffy (Ron Perlman) is a priest who comes to interview him before his head gets chopped off. Blake tells the story of how, as a wee lad, he got into the body-snatching trade — and then how he and his mentor discovered the real money was in stealing the undead. Wacky hijinks ensue.
It’s a low-budget film that embraces its limitations and turns them into an aesthetic: lots of fog-filled shots with painted backdrops, occasional fades to cartoon sketches, that kind of thing. And, y’know, a fairly sick sense of humour. But you’ve already admitted you think a resurrectionist comedy sounds like a good idea, so there’s no point in pretending you aren’t going to laugh at the jokes.
I rented it in the name of research. There will be no grave-robbing in this novel, but if an Onyx Court body-snatcher story shows up at some point, you’ll know what source to blame.
For those interested in the interrelation of music and books, today’s countdown-to-book-release goodie for A Star Shall Fall is the soundtrack.
Usual caveat: if you stare at those new track titles long enough, you may be able to guess some of what’s going to happen in the plot (though I do make an effort to avoid outright spoilers).
You should be able to hear samples from some of the tracks in the iTunes store. Enjoy!
Finished another Driftwood story. Wrote most of this one on the Bahamas cruise, because it wasn’t really work work, it was fun work. (Especially since the goal of this one is to have a Driftwood story that isn’t depressing.)
Current title is “Stone and Sky,” but I hope to find something more interesting before it gets sent out to magazines. It needs to sit for a bit and get critiqued first, though, so the title fairy has some time to show up.
(Right now, my subconscious wants to call it “Two Madmen in a Basket.” It is possibly a silly enough story to make that work.)
I haven’t run a lot of games. (In fact, I’ve run precisely two: Memento and the ongoing Once Upon a Time in the West, plus one almost completely rules-free LARP session.) In the case of Memento, going into that game, I had a large amount of familiarity with the LARP mechanics for Changeling (i.e. what sorts of things their powers did, though there were occasional points of massive discrepancy between the two sets of rules), and a similarly large amount of familiarity with basic World of Darkness tabletop mechanics (i.e. how combat and such worked, though certain Changeling-specific rules were new to me).
That isn’t the case with OTW, and man, is this an eye-opening experience.
With all due respect to certain readers of this journal who were involved in the design of Scion, there are some honking big holes in the mechanics, which I mostly find when we fall into them headfirst. For example, there’s a first-level Justice Boon which allows you to accuse somebody of a specific crime and know if they’re guilty or not. The rules specifically tell you that the roll isn’t contested by the suspect’s player. So, in theory, a brand-new Scion of Tyr could walk up to Loki and say, “Loki! You arranged for Baldur to be murdered!” And know immediately that Loki was guilty. Erm, no: I respectfully submit that a trickster god should not be so easily caught, unless he wants to be. Also, there are a truckload of Manipulation knacks that have no mechanic for resistance; you could just say to Loki, “Tell the truth!” and he would have to obey, at least briefly. This seems unbalanced to me.
But the interesting thing to me — and the point where I diverge from some of the attitudes I saw expressed on the Forge, back when I was reading their forums — is that I don’t think house-ruling is necessarily a sign of failure on the part of the game designer. I do think the examples I’ve just given are things that would have been better fixed before I got my hands on the book, but that isn’t true of everything. For example, I prefer to have Legend increases (which are kind of like level increases) happen at narratively appropriate points, rather than whenever a given player saves up enough XP to buy the next dot. Ergo, our house-rule is that I announce when the PCs all go up in Legend, and in return they don’t have to pay for it. That’s a personal choice, not necessarily a flaw in the original design.
Then there’s the stuff that isn’t broken, I just have to learn how to use it. Boy howdy, does it make a difference how familiar you are with a system before you start running it: things like “what difficulty should this roll be?” and “will this opponent be somebody the PCs can take down?” and so on are tricky enough when you’re trying to remember which of the eighteen different White Wolf dodge mechanics this system uses, and a good deal harder when you start throwing in system-specific powers that can really change the odds. Scion has a particularly brutal setup on that front, I think, because of the way epic attributes scale. I think the scaling is appropriate — we’re talking about characters on their way to becoming gods, after all — but it makes me remember that the one thing I like out of D&D mechanics is the nicely mathematical formulae for calculating challenge ratings.
And yet, I wouldn’t want to run D&D, because I find its rules too confining for the kind of game I want to run. (Or for that matter, play in: most of my D&D experience was in a game that was really just a Forgotten Realms game, a world for which D&D happened to be the system. We regularly threw the rules out the window, and got by on group consensus.) It all just hammers home to me that whatever some die-hard fans preach, there is no such thing as a perfect system: there are systems better or worse suited to what you want to do; there are systems you know well or poorly and navigate accordingly; there are systems with more or fewer obvious mechanical holes. Only that third aspect rests in the hands of the game designer.
And that’s why we don’t live in a world where every game runs on GURPS or d20 mods. But I admit, there are times when I think about how much easier my gaming life would be if I only had to know one system. 🙂
One of the odd perks of my sleep schedule (going to bed circa 2 or 3 a.m. West Coast time, waking up circa 10 or 11 a.m.) is that most U.S.-based people have started their business day before I get up. And that means a disproportionate number of the e-mails I get saying “I’d like to buy your story!” are in my inbox by the time I shuffle into my office, starting my day with a smile.
Which is by way of saying that Pseudopod will be doing an audio reprint of “The Snow-White Heart,” which originally came out in the final issue of Talebones.
It’s hard to say how many words I wrote today, since some of it involved replacing a bit of scene I’d written before, but it’s definitely north of 5K.
This is what happens when I let myself work on something other than What I Should Be Working On. (Even if the something else is, technically, also something I should be working on. It ain’t the novel currently under deadline, which is all that really matters.)
Tomorrow, we see if we can’t polish off that nearly-finished short story, and get some other stuff done, too.
