Loading ...I started writing a post about the art and craft of writing when I came up with the title for this post. I got a little distracted by wondering about how alluring or offputting the title might be on its own. So, my thoughts will go in another post, but right now I’m curious about any comments you have on just the title.
My first blog post was on 1 September 2004. [Believe it or not, many people still do not consider that the most significant event of that year. Or even of that day....] Several of my early posts were related to hurricanes, 2004 being one of the most active and devastating Atlantic hurricane seasons on record including three hurricanes that passed pretty much directly over where I lived in central Florida. At the time of that post, we were still cleaning up from hurricane Charley and Frances had us in her sights.
I was relatively lucky as far as storm damage was concerned. I lost some branches from the trees in my yard and I was without electricity [for a week with Charley, a few days with Frances, and a few hours with Jeanne.] Some of my friends and colleagues had significant damage to their homes that took months to repair. Coastal and Caribbean areas were hit even harder and thousands of people lost their lives. By comparison, having the school calendar messed up and sweating through several days of heat and humidity with no electricity was a cakewalk.
In two and a half decades of living in central Florida, only two other years really stand out in my memory as far as hurricanes are concerned. The first is 1992. I was in a brand new high school that year. The way I remember it, the first day of classes was cancelled district-wide. The weather that day was glorious. We started a day late amid torrential rains. The reason? Hurricane Andrew. At the time district officials had to decide whether to delay the start of the school year, it looked like Andrew could pass right over us. We dodged a bullet, but south Florida was hit hard. Andrew was the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. We were inconvenienced. And we knew we were lucky.
The other year that stands out is 2005. Two major hurricanes hit Florida that year, but that’s not really what I remember most. It was the most active season on record with storms continuing into January of 2006 and it included Wilma, the most intense hurricane on record, and Katrina, which replaced Andrew as the costliest. Katrina was the real game-changer. With Katrina, hurricanes became political or, depending on your point-of-view, more political than ever.
I have always been dismayed at news agencies that send reporters into evacuated areas to stand amid wind and rain to tell us how windy and rainy it is and how no one should be out there. And I am doubly dismayed when they interview people who have ignored evacuation orders, especially when they declare they were “right” rather than just lucky. I didn’t understand how people could complain last year that the anniversary of Katrina was in the news even though the damage is still being repaired. And I was completely mystified this weekend when I saw people claiming that the threat of Irene was exaggerated even while the storm was knocking out electricity to millions of people, destroying property, and taking lives. I happen to think the preparations, the evacuations, shutting down airports and subways, etc. was completely rational and proportional to the potential that Irene represented. It could have been much worse. And I dare anyone to tell the people who lost their homes and business or especially the families of the 40+ people who lost their lives that it wasn’t that bad….
Spoiler alert: In this post I discuss specific details of the book The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. If you haven’t read it or if violence and gore bother you, I suggest you read one of my humor posts instead.
The hat ruined this book for me. Well, the hat and the elbow and the hole. But mostly the hat. And, yes, I know how silly that sounds.
Let me preface this by repeating something I’ve said many times. I am not normal. Some of you will point out that my problems with this book are incredibly picky and miss the point of the story. I will not dispute that. But here’s the thing, my suspension of disbelief faltered and I don’t think it needed to. Because I willingly accepted that the story was being told by a dead girl. I found the description of her heaven unique and sometimes even charming. And while I think some of the paranormal aspects stretched beyond credibility for dramatic effect, none of them ruined the story for me.
But the hat… actually, I’ll come back to that. Let me talk about the elbow. First, I’ll admit I have little experience with butchering beyond what one normally finds in a kitchen or on a dinner plate. But cutting through bone using just a knife is exceedingly difficult. Even separating bones at the joints, the most practical method, can be a challenge. How then does one wind up with an elbow? And why? Why not a hand or a foot? Why not a radius or ulna? And perhaps less important but just as puzzling to me, how do an elbow and a corn husk — and nothing else — fall together out of a cloth bag half-way between the murder site and the killer’s house?
Then there’s the scene of the crime. We have to believe first of all that a man working alone can dig a hole “the size of a small room, the mudroom in our house, say, where we kept our boots and slickers and where Mom had managed to fit a washer and dryer, one on top of the other.” He digs this hole in an open cornfield in the wintertime. It has a chimney and a wooden cover over the entrance. Yet no one sees him constructing it and it is so well hidden that Susie is practically on top of it and doesn’t see it. And then, “In the hours after I was murdered… Mr. Harvey had collapsed the hole in the corn field….” But did that leave a depression where it had collapsed? Apparently not because when the police began searching the cornfield they didn’t find a big hole, they found “there was an obvious area where the earth had been freshly manipulated.” And “In places, the lab later found, there was a dense concentration of my blood mixed with the dirt….” Her blood would have been on the floor of the room and that would have been about six feet deep. This just doesn’t present a realistic scenario to me.
My first inkling though that my suspension of disbelief was inadequate for this book came in this sentence: “He reached into the pocket of my parka and balled up the hat my mother had made me, smashing it into my mouth.” Here’s why that bothered me so much. How did he know the hat was there? Susie had complained of her ears freezing a few pages earlier and explained that she “wouldn’t wear the multicolored cap with the pompom and jingle bells that my mother made me one Christmas. I had shoved it in the pocket of my parka instead.” Perhaps more incredible, he is attacking this girl, holding her down on the ground, and when “he grew tired of hearing me plead” he doesn’t just grab the closest thing at hand. He doesn’t, for example, use the sleeve or the hood of the parka to gag her. Nope. He reaches into the pocket and pulls out a hat she hadn’t even been wearing.
I’ll be honest. As much as that bothered me I figured that the author really wanted the scene where the police return the hat to the parents. The hat was an important symbol. I don’t think it was ever revealed how the hat was separated from the rest of the remains or where it was found. I was continuing at a fair clip when the hat came back to haunt me. Susie recalls a day that was two weeks before she was killed. She was late to school and entered near the stage. And then, “I paused near some scaffolding and put down my book bag to brush my hair. I’d taken to leaving the house in the jingle bell cap and then switching, as soon as I gained cover behind the O’Dwyers’ house, to an old black watch cap of my father’s.” Wait a minute. If she had another cap, where was it on the day she was killed? Why were her ears freezing so much that she tells us about the cap in her pocket?
There’s a quote from Tom Clancy that echoes sentiments going back to Mark Twain, Lord Byron and others. “The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.” The hat, or I should say hats, don’t make sense to me. Neither does the way the body was dismembered. Neither does the underground bunker. Neither do a handful of other, less important details. My failure to connect is not unique to this book; I’m the same with a lot of the fiction I read. Maybe I’m overly critical. I know some people love this book and there are parts that I liked quite a lot. I just don’t believe it.
I was a late-comer to Twitter. [Call me slow, sometimes.] I still think that “What are you doing?” was [is] stupid and inane and that Twitter was a wasteland until it matured to its “What’s Happening?” phase. It looked to me like a huge, disorganized chat room — and I have never enjoyed chat rooms. [I quite understand if you disagree with me, especially if you were an early adopter.] I read technology and education blogs that hailed Twitter as the next big thing with glowing examples of how they had tweeted questions and gotten reliable answers faster than if they had blogged the question. I read the articles about unresponsive companies suddenly becoming models of customer service when a tweet from a dissatisfied customer cascaded exponentially across the twitterverse. Still, it didn’t seem like the right place for me.
I joined Twitter specifically and solely for participating in #FridayFlash. I followed several dozen writers and spent a couple hours on weekends tweeting links to my fiction and retweeting links to others that I liked. [Can we say "like" when talking about Twitter or is that just for FB?] For about a year, that was the limit of my Twitter participation.
I will never be one of those people who has a lopsided follow:follower ratio like 1:1000. On the other hand, I have never tweeted something like, “I am x followers away from some big round number y. Who’s going to put me over the top?” [And I promise I never will, because it's not about the numbers.] But I was smugly pleased that I had more followers than I was following — even though both numbers were in the very low hundreds, extremely small by Twitter standards. Even at that, tweets sometimes flowed past faster than I could read them or pick out useful information.
I explored other tools and interfaces for Twitter [which will be the topic of another post]. Some interesting things happened when I got better organized and more acclimated to the twitterverse. I spent more time there instead of just a few hours on weekends. I began to engage in small conversations [the only kind practical in 140 characters, he smirked] outside of exchanging #FridayFlash links. I began following writers, editors, and publishers outside the #FridayFlash community. Some of them followed me back, but not enough to maintain my positive ratio. [But that's okay, because it's not about the numbers.]
I’m sorry I have not personally thanked everyone who follows me. On the other hand, I have never DMed someone to say, “Thanks for following me and here’s a link to where you can buy my books.” [And I promise I never will. Frankly, I think it's rude. I know how to follow the links in your profile and comment stream to find your products, thank you very much.] But I have joined a larger, more diverse, and more interesting community.
I started the first draft of this post a couple weeks ago. Last night I witnessed something remarkable. It was the first time I was on Twitter when a major news story broke. [I don't consider who won some show biz award or the score of a sports contest to be major breaking news, despite the frantic posting that accompanies those events.] It started with a trickle of tweets asking if anyone knew why President Obama had scheduled a press briefing. Immediately there were speculation and rumors about the subject. For about two hours I was mesmerized watching the events unfold.
In the background, I had the TV on a major US broadcast network. The news about Bin Laden’s death was widespread on Twitter a good 15 or 20 minutes before my TV even reported that there was to be a news conference. And as the news conference was delayed, the Twitter stream swelled to a flood. It was an interesting mish-mash of fact, rumor, speculation, humor, cynicism, patriotism, fear, sorrow, and joy. Mixed in were several tweets that apparently had been pre-scheduled. [Either that, or the authors had to be hopelessly clueless or incredibly self-absorbed.] That mundane self-promotion stuck out amid the political commentary. I suppose it shouldn’t have, but I thought it made the authors look foolish. Worse though [to me], were the participants in the conversation who still thought it appropriate to plug their latest post or project. That looked crass.
I’m still adjusting my expectations of Twitter and figuring out where it fits in my online life. I still think that a significant portion of what gets tweeted is cheap and superficial, but that’s okay. I see a lot more potential in it now than I ever have. [Call me slow, sometimes.]
I have a sort of millennium bug up my ass. It’s not exactly a Y2K problem… it’s a Y2KX… no YMMX… well, it’s all these end-of-the-decade-wrapup stories I’ve been seeing the last few days.
Remember back when everyone was partying like it was 1999? I mean, when it actually was 1999 and they were all like, “It’s the end of the millennium!” And all the geeks [like me] were all, “No, the millennium actually ends next year.” And we would try to explain that there was no year zero, which NEVER worked, so then we would say, “OK, see. The first century had to be years 1 to 100, and the second century had to be years 101 to 200, and so on. So the twentieth century has to be years 1901 to 2000.” And that’s when we were uninvited to all the new year’s eve parties that year and some of us the next year also [because we just couldn't let it go and we would have spent all that night too explaining that this was the dawn of a new century] and a few of us several more years after that [but I'm not bitter].
OK. So we have NOT just finished the first decade of the twenty-first century. We have finished a decade of years with 0-numbers. But even though I am one of those annoying people [shut up] that said twenty-oh-one right up through twenty-oh-nine, not even I ever said twenty-oh-oh instead of two-thousand. [I have said uh-oh a LOT, but the date has nothing to do with that. Well, once it was on a date. But that's a different story....] And I know you’re wondering, so yes, to me this year is twenty-ten, not two-thousand-ten.
Is this what Santayana meant by, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”?
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
This is an update of a post originally published on 21 November 2006.
I garnered three new followers on Twitter this weekend. I have blocked two of them because they link directly to porn sites. [I am not philosophically opposed to porn. It's just not what I publish in this space nor will I promote it here.] I’m guessing I picked them up because I had the word “erotica” in my Friday Flash title and the tweets promoting it. And I’m guessing I’ll have to block a couple more when I publish this post. ~Tim 14 December 2009
Here’s the old post with updates:
Let me tell you about the time my website was labeled “pornography”. [And it was not last month when I got all crude and rude on a couple posts. In fact, it predates my blog by a few years.]
The school district where I work has only been hosting websites for teachers for about a year or two. Those of us that were ahead of that curve were on our own. So for a while I used some of the space provided for personal pages by my ISP to post information for my classes. I registered a domain name and had the URL forward to my pages.
That worked well… until one day the filtering software the district used blocked access to my site. It was classified as pornography. Hmm. Well, I was angered a little and amused a lot. But URL forwarding was a trick often used by pornographic sites so you could have a link for PureAsTheDrivenSnow.com that actually links to RaunchyDebauchery.com. And since it wasn’t really practical for them to, you know, actually have a person look at every website that passes through our servers, the filtering software just blocked every site that was forwarded. And labeled it pornography.
[I just made up those domain names and figured I better check whether there are websites attached to them. As of this writing PureAsTheDrivenSnow.com is registered but does not have a site up and RaunchyDebauchery.com is not yet registered. Wow! Same as three years ago! ~TVS So if you're looking for the Christmas gift for the person that seems to have everything....]
I copied the section of the agreement with my ISP that expressly prohibits posting obscene material and emailed our district network administrator. The reply shocked me more than having my students see the big stop sign when they tried to get to my site. It was district policy not to unblock sites owned by teachers. I think they adopted the policy because a lot of people were using services like Geocities [remember Geocities?] that were full of banner ads over which you had very little control. But I wasn’t using Geocities for my class pages and I had no ads (or pornography) anywhere on my site. And shouldn’t we expect a site owned by a teacher to be among the most relevant of the sites we want our students to access?
Fortuitously, I also emailed the publisher of the software the district was using and they unblocked my site. The argument with district policy was moot for me then and it was a battle I was not inclined to fight just on principle. Eventually web hosting prices dropped low enough that I was willing to have a site devoted just to my classes so I don’t have to forward the URL any more. And thus ended My Extremely Brief, Unintentional, and Unprofitable [dammit] Ownership of a Pornographic Website.
Obviously I am too critical of what I read. I followed LAWKI with books I chose for pure escapism, Sail by James Patterson & Howard Roughan and now Spy by Ted Bell.
I really like the Alex Cross novels by Patterson. I wonder how much writing he really does on the books he co-authors. It seems he is more of a brand now. All the way through Sail part of my brain kept saying, “This is stupid!” while another part reminded me, “It’s supposed to be.” I need to read things just for fun and after LAWKI anything is an improvement. So I finished Sail and chalked it up to my need for an easy summer read.
Now I’m almost half-way through Spy. Novels often require a suspension of disbelief. Super heroes need super villains and what would be the point if the fate of the entire world did not hang in the balance? So, okay, I’ll accept that a terrorist group has spent years building a huge military complex in the rain forest of South America virtually undetected. Honestly I can let that go much more easily than little things like this: A sheriff breaks up a bar fight on a Sunday afternoon. The next Sunday he is again called to service and thinks, “It had been nine days since the incident at the Wagon Wheel.” Nine days? Damn, that’s a long work week!
And this: Two characters playing gin rummy. One plays a winning hand with “three queens, three jacks, and a royal straight.” He explains that he only drew three cards, “the third queen, the ace of diamonds, and the jack of spades filling in a lovely straight.” Scoring in gin rummy requires sets of cards all with the same face value or runs of cards in sequence (a straight) all in the same suit. So he needed to have all four queens and all four jacks in his hand and the straight would have had to be in diamonds (to use the ace), not spades. If that weren’t bad enough, his opponent was caught with, “two kings, two jacks, pair of nines, pair of sevens….” That puts six jacks on the table. Haven’t the author and editor ever played this game?
So while terrorists amass south of the border, these are the things that get under my skin….
Someone at the school where I teach [SWIT] had the brilliant idea to require all students to read the same book this summer. From a letter to the parents our fearless leader explains:
In an effort to support academic performance, cross-curricular and community connections, and a lifelong love of reading, [SWIT] proudly announces our 2009 “One Book, One [SWIT]” required summer reading title Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. The book is a heart-pounding account of one family’s struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar time.
Every student in the school will be required to read Life as We Knew It. This is in addition to any summer reading assignment for specific programs or classes. A school-wide test will be given to every student during the first week of school; some ideas and questions to think about as you read are listed on the back of this letter. In addition, all content areas will use the book as a foundation for many activities, writings, and projects during the first few weeks of school.
While I appreciate the concept, imagine the difficulty in choosing one book for all our students in grades 9-12 (which easily spans ages 14-19) of widely varying abilities and interests. Frankly it is a task I would not want. And while they chose a highly rated, award-winning title it is one that I think is really terrible. Bad science. Bad fiction.
Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
My review
rating: 1 of 5 stars
This book is just awful. Honestly, I don’t understand why it is so highly regarded and has won so many awards. I don’t believe the premise on which it is based and I don’t believe the way the characters act. It doesn’t even get the phases of the moon correct. Ugh!
View all my reviews.
I am a fan of some of the shows on the USA cable TV network. I am not a fan of their various “Characters” promotions. One of them in particular gets me every time I hear it.
The 2009 Character Approved winner for music is hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco. In the spot he says,
I try to write about meaningful things… drug abuse, skateboards, giant robots….
I freely [and quickly] admit that I am not a fan of rap or hip-hop. To be fair, I’m not exactly in the target demographic for rappers, so maybe I’m just not supposed to get it. Does he really think that drug abuse, skateboards, and giant robots are all meaningful things? Equally meaningful? Or is he being ironic and I’m just being too literal?
Not that I care.
Nor should you.
I was indirectly privy to this exchange:
Fast food worker after removing an entree from an oven and dropping it on the floor — “How did that happen?”
Her supervisor — “I don’t have time to explain gravity to you, honey.”
There is an ad (or maybe a PSA) soliciting blood donations running on radio that begins with:
“It’s been said that it is as blessed to give than to receive….”
If I hear it again they can collect from my bleeding ears. The incongruity of “as” and “than” just really irritates me.
I recently received a complimentary first issue of a magazine for “a reinvented old-world style barber shop franchise.” I have no idea how I got on their mailing list. This barber club “caters to discerning gentlemen looking for a fine grooming experience with the old-world charm of your father’s barber shop. Offering the finest in haircuts for men, the lost art of straight-razor shaves, and a modern selection of grooming products….” They have obviously never met me.
My initial reaction was “snobs!” and I nearly tossed it without even opening it. But I was sitting on the toilet anyway and what better place to read crap? some perverse curiosity drew me in. Apparently their marketing strategy involves trademarking just about every other word they print. [So it isn't just crap, it's CrapTM!] Misspelling one the trademarks in a rather prominent spot does nothing to stir my confidence in the business or the people behind it. The articles were inane and contained logical inconsistencies.
Reading was, in short, a waste of my time. And now I’ve wasted yours.
SorryTM.
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