From time to time, here and there, someone brings Ayn Rand up as some kind of role model. Lately it’s even in the national news, thanks to the Tea Party and an apparently not very good film of Rand’s seminal masterwork, Atlas Shrugged. The uber conservatives now crowding reason out of the halls of congress with their bizarro legislation and their lectures from the floor and on committees about how their toilets don’t flush right so why should regulations on light bulbs be passed are the children of the Dragon’s Teeth cast randomly by Ms. Rand and her philosophical cult followers. …
Category: Life
Between
I completed a massive rewrite the other day and sent it out. Â When I say massive, I mean big, a whole novel. Â There’s a lot riding on this and I find myself fidgety and on edge in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time. Â It was an older book, one I thought (mistakenly, as it turned out) was done, complete, just fine. Â What I found was proof that I need a good editor.
But the work is done and it’s out the door and all I can do now is wait for the yea or the nay.…
Post Manuscript Depression
Sort of. I have just completed a marathon session (about four weeks straight) of disassembling and revising a novel I thought I’d completed years ago. The rewrite came at a request. I may have news, but not now. That’s for later.
I don’t know about others, but when I finish a big project like that, I tend to have a day or two of complete confusion. I don’t know what to do with myself. For several years, I cleaned house afterward, which occupied the time I might spend brooding, used whatever left-over energy from the writing process, and performed a domestically useful job. …
A Short Bit About School
There’s a scene from that marvelous film, The Dead Poets Society, in which Robin Williams playing teacher John Keating has a brief conversation with Mr. Nolan, the headmaster of the school played by Norman Lloyd, about the purpose of his job.
“I thought my job was to teach them to think,” says Keating.
“Not on your life,” Mr. Nolan snaps back. “They can learn that in college.”
Or something like that. You get the point, anyway.
I just finished reading John Taylor Gatto’s thick, data-packed screed on American public schools, The Underground History of American Education. Gatto taught in New York City for 30 years and the year he achieved teacher-of-the-year status, both citywide and statewide, he resigned, fed up finally with fighting a losing battle against a system he declares page after page in this book to be fundamentally malign.…
On Being Fooled
Okay, it’s April 1st. We all know what that means. I have myself played an occasional prank in years past, but tend not to as a matter of principle.
See, I don’t care much for being teased. Lots of reasons, but a big one has to do with having been not particularly cool for a very significant part of my childhood, which meant not being “in” on a lot of the current really important stuff that all my peers thought was the basis of timeless significance. So I was an easy mark when it came to being tagged in pranks and April Fool’s Day was a big one for being made to feel, well, stupid.…
First Image
I’ve been dutifully reading the manuals for the new camera, even though in some cases it is high order calculus to my primitive mind. Still, I wanted to show something for the expense and the effort, so…here is the first image, from Saturday evening.
Whenever possible, I like to start with something DRAMATIC!…
Biting Bullets
Okay, so today was the day. The Day. After procrastinating for many reasons, both rational and just perverse, Donna and I plunked down our plastic and walked out of ye olde camera emporium with my new camera. I’ve been talking to people, some of them extremely knowledgeable (internet wave to Jennifer—“Thank You!”), and reading blogs and consumer reports and websites and agonizing and today it culminated in A Purchase.
Was a time, mind you, that this would have been the cause of a couple of days of decision-making. I used to be one of the Go-To people about matters photographic. If I needed a new piece of equipment, the only question was, could I afford it this week or did I have to wait a few more weeks.…
“I do not like Home School and Ham…”
Ken Ham is the head of Answers In Genesis, an organization that promotes and perpetuates the Creationist view that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, that homo sapiens sapien trod the same ground at the same time as dinosaurs, the the story of Noah is literally true, and that evolution is All Wrong. He’s an Australian and a biblical literalist. He built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in 2007. Check the link for an overview by an (admittedly) biased source, but for simple clarity is hard to beat. It is a fraud of research, flagrantly anti-science, and laughable in its assertions (in my opinion).…
Slogging Through
I’ve been going through this novel like a reaper, cutting and slashing, removing viscera, changing things around. It’s fun so far. The request was to knock between 50 and 100 pages out of the manuscript, which roughly equates to between twelve and twenty thousand words. So far I have flensed the text of seven thousand. This may sound like a lot, but the book was nearly 140,000 to start with, so it can lose a little weight and probably be much better for it.
The weather has been beautiful and since I am working in my front room, by the big picture window, it’s been pleasant. …