(Link in post title).
The Oxford Comma is an essential part of grammar - I use it in novels, short stories, and blog posts. Without it, you'd have mass confusion, chaos, disorder, and grammatical incoherence.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Letter to the Oregonian
The Oregonian newspaper had a great editorial today calling for marriage equality in Oregon (link in post title). I wrote this letter to the editor in response.
Dear Editor,
Thank you for today's editorial calling for marriage equality in Oregon. I applaud the paper for its strong stance.
However, you've missed a critical point. Marriage isn’t only a state issue. Until the Defense of Marriage Act is repealed, married same-sex couples will only enjoy the State benefits of marriage, while being denied crucial Federal benefits their heterosexual counterparts enjoy. Furthermore, gay couples traveling from a state where their marriage is recognized to a state where it isn't, lose their state benefits. Heterosexual couples have no such worries - their marriages are automatically recognized across state lines.
Oregon should overturn Measure 36, but our Congressional delegation should take the lead to overturn DOMA. The Obama Administration, while not taking as firm a stance as it should, has declared DOMA unconstitutional. It's time for Congress to establish marriage equality as a matter of Federal law.
Sincerely,
Ethan Jones
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
I am large; I contain multitudes
Credit where credit's due - a geek blog I follow called Lifehacker reminded me that today is Walt Whitman's 192nd birthday. Please sound a barbaric YAWP in his honor.
An excerpt from Song of Myself:
An excerpt from Song of Myself:
It is time to explain myself—let us stand up.
What is known I strip away,
I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.
The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?
We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.
Births have brought us richness and variety,
And other births will bring us richness and variety.
I do not call one greater and one smaller,
That which fills its period and place is equal to any.
Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my
sister?
I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,
(What have I to do with lamentation?)
I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things
to be.
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the
steps,
All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount.
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.
Long I was hugg'd close—long and long.
Immense have been the preparations for me,
Faithful and friendly the arms that have help'd me.
Monday, May 30, 2011
The Shooter Vanished
and the direction of the story vanished from my brain for quite a while as well. Recall that just recently I was discussing turning it into a screenplay as a way of trying to avoid some of the stuff I was having difficulty with. But trying to write in a form I have no experience with isn't the answer.
Turns out the answer was simply sitting down and figuring out the damn timeline. This is a story that is very dependent on a precise timeline in which events unfold in a particular order. So I figured out the timeline. I made myself a little worksheet and plotted it all out. I even printed some blank calendars and handwrote the key events on the blank calendars to have a way of visualizing things better.
Once I did that, the story really started to click for me again. That, and I realized the yWriter software I thought had been helping me had actually just been throwing unnecessary complicated fiddliness into the mixture, which gave me another excuse to procrastinate. So I took the story out of yWriter and started writing it in Word again, and that also helped. Once I was able to look at what I had written as a whole, I was able to cut and paste, reorder, rearrange, rewrite, and start to really put the puzzle pieces together. I did a ton of that today, and I feel really good about it.
Three Bikes and a Broomstick (which is what I was previously working on) hit a wall for me when I realized that my three main protagonists were all completely flat and featureless. The story is fun, but I need to flesh out my characters before I continue it.
So, current status:
Jeff Thurman in Universe 12: Stalled, until I figure out how the hell it ends.
Three Bikes and a Broomstick: Stalled, until I flesh out the main characters.
"Ark Ship" (my hard sci-fi short story): Stalled, just generally, until I do some major tweaking.
The Shooter Vanished: Progressing nicely now - hopefully for some time to come.
Of course, knowing me, I'll hit a wall on Shooter Vanished next week. If that happens, I'll turn my attention to cracking one of the other things I have stalled. That's kind of how I'm going to operate, it turns out - have several projects going at once, and work on one of them until I hit a wall, and then move on to another, lather, rinse, repeat, ???, profit.
Anyway. Onward and upward.
Turns out the answer was simply sitting down and figuring out the damn timeline. This is a story that is very dependent on a precise timeline in which events unfold in a particular order. So I figured out the timeline. I made myself a little worksheet and plotted it all out. I even printed some blank calendars and handwrote the key events on the blank calendars to have a way of visualizing things better.
Once I did that, the story really started to click for me again. That, and I realized the yWriter software I thought had been helping me had actually just been throwing unnecessary complicated fiddliness into the mixture, which gave me another excuse to procrastinate. So I took the story out of yWriter and started writing it in Word again, and that also helped. Once I was able to look at what I had written as a whole, I was able to cut and paste, reorder, rearrange, rewrite, and start to really put the puzzle pieces together. I did a ton of that today, and I feel really good about it.
Three Bikes and a Broomstick (which is what I was previously working on) hit a wall for me when I realized that my three main protagonists were all completely flat and featureless. The story is fun, but I need to flesh out my characters before I continue it.
So, current status:
Jeff Thurman in Universe 12: Stalled, until I figure out how the hell it ends.
Three Bikes and a Broomstick: Stalled, until I flesh out the main characters.
"Ark Ship" (my hard sci-fi short story): Stalled, just generally, until I do some major tweaking.
The Shooter Vanished: Progressing nicely now - hopefully for some time to come.
Of course, knowing me, I'll hit a wall on Shooter Vanished next week. If that happens, I'll turn my attention to cracking one of the other things I have stalled. That's kind of how I'm going to operate, it turns out - have several projects going at once, and work on one of them until I hit a wall, and then move on to another, lather, rinse, repeat, ???, profit.
Anyway. Onward and upward.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Oh hai
Much has happened since last we spoke. None of it particularly groundbreaking - I moved, which was about the biggest thing, into a different apartment.
It's a gorgeous day in the City of Roses, and I just spent the last hour sitting on my lovely balcony and writing.
What am I currently working on? It's the NANO that I started and then abandoned last year. It's really fun to write. It's an absurd story about ...well, you'll just have to see, won't you? If I ever get it finished. I'm almost to 20,000 words, so that's good progress.
Essentially, my obsessive admiration of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett is paying off with this story, and I think anyone who reads it will recognize that sort of bizarre humor infused all over this story.
I'm having a bit of a conundrum right now. The Shooter Vanished is stalled, but not for any good reason. I was in San Diego several months ago and spoke with a close friend of the family who suggested that I should consider turning it into a screenplay. My brother studied screenwriting in college, so I'm going to borrow some books from him on how to write a screenplay. If it seems like The Shooter Vanished will work better as a screenplay than as a novel, then I'll do that.
The conundrum, which is not a big deal, probably, is this. I have three novels in progress, all of which have a slightly different feel to them. The one I'm working on now (tentatively titled "Three Bikes and a Broomstick") is primarily a satire. Shooter Vanished is a serious sci-fi murder mystery. The other one is also probably going to be more serious than funny. All of them have to do with alternate universes and skewed realities, so that connects them. But if I publish a funny book first, and then publish a serious book, are the fans of my funny book going to be thrown by the fact that not all of my books are going to be funny? Likewise, if I publish a serious book first, and then a funny one...
These are silly questions, probably. I have to actually get one of these finished before I can think about establishing a "style" or an "identity" as an author. And then there are people like Neil Gaiman, who has written both serious and funny stuff (well, at least one funny thing - Good Omens, co-written with Terry Pratchett), and seems to be doing just fine.
Just things that rattle around in my brain, I suppose. The important thing right now is finishing something, which is harder than it sounds.
It's a gorgeous day in the City of Roses, and I just spent the last hour sitting on my lovely balcony and writing.
What am I currently working on? It's the NANO that I started and then abandoned last year. It's really fun to write. It's an absurd story about ...well, you'll just have to see, won't you? If I ever get it finished. I'm almost to 20,000 words, so that's good progress.
Essentially, my obsessive admiration of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett is paying off with this story, and I think anyone who reads it will recognize that sort of bizarre humor infused all over this story.
I'm having a bit of a conundrum right now. The Shooter Vanished is stalled, but not for any good reason. I was in San Diego several months ago and spoke with a close friend of the family who suggested that I should consider turning it into a screenplay. My brother studied screenwriting in college, so I'm going to borrow some books from him on how to write a screenplay. If it seems like The Shooter Vanished will work better as a screenplay than as a novel, then I'll do that.
The conundrum, which is not a big deal, probably, is this. I have three novels in progress, all of which have a slightly different feel to them. The one I'm working on now (tentatively titled "Three Bikes and a Broomstick") is primarily a satire. Shooter Vanished is a serious sci-fi murder mystery. The other one is also probably going to be more serious than funny. All of them have to do with alternate universes and skewed realities, so that connects them. But if I publish a funny book first, and then publish a serious book, are the fans of my funny book going to be thrown by the fact that not all of my books are going to be funny? Likewise, if I publish a serious book first, and then a funny one...
These are silly questions, probably. I have to actually get one of these finished before I can think about establishing a "style" or an "identity" as an author. And then there are people like Neil Gaiman, who has written both serious and funny stuff (well, at least one funny thing - Good Omens, co-written with Terry Pratchett), and seems to be doing just fine.
Just things that rattle around in my brain, I suppose. The important thing right now is finishing something, which is harder than it sounds.
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