Different Perspective

So the writing challenge is thus: Can you work your craft from 2 angles? Homework: Write a paragraph from 1 person’s POV, then write the SAME paragraph from the point of view of someone else entirely.

This is important for me for a few reasons:

1. I might find writing the story from the point of view of a different character might help me fix things in the story
2. I might find ways to introduce more female characters – because beta readers have pointed out one thing to me about my WIP, re: Female Characters. They’re a) Evil or b) Dead.

So here we goes. Scene (not a paragraph; I need more practice at this) from the POV of Character No. 1:

The blast of light ricocheted off the canyon walls, forcing shadows to scurry into cracks and melt underneath rocks.

“Jarrod.”

At the sound of his name again, his heart leaped.

The black star grew larger still. Two of its arms fringed. Feathers.

And with the fading of the white light into hues more normal, he could see on the feathers patterns of white.

Patterns he knew.

“You.”

That was his voice. That was his voice saying something his brain had urgently cried for many moments, watching the star grow larger. He spread his wings to fly but felt no strength in his muscles.

“You.”

“Yes, me. Who else should come?”

The voice too, softened with the waning white. He could see eyes in the dark face, moires of green and purple reflecting off the black feathers of the wings, the shoulders, the breast.

“But you’re dead. I saw you.”

“Yes,” Rebekah said. “Yet here I am again.”

She lit on the branch next to him and leaned into his side as she had always done, and when they touched the last of the white light snapped away and the world was vivid green and blue.

And from the POV of someone else:

The blast of light ricocheted off the canyon walls, forcing shadows to scurry into cracks and melt underneath rocks.

For a few moments, the only movement was that of birds in the air struggling to right themselves as the wave of light hit them.

Those on the ground froze, some rolled into tight balls and tried to hide under the rocks with the shadows.

Aloysius looked up to see Jarrod dumb on a branch jutting over the canyon, beak agape, staring into the quickly-waning light.

“It’s The Lady,” he thought. “Some hypnosis.”

He tried to croak out Jarrod’s name, but his throat was parched.

Then as the light faded he saw a black star at the center of it.

“Oh, the venom,” he thought, and shuddered. How long had he been held in thrall to The Lady’s blackness?

“Aloysius.”

Something like a jolt of lightning pinned him to the ground, set his long-broken teeth on edge.

“Aloysius.”

Just as suddenly, weightless. Young as a badger cub. Old as the mountains yet ready to race to their peaks. Race with . . .

“You’re dead. I know you’re dead.”

“Yet in the Sparrow-Minder, we all live again,” Landi said.

And the badger, teeth broken, right hind leg in a limp, blood spattered on his fur, felt new and clean as if he’d just emerged from one of the beavers’ ponds, his love at his side.

Conclusion: These scenes are bringing two characters – both female – back into the story. Can’t decide if this is a deus ex machina element, or if it’ll lead to something else. Need to study.

Just Because it Goes in the Dumper . . .

Remember how I gloried about our vastly improved internet service?

Well . . . I might have been a bit premature.Because the good ol’ net is up to its old tricks again.

I’m going to try a few things this weekend – looking at router settings, testing to see if we have a wifi weak spot in the study, etc. The latter is where my money is – although the craft room is right next to the study and NEVER seems to have any wifi problems. Then again, the study is nested underneath furnace ducts whereas the craft room has a straighter shot to the router upstairs.

So maybe a wifi extender. Or we just nuke it from orbit to be sure.

The nuclear option might also include having Cable One pay us a visit, now that the house has been “re-wired.”

In any case, if Freddy deCordova were here, he’d disavow himself of the whole situation too.

Storyoboarding Scribbles

Tried my hand at storyboarding the next scene I need to write for Doleful Creatures. Clearly, I am NOT an artist.

Also, the story is taking a little bit of a dark turn. I hope it turns out well for Aloysius and Rebekah. As I don't outline much, I'm not necessarily sure how this is going to end.

Users are the True Dictators

I was taking online classes in technical writing at the Utah State University at about the same time I signed up for Facebook.

Occasionally as I peruse my Facebook memories – thoughtfully tossed up by the social network itself – I see one of those early posts where, like so many others, I engaged in the hokey syntax of assuming my name was part of the post: “Brian John Davidson is sick of eating green bananas,” or some other such nonsense.

At the same time, David Hailey, one of my USU professors, was asking us a poser.

He’d have us visit a website and report back on what we thought was wrong with it. Of course he was fishing for a pet answer – but a pet answer that, once we figured it out – made a lot of sense, though it took us a while to figure it out. Most of what we were seeing wasn’t written or conceived for the Web – it was being shoehorned into service and being used by people who wouldn’t use it in the sense intended. People don’t come into the Internet, or our material on the Internet, through the front door. They come in via search algorithms, and zero in on the stuff they need. If it’s there, they’ll linger. If it’s not they depart as quickly as they came.

I still see vestiges of this. For example, a few weeks ago I was furiously scrubbing the Internet, trying to find addresses where I needed to have universities where our oldest son has dual enrollment credit send his transcripts. Universities were enthusiastically telling me how to order transcripts from them, but it took a lot more poking through their websites to find addresses to send transcripts to (nevermind the backwards approach of having to physically mail the transcripts; only one of the schools my son had credit at would offer an electronic option).

So that lesson Prof. Hailey was trying to teach us way back in 2009 is still a struggle to learn today, and for people who supposedly have much more internet savvy than I.

Enter Facebook.

In an excellent article at Wired, Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein outline how Facebook has grappled – and continues to grapple – with how its users use Facebook. Facebook’s founders envisioned the social network as a place for friends to get together. Recent events have shown the platform is being used for political and social manipulation, some of it on the part of Facebook.

A few illustrating quotes:

“And I’m sitting there going, ‘Guys, seriously, I don’t think that’s how it works,’” [Roger] McNamee [an early Facebook investor] says. “You can assert till you’re blue in the face that you’re a platform, but if your users take a different point of view, it doesn’t matter what you assert.”

To McNamee, the way the Russians used the platform was neither a surprise nor an anomaly. “They find 100 or 1,000 people who are angry and afraid and then use Facebook’s tools to advertise to get people into groups,” he says. “That’s exactly how Facebook was designed to be used.”

The article is definitely worth reading.

And it all goes back to Professor Hailey. We can put whatever we want on the Internet – but we can’t make our users use it in the way we intended. It’s just like Homer Simpson finding Henry Kissinger’s glasses in the toilet.*

*I’ll leave it in a sidebar conversation for those who want to decide if it was Kissinger or Simpson who used the toilet glasses for evil.

"Can’t Make A Move Without A Form"

I feel a bit like Tuttle this week.

Over the weekend, filled out our federal taxes. After three rejections and fixes (mostly for minor issues) I got the taxes submitted, with a refund on the way.

I know – celebrating I’m getting a little bit of my money back, even though less than we’d hoped, as one of our kids has aged out of the dependent tax deduction even though he’s still living with us and costing us plenty.

Also got us within one step of having same said child’s application to Brigham Young University-Idaho completed (more on that later).

Also, revised a FAFSA form, already submitted, now that FAFSA and the IRS’ websites agreed to talk to each other, though our home internet service, which still wants to randomly crap out on my computer* tried to throw another snake into the works.

Also started same child on a scholarship application which, if all goes well, could be submitted this evening if all the paperwork has come in. Mercifully, this one has had a lot less paperwork than anything else we’ve done in recent memory.

Then today, got the state taxes ready to go – another refund, much smaller this time around – and got the BYU-I application sorted out. I don’t know if my call got them to ferret the last of the dual enrollment transcripts out of the file pile or if it had just coincidentally arrived this morning, but the button is now READY TO BE PUSHED. That should happen once said child is out of school, or I get home.

There are other applications to sort out, of course. Not looking forward to them. Because paperwork, it’ll kill ya. Tuttle knows.

And this is outside the regular paper-pushing I do at my full-time job. And at my part-time job, ho help me.

*The home internet, while working wildly better than it has in the past, is still a bit hinky. But less so.

"Some People Say that You Are Very Vain . . . "

So there is now a midnight cherry red 2008 Tesla roadster in orbit around the sun.

Aside from this being the biggest advancement in automotive advertising technology since the air-powered flapping noodle man, I’m not sure I understand the value of this mission. If it can even be called a mission.

Sure, I get the proof of concept. Proof that the Falcon Heavy rocket can deliver payloads to space. But the car to Mars thing – pure ego. Which, I suppose, it what makes Musk go round.

And he has his phanbois:

Sending the trailblazing Roadster on a trailblazing mission to Mars is amazing. If it gets to Mars, a trailblazing electric car will be in orbit around a future home of humanity and the first car “on Mars” will be the only type of car ever on Mars, an electric one. If it blows up on launch, it will go out in a blaze of glory. If it drifts off into space, it will be going where no car has gone before.

There is no way for this to be less than an epic end for an iconic car.

I suppose it is a less ignominious end than the accident that claimed my Dad’s Lincoln Mark 4, but that accident was at least a lot less spendy.

And yes, I did say “orbit the sun,” because the Tesla is not orbiting Mars, nor is it ever likely to see Mars, except via some cosmic accident of proximity as the car orbits the sun, crossing the orbit of Mars only twice each orbit.

As far as I can tell, their goal was to light that candle and see how fast it would go, and hope it didn’t blow up. The Tesla was just something to get Joe Sixpack at least moderately interested in the launch, or at least something to brag about to the media and the other elites as the launch window approached.

The Apollo training missions certainly had more training and scientific gravitas, though they were probably met with at least as much meh as this launch has seen.

We Get to Drink from the (Almost) FIREHOSE!

So last summer, while the family was at camp, our Internet crapped out. I couldn’t connect at all and it was getting frustrating not only trying to update this fabulous blog but also get into the class I was teaching. You know, the paying gig.

Riveting stuff, I know. But it gets better.

Cable One sent out a technician and he poked around for a while at their outside box (a long while, but more on that later) and then poked around inside for a while. He asked if we had any other cable connections in the house. I showed him, and he was not impressed.

He did manage to get us connected again, but in talking with their tech support afterward (they called to follow-up on the visit) the guy said something classic:

“Looks like you might have something wrong with your wires.”

He meant the wires in our home, and suggested we contact an electrician to have at least one new connection put in so we’d have a better overall internet experience.

I chalked it up to the typical “We don’t know what’s wrong, so let’s blame the wires” talk and did nothing about it apart from look at the costs of CAT-6 cable at Home Depot.

So you know where this is going.

This weekend, in a fit of frustration trying to connect with the FAFSA website (don’t get me started) I decided I’d had enough. I grabbed the new cable we had just purchased that weekend and marched outside to the famed box on the side of the house. I remembered clearly the guy on the phone saying “When you get your house re-wired, call us and we’ll come out and get you hooked up.” So I was hopeful but not optimistic when I opened the box – to find one simple screw-in connection and a ground wire. I think I might be able to stave off a service call, I thought. I connected the wire to the box. Then strung it through the garage, through the back door of the house and to our wireless router.*

After a few sparks and a quick whiff of ozone, GLORY BE we had an internet connection that stretched for miles. Relatively. But you get the idea. We could have MULTIPLE devices connected at the SAME TIME.

I’m still wrassling with FAFSA (again, don’t get me started) but everything else has been wonderful. We were able to watch the Super Bowl this weekend, streaming it, with only a few temporary glitches.

So the question from my wife came up: Why did you wait until now to fix this, when you knew what the fix was this summer?

Answer: I’m a man. But I can change. If I have to. I guess.

This isn’t to say our connection is perfect – we still see a slowdown in the evening when lots of people are using the net – but it’s nothing like the slowdown we’d seen for months.

We’re drinking from the fire hose, folks, and it feels great. Should have found that marble in the oatmeal a long time ago.

*Naturally, once I saw the improved connection I installed the new cable properly, even digging through the insulation in the wall to get the cable to come out the proper box in the kitchen. While my wife is a patient woman and put up with lousy internet access for months, she would NOT put up with a cable snaking in through the back door for more than the necessary time to test the new connection.

Headology – and the Holy Ghost

Everyone knows and loves Terry Pratchett the satirist.

But once in a while, I read one of his books – particularly an earlier one – and remember there’s also Terry Pratchett, the fantasist.

In particular, a recent re-reading of his “Lords and Ladies” reminds me that Pratchett really knows fantasy and feels it all the way down to the bones of the Earth, or at least to the bones of the elephants supporting the Discworld on the back of the Great A’Tuin.

Witness the denouement in Lords and Ladies:

“Oh, yes. You know I never entered your circle. I could see where it led. So I had to learn. All my life. The hard way. And the hard way’s pretty hard, but not so hard as the easy way. I learned. From the trolls and the dwarfs and from people. Even from pebbles.”

The Queen lowered her voice.

“You will not be killed,” she whispered. “I promise you that. You’ll be left alone, to dribble and gibber and soil yourself and wander from door to door for scraps., And they’ll say: there goes the mad old woman.”

“They say that now,” said Granny Weatherwax. “They think I can’t hear.”

“But inside,” said the Queen, ignoring this, “inside, I’ll keep just a part of you which looks out through your eyes and knows what you’ve become.”

“And there will be none to help,” said the Queen. She was closer now, her eyes pinpoints of hatred. “No charity for the mad old woman. YHou’ll see what you have to eat to stay alive. And we’ll be with you all the time inside your head, just to remind you. You could have been the great one, there was so much you could have done. And inside you’ll know it, and you’ll plead all the dark night long for the silence of the elves.”

The Queen wasn’t expecting it. Granny Weatherwax’s hand shot out, pieces of rope falling away from it, and slapped her across the face.

“You threaten me with this?” she said. “Me? When I am becoming old?”

The elf woman’s hand rose slowly to the livid mark across her cheek. The elves raised their bows, waiting for an order.

“Go back,” said Granny. “You call yourself some kind of goddess and you know nothing, madam, nothing. What don’t die can’t live. What don’t live can’t change. What don’t change can’t learn. The smallest creature that dies in the grass knows more than you. You’re right. I’m older. You’ve lived longer than me, but I’m older than you. And better’n you. And, madam, that ain’t hard.”

Headology. That’s the magic of Pratchett that I appreciate. Granny Weatherwax has never needs spells (though sometimes she’s had to get along with a bag of Nanny Ogg’s boiled sweets). The magic of Granny Weatherwax is that she’s lived. It’s that she’s old.

Oh, to be old.

And secondarily – and this probably would annoy Pratchett – I see a good level of Christian and even Mormon theology in this passage, indeed, in this entire book. Pratchett the Humanist has come to the theological realization that is perfectly in line with the theology I believe, in that the Devil wants us to see him and his followers as far, far better than we – and it’s the old (the old in experience, the old in knowing the Spirit of the Lord) who can see the Queen for what she really is – an elf-woman, bent on our destruction for her amusement and delight. That’s the Devil’s goal, always has been.

So blessed be the old in spirit, and blessed be the tellers of fantasy, who convince us to believe the little lies, so that we may in turn believe the big ones.

I WILL GIVE YOU A LIFT BACK, said Death, after a while.

“Thank you. Now . . . tell me . . .”

WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF YOU HADN’T SAVED [THE HOGFATHER]?

“Yes! The sun would have risen just the same, yes?”

NO.

“Oh, come on! You can’t expect me to believe that! It’s an astronomical fact!”

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.

She turned on him.

“It’s been a long night, Grandfather! I’m tired and I need a bath! I don’t need silliness!”

THE SUN WOULD NOT HAVE RISEN.

“Really? Then what would have happened, pray?”

A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD.

They walked in silence for a moment.

“Ah,” said Susan dully. “Trickery with words. I would have thought you’d have been more literal minded than that.”

I AM NOTHING IF NOT LITERAL-MINDED TRICKERY WITH WORDS IS WHERE HUMANS LIVE.

“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need . . . fantasies to make life bearable?”

REALLY? AS IF IT WERE SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little. . .”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So you can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET – Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME . . . RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have to believe that, or what’s the point – “

MY POINT EXACTLY.

Out of the best books, they say, we will find God.

When I read Lords and Ladies, I hear this screaming at me, from Ecclesiastes:

And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. (Ecclesiastes 1:13)

I am, Mr. Pratchett. I am.

Separating the Whatever from the Whatsis

Yesterday, we watched the Super Bowl.

Only one of us cared about the outcome – that would be our thirteen-year-old sports fan. Even though his beloved 49ers weren’t in the game, he wanted to watch.

So, because we love our son, we watched.

It’s football. You know, football. Two teams of players smashing into each other while one tries to get the ball to their end zone while the other tries to prevent it. There are other nuances; our 13-year-old could tell you. At length.

It’s different than when I was a kid, idling through the living room when the game was on – back then, I had better things to do. Or so I assume it was different. Maybe it was absolutely the same. I wouldn’t know.

But I might have an inkling.

I don’t remember any politics or whatnot coming into play. I don’t remember whisperings about what he or she did the last time they performed at the halftime show.

Today, it’s hard to separate the whatever from the whatsis.

Want to advertise your trucks and put a little emphasis on service organizations that happen to have your trucks in common? Borrow text from a Martin Luther King Jr. speech (with permission from the people holding the purse strings, naturally) and play it.

Then forget the collective memory of an aggrieved people – or at least the fussbudgety with internet access, and see you same ad re-cut with a different section from the same speech, and see how it plays with the masses.

Separating the whatever from the whatsis is no longer possible.

Our memories may not be any longer or shorter these days, but with the Internet, one can spread those memories – those opinions – those nonseparations of the whatever from the whatsis with ease.

Back in the day, you could have a show like The Brady Bunch set during the Vietnam Era, but have it never mention the war.

Nowadays, even the commercials during premier sporting events have that social conscience. Or pseudoconscience. Until the collective memory catches up to it.

And the message on one level may appear helpful. Hopeful. Or hurtful, looked at from another point of view. Through another lens.

Enjoy the humor of Bill Cosby or the g-rated stuff produced by Louis CK but don't want to deal with the baggage both men carry with them now? Good luck separating the whatever from the whatsis.

Can you watch a football game these days and separate the whatever from the whatsis? Can a thirteen-year-old enjoy the sport without worrying about who knelt during the national anthem and why, and why some want the behavior ignored, others want it applauded, and others want it outlawed?

Ask the thirteen-year-old.

Yes. Yes you can. But you’re aware. You’re aware of what’s going on. And you have friends and family and other influencers who help you shape your opinion of the matter.

But then you watch the game. You watch the missed passes. You watch the sacking of Tom Brady and the turnover that likely cost the Patriots the game. And you marvel that this was the Superbowl with the most offensive yardage ever.

And you tell your parents that night that you’re leaning toward basketball – you play church ball, you see – and aren’t really interested in trying out for the high school team next year.

You switch gears. Because you’re a thirteen-year-old who knows there’s a whatever to separate from the whatsis, but there are also games to play.

This is Not A Drill, Part II

So I’ve been fascinated by the false alarm missile attack that occurred earlier this month in Hawaii. Today’s Washington Post peels back more of that onion, leading to some pretty interesting stuff.

Per the Post, sending the missile alert was not a mistake brought on by a poorly designed user interface or any other factor – but a deliberate act by a person who sincerely believed missiles were inbound.

Per the Post:

The emergency worker who sent a false public safety alert on Jan. 13 warning of an imminent  ballistic missile attack on Hawaii believed that a ballistic missile was truly bound for the state after mishearing a recorded message as part of an unscheduled drill, according to a preliminary investigation by federal officials.

The Post notes that while the recorded message began with the phrase “Exercise, exercise, exercise” (mimicking the “this is a drill” I’m familiar with in my experience in emergency response) it concluded with the phrase “This is not a drill.”

(That’s what the Post says. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser says the message concluded with “Exercise, exercise, exercise” after the “this is not a drill” statement.)

The worker who sent the notification missed the “exercise, exercise, exercise” portions of the recording, and the rest is, as they say, history – mostly a history of soiling drawers throughout the state of Hawaii for 38 minutes before a false alarm announcement was sent out.

Oopsie.

There are other error precursors too:

The drill took place at a shift change, when peoples’ heads weren’t yet “in the game.”

The supervisor of the shift coming on duty was aware of an imminent drill, but thought it was directed at the shift coming off-duty, so he or she was mentally unprepared for the exercise when it started.

The computer system that sends the notification was programmed to ask the sender to confirm actions – but used the same wording for an actual emergency as it would for a drill (not that this would have mattered at this point, as the sender’s mindset was ACTUAL EMERGENCY).

There was no contingency plan in place to correct a false alert, thus a plan had to be drafted while the alert was live – adding time to the debacle.

Only one person had to be present to send messages and alerts – a mistake the state has corrected.

Pile up enough precursors, and the chance for a mistake like this being made go up quickly.

What’s unclear in the media reports is if this action was done in a vacuum – without the presence of others on the emergency response team – or if the action was taken in a group setting (as all of our drills or actual emergency responses take place). Had this been in a team environment, there might have been enough ancillary clues around for the worker who missed the “exercise” portion of the drill to be keyed in on the fact this was a drill, not an actual emergency.

And if there weren’t any immediate clues, someone in a team environment could simply ask “is this a drill?” and get confirmation from others who may have heard (or listened) to the full message that the vent was a drill, or real, or whatever.

Reading the report, though, it’s clear this alert went out in a team environment where others in the room understood the event was a drill, while the one person sending the alert missed that part of the story (link opens a PDF).

Leaving any responder to make a decision like this when there’s no one else to turn to for confirmation is a true Hobson’s Choice, and not good emergency management, even to an amateur like me. However, sending out an alert without asking your co-workers for confirmation is, well, stupid. Even Stormtroopers know that.

Disclaimer: I am a moron. I am not speaking on behalf of my employer or place of work. Anyone who thinks otherwise is selling something.