Facebook Jail, Folks.

If you're interested:

I used the term "white trash." That's the comment they're worried about.

And the post they're worried about? I gave a screenshot of Facebook's message on my forbidden word and said, "Facebook has trouble with [thoughtcrime deleted]. Who knew?"

Just so you know, Facebook jail feels like this:

Also, it's clear Facebook can't count. My number of sins? Three. The number they tell me about? Two.

Slight ironic update: I'm back on Facebook, such as it is.

They wouldn't let me do anything there for 24 hours but the following:

1. Accidentally "like" an ad.

2. Show me targeted advertising for the company handling my 401k after I visited their website.

Buncha weenies.

You're A Genius. You Know the Atlas.

So writer (and particularly editor) friends: I have a request that is a cipher wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce.

I’d like answers to the two following questions:

1. How many times is too many times to edit a novel? Explain your answer.
2. What would a writer do to best spend his/her time during the editing process?

My purpose in asking these questions is twofold:

1. I teach a basic English writing course at BYU-Idaho, where we spend about ¾ of the semester on an “argumentative synthesis” paper, which calls for the students to identify a problem, explain why it’s a significant problem, explore solutions, and then propose the best solution. I want to show them that writing about problems they’re facing in their own life will lead to a better paper than writing about the Big Three topics they always want to write about: Gun control, abortion, and overuse of social media (if they happen to have a personal, rather than general, connection to these topics, that’s fine, but most of them just want to write about a Big Problem, and that leads to boring, boring papers.
2. I’m a hack fantasy novelist on his 17th revision to his first novel and would like to get it out of Limboland and into a form presentable for querying. (I’m trying to show my students that I use the argumentative synthesis process to fix problems in my own life, so they’ll want to do the same.)
Because the paper I’m writing requires evidence of research, I would like permission to use your names, titles, etc., as I write this sample paper to show to my students. I may also publish the results on my personal blog which has an audience of mostly relatives, some students, and Chinese bots.

I may contact you for further edification as I work on this paper. You would be under no obligation, however, to read my novel – in other words, I’m not fishing for hours of free work. Just a little bit of free advice mostly to help my students out. I can reciprocate with any number of consultations in my areas of expertise which include MASH and Simpsons quotes and – believe it or not – a lot of writing experience, just not with novels.

I have a ten-year background in newspaper journalism, followed up by more than a decade’s worth of technical writing, so I’m not averse to correction or criticism.

And since I am prone to offering nonsensical answers to serious queries, I fully expect to see a few of them here. That’s all good. I fully expect things like this too:

Dave: I made a small error in judgment.

Mr. James: A small error in judgment... What exactly would that be, Dave? Would that be Matthew's desk, or the dinner with Matthew, or the dinner with Lisa or the second dinner with Lisa?

Dave: Okay, I may have made three or four small errors in judgment.

Mr. James: No, they weren't errors, Dave. They were decisions and that's your job. No, the only error I see is that you're letting your people push you around and make you second-guess your decisions.

Dave: Of course, you're right.

Mr. James: And now you're letting me do it. Want my advice?

Dave: Yes.

Mr. James: Well, I'm not gonna give it to you.

The Phantom Tollbooth, IRL

In Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth,” we meet the Terrible Trivium: A demon with a long list of beguiling, trivial tasks meant to keep those doing them from accomplishing something better. He sets Milo to moving an enormous pile of sand using only a pair of tweezers. To the eager Humbug, he gives a needle with the direction to use it to dig a tunnel through a cliff. To the scoffing Tock, he gives an eye dropper, with the instructions to use it to empty a well.

Tock quickly sees the uselessness of their tasks and drags Milo and the Humbug away, with the Terrible Trivium chasing them, hoping to take them back to their useless tasks.



Now, I know useless. How many hours have I spent filing marginally unimportant papers or scrolling through social media when I could be working on Doleful Creatures? Far too many, meaning a social media fast* is in order. I’ve dragged this book out for far too long. Time to finish it.

And there are other people who know uselessness too. Like the folks at Pioneer.

Put simply, Pioneer appears to be a business incubator enveloped inside a game. Many of the tasks the budding entrepreneurs can do to gain points and statue and maybe the attention of those deciding who gets the investment funding to bring their idea into the light, appear useless, even to those striving for the monetary goal.

From the article:

For Anton Samoylov, a software engineer who’s been playing Pioneer since April, this was the most gripping aspect of the tournament. “I went crazy," Samoylov recalls, laughing. "When I see points that I can earn and increase my position on the leaderboard, I can't resist.

“I see I have, like, 1,300 points, and then I see a quest: Submit a one-minute video about yourself and your project and get another 50 points? Obviously, I’m going to do that,” he says. “Sign up for our Discord … channel and get another 25 points? Again, I will do that.”

The contest quickly consumed his life. Samoylov asserts that his obsession with points and standings made him more productive than he thought was possible. His desire to win motivated him to complete difficult tasks and set impressive goals, he says. Before Pioneer, his project—an app, which, like Pioneer, uses gamification tools to help users meet their goals—was little more than an idea. 

Pioneer helped him turn it into a reality. Now, the app is available on the Google Play store and has a few dozen users, he says.

But playing Pioneer has its costs, he says. Samoylov spends an hour or two each Monday ranking other players’ progress updates. He points out that the anticipation of feedback from other players and the pressure to maintain a high score stressed him out to the point where it affected his sleep. “It can be used as a motivation boost, but at the same time it has its costs in terms of stress, in terms of additional time spent … and also in terms of focus lost.”

What he’s experiencing epitomizes what I’m experiencing with my writing. I keep putting it off in favor of less-important tasks (and while some of them are important, like being with my family, keeping up with my teaching, etc., much of what I do is, in fact, trivial and useless. Downtime has its virtues, but they fade when all you have is downtime.

*I’m not going to cut myself off completely but limit myself to fifteen minutes or less a day.

Spooky Boring Stories

I’m not partial to ghost stories, but as I am attached to a Scout troop, the occasional demand for a good spooky story does come up.

So I was happy to see “Western Ghosts,” edited by McSherry, Waugh, and Greenberg, at the local thrift store.

I was a bit disappointed when I got home and looked further. The book isn’t full of “true” ghost stories, but short fiction. And then I got to reading and I was further disappointed.

Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, for example – my introduction to Harlan Ellison fiction – was a disappointment. Felt like it was written by that creepy yet somewhat-more-intelligent-than-average kid you knew in junior high school.

And story after story in this book were klunkers.

Then I got to Clark Howard’s “Custer’s Ghost,” and the book was almost redeemed.

Which is more ghostly? John’s leg pain, or the visions and memories he has of being a Native American at Custer’s Last Stand; of Crazy Horse egging him on to go back to Montana to avenge himself on Wendell Stuart, the soldier who caused his injury?

I won’t spoil the story. But this is the kind of ghost story I love to read, because, in a way, it’s the kind of ghost story familiar to most of us (not because we hear such good stories all the time, but because, in some ways, we’ve lived such a story).

“The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee,” by Arthur Burks, is also a gem of a tale. Again, no spoilers, but it’s the kind of story I could see myself in.

Nevertheless, the quest for a book of true ghost stories goes on . . .

Impeachment Predictions

So the House is (finally) opening an impeachment inquiry to see if President Donald Trump is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” or however that quote goes.

Going to make a few predictions:

9/24/2019 – Inquiry announced.

Sometime in December 2019 – Inquiry officially opens.

Election Day, 2019 – Inquiry ongoing. Democratic candidates boxed it out during the primaries, with winner and bloodied all beating the drum of IMPEACH TRUMP, leaving Elizabeth Warren as their nominee and It Doesn’t Even Matter as her vice presidential pick, because the headlines the day after Election Day scream TRUMP WINS SECOND TERM.*

Not that the inquiry, ongoing still after election day, won’t find that he did bad. That he doesn’t deserve to be in the Army. But because the inquiry, in the nature of inquiries, gets dragged on and on and on and on by politics and poker, politics and poker, shuffle up the cards and find the joker. But because the Republican base will always be able to do one thing that the Democratic base will never be able to do: No matter how rotten their candidate is, they will hold their nose and vote for that candidate.

So Mike Pence fills Trump’s second term after Trump is forced from office, sometime in August or September 2021.

It’s a full inquiry. Full impeachment finding him guilty. No resignations; that’s not his style.

And impeachment is what will demand full attention and energy of Congress. Not getting other stuff done. But impeachment and impeachment only. And they’ll still get paid, that’s the beauty of it. And they’ll all feel GOOD they did something RIGHT for a change and they’ll run TV ads saying YES YOU SHOULD BE GRATEFUL and give us contributions so we can KEEP ON DOING THE BUSINESS OF THE PEOPLE.

Or not.

*I’m NOT in favor of Trump. I’m just making predictions.

They Got to See the Beach. And Chase A Seagull.

We've never thought our two dogs, Daisy and Dottie, were all that good in the car. They both want to sit with the driver. They both get really nervous. So we had our doubts when we planned a quick family trip to the Oregon coast -- a trip of almost 2,000 miles -- that they'd survive.

But our dogsitters had moved. And we thought, what the heck?

There were times they didn't like the car. But they did fine.

And they got to play on the beach, near Face Rock at Bandon. And they had a ball chasing a seagull.

Dottie remains our miracle dog. She had IVDD a few years ago and was paralyzed in the rear end department. But she recovered. She still has a bit of a stagger, but can run. And loved running, chasing that bird.

Read Everything. Write Everything, Part 2

Today I stumbled across this.

The topic immediately caught my attention – I’m kind of a fan of aviation, aviation disasters in particular. And then I saw the author – William Langewiesche. I’ve read him before and know him to be knowledgeable on technical issues and an excellent writer to boot.

So I read.

And read.

And read.

I don’t pretend to understand everything, but I read enough to get curious about a few other things he mentions. Such as “Cockroach Corner.” That’s an appellation, as far as I can tell, given to a collection of cut-rate passenger and freight airlines airplane leasing agents, and airplane parts distributors that call a little corner of Miami International Airport home. It’s also called “Collision Corner.” There’s not a lot about either on the Internet, but I read a few things by the deeper aviation enthusiasts to know it’s a place where you can go see the history of aviation still trying to hold together and make people money.

I can find a United Press International article from 1980 that uses the term.

There’s also a blog about “Corrosion Corner,” but it appears to be pretty shiny about the place. Lots of McDonnell Douglas aircraft.

This one is a bit more, ahem, honest.

What does this have to do with me?

Well, I’m writing this book about a guy who makes his own spaceship, flies to Saturn’s moon Iapetus, and settles there. I’ve dodged the question thusfar about how he got there.

Now I see a way, or at least a starting place. A space exploration equivalent to Cockroach Corner. Sounds like it’s got a lot of potential. Potential for humor as well as drama.

So it’s important, boys and girls, for wannabe writers to read a lot. You never know where your inspiration is going to come from.

Read Everything. Write Everything.

I’m reading right now a little book that, in the wider publishing world, would probably never have gone to print.

Not that it’s bad. It’s entertaining. And educational.

But the storytelling therein isn’t a slick or polished as traditional publishing would have it be. So it wouldn’t be a go. It’s the kind of book some of the locals pick up and read because they or a family member or relative may be mentioned in it, but it might lack a wider audience.

Which is wrong. So wrong.

Because everything ought to be written down.

And even if the things written down aren’t as polished as they could be in the hands of another writer, what is preserved could be the germ of an idea. A springboard for a different kind of story. Or a mine for the little details that, say, a big-city writer might not know about small-town life. Or vice-versa.

The book in question is “Life Among the Lava Beds,” by Leonard Stephenson. I picked it up at a local thrift store because a quick glance showed me it was by a semi-local author (I live about two hours north of its setting, lava Hot Springs, Idaho) and I love to read bits by local authors. And in what pages I’ve read I can see a genesis of other Idaho writers, notably Patrick F. McManus, who made a great career retelling stories and exaggerations about his childhood. Stephenson, with a bit more practice and polish, could be southern Idaho’s analog to one of Idaho’s more famous and folksy writers. (The biggest flaw I can see is that there’s a lot of telling, but only a modicum of showing in Stephenson’s stories. With a bit more flair for presentation and a bigger poetic license, he could take his stories a lot farther.)

I’ve got settings and story ideas that could go somewhere. Except I don’t know where to take them. Looking at what authors like Stephenson write can open windows into a different world, one my characters could populate.

And I’m not talking about outright literary theft. That would be dishonest, and a disservice to this author. But I am talking about inspiration and ideas. What kinds of mischief could my characters get up to? So far, I’ve read about Stepehson’s experiences as an eight-year-old on a cattle drive, or being bored to tears helping harvest raspberries. Taken the general idea – cattle drives and berry-picking – gives my characters places to play and expand. Had Stepehnson not written them, and had I not been lucky enough to find his little book, I might not have thought of such ideas.

Is this theft? No. Because if drawing inspiration from other writers is theft, then Mr. Stephenson had better be ready to hear from a lot of other writers who wrote of cattle drives and berry-picking before him. Inspiration is drawing on the bigger ideas or themes. Theft is taking the little details.

It’s quite possible I’ll never be published. But maybe some writer will look at a useless blog posting of mine and find inspiration. That would be neat.

Toeing vs. Towing, and Avoiding Eggcorns

Read this today:

(And yes, I should be slightly embarrassed being caught reading at Reason.com)

Politics aside, let’s concentrate on the idiom: toe the line. It is not, nor has it ever been, tow the line.
Per Wikipedia, it’s a little muddled where the phrase comes from, but it’s clear in several possible examples that it refers specifically to toes, not the act of towing.

Which is apt. When one toes the line, one is meeting expectations exactly. Towing implies pulling the line, pulling it to a different place. The line the idiom refers to is static, or at least static in the instance one is accused of not toeing it.

It’s a subtle, homophonic difference. But it brings us to the fascinating world of eggcorns, which I’ve seen more and more as people, unfamiliar with idioms, translate them from speech to text without first seeing them in print. Phonics helps them get the sounds on paper, but not the words.

Not Quite Moses' Tablets

We used to poke fun at Dad when he'd take notes for brick jobs on slabs of brick or bits of wood. But it's a habit I picked up. Behold my Troop 1010 inventory list, partly written on a hunk of cardboard ripped from a box in the garage. . .