And Another Thing . . .

No one writes like Douglas Adams.

In fact, after the first few books, not even Douglas Adams writes like Douglas Adams – the penchant for silly gets in the way of an actual storyline and, well, you’ve got Dickensian characters without the underlying story.

Same kind a goes for Eoin Colfer’s Hitchhiker’s attempt, “And Another Thing,” which, while it has a brief struggle with a story about the nature of gods and worship and such, doesn’t seem to get past the novelty of parading Adams’ characters (“Look! It’s Eccentrica Gallumbits!” Now it’s Ford Prefect! Whee!”) to get to an actual story.

So in that vein, Colfer has succeeded in writing the perfect Hitchhiker’s book, because they’ve always been light on plot, but this one seems lighter than most.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide itself (the device and company, not necessarily the books) hasn’t aged well. What seemed magical at the beginning  -- a portable device that offers the froody history of everything in the universe – now boils down to the worst of Wikipedia where you see [citation needed] more than anything else.

Colfer’s take is rather depressing – nobody in this book is happy, with the exception of those infamous Ameglian Major cows, who want to shove themselves down everyone’s throats at the nearest possible occasion. Sign of the times, I suppose. You can’t write space opera these days without everyone being so utterly depressed about everything. Why concentrate on the glorious vastness of the universe when the universe inside our own skulls is such a miserable, wretched place, right? I’m tired of science fiction and fantasy like that. I don’t mind brooding – but a whole novel of brooding? No thank you.

Yes, this book is dull. Dull re-destruction of Earth ad infinitum as Earth exists in so many dimensions . . . Vogons questioning their Vogonness (see? Even the Vogons are depressed in this one). And Arthur is there WITHOUT HIS DRESSING GOWN and SANS TOWEL.

I sound old. I must pause to adjust the onion on my belt.

Section 215 to Room 101

Chances are, someone at the NSA read this blog post before I even published it.

That’s not hyperbole. Because I sent it to my personal Yahoo! email account, it’s quite likely it got routed overseas before it hit my inbox at home. And since I have a poor record of cleaning my email out at home, even if it didn’t go overseas when it got sent, Yahoo! has the right and the means to send it overseas to be stored until such time that I delete it. And even then . . .

Yes, I work as a government subcontractor. In documents. But I have never come across anything worth sharing -- aside from the desire, before this project closes out, to insert the phrase “monkey nostrils” into a significant portion of one of our working documents.

But what the National Security Agency and associated agencies and programs can do – with full sanction by our own government – is a bit scary. Even if I have nothing to be scared about.

If you have not watched John Oliver’s interview with Edward Snowden, you should. Even if you don’t approve of salty language.

OLIVER: Would a good takeaway from this be, ‘Until such time as we’ve sorted all this out, don’t take pictures of your d***. Just don’t do it any more’?

SNOWDEN: No, if we do that, if we. . .  You shouldn’t change your behavior because a government agency somewhere is doing the wrong thing. If we sacrifice our values because we’re afraid, we don’t care about those values very much.

What is our greatest fear? To read even a summary of Section215 of the Patriot Act, it’s clear the fear isn’t clear at all.

But with the help of Oliver and Snowden, it’s clear the fear isn’t in Section 215, but in Room 101.

“You asked me once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world,” the sinister O’Brien tells the dupe Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel 1984 (and this is in contrast to my theory that we’re descending not into 1984, but Brave New World – though Oliver’s report certainly has a certain BNW vibe to it as well). We’re witnessing Room 104 as the government uses the Patriot Act to overreach.

So what do we do? Oliver is a little scant on the details. Contact our congressmen, I suppose.

Uh-huh.

And uh-huh.

I’ve emailed Simpson, as he tends to be the more rational of the two. I merely asked him what his intentions are on renewing the act on June 1, 2015. We’ll see what kind of response I get.

Query Focus

NOTE: Updated after some input from the folks at LDS Beta Readers.

There’s a secret in the wood near Purdy Farm. Older than the hills. Older than the sky.

The Man in the Rock knows the secret. But the only creature who can hear him talk is Jarrod, and no one listens to him. Jarrod the Magpie. Jarrod the Distant. Jarrod the Murderer. Everyone’s seen the blood on his wingtips. Everyone knows he sent his own Rebekah to her doom. And those who don’t see the blood? Aloysius the badger tells them. He saw Rebekah die. He saw his own Landi die. He saw the shores of the beaver ponds, smeared with blood, littered with grimacing, cold faces. He spreads the tale to all who’ll listen. And many who’d rather not hear it at all.

And The Lady is coming. The Lady who causes marigolds to sprout where she walks; the same who brings the ice, the cold, the dark and lightning and who quiets the creatures who dare seek the joy promised long ago. Her stooges are legion – sneaking, digging, seeking. They’re looking for the guardian of the secret, the secret that will set The Lady free forever.

Jarrod seeks hope among the creatures of the wood who shun him as he, too, seeks the secret to stop The Lady’s return and to clean his tarnished feathers. His allies are few, frightened, flighty. And Jarrod seeks forgiveness from Aloysius, companion of youth, soured by the bloody events in the box canyon where so many died.

Hope arrives with the flocks of sparrows that also fill the wood and sky – sent by he who notes their fall. Doom arrives with a cold that seeps through the tunnels, killing trees, killing the diggers, filling the creek bottoms with fog and despair. Jarrod the Murderer and his band of crows must discover the secret if they are to stand between their beloved wood and a conflict as old as the world itself.

This is the world of DOLEFUL CREATURES, a 90,000-word fantasy inspired by the writings of Robert C. O’Brien and Walter Wangerin, Jr. DOLEFUL CREATURES is my debut novel, written after more than 40 years of reading fantasy novels and figuring out what I love about them.

NOTE: This is an attempt at a query for DOLEFUL CREATURES, my current WIP. I've got a lot of work to do on the book, but I'm hoping honing a query will help me gain additional focus on the story.

There’s a secret at Purdy Farm. Older than the hills. Older than the sky.

The Man in the Rock knows. But the only creature who can hear him talk is Jarrod, and no one listens to him. Jarrod the Magpie. Jarrod the Distant. Jarrod the Murderer. Everyone’s seen the blood on his wingtips. Everyone knows he sent his own Rebekah to her doom. And those who don’t see? Aloysius the badger tells them. He saw Rebekah die. He saw his own Landi die. He saw the shores of the beaver ponds, smeared with blood, littered with grimacing, cold faces. He spreads the tale to all who’ll listen. And many who’d rather not hear it at all.

And The Lady is coming. The Lady who causes marigolds to sprout where she walks; the same who brings the ice, the cold, the dark and lightning and who quiets the creatures who dare seek the joy promised long ago. Her stooges are legion – sneaking, digging, seeking. They’re looking for the guardian of the secret, the secret that will set The Lady free forever.

Jarrod seeks hope at the farm that shuns him as he, too, seeks the secret, hoping to stop The Lady’s return and to clean his tarnished feathers. His allies are few, frightened, flighty. And Jarrod seeks forgiveness from Aloysius, companion of youth, soured by the bloody events in the box canyon where so many died.

Hope arrives with the flocks of sparrows that also fill the wood and sky – sent by he who notes their fall. Doom arrives with a cold that seeps through the tunnels, killing trees, killing the diggers, filling the creek bottoms with fog and despair. Jarrod the Murderer and his band of crows stand between his beloved wood and a conflict as old as the world itself.

This is the world of DOLEFUL CREATURES, a 90,000-word fantasy inspired by the writings of Robert C. O’Brien and Walter Wangerin, Jr.

Sadder but Wiser Man

Having exited the journalism industry on the heels of making some fundamentally stupid errors, I know from whence I speak: Reading about the Rolling Stone Oopsie of 2014 hurts.

Best details of the story, its implosion, and the aftermath are here (offered by Slate) and here (offered by the Washington Post by a writer who was offered the story before Rolling Stone, but who poked it full of holes and decided against pursuing it).

I know full well the feeling of writing, and then having published, a story that turned out not to be true. And I lost my job because of it – and rightfully so. So to hear this kind of thing boggles the mind (from Slate):

No one is getting fired. And the editors, despite lots of apologies throughout, wind up sounding indifferent. Dana ended by saying they don’t need new ways of doing things; they “just have to do what we've always done and just make sure we don't make this mistake again." And Coco McPherson, head of fact-checking, said, "I one hundred percent do not think that the policies that we have in place failed. I think decisions were made around those because of the subject matter."

And from The Huffington Post:

The authors walk through several reporting lapses and make recommendations, such as Rolling Stone considering not using pseudonyms and for fact-checkers to be more assertive in the editorial process. But the report falls short of making recommendations about which of the principals, if any, should lose their jobs over the debacle. Wenner told The New York Times that Dana and Woods would keep their jobs and Erdely would continue writing for the magazine.

Buzzfeed – of all places – is even more damning in its assessment:

Rolling Stone, in other words, has taken an idea native to the world of feminist advocacy, that of unconditionally believing and supporting rape victims, and used it as a shield for its own journalistic errors. Many rape counselors preach unquestioned belief to both encourage victims to come forward and create safe communities for them when they do — but this is not the role of reporters. And despite Columbia’s conclusion, Rolling Stone hasn’t stopped emphasizing how its mindfulness of Jackie’s status drove the failure to properly scrutinize her story.

They also add:

According to the report, Erdely could have also built the story around other alleged victims, instead of Jackie — but apparently none packed the same narrative punch Rolling Stone was looking for. The report states “Erdely’s reporting led her to other, adjudicated cases of rape at the university that could have illustrated her narrative, although none was as shocking and dramatic as Jackie’s.”

And people wonder why some cry about pre-programmed bias in the news media, when things like this happen. I don’t say this to say everyone involved in reporting has a preprogrammed agenda that will trump editorial standards, but it’s growing obvious that in this case, there was such an agenda.

I don’t wish the loss of a job on anyone. But to say it’s going to be business as usual after this kind of thing for both the magazine and the writer involved is puzzling, especially as the editor in charge had this to say to the HP:

Dana, who has been at Rolling Stone for nearly two decades, said the breakdown was both an “individual failure” and “procedural failure, an institutional failure.”

“Every single person at every level of this thing had opportunities to pull the strings a little harder,” he said, “to question things a little more deeply, and that was not done.”

I’m a sadder but wiser man now. It still hurts that I screwed up and let my newspaper down. I don’t regret their decisions, nor the path my life has led since. To see others make such mistakes is painful, in that it reminds me of my own errors. But to see them go blithely on, admitting fault without even considering a fix, shows the complacency that may allow such a thing to happen again.