(Darker = more per capita drinky-drinky)

….daaaaaang; white people drink a lot.

(although those Ugandans can drink anyone under the table)

No Porn, Or Even Nipples, On The iPad

Mags Blast iPad’s No-Nipples Policy

Apple’s no-nipples policy means fashion mags are censoring their iPad editions

I’m not sure what I think.

• I always appreciate somebody standing up for what they believe in.
• I hate censorship.
• I admit, I’ve got some anti-porn feelings. I do draw a line between depictions of sex in creative endeavors that require live humans and ones that don’t, i.e. in a book, painting, sculpture or even a realistic animation? Get graphic with your kinky self. In a movie,  internet video or photograph with actors/models doing these things for money? I get squiggy about that. From what I’ve read, I don’t like the way the porn industry treats its actors, particularly its women. Nobody’s looking out for them; I mean you don’t get voted into office as the politician who wants to “supervise porn.” But big business needs monitoring, and porn is huge business.  So, yeah, I tentatively appreciate somebody taking an anti-porn stand. (Note: I’m not talking about videos made by couples for sex therapy or sexual enhancement – people copulating on camera who would be doing it anyway doesn’t bother me, and though potentially titillating, those videos are not something I consider porn.)
• Just because something depicts body parts does not mean it’s porn, and America needs to lighten up about boobs (I gotta agree what the first writer says about breastfeeding).

It also gets into the question of if you develop a device, can you control the way it’s used? I’m tempted to say yes – it’s your invention – but if asked the same question about some practical items already in existence, I’d say no. Can Alexander Graham Bell set rules (yeah, from the grave) about what I can say on the telephone? Can the inventor of the television tell us what we can put on it? The inventor of digital cameras tell us what movies can be made? Does Al Gore get to decide what goes on the internet (just kidding!)?

The 20th and 21st century are all about communication – how we communicate, how quickly, from where to where – and it continues to raise some interesting questions about control.  True, a lot of communicators do not possess the same values I do, and that can lead to encountering things I would rather not see (and that I’d certainly rather my mythical children not see). On the other hand, a lot of controllers do not possess the same values I do, and as an artist, it terrifies me that they would stop me from communicating my ideas to the world. The fact that I know that the words I write would be censored in different places around the world for different reasons, in my mind, justifies my fear.

My verdict? And maybe this isn’t for the right reasons, but I’m OK with Steve Jobs outlawing porn aps on his iPad (and again, it’s not the sex. With the stories I write I have no business telling somebody else they can’t depict sex in their, uh, “artwork”). But I’m not OK with him censoring art/fashion photography in magazines. Maybe there’s a little inconsistency in that, but frankly, I’m still working out where, why, and how I draw my censorship line, because as much as we say “anything goes” on the internet, the reality is, I’ve never met anyone who still  meant that when you drag it down to the lowest depravities of human behavior (snuff? pedophilia? non-consensual sadism? is that really okay on the web?), and that means there is a line.

…and found this link which made my day in laughter. It’s  by travel writer Matt Gibson, and it’s on the dangers of picking a foreign language name when you don’t… quite… get the associated content of said name.

Though I must defend one of the names, Cash, as something that I have used for a character in a novel. But in my book, it’s the nickname of someone who’s real name is Cassius (a Latin name pronounced CASH-us (or CASS-ee-us in old, old Latin, but most people use the medieval Latin pronunciation now)), not a name in it’s own right. And if my name was Cassius, I might shorten it, too.

Otherwise… I’m finally at work on my epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell whose name I’m not telling the general public because I’m so dern excited about it. (I usually am lukewarm on my titles, but this one was so obvious and perfect… and I keep checking Amazon because I’m frankly shocked that it’s not already the title of a book.) Anywho, I was having a rough time because in the story there’s this initial brouhaha that happens… and then there’s a loooong time where stuff happens which is important, but the enormity of the stakes aren’t yet evident. And as any writer knows, stakes are key. But, thanks to my spate of fantasy reading, I’ve figured it out. Multiple plot threads. Der… I’ve been reading too many urban fantasies and romances where the plot necessarily centers on one or two people, and really, that’s not gonna work for this story. So now I have the plot line that’s going on in Heaven (the original one) and the plot line that’s going on in Hell (the new one that’s got very obvious stakes)… and eventually they are going to come together at the magical twisty moment in which the intensity of the stakes for all concerned get ratcheted up to epic.

I think I’d been worried that I wasn’t capable of balancing multiple plot lines (I almost wrote plot loins… I must be in RWA), but now that I’ve accepted the challenge, it’s really exciting and words are just flowing onto each new blank page. I’ve found that I need to work on one story and then open a new document and write another one, and then I’ll start putting them together. But I LOVE characters. I love their diversity and their strengths and weaknesses. I love bad guys with bits of good and good guys who fail. I love how viewpoint often determines who’s the hero and who’s the villain. And in a story about betrayal and forgiveness, having multiple viewpoints is exactly what I needed to add facets and shadings to questions of what is good and what is evil.

So… I’ve started on a blurb already, and here it is (and, OK, nobody reads my blog, so I’ll include the title):

The Judas Club is an epic fantasy of Heaven and Hell where angels, demons, the damned and the blessed struggle for identity and meaning after the worths of their souls have been judged – and the story of the Black Angels who straddle both worlds, braving Hell to offer the lost a second chance at salvation. (Here I need to figure out how to sum up in one or two sentences what the main characters’ GMCs (goal/motivation/conflicts) are (and there’re six of them – two Black Angels, a soul in Heaven, a soul in Hell, a demon and an angel). I’ll likely have to pick a couple and leave out the rest.) Until Jeshua of Bethlehem brings them all together to once again turn the establishment on its head – and dare the most dangerous rescue mission in the history of Heaven or Hell.

Wanna read it? I know I want to write it! It’s my fourth novel, and I’m drafting it now!!

The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks

And I mean LOST. If you like urban fantasy or you’re willing to try fantasy but you’re not big on monsters or you just really want something to completely suck all of your time and existence for about a week, you really need to read Brent Weeks’ The Way of Shadows. It came out about a year and a half ago, and I just read it on the rec of one of my ex-students and wow. SO good. The only problem with it, is that it’s 688 pages.

And it’s the first book in a trilogy.

And you won’t want to stop after the first one.

So I’m almost done with book 2 Shadow’s Edge (which is also well over 600 pages and I started last night immediately after turning the last page of TWoS and will finish before I go to sleep tonight and, I’m sure, start book 3), and I’m shocked I got my nose out of the book long enough to write this. It has one of the COOLEST protagonists I’ve read in a looooong time. I am completely lusting over Kylar Stern, and this isn’t even vaguely a romance novel – it’s a fantasy about assassins in a fictional world called Midcyru and awar that is raged between a mafia run country and the invading barbarians from the north with their goddess of death. So wicked awesome (and does at times require a pretty strong stomach).

This book has also made me think about a lot of writing type things and what is Weeks doing so right.

This book is a great study in the power of secondary characters. If I had one issue with this book it’s that I wish I’d written down a list of characters as I encountered them because omg there’s like five million. And I should have crossed them off as they die (which would be most of the list, but you know, that’s apparently the way of fantasy now… Thank George!).

But from a writing perspective, he’s done a great job of giving them the work of making this gritty world real – so that even when our assassin hero does crappy things, he is still a hero compared to the rest of the world. And I can’t BELIEVE how much I let the main character get away with… and I still, as I’ve mentioned, love him. He’s a freaking assassin, for crying out loud. I have never in my life thought that was a profession I’d get behind, even fictionally.

But the secondary characters can do… anything. They can be depressingly hopeless… and teach the hero a lesson. They can make the completely wrong decision… and then when the hero goes with them out of love or loyalty, it’s no longer the protagonist’s fault for being too stupid to live, it’s his strength for being so connected. They are so useful to a writer. I need to think and concentrate on that. I guess in my writing world we’re so encouraged to have the hero and/or heroine on every page that it’s hard to give secondaries their glory.  But dang, Weeks does it. And I’m always excited to see the protagonist again… but I’m not sorry when I’m involved with somebody else, like I so often am in other books.

I’ve rarely read a book with so dern many well fleshed out, fascinating secondary characters. Like, I need a map with all of them sometimes, but once I remember which one this guy is again, it’s awesome.

So… if you have a reasonably strong stomach, read this book!