My Letter to you, Damien Echols

It's hard for me to say for how many years I've followed the story of the West Memphis Three, but fifteen years may be about fair, for paying specific attention and actually seeking reading (and the documentaries) about the tragedy.

For those unfamiliar with the story, I won't link Wikipedia, only provide the simple story. The West Memphis Three were Jessie Misskelly, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin. In 1993, amid Satanist panic and public furor, these teenaged boys were convicted of the murder of three young boys in West Memphis Arkansas, in one of the more famous miscarriages of justice in the twentieth century. The details abound, so I will not recount them here, but it is a cruelly fascinating episode, and shameful beyond description.

The most famous, and oldest, of the convicted Three, is Damien Echols. He has become well known both for his past and also for his recovery (I will not use the term rehabilitation), but it is always his writing that clings to me when I look again toward this story. It feels cruel to call it a story, though. Perhaps I should say, look again toward these people.

I wish I had a handful of dust
--Damien Echols

One of the things that always strikes me in the heart about these kids - about this one - is that he reminds me indelibly of two of the three great loves of my life. His melancholy and his coloring are powerfully like Mr. X. And his expression of what a disadvantaged - what a battered - life is like echo sometimes in the communications with my first love, who reappeared almost a year ago, and who still breaks my heart at times (not in the way we once felt, of course).

And, seven years younger than I am, I know he's not a child, but his experience sparks in me something like a maternal outrage. The wish it had been possible to protect him. He was just a boy, barely older than the murder victims themselves really, and so the offense at his wrongful conviction and confinement - on death ROW, no less - is compounded by whatever vestige of protectiveness washing around in my guts.



Humanity is filled with so many who respond so much worse to wounds so much less - or illusory - his is an example of grace.

In recent months, face to face with another kind of grace, reading the link above today was inspirational. And, I will admit it, entertaining. In the sense that art entertains, that great writing does - even as it may elevate, or relieve, or release, or evaporate with no ghost but pleasure had - to understand the experience of solitary, of death row, of imprisonment is ... how to choose a word carefully here ... "stimulating" is accurate, but larded with inaccurate implications ... "educational" is right too, but almost so spare of deeper meaning as to fall short rather than overshoot ...

Enlightening. It lightens the soul to know another soul is not burdened by the worst we can do to one another - or has been set free. And it lightens the world to illuminate corners of it most of us will never see, G-d be praised for it.

Image: Wikipedia

His writing is extraordinary, evocative. The piece linked above reads like engrossing fiction; and the fact that it is not is an outrage. Something beyond poignant, something so much more important.

Certain shade of agony have their own beauty
--Damien Echols

Read his writing at the link. It is life itself.

Once More Unto the Dragon, Still Wielding My Trusty Butterknife

I haven't liked to post about it, but will keep this short and less-painful.  In this past week, Carole Blake has finally sent me my rejection (I didn't expect otherwise, but hormones still make it deflating), and James River Writers' letter came, 'congratulations, you didn't win this.'  Again, hardly a shock (JRW has never much featured my kind of fiction; it took like six years to even get a first page read, between all the Southern fiction and writers writing writerly-ly about being writers), but again, not feeling good about it.  I think the latter bugged me mainly for its patent expectation I'd rewrite.

Taking advice does not come hard for me in my work.  The problem is - I'm out of readers.  The two I want to trust most have full lives, and writing of their own - and taking on a 130k word manuscript of someone else's is too much a demand on their time.  Mr. X, who's always been one of my best readers, abdicated the position some time ago because he somewhat unnecessarily recoiled in a moment when I explained the market inadvisability of preserving some passages he happened to like.

It is what it is, but it was thus I spent six months of before my last real go at revisions flailing and not knowing where to stab that butterknife at the dragon which was the MSS.  I finally tackled it, essentially alone, and felt I'd done a lot of good with it.

Not surprisingly, even to *my* vanity:  clearly I haven't done enough good.  Not that JRW is the last word in a genre they don't prefer, obviously - but even dipping back into it myself, I know I can do better. Must do.

And it is completely exhausting.  Not exasperating.  But I want Mr. X back, or to have the capacity to trust. It's not lost on me that you can find readers online, but the one way I am "precious" about my writing is in that making a reader of a stranger is almost giddily horrifying to me.  It's not the sharing of my work - it's the trusting to the competence of someone I don't know to know how to follow the path to where I want to go.  The idea is nearly offensive in its alienness to my way of working.

Though to be sure I never was a joiner - and went on to become a First Chapter member of JRW - and actually a founder of the SBC ... still, for me, reaching out for help to someone anonymous to me is beyond my capability.

And so I read (again) and so I see, cold now, the words I once could not see for the forest, or whatever it is the kids say these days.  And so I wield my trusty butterknife.

And stare into the cold eyes of the dragon again.

Culture of Blame

Cultures across the globe and across time have found ways to blame women for their own rapes and harassment, but this is absolutely outlandish.  Iowa has ruled that it is LEGAL to fire attractive people.

Tell me how many men you think could ever lose their jobs, when acting perfectly correctly and professionally, for posing a threat to a coworker's marriage.  How many judges would CONDONE such a termination.

See also here, for further elaboration such as this paragraph:

When Stuyvesant says that women’s dress and bodies are distraction in a learning environment, for example, what they’re really saying is that they’re distracting to male students. The default student we are concerned about—the student whose learning we want to ensure is protected—is male. Never mind how “distracting” it is to be pulled from class, humiliated, and made to change outfits—publicly degrading young women is small price to pay to make sure that a boy doesn’t have to suffer through the momentary distraction of glancing at a girl’s legs. When this dentist in Iowa can fire his assistant for turning him on—even though she’s done absolutely nothing wrong—the message again is that it’s men’s ability to work that’s important.

Unconscionable

One in five children in our country goes hungry.  The wealthy in power DO NOT CARE.

School shootings generate an almost queasy level of excitement and attention in our nation - but, as often as we hear the statistic that twenty percent of our children suffer from deprivation, the excitement (the outrage) just isn't there for headlines without the perverted appeal of gruesome and random barbarity.

But hunger is NOT unpredictable.  It is NOT random.

And the wealthy in power are more concerned about THEIR PERSONAL WEALTH than other people's children (or other people at all).  There is no tenderness for children suffering in ordinary ways.  Hunger doesn't have the shock, commerce, or (let's be frank) entertainment value extreme violence does.  And it doesn't make anybody a buck, not reliably.

So bills like this week's watery soup get passed, and we try to consider it a triumph.

It is not.

And the kids aren't mine, so perhaps I am the perverse one.  Because I do care - and I know I don't do more than work the food bank on rare occasion, or the Salvation Army holiday charity event, or sign petitions (the link is a petition focusing on gun violence, not on hunger) ... an otherwise just go to my job, pray in thanksgiving and in supplication for those in need, and giggle about my new pets in my nice warm house.  I suck.

As the wealthy in power work hard to sin outright against everyone but themselves.

Joe Williams - Not of Politico

Last fall at the JRW Conference, I had the pleasure to meet Joe Williams.  He was one of the most open and intelligent people there, clearly engaged, very professional, still not over-confident in himself, and funny to boot.  We talked about the Pitchapalooza - I went first, and he was incredibly generous about how hard that must have been and how I actually did.

Since I assume this will be deleted, here is the screenshot of Joe's page from Polico.com

Not a raving lunatic racist, this gentleman.  I'm sickened to see what is happening to him today.

Lyrics

Driving around in the heat of the day running errands, I heard this pop song I've heard bits of before, but never the whole thing.  It starts off with a bit of talk-sing-y drama, a monologue of a guy going to the bathroom in a bar, his girl sitting at the table, someone comes up to her, starts chatting her up, asking her about a scar "I know I gave you that a few months ago but I'm trying to make it up to you"

CUE RECORD SCREECHING TO A HALT.

Wait.

Wait.

Pop song lyrics about a man who beats his girlfriend so severely she SCARS are now a thing we can just drop in and blow by like nothing has been said are okay now?  This is a thing?  This is not any cause for concern?

Holy crap.

Look, I know I am an apologist for someone pretty rightly famed for his (fear and) obsession with women, and even I don't pretend he wasn't a misogynist.  The songs he wrote which caused the most outrage were the most clearly fantastical.

This tune today?  Nothing fantastical there.  Quite pointedly prosaic and personal, this is a song about the curvatus en se personal foolishness of youth, and the bit about SCARRING A WOMAN just goes by without the slightest notice, even by the writer/singer.  "I'm trying to make it up" basically is all we hear, which ... is not enough.

It's bad enough people are obsessed with a now years-old saga of two of the wealthiest and most famous music starlets of their time on-again/off-again dating each other ages after HE BATTERED HER VIOLENTLY.  It's bad enough there remain huge swaths of "entertainment" dependent upon the rape and terrifying abuse of women and little girls in our culture (see also "news" cycles breathlessly relating to the latest Pretty White Girl abduction or murder - see also G-d damned LAW AND BLOODY ORDER SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, which of course is at its most painstakingly special when someone has been specially, sickeningly violated and we get to explore THAT in loving detail).

No, now we get to SING, popular little teenaged songs, glorifying the inchoate angst of little boys who HIT GIRLS - meanwhile that girl is herself an invisible figure in this song, left either as the inspiration for the poor boy's cruelly debilitating self-interest or perhaps someone he'll need to be discarding soon, as she is the cause of unhappiness for him.  Meanwhile the ABUSE he has inflicted upon her isn't even a FOOTNOTE in terms of the meaning of the song.

This is seriously just peachy.  Boy howdy, I hope the idiot-hole who wrote that happy tune sure will make kabillions of kilobucks off it.



Please say something, please comment, please be horrified or explain to me I mis-heard this, or something - someone ... !

Editing to add:  nope.  The lyrics are, if anything, WORSE in b/w.

Like This

Things like this get to me lately.  It *isn't* just the dinosaurs, who'll be retiring/dying off soon.  "Shut up and take it" is alive and well and always has been.  And there is always someone to tell you to stop talking about it.

More (Gross) Tangentiality

Yes, this is supposed to be my author blog, but ... I just finally got around to eating lunch.  One of my pre-made Ukrop's meals, a Mediterranean pasta I usually like (lately, the herbs have been a bit crunchy, rather than fresh and soft).

If my appetite had not been badly affected enough by the illness this week?  The FINGERNAIL I JUST FOUND IN MY FOOD would certainly have done it.  The fingernail which appears to be stained with ink, or who in blazes knows what ...

So my weight now is 8 pounds down, and the only thing this could cause to come up is the lunch I just tried to eat.  Holy crap.  Fingernail.  Ew, guys.  EW.

Still Obstinate

One of the "musts" of being a writer in 2012 - apart from "must" be on FB and "must" be on Twitter and even "must" do some things I am actually willing and EAGER to get into in support of my novels - is that one "must" read what is out there now, know the market, be educated both in my genre and in what is likely to sell.  Stylistically, one "must" study contemporary lit and mass market.  Professionally, one "must" understand how to become a part of it.

I've gotten over my Special Snowflake phase, in which we ALL, every damned one of us, presume exemption from the work that is querying, polishing, shilling, meet-and-greeting.  I've gotten over my initial reluctance to create a presence (under my real name) online, and joined genre discussion boards and, yes, gone on Twitter to get myself some low-hanging follow action.  I've learned to enjoy and clearly respect the function of these activities (in the case of Historical Fiction Online and Absolute Write, this has hardly been a chore, though putting myself out there has always been difficult).

I still can't get over the fundamental feeling in my heart, though, that reading is such a deeply intimate experience, and so essentially a form of *entertainment*, that to forgo consuming what I want in it is still anathema.

This isn't to say I don't dig Iggulden's Conqueror series, or failed to notice Cornwell's latest Saxon release, nor that I'm not excited about Ben Kane and Spartacus (I need to ping the local bookstore to see if we can even get him to come visit!).

Oh, but it so IS to say that the Charles Major I have read recently, and the Edgar Rice Burroughs I am reading now, I would not trade, I would not give up.  There is only so much time for reading, and I am still a pouty and petulant child, obstinate in my believe that It Is Not Fair to ask me to follow any sort of scholastic reading program when ... I am a big girl.  I have earned the right to read what I wish to - not what I "have" to.  Not what I "must" ...

At its heart, reading is entertainment.  Part of entertainment is that it takes place in a space and time of personal autonomy.  We decide what we enjoy.  Entertainment fails when it's imposed on us by someone else (as opposed to inspired by someone else, shared with someone else, or SUGGESTED by someone else, and then catches fire for us personally).  How many times has someone pressed a book into your hand, sweaty with passion over it, told you you MUST read this ... and you just hated it?  Openmindedness is all very well, but without personal identification - and therefore personal motivation - the entertainment aspect of the picture is lost.  Time spent reading for anyone but yourself (or watching a movie or whatever you do for diversion) is a chore.

Even the research reading I did was something in my control, and though I became so absorbed in it I actually realized at some point a few years ago that I had not "read a book" for the sake of enjoyment for a period of months, that was because I became absorbed.  It was an act of will on my part to dunk myself into reading for work rather than pleasure - but of course even that had immense pleasures too.

Someday, perhaps, I will consider the "must" of reading the market an equal pleasure.  It isn't as if contemporary publishing is of no interest to me.  It's only that the loss, for me, of the incredible autonomy and intimacy, magnificent experience of reading, which for me is necessarily independent, rather nonconformist, perhaps a trifle contrarian and definitely antiquarian ... seems too much to ask.  And of a writer, of all the ironies.

Still obstinate.  But my mind is not utterly closed.  Only afraid.  I've lost enough of my childhood.  It doesn't seems sporting to kill off those ruins still standing.

Tech II

I can't post anything profound nor considered about what happened today in Blacksburg.  This is what I said at Historical Fiction Online (where someone thought the big deal had something to do with "being in a certain radius of DC).





I heard about it within half an hour of the second murder, and damn near didn't make it through the rest of the day. There is *nobody* around here who doesn't have blood tied to Tech. My parents' first home was on campus; my brother born while they lived there. My dad's orange and maroon graduation stole is upstairs right now; I've had it since his death, and any of this would break his heart.

The massacre was unspeakable. I still remember the Queen of England meeting the families, here in Richmond. It is manifest here EVERY day - ribbon magnets on cars. People have hardly forgotten.

When my coworker told me, I almost broke down in tears. When my boss (not local, but he was in town today) mentioned it casually, I had a hard time responding to him without my voice cracking. I have prayed ... all afternoon.

This is worse than simply appalling. It goes below an emotional, social waterline and cracks something fundamental.


***


Blacksburg is really nowhere near DC. Today's crimes began with a murder in the parking lot at the University Colosseum, and escalated when, during a routine traffic stop just afterward, the murderer then shot the campus police officer who pulled him over.

Thirty two people died less than five years ago. Too many of those people were *kids*. None of those people, nor their families, could ever have imagined this tragedy.

This happened on campus, involving a campus police officer - in all probability, a man who himself would have been mobilized to the massacre of April 16. That's all it has to have to do with this. It is devastating.


I don't mean to sound pedantic nor nasty. But this has nothing to do with Washington, DC.

The Magic of Touch-Ups

And the cruelty of expectations.  Bro, please look at these with the girls.  X, you guys too.

Speaking as someone who LOVES the artificiality of makeup, and who recognizes just how CGI'd most images have become - perhaps even more in photography we don't even think about being altered than in special effects we acknowledge every day - the pervasiveness and effects of this imagery are saddening, sickening, deeply disturbing.  Many of the pics used are obviously exemplars - just ways to demonstrate the power of image manipulation.

But too many of them are the faces of those put before us every day as expectations - as ideals - to aspire to.

And the one of the child is just too much to even manage, emotionally.  A *child* isn't deemed beautiful enough to print.  *Sigh*

"There's Lots of Darks Out Tonight"

I could NOT be angrier with Blogger right now.  I opened this window to create the post, and minutes later the site went offline.  When I hit the "tough luck" screen, there was a link to the Status page - which gave me the day-old news that the site would be going down at 5:00 PST today (because, after all, who the heck uses the INTERNET at 8:00 EST? or, for that matter, at the end of the workday in Cali ... ?).  NO NOTICE ON MY DASHBOARD.  NO NOTICE ON THE COMPOSITION PAGE.  Which, you know, was WORKING when I opened it.

I guess we are supposed to be constantly checking the obscure little posts on Blogger's Status page.  Gah.

So anyway.  This is an incredibly crappy, unsatisfying reconstruction of what was a pithy and lovely post about two hours ago.  *Seethe*


My older niece said this when she was two or so, in the car at night, after a long flight, on the way to grandma and granddaddy's house.  It's a way of looking at the night any writer could envy; seeing the dark, and being able to describe it.  Instead of the perfectly serviceable "it's dark" - she instead saw forms, she saw the multiplicity of night, she saw depths and expressed them (without the easy expedient of, for instance, "depths").  Her observation underscores the power of seeing things - *SEEING* them - without rules, but with the simplicity of clarity and honesty.  There is no arguing:  she was right.

Her approach to words was learning, then - but learning, as we know, has always been play.  ...  Or play is learning.

I use language with an enormous sense of play.  It is one of my favorite things, to get people to laugh.  Not class-clown laugh - but surprise laugh.  I use words with the same unexpected play as my niece (still does, over a decade later), and delight when they delight someone else as much as they do me.

I am fortunate, in having friends who are willing to indulge in delight - and in words.



In writing Clovis, I refused ploy in favor of play.  Histfic of my period tend for some reason to be little associated with wit - though Victorian, or Elizabethan, or other periods may indulge.  Yet humor is human; there's no authenticity in writing funless Forsooth-ery - nor in planting Weighty Declamation throughout your dialogue.  It's not fair to preclude cleverness, least of all for someone who must have been intelligent.

Blah.  I am so mad at Blogger.  I've completely lost the very good original ending of this post.  I will have to come back and edit this if it is to be saved.  But I am mad enough I insist on being stupid enough to post this shameful, crappy post.  Just to spite BLOGGER.  Which has cruelly betrayed my niece's brilliance.

*Insert outrageous swearing here*

How Much Do I Love My President Right Now?

Yeah, the speech he is giving even as I type is pretty stellar and all that.

But he just asked why hedge fund managers should pay lower tax rates than their secretaries.  WOO for him ditching that "Administrative Assistant" bullshit.  (Additionally:  good question.  Let's get a *decent* answer.)

And also, you know - for growing a functional pair, and publicly making the most salient point of our day.



Get it the hell done, O Wealthy Lawyer-Politicians.  The rest of us are heartily sick of the bloody brinksmanship.  NOBODY'S little "endowments" (all entendres intended) are going to look good if this plays out.  So quit lying about your measurements and each other's.  You guys have a ****ing job to do.

Do it.

Lining

Supremely annoyingly, it has happened again.

I haven't discussed the incident at work here on this blog, but it was sufficiently inappropriate that I went on record with it at the time with two separate coworkers.  The particular offender in that case received a wall of ice from me, high enough and for long enough, that he hasn't proffered further *inappropriate* conduct - BUT his presence is near enough to me, and constant enough, that I enjoy a modicum of discomfort and irritation pretty much every day.  Because this is not my home, and because no further issues have arisen - nor has there been escalation - I suffer this, because this is a place I am paid to do a job, and that is the matter I prefer to focus on.  If not joyously gratifying, the lack of any more event has at least been satisfactory.

Yesterday, I was hit on while trying to go to the bathroom.  My response to this was to be elaborately awkward and discouraging - while LEANING on the door and all but "dancing" to get away - and still it went on.

The brand of man who pushes and pushes, asking "can't we talk" and "I just want to be friends" in the face of a stark and utter absence of even a scintilla of rapport (never mind interest):  definitely and unquestionably not the man for me.

Better still - it's not even the original creep.  So now I have two of these people, in a place I spend so much of my time, men from whom I have no escape but the blank ice of (one side of) my personality, to be unfortunately *aware* of all the time.

"I have to say something" this one said to me.  To which, if I'd had any d*mned sense, I would have said right then:  "No.  Really, you do not."  And "are you married" was his opener.  Which - good lord.  Even my very first words to the guy - "No, but there is a specific person I am not married to" - were to no avail with this one.



The thing is, one hit might have gotten a miss, in this situation.  Except then the guy showed up later in the day.  With "I didn't see you again" - to which I said simply, "Nope."  He lurked at me while I was making coffee, and I could not have been less open to his presence, but he kept standing there.  When he said he wanted to be friends, I finally actually looked him in the face and said, "I think that what you want I am not prepared to accomodate" - and even this didn't cause him to evaporate instantaneously.  When he tried the I just want to talk/I just want to be friends gambit YET again, I finally simply said, pointblank:  "You are making me uncomfortable."

Even that didn't result in his absence, because first there had to be all sorts of slow-talk apologies from this overly soft-spoken dullard.  But finally, he did eventually go.



At this point, I mull what if anything to say to my boss, who's in the office this week.  I don't want to create a formal HR process (I don't even know this guy's name), but I do probably need to be on record, now that the population of unwanted attention-payers is doubled (and I'm not even counting the silent stare-er I see around the buillding).

It's a frustrating thing, and I am angry that I have to Deal With all this now, some way or another.  This is not what I'm paid for, and it's an infraction against my right to simply work in peace.

I just want to do my job.

Which isn't actually Human Resources mediation.



Blah.

Now. See Here, Universe.

The deal was that I would endure my mother's having surgery, one of my two best friends having a lung biopsy and pain pump installed, and my other best friend coming through the crisis of last week. Now, you understand: it is OVER.

There is nothing, nothing whatever, okay - about my best friend who just came through the biopsy, having a preliminary diagnosis ... of the disease that killed my father.