Trembling in the face of Iranian space turtle technology.

Oh, Internet. This week has been epic.

Today’s useful thing: a quote from William Gibson’s blog about writer’s block:

Q Creator’s block. If ever: how long, when/why it happened; or how was it avoided, palliated?

A “Creator’s block” sounds like something afflicting a divinity, but writer’s block is my default setting. Its opposite is miraculous. The process of learning to write fiction, for me, was one of learning to almost continually be doing it *through* the block, in spite of the block, the block becoming the accustomed place from which to work. Our traditional cultural models of creativity tend to involve the wrong sort of heroism, for me. “It sprang whole and perfect from my brow” as opposed to “I saw it mispelled, in mauve Krylon, on the side of a dumpster, and it haunted me”. I was much encouraged, when I began to write, by Manny Farber’s idea of “termite art”.

~*~

So this past Thursday I added a footnote to my link dump noting that Constance McMillen had been given permission to attend the private prom that was replacing the prom the Itawamba school district had canceled when Constance had asked to bring her girlfriend as a date. As it turns out, that’s not quite what happened in the end.

Turns out there were TWO private proms: the ‘real’ one and the one to which various ‘undesirables’ (including McMillen and some students with special needs) were sent.

Oh, people.

When I think back on my own high school experience, and how unhappy I was, I remember that what got me through was the advice I got from counselors and supportive adults. They told me that high school isn’t life. It’s not permanent. People move on and grow up. High school kids are jerks. Adults behave…well, like adults.

What bothers me most about the Constance McMillen story — and, in fact, reduces me to SEARING WHITE-HOT RAGE — is the fact that a community of adults is overtly, and with clear malice, acting out after-school special levels of villainy.

And all I can think is just how damned ashamed of themselves these so-called adults should be. This isn’t how school superintendents, district officials, teachers, and administrators are supposed to behave. These people are supposed to be role models. Instead, they’re acting like the worst sort of ill-mannered, spiteful, overgrown children. And it’s a disgrace.

So here’s a free clue to the adults of Itawamba County, Mississippi: grow up.

Sometimes in the real world we meet people who are different from us. They may dress differently, or have different color skin, or practice a different religion, or have disabilities, and so on. But you know what? They’re still people, just like you, and they’re entitled to all the same human rights and dignity you are. They still have just as much right to be here as you do, and a mark of maturity is learning to live with and respect differences in an equitable and civil manner, even with people you don’t necessarily like.

What you don’t do is run a kid and his family out of town or devise crazy schemes to exclude people. Goodness. I can’t imagine what my mother would have done if I’d pulled something like this.

It just boggles the mind.

~*~

FREE TO A GOOD HOME: One soapbox, well-worn.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com

Don't go to bed mad.

Ugh. I'm grumpy after writing up that last Dimlight post. Therefore, largely in an effort to unknot my psyche, it's time for that silly icon thing that's going around.

( You can't say you weren't warned. )

Super Duper Friday Link Dump

How is it Friday? How did this happen? How brilliant! I’m so excited. I just want to roll around in this whole weekend thing.

- Lambda Literary is looking for contributors. They’ve got a list of things they’re looking for, but are open to more by the look of things. Be sure to check out their guidelines as well. And, obviously, if you’re into LGBT lit as a reader more than a writer, there’s a lot to love here already.

- From io9, 5 Ways the Google Book Settlement will change the future of reading. I confess, the GBR is one of those Very Big Things that I’m still processing. I’ve got complex opinions about things like rights, fair use, and licensing, and while I do like some of Google’s aims, the overall nature of the thing is…challenging? Terrifying?

- Of interest mainly to writers and curious readers, “Testing…Testing…Is this query on?”, from The Other Side of the Story, is fairly in-depth bit of usefulness about using queries to direct the work. As someone who is often tempted to start writing big without knowing where I’m going (and as someone for whom that has paid off on a couple of occasions), this is a useful technique for pinning down one’s aims early in the creative process.

- From Joshua Palmatier’s LiveJournal, “Check Out the Sex Scene in My Fantasy Novel”, a short account of the panel of the same name at Norwescon, recounting the good advice to writers about how to handle sex in fiction. Good advice, all of it.

- Five+ Ways Being Transgender in Fandom Really Sucks, and Why I Stick With It Anyway, which I read with a lot of gladness in my heart because for all the ways genderbending and other exploration is increasingly permissible both in the culture at large and in fandom, most people don’t have any real sense of what it means from the inside. This won’t make you ‘get it’ necessarily, but it will probably make you think.

- Cherie Priest did a great post about what things authors can and can’t control in traditional publishing.

- The scariest damn drug I have ever heard of. So apparently this stuff has been around for ages and is far less dramatic than the nice people of VBS would lead us all to believe. Apologies for the web fail, folks.

Have a great weekend, all.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com

My brain's contribution to today's weirdness.

I have just awakened from the most ridiculously irritating dream ever.

My car (which I have had since 2006) had, for some reason, been latched onto by the city as a 'recovered stolen car' story. They kept reporting it in the papers as having been found after two and a half years, and that authorities were celebrating their success in finding it. The twist being that the 'rightful owner' -- or, rather, the random guy they found using an old phone number of mine -- was hostile to the authorities when they kept contacting him to try and tell him that they'd found his missing vehicle.

All the while, no one would listen to me that the whole story was a sham, that it was my car and had been for years, and that I'd really prefer it if the city would stop trying to give it to this random guy who wasn't even me. I'd try to resolve it, think it was blowing over or whatever, and then I'd stumble on a new news article or tweet from a city office about it.

I was afraid to contact the so-called owner to work things out with him for fear he'd decide he was entitled to my vehicle after all.