Sick Day vs. Everything Else

[bodlon]

When I get to Saturday and the remains of this week are smoldering around my feet where they all came crashing down, I wish for the record to reflect that it’s so very not my fault. It is the microbes’ fault for colonizing me.

At least this afghan and my ridiculous wing-back chair love me. And my netbook. And my warm, warm dogs. Oh dogs. So warm.

~*~

I’ve been going around in circles again with whether or not I should consider using a pseudonym. On the one hand, I really enjoy writing SF/F. On the other, I really enjoy writing romance and erotica. Sometimes these things meet in the middle. Sometimes they don’t.

Neither of these things is a cause for shame so much as a question of whether my aspirations in each area might make sufficiently odd or uncomfortable bedfellows as to be problematic. Like, how do my aspirations to write original spec fic mesh with my desire to write certain licensed spin-off media, and does that really go in the same box as my working on a gay para-rom novel or short erotic fiction?

As a writer, there’s a certain amount of branding I have to do, not just as someone seeking work, but as someone who wants his readers to keep reading. I naturally want someone who likes a thing I’ve written to feel curious about and want to read other things I’ve written. I don’t want to turn someone off of my work because they’re expecting one thing and they get another.

So it’s a thing. And, unfortunately, it’s probably the thing that will have me working on the novel well past November because I spent a lot of my writing time this month trying to make it fit into more boxes than it’s really designed to. If anyone’s got good ideas or advice (and especially experience), I’m keen to hear what you think.

~*~

I find that I am deeply and increasingly discomfited by the unfolding story of Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-born naturalized citizen who has been arrested for thinking he was acting out a terrorist plot at a tree-lighting ceremony in Portland. In actuality, the plot was a sting arranged by the FBI.

The more I think about it, the more concerned I am that this event (and others like it) represents a massive transgression of the duty of law enforcement to protect and serve and approaches something far darker. The word entrapment keeps coming up, and it appears that Mohamud intends to plea not guilty on that basis.

While I suspect that’s the nearest thing to appropriate legal nomenclature under the circumstances, I worry intensely that the FBI took the opportunity to fashion the perfect monster instead of stopping Mohamud before things got out of control. Instead, the FBI essentially did the equivalent of a parent who notices a child misusing his or her allowance responding by arranging for someone to teach the kid to embezzle.

If we needed more evidence beyond the TSA’s irradiate-and-grope schtick that the system is sick right now, this may well be it.

(As an aside, while I can’t speak for the city of Portland, I think it’s telling that everyone I know who lives there appears to be asking “WTF FBI?” more than being relieved at being rescued by the FBI from a terrorist plot. Which, as Glenn Greenwald points out, was the FBI’s own plot in the first place.)

~*~

- Speaking of the TSA, thank goodness they’re protecting us from menstruating women. Oh, and “syphilis, lice, gonorrhea, chlamydia, strep and papilloma viruses can be transferred from passenger to passenger” by TSA agents who do not change gloves between pat-downs. Syphilis or radiation? I’ll have the chicken, then.

- Being a writer means never having to apologize for your Internet history. In the last 24 hours I’ve learned about Victorian attitudes about courtship and marriage, and how to lace oneself into a corset (vaguely NSFW if your work is squeamish about corsetry).

- I need all the money. That way, I can spend it all on soap.

- I had never heard of kettling before this week. Then I read this article about teenage student protesters in the UK being detained by police and found it upsetting and rage-inducing. I realize that as someone who lives in the United States, my experience of protest is somewhat different from that of my friends in Britain, but it certainly puts things like rioting into a whole different light for me in terms of acceptability.

- Domestication: it may have been easier than we thought.

- Rewilding: may help stop global warming.

- I’d almost forgotten how much I like this history of the Soviet Union via the Tetris theme. I am the man who arranges the blocks indeed.

- Values-affirming writing exercises may be the solution to the gender-based achievement gap in the sciences.

- Spanish woman claims ownership of the Sun. My immediate thought: “But does she have a flag?”

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

Comments

[such_heights]

Yeah, the kettling thing is -- I don't even know, it's so sad and infuriating. The government and police responses to the current protests here do not bode well for my generation's attitudes towards authority, and I can't blame them at all.

[bodlon]

I will say what the drummer of the band in which I was playing bass in 2000 said at the election of Bush the Younger:

"Well, at least it'll be a good thing for punk rock."