Back of the Envelope

As some of you may know, I have family in Louisiana. Thus it caused some concern to hear that Hurricane Katrina has flooded 80% of New Orleans. Now my family doesn't live in New Orleans. They live in St. Francisville, a small town about 30 miles north of Baton Rouge. And if you search the news stories on Katrina, St. Francisville comes up as the place where people have found refuge after fleeing the hurricane. Still, attempts to call home were thwarted yesterday due to the overloading of the phone circuits, and I was frustrated at not being able to get through.

I finally did talk to my sister, and everyone's all right. My parents were west of the storm, near Texas, for a vacation, while my sisters hunkered down with their friends in my parents' home, which is sturdier than theirs. One of my sisters is still without electricity, but my parents' house only lost it for an hour or so.

Please keep them, and everyone else in the path of Katrina, in your prayers. Many weren't so lucky. Loss of life is over a 100 (I expect it will be several hundred by the time we're done counting), and hundreds of thousands of people are homeless.

I've finally finished the first draft of the story I intend to submit to Faith in Fiction's writing contest. I think it turned out okay, but I need some independent opinions. Now, I don't intend to even look at the story again for a few weeks, in order to gain the distance I need to properly revise it, but I'd also like the opinions of some other folks. I haven't really decided whether to have them look at the current version or the next revision. I'd prefer to wait for the next revision, but I'm not sure I'll have time considering the short time frame until the story's due (September 30th). If you're interested in helping me out, let me know. In some ways, the more critical you can be of my work, the better.

I've spent a good bit of time working on my entry for the Writing Contest I mentioned earlier. As of Monday night, I had written 4,000 words for a 3,000 word limit short story and I didn't seem to be getting anywhere. At the center of the story is the character's argument with God, but I couldn't seem to get the argument right--it kept going around in circles, or off on tangents, or following non sequiturs. It was beginning to look like I wouldn't have an entry for the contest.

At that point I decided that I had had enough of what I was doing. If the central point of the story is the argument, then I needed to write that and only that: all the background information, the probing of the character's thoughts and feelings and motivation, the descriptions of his environs and his gestures, all of that needed to be done away with, so that all that was left was the argument itself, to stand and fall on its own. So that's what I did Monday night, and the result was... better. It's not perfect, certainly, but it's coherent, which is more than I can say for what I had written previoiusly. Most of what I had before is going to go in the bitbucket, which is good as I now have 5,000 words and a 3,000 word limit. Then I have to figure out some way to fill in the background and the aftermath, writing around the argument now rather than trying to interweave things. So I still have a lot to do before the story's done, but I'm feeling a lot more confident that the story will eventually get done.

For a guy with pretensions of being a writer, I have a definite problem with question marks: I keep forgetting them. I mean, I can use colons and semicolons with aplomb, the dash is my best friend, and I know the best way to use an exclamation mark--sparingly! I emphasize all the right words with italics, I know when a strategic ellipsis helps, and I even place my commas in the right places... mostly. Why is it that I keep forgetting to put question marks at the end of my interrogative sentences. Er, I mean, "Why is it that I keep forgetting to put question marks at the end of my interrogative sentences?" I honestly think it is my most common punctuation mistake, and I find at least one instance in every story--make that every chapter of every story--that I write. Who knows how many instances I'm missing? Maybe I'm just deluding myself; maybe all my punctuation is just as bad, and I only notice the question mark because it's so obvious when I mess it up. What do you think. What do you think?

I rarely complain about companies, even when I have troubles with them. Most of the time, I can see their side of the story and why I ran afoul of their policy, but in the case of GoToMyPC, my interactions have reached irritating beyond reason and I find their policies highly annoying, so I have to vent. GoToMyPC is run by Citrix, and I intend to avoid future interactions with them.

The company has a service that lets you access a computer you install its program on from anywhere. They charge $14.95 a month for this. There are cheaper ways to do this, such as Windows XP's Remote Desktop, but when you have a Dynamic DNS address and a router, it requires some Port Forwarding and DNS aliasing tricks, and can only work for one PC per router, so I thought I'd give it a try. After all, they have a 30 day free trial, so it shouldn't be a problem, right? Well, the first problem appears once you realize that their 30 day free trial is a 30 day or 60 minutes of connection time, whichever comes first. 60 minutes is barely enough time to see what the service can do, much less to decide if you like it, but it's still free, right? The next problem is that in order to sign up for the "free" service, you have to give a credit card number, so they can start charging you the minute you go over the terms of your "free" trial. Annoying, but typical. The first time I saw this I just quit halfway through the application process. But I came back, since I really did want to see if it could do what I thought it could.

It turns out that it can, but it's really sluggish. Then again, so are most remote desktop programs, aren't they? Anyway, I gave it a try and used up some of my minutes. I also discovered that I can't use it through my work's firewall, making it ultimately useless, so I decided that it wasn't worth the price. As a result I went to cancel my account. Or tried to.

After going through all the webpages about my account set-up, I discovered that I could only cancel my account by calling them. Okay, now I'm really annoyed. I'm so annoyed, in fact, that I'm actually looking forward to telling a real live operator exactly why I'm cancelling my account. So I made the call, and waited on hold for a full twenty minutes, only to be booted to their voice mail system, which promised that someone would call me that day if I left a message during working hours (of which Saturday, from 7 am - 5 pm PST is). I've given them my message and I'm interested to see whether they really will call me, or if it will take a legal order to close my account.

Update: Well, it looks like my account has been closed down in response to my message. I'd be happier if they had let me know, via e-mail or phone, but my annoyance has abated as a result.

Update: One of Citrix's VPs noticed this entry and addressed my complaints in my comments. While I'm still annoyed about the difficulties I had, I do appreciate the personal attention. The service may be worthwhile now if they've made the improvements he claims. It still doesn't do me much good if I can't access my home computer from work, but I'll quit saying nasty things about it, at least.

Dave at Faith in Fiction has annoucned a writing contest:

One of the most crucial (and hard) things in writing Christian fiction is the "God talk"--making it sound authentic and natural. And one of the hardest things to write is a conversion scene. Yet, this should be the most powerful thing we should read--this should render us awestruck that a name has been written in the Book. (Metaphorically or literally, depending on how much Calvin you like in your theology.)

So, I'd like us to write conversion stories. Simple as that.

We complain a lot about bad conversion stories, so let's see if we can write something more compelling.

Rules (to this point, more may be added)
1. 3000 words or less.
2. I have no definition for what a conversion story is, but we're talking about some Christian salvific experience. It also needs to be fiction, no autobiography or memoir.
3. Deadline will be Friday, September 30, 5:00pm central time. Earlier is appreciated.
4. I haven't talked with anybody about partnering on this one, but I'll try to track somebody down. Let me know if you have suggestions or contacts at online journals.
5. There will be prizes for the chosen finalists. They will be more symbolic than impressive. Unless someone wants to give me a grant.
6. But remember, these things get read and a book contract emerged out of the last group.

I haven't decided whether or not I'll participate in this. I have an idea, one which really appeals to me and lets me use familiar characters, but I think y'all might hate me if I actually do it. The 3,000 word limit is a difficult one. It's hard enough for me to write within a 6,000 word limit. Heck, I can hardly squeeze a single chapter to under 3,000 words. Still, it sounds like it's worth doing.

For reasons I'm uncertain of, Netscape 8.0 has inexplicably started to crash whenever I visit certain sites. Well, sort of. It pops up a dialogue asking whether I want to save a dump file. Whether I say yes or no, it will close Netscape. However, if I just ignore it, Netscape will continue to run fine. It's an odd error to come up. Eh, maybe it's time to switch to Firefox after all.

Dave at Faith in Fiction asks whether Christian fiction should be safe:

I bring this up because within the CBA industry one you thing realize is that our “adult” books are being read by kids...

The reason oft-cited (by parents) for why they offer their children our books is that they know they are going to be “safe.” (There’s that word again. Mark Bertrand dissected implications of “safe” fiction on Friday. I won’t rehash it.)
...
So what of books that tackle “adult” topics—perhaps infidelity or divorce or abuse or a variety of other topics. Are “ratings” the answer? Concerned conservative consumers have forced these moves in the movie, music, and video game industry. Books, for whatever, reason have been passed by. That’s fine in my estimation. UNLESS, the implicit understand is: If it’s in a Christian book store, my eleven-year-old should be able to read it! To me that’s too constricting a call. Shouldn't there be room for our books to "put childish things behind them" and stand before the dark glass, no matter how perplexing and confusing the view might be.

I'm not sure about the ratings thing, but I can say that the things I write are not safe. I'm not talking about adult situations or language. Although that sometimes appears in what I write, I've never done explicit sexual scenes and I have no desire to. That, to me, is not what makes a work edgy, although it can certainly make it uncomfortable. No, what makes a work unsafe is when it makes you doubt, when it strips away the assumptions and the rules and makes you confront a world that doesn't match your ideals. Granted, this horrible world can be just as much a fantasy as an ideal one, and that is what I am trying to discover when I write. Can my beliefs deal with the raw ugliness in the world? Are my fears and doubts as real and powerful as they seem when they're anchored to realistic situations rather than free-floating in my mind?

When I write, I write both my hopes and fears, made "concrete" in situations which may not be real, but which have more flesh than the logic and emotion which conceived those hopes and fears. I put them on stage, in the lives of characters who are sometimes representative of me, and sometimes not, and I see what happens. Some of the time I have a pretty good idea of what will happen, a story in mind, but just because I think I know the path a story will follow doesn't ensure it happens that way. Fire went a very different path than expected. And other times I have no idea which way things will go, and I write because I am as curious as to how things will shape up as my readers, as was the case with Eyes in the Shadow.

So, for me, my writing is not safe, because I don't know the answers. I'm not certain whether hope or fear will prevail in the lives of my characters, and I can only write through it, praying--sometimes literally--that my characters will find the way, and that they will share it with me.