It's Back: Now that mildlyamusing.com is back up, look for updates frequently. We've even begun to consider dabbling in flash animations and podcasting. We'll probably get around to doing them right around the time when something else is hip and new.

Saturday Story: This is not one I finished this week, but rather one "From The Archives," so to speak. It's a little bit of nonsense called, "Moonshine," and if you're wondering why you've never seen it before, it's because it never really did what I wanted it to do. I got exactly one critique on it before, and it was before I knew enough about criticism to know which questions to ask, so it's still mostly as it was then.

It's about 24 pages and just over 5,000 words long. As always, email me if you're able to give it a look. I could really use your help on this one.

Saturday Story: This week's story is a short one. It's called, "At The End Of His Rope," and it's a juvenile western about a kid who's about to be lynched by a mob of goldminers who think he's a jinx. It comes in at under 10 pages, about 1500 words.

As always, email if you're able to send a critique.

And while I'm on the subject, anybody know any good markets for juvenile westerns?

Saturday's Story: The story I'd like to send around this Saturday is a rather quirky little piece called, "The Karmatic Balancing Act." I'm a little nervous about sending this one out first, because while I like it a whole lot, I'm afraid that may be totally personal predilection and others may find it merely odd.

So even at the risk that it will turn you off to reading anything more by me, I ask: Who would like a copy?

It's 32 pages in double spaced courier, right around 7,500 words. It tells the story of an accountant who learns Karma guarantees the medicine always has to be as bad as the disease.

Why I'm Not Libertarian, Part II: Some time ago, I posted a bunch of reasons why I wasn't Libertarian. I won't bother to find that again.

But I found a quote today that wonderfully sums up the other part.

So much of Libertarianism is tied up in my mind with Objectivism, the philosophy that says if you look out for yours and I look out for mine, we will both of us end up alright.

Objectivism, as I understand it, even goes so far as to explain altruism in selfish terms, saying that because I "love" another, that makes him part of me, and so in looking after him I am ultimately looking after myself.

Here's the quote I found:

Many of us can recount experiences in which we lost ourselves in the service of others and found those moments to be among the most rewarding of life. Everyone actively involved in serving God by reaching out to others can recount similar stories, as can devoted parents and marriage partners who have given of their time and means, who have loved and sacrificed so greatly that their concern for each other and for their children has known almost no bounds.

What a therapeutic and wonderful thing it is for a man or woman to set aside all consideration of personal gain and reach out with strength and energy and purpose to help the unfortunate, to improve and beautify the community, to clean up the environment. How much greater would be the suffering of the homeless and the hungry in our own communities without the service of hundreds of volunteers who give of their time and substance to assist them. All of us need to learn that life is a mission and not simply a career.

Tremendous happiness and peace of mind are the results of loving service to others. Nobody can live fully and happily who lives only unto himself or herself.

Now granted, I'm not a Democrat either, because I do not believe virtue like this can be "imposed" on those who don't have it.

But the idea that selfishness is a virtue and that being self-serving will lead humanity to reach its greatest potential requires mental and semantic gymnastics I won't be a part of.

Yeah, yeah. I know the circular argument. "If co-operation is truly what's best for us, then our craving to have the best for ourselves will drive us to co-operation!"

We agree it's a circle, we just disagree on which direction we should be moving in. The objectivist says to start by looking in, and your frustration and lack of fulfillment will eventually give you reasons to look out.

I say start out by looking out, and by the time you get around to noticing yourself again, you'll already be delighted with what you find there.

Readers: First, my heartfelt thanks to all of you who read my last story. I really appreciate it. Your comments were all thoughtful and helpful. You're an amazing bunch of friends.

Now, I have kind of an insane request.

First, let me be up front that I'm confident the answer this question will mostly be no. In fact, I expect "NO's" all around.

Here's the situation.

I want to put myself through a writing "boot camp" for one year. From now until the end of next year, I want to write one story a week, and rewrite one story each weekend.

Most of these would be short stories (less than 7,500 words) although occasionally, I might write a longer story over a two-week period. Also, I'll probably miss a lot of weeks, especially in the beginning.

The hope is that by the end of next year, I'll have 50 stories kicking around, and that I will have learned a little something about the process of writing. About the discipline that it takes to get words out consistently, about the process of turning a fraction of an idea into a story, and, most importantly, about entertaining readers.

It's this last part I need help with. What I'm wondering is if there's anybody who's willing to read at least some of this massive amount of stuff I'll (hopefully) be cranking out.

It would be reader-response criticism, like I've talked about before. It doesn't require anything more than what you already are good at--reading something and deciding what you like and don't like about it. Letting me know when the story was exciting, when it was boring, when you cared about the characters and when you didn't. It's not just criticism, but also an accounting of your experience as a reader.

In other words, I will try do one thing when I write the story, but your job is to tell me what I actually did.

No obligations to finish anything. If you read three pages and decide it isn't for you, great. Send it back and tell me why you were able to put it down. No obligations to do it every week. If you don't have the chance to get to a bunch of them, don't sweat it.

But what I'll do is post here each week that I finish one, and then, if you think you might be able to get to it, email me and tell me. If not, don't sweat it.

This will give me a motivation to write, because I know people will see here if I finished anything, so it will be a kind of check-in.

What I'm looking for, though, are thoughts on whether anyone feels they'd even be able to participate partly. If not, that's fine, like I said. But if so, then please let me know either in the comments here or in my email.

If you're someone who reads this blog, but has never read my fiction, here's a little info: I'm a decent fiction writer. I've been an Honorable Mention in the Writers Of The Future contest, been published semi-professionally, and received lots of encouraging comments from editors. In other words, I'm getting ever closer to that precipice that separates the pro from the amateur, and I really want to make the leap.

This means the fiction you read will not be unspeakably bad, but it will need comments, suggestions, tips and help to make it be, as they say, all it can be.

And, hopefully, it will gradually get better.

So if anybody is willing to hang in there with me, to any degree, please let me know, so I know whether or not to worry about posting the info here as each story becomes available.

Speaking Of Reality Shows: I finished a peice of fiction this week that deals with reality TV. It's around 7,000 words. If anybody's interested in reading it and giving me some feedback, please drop me a line. I'll probably have the second draft ready to go out to you a week from today.

It's a little brutal. Just a warning.

Book Review: Sometimes The Magic Works: Lessons From A Writer's Life by Terry Brooks

I had exactly two bits of exposure to Terry Brooks prior to picking up this book. Well, maybe more than that. I had a friend who loved the Shanara books, and I own a copy of Running With The Demon I picked up at a used bookstore but have never read.

I guess it's more accurate to say, I'd read two of his books.

The first was the book that turned me off to him, and that was his adaptation of the movie Hook. I really enjoyed Hook. I'm a fan of the Peter Pan books and movies in most of their incarnations, but most of all in the original book. The movie was true enough to that to win me over, and so I rushed out to buy the novelization.

See, most of you are already giggling behind your hands, because novelizations are bad. We all know that, right? Well, I didn't. I had only read a couple of novelizations. The first were the Craig Shaw Gardner ones he did for Back To The Future II & III and Batman, and the other was Orson Scott Card's novelization of The Abyss. The Gardner books were interesting, including deleted scenes that weren't in the movies (Including my favorite line that didn't make Batman) and the Card book would have likely was award-worthy but largely ignored solely because it was a novelization.

That's all a long way of saying I hadn't yet met a bad novelization. So then I came across Hook, and I swore off Terry Brooks forever.

Well, not quite forever.

Because then he did the novelization for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Like everybody else that year, I was caught up in the Star Wars hype, and since one of my soon-to-be brothers in law had bought it, I gave it a read, despite my fears about Brooks.

And you know what? It was a terrific book. And it fixed the biggest flaw in the film.

People blame their feelings about little Annakin on Jake Lloyd's acting--the real culprit was George Lucas's script. Here's a little boy we're supposed to feel bad for, but in Lucas's script, it looks like he's got everything going for him. He gets to build robots and race pods, he has lots of friends and a mother who loves him. We're never given any real reason to root for him, because it doesn't look like he's got much to worry about.

Brook's book fixes this flaw. We get one extra chapter at the start of the book about Annikan. We see him lose a pod race he's forced to run and almost die doing it. We see his owner knock him around a little for his incompetence. In other words, we get some conflict around this character. We're given reasons to care.

So now I had two conflicting views of Brooks--one good, one bad.

Then along comes this book, Sometimes the Magic Works. It came out about the same time as Stephen King's On Writing, and is similar in a lot of ways. They're both part writing guide and part autobiographical. They're both a little whimsical and chatty. And they're both worth your time if you're interested in writing.

The most reassuring thing, for me, was that Brooks seems to share my disdain for the Hook book. The folks at Amblin apparently didn't realize they were going to be getting a New York Times Bestselling author to do the adaptation for them, and had been extremely limiting in what they would and wouldn't allow him access to and information about. The whole experience had been as dismal for him to write as it had been for me to read.

As for his advice--well, it's an interesting mix of practicality and whimsy. As you can see by the title, he acknowledges that a certain amount of the process is just magic. You can't really account for it or explain it.

But yet he strongly encourages outlining and pooh-poohs the notion of freewriting off the top of your head without one. (Why waste your time writing pages and pages of prose you'd have known you were going to throw out if you'd have done an outline?)

He's flexible with it, of course--if a wonderful idea occurs to you on page 100, you don't chuck it out just because it isn't in the outline. The outline is a tool, not the rule, and is as fluid and changeable as you need it to be. It's just a lot easier and less time consuming to change than pages and pages of nearly finished text.

My favorite bit of advice, though, comes late in the book. If you read the Amazon reviews, you'll see a couple are down on some bits where Brooks talks about his Grandson. I'd argue that the bits where he talks about his Grandson are two of the most important parts of the book.

I won't tell the anecdote, but I will tell you the moral of at least one of the stories:

There's a reason why fiction, be it a book, or TV, or film, is more noble than "reality" books or "reality" shows. Reality shows only show us as we are. It's only when we journey into fiction that we discover what we ultimately could be.

So I recommend it. It's a thin book, and it won't turn your world upside down. But it will reinstill some of that sense of what you're doing and why.

Good-Bye, Kinda: I'm not closing the blog down, but I am giving you fair warning that this is going to be updated infrequently. Once a week at the most, once a month at least.

If you want to take down reciprolinks, I'll understand.

Some stuff has come up--my church has asked me to teach an early morning seminary class for high school kids--that will take several hours of my day. If I want to keep exercising and writing fiction, I'm going to have to give some things up somewhere, and after careful consideration, I've decided blogging is one of them.

Not that I've ever really updated this blog anywhere close to regularly, but I just thought I'd give a heads-up this was coming.

And if you do see me posting here regularly, yell at me and tell me to get back to working on stories.

Thanks a lot.

NPOV: I like Wikipedia. I usually go there first when I need a bit of information. It has served me well--even giving me a useful timeline to let me know where a couple of fairly minor historical figures were during the months before and after the start of the Civil War, a remarkably specific fact, and incredibly useful for the script I'm currently writing.

But see, there's a seedy underbelly I wasn't really aware of until today. See, the idea behind wikis is that anyone who wants to can show up and make a change. Then, somebody else can change it another way, or change it back. So any stupid changes disappear forever, and any useful changes remain for all posterity.

The problem, of course, comes from the fact that there are a number of things we all disagree about. Pat Moynihan once said (as you can read on WikiQuote, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." Well, apparently a bunch of people never heard that.

If you click on the little tab on the top that says, "Discussion," you'll find the behind-the-scenes of the article you're reading. People fighting, arguing, name-calling, and slandering each other over what actually ends up on that main page.

You see, Wikipedia has aspirations of achieving a true "Neutral Point of View," or "NPOV," for short. A noble aspiration, to be sure, but tough in practice.

A review of disputed articles includes the expected--does the existence of an article on the word "Chinglish" already make an NPOV impossible?--and the obscure--what really happened to the original ending of the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic video game?

There's even arguments about NPOV regarding the Solar System in Astrology, and it's not the ones you think. One argument is about whether the article has too many references to a single source. Another is about whether the page should even exist, or whether the discussions should be moved to the pages about the individual planets. After all, wouldn't a true "NPOV" treat the astrological implications of Venus as seriously as they would the geological ones?

So I made a change somewhere. Then I discovered I'd thrown myself into the midst of a controversy. So I changed it back, and voiced my opinions on why it should be changed. But it's not like a forum, really. It's an encyclopedia. So when do we "decide" which is right? Who gets final say? Who knows.

So I decided to change an incorrect fact, just to put my foot down.

And now, hopefully I'll stay away from that edit button like I should have all along.