Arwen Spicer's Blog: Diary of a Readerly Writer (and Writerly Reader), page 3

The Passion and the Blood: A Comparison

(Les Misérables through a lens of Trigun)

(big spoilers for both)

In Les Misérables, the musical, the Bishop and Marius, for a time, sing the same melody, the Bishop singing early on about his hopes for Valjean's redemption and Marius, near the play's end, lamenting the deaths of all his friends on the barricade. What's the connection between these songs? Why the thematic echo?

Both songs discuss sacrifice for a noble cause. The Bishop invokes the death of Christ and other martyrs as an illustration of the tenacity of Christian commitment to redemption:

By the witness of the martyrs,
By the passion and the blood,
God has raised you out of darkness.
I have bought your soul for God.

Such great sacrifices in the name of love and kindness must, he suggests, inspire us to like acts of goodness, such as forgiving a thief by giving him the silver he stole, plus candlesticks, and inviting him to use it to start a new chapter in his life.

Seventeen years later, Marius is grieving the loss of his entire community in a failed rebellion. He is (understandably) stuck at:

Oh, my friends, my friends, don't ask me
What your sacrifice was for.

All he can see is:

Here they sang about tomorrow
And tomorrow never came.

But we know, of course, that the ultimate message of Les Misérables is "tomorrow comes," or as Enjolras puts it in the book, "We are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn." The June Rebellion, the story argues, lays groundwork for the more successful revolution sixteen years later. In a broader sense, such commitment to the possibility of social reform becomes part of the arc of humanity toward social reform even when specific endeavors fail. As the Bishop contended, the passion and the blood are not wasted: the effects ripple out in unforeseen ways generations, indeed centuries, later.

Marius in is a stage of grief. He's feeling exactly as any decent person would in the circumstances, but what he's perceiving is not the whole story. There is a profound hope outside the proximate tragedy. This, I think, is the reason for the reuse of the melody.

An intriguing part of this parallel is the idea that the "passion and blood" of the barricade is akin to that of Christian martyrs and even Christ's crucifixion itself. These two types of sacrifice have similarities: they are both great acts of courage and willingness to suffer personal harm, even death, to help humanity. Yet the moral systems out of which these two types arise are also very different. The essence of Jesus's teaching is to love your neighbor and turn the other cheek. He eschews all violence and renders unto Caesar. His concern is with his own and other individuals' conduct, with the state of souls, not of sociopolitical systems.

The post-Rousseauvian age the ABC inhabits, however, is invested in changing sociopolitical systems: the goal is to overthrow Caesar and create a structure in which having a decent standard of living will be more easily attainable. Loving one's neighbor is excellent, but it should not be relied upon as the method for promoting decent treatment of all people in a complex nation state. The state itself should have a social contract that will (to a degree) mandate decent treatment through the enshrinement of rights. And to attain this goal, the ends often justify the means. The men on the barricade do not kill lightly, but they are very willing to kill. In these respects, their moral system is fundamentally unChristlike.

These two value systems, to some degree incommensurate, are both praised within Les Misérables, play and novel, so that the tensions between them are not readily apparent. The complexity of this discourse is thrown into sharper relief for me by comparison to the manga, Trigun.

Trigun provides a text in which these two systems are openly at war. The story concerns the antagonism between twin brothers, Vash and Knives, who are vastly powerful beings called Plants, designed to generate energy for humans. On their planet, Plants are exploited by humans in the struggle to survive ecological privation.

Vash's moral system is essentially Christlike: based on kind behavior, "peace and love," for everyone, a refusal to kill anyone, and a general lack of any kind of systemic social planning. Knives, the antagonist, does nothing but systemic social planning: he is an ardent revolutionary willing (indeed eager) to commit genocide against the entire human race on their planet in order to change the system that enslaves his Plant people to human needs.

Now, Knives's plan is obviously not good. And yet, it is a plan for pulling the ecosystem they all exist in out of a death spiral in which too many humans are being materially supported by too few Plants, with the result that both Plants and humans are slowly dying off, the Plants from overextension, the humans from lack of resources. Vash has no plan. Left to his own devices, the Plants and humans on their planet might very well go extinct for all he would actually do to prevent it (though he'd be very nice to them as they dwindle away).

Trigun pits Vash and Knives against each other. But the triumph of Trigun is a direct result of the agency of both. Vash does stop Knives from genocide, essentially by awakening both humans and Plants en masse to empathy for each other. Once they understand each other's suffering, they have a motive to find a peaceful solution. However, Vash would never have done this if Knives had not forced his hand by apocalyptically pushing his social reform agenda. The two value systems have elements that are incommensurate, yet—perhaps for this very reason—both are needed to break the social stalemate and achieve positive change.

So too, perhaps, in Les Misérables: the boys from the ABC were, to a degree, not good Christians—I dare posit a number of them weren't Christians at all. But agency such as theirs is needed, as surely as Valjean's or the Bishop's. A social system without individual human kindnesses will be a Brave New World at best, but humans without a decent social system will continue to suffer and die, Fantine after Fantine. Hope is born of individuals and systems both. The passion and the blood prove the worth of the dream.

Uh Oh! Worldbuilding Misadventure!

I admit it. I'm a fan fiction writer at heart. I like having a world already created and inserting a couple of characters having a long, intense conversation. But in original science fiction, you've got to come up with the world yourself, and here's where my pay-attention-to-the-characters-first predisposition has gotten the better of me.

There I was, polishing up my nicely revised first chapter of Mercy in preparation for applying to the Oregon Literary Fellowship, and it occurred to me to put in some time filling in actual dates in place of [DATE] notes that have been sitting in the first few paragraphs for four or five years. Shouldn't be a big deal, I figured. The text states that poor 'Eblia has been unconscious for about 20 hours; I may need to tweak that, but the figure should be in the ballpark.

So I pulled out the old astrographic map, checked some Tide (a.k.a. wormhole) locations, and crunched some lightspeed velocity equivalency numbers. Turns out that in the shortest possible journey I can contrive at the fastest allowable speed in the Continuation universe, poor 'Eblia has been unconscious for 375 hours, which is 15 standard days!

This is surmountable. For one thing, it's nice to be in a science fiction context where I can conjure up a drug that will slow her metabolism to keep her alive over that stretch of time (not on life support). But this single change forces massive rewriting of the first three chapters—and updating of plot points throughout the story. It changes the order in which people have to meet each other and greatly complicates the intricacy of the conspiracy poor 'Eblia has fallen afoul of. This, by extension, means that 'Eblia is a more important player than I (or she) thought she was. (If she weren't, no one would bother with the immense planning that would have to go in to contriving this long, unconscious space hijacking across at least one border patrol.) Luckily, I can make a case that 'Eblia is that important: after all, hypertelepaths are rare and dangerous spies when properly motivated to suss out your plans. I just wish I known all this four years ago.

The moral of the story: don't wait four or five years to do your world-building homework. It'll bite you.

Why Do I Write?

I write for the same reason people fall in love: because the soul needs to communicate with others. And as with love, writing is not a one-way street. Every writer is a reader, and every reader is a participant in writing. We create based on what we’ve learned from others, and when we read, we translate the words (or video images, music, etc.) through the contexts of our minds to produce our own version of the story. I am happy that we live in an age in which the basic fact that all art is a collaboration is becoming accepted once again and the myth of the solitary author producing an artifact called “original” work is slowly melting back into deeper sea of human storytelling.

(Read the rest at Johnnie Mazzocco's Writing Through the Body blog.)

Writing Hot

I am breaking a rule. Everybody knows that it is a terrible idea for a writer to write fiction based on the venting personal pain. There's no authorial distance; the lack of perspective is obvious; the characters and situations will be out of balance. It will sound like angry, juvenile, Mary-Sue-ish ranting. Heck, I learned a long time ago not even to write academic papers about books I especially love because they lack critical distance.

Yet here I am, writing furiously on a book (titled Mercy) that is largely spurred by venting my personal grief about my friend ditching me this past fall.

Here's my justification. Two justifications: 1) it's therapy. That's fair. And I think, as such, it's helping, but this isn't an artistic justification. Therapy may be great for me, but there's no guarantee it will make good art and a good chance that it won't. Which brings us number 2, the artistic justification: there is a power in writing hot.

By this I mean, writing out of emotion: throwing onto the page whatever the heart most needs to say. Angry name-calling, apologia, self-justification, random philosophizing, fear, angst, crazy sarcasm, rabbit holes galore. I want a record of it. Partly just for myself (I seem to be full of fragments today). I want to be able to look back in a year or five and see what my grieving process was/is.

But there's a use for this in literature too. My main character is also in a grieving process. This book—a revision of an old project—has become a story about grieving. I can best express her process by feeling the process in my bones. When I want to shout imprecations about betrayal, she wants to, and the force of the feeling comes out real, much realer than if I tried retroactively to work myself into a state five or ten years later when I'm somewhere else.

So here's what I imagine will happen if I ever work this book into good science fiction literature:

Right now, the book is a weird amalgam: one part old sci-fi romantic road story I started creating at seventeen (over twenty years ago); part revision of 2011 to a create a more philosophical, reflective story of finding love unexpectedly; part grief-and-guilt-ridden rant about lost friendship and betrayal coming unapologetically almost word for word out of my own life right now. It's a weird mess.

Eventually, I suspect that 80% of the lost-friendship rant text will be revised out (though probably preserved in my archives for my own therapeutic purposes). What will be left will be the gems that concisely express the grieving process in a proper narrative form. Meanwhile, that process will become increasingly thematically integrated into the actual fictional story of these characters being mysteriously stuck on a planet, investigating how this came about. Hopefully, the end result will be a thoughtful work of sociological/literary science fiction that principally argues that human grief and interpersonal pain is a main driver in human society, whether in a particular friendship or in events as cosmic as interstellar war. And hopefully, it will come out as a readable story.

If it doesn't, it's still helpful as therapy. And it will certainly show a raw truth that a more systematic control of the written word could never capture. I may not be writing a good book right now, but I know I am writing some good prose. Writing, like grieving, is a process, and sometimes we need to start hot.

The Kvetching Cashier

There’s a cashier at my local Safeway who is not the model cashier. While the other cashiers smile nicely and ask how my day is going and if I found everything I needed, this fellow is more likely to grumble, “Darn yogurt won’t scan. C’mon! Stupid machine.”

This put me off at first and, in the back of my head, I wondered how he managed to hold on to his job. But gradually I warmed to him, his genuineness, his inexhaustible ability to kvetch about leaves to rake, annoying neighbors, headstrong pets, and anything else a patron wanted to get off their chest.

Today, as he handed me my coupons, he said, “Here’s your propaganda.”

I laughed and said, “That’s very true” and walked out comforted by the little corner of uncensored humanity this man represents in a society in which we too often buy groceries self-check-out machines or people told to behave like them.

My Film, The Hour before Morning, Premieres This Friday

The film adaptation of my science fiction novel, The Hour before Morning premieres this Friday, 10/17, at 8 p.m. at Portland's Bar Carlo restaurant, 6433 SE Foster Rd. If you're in the Portland area, come on by, have a beer and some grub, and marvel at the chutzpah of our first film: a murderer seeks redemption in an oppressive future (while the floor boards of my 1940s bungalow creek).

On Listening to Les Mis Again

I was driving along on the way to pick my son up from day camp, listening to the boys die on the barricade in Japanese (like you do), and suddenly I started to cry: not the few silent tears I might shed watching the play in the theater but sobbing to the point that I had to be careful not to blind myself as I proceeded down the five-lane highway. I sobbed till about midway through Thenardier talking about the dogs eat the dogs, or the Japanese equivalent, then pulled myself together but cried again after reaching the parking lot of my son's school.

I wasn't just crying for the characters in Les Mis or for the real-life revolutionaries of the June Rebellion. I was crying because life as a new adoptive parent is stressful, and I'd spent much of my afternoon staring at my tax return in a vain attempt to fill out financial aid documents. But I wasn't just crying for my own life. My day had not been bad; my week hasn't been bad; my life isn't bad right now. I was surfeited, enmeshed in the tangled bank. I was crying for the characters I love, for the real people they represent, for the striving and failing of human life. I was crying because my life makes me tired and because the world is frightening, and the sweep of history is vast, and fact and fiction and then and now are not fully separate things but all part of one experience of living.

And words from Carbon Leaf came into my mind: "Pay no mind. My sorrow's fine. The day is alive, and that's why I cry." That's why I was crying: because the day is alive.

The Hour before Morning Film is Here!

I am pleased to announce that, at long last, my film, The Hour before Morning , is available on Vimeo. This adaptation of my novel is a sociological science fiction story about a murderer's quest for redemption in an oppressive future and the two unlikely friends he finds in his prison cell mates. It is set in the Continuation universe.



This project has been a long time in coming. I first began writing the story in 1996. The first draft of the screenplay dates from 2004, and we finished filming in 2010. Wow, what a ride and a learning experience!

It is a first film on a microbudget, and this certainly shows. From pre-production to post-production, we've made more mistakes than I can shake a stick at, and yet we also marshalled a lot of talent, a lot of hard work (mostly volunteer), and a lot of determination, and we finished our film, complete with some excellent performances and moving moments. I'm proud of everyone who participated to bring this project to fruition.



Extra special thanks to Matt Pryor, our director of photography, editor, and so much else for his years of work on this project. Likewise, great thanks to Ostin Drais for his good will and hard work over years of laboring with post-production sound despite many problems with the original footage we sent him. And, of course, a giant thanks to all our Kickstarter backers. And to everyone else involved, you've been amazing! What a testament to teamwork for next-to-no money under hard conditions, all for the love of art.

If you would like to support our indie film efforts and help us raise money for our (comparatively) more action-packed sequel, The Eater , please tip us on Vimeo's Tip Jar.

How Mushishi Can Save the World

Like many, I’m jazzed that the anime, Mushishi, is getting a second season: no anime deserves it more. As the second season episodes begin to trickle in, I’ve been revisiting the first season and bits of the original manga by Yuki Urushibara, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Mushishi should be required reading/viewing in schools across the world. The attitudes it teaches are indispensible to the salvation of the Earth as we know it. This is not hyperbole; it is simply true.

Mushishi takes place in a fictionalized, rural Japan somewhere between the Edo and Meiji Periods. In this world, members of the local ecosystems include not only plants, animals, humans, etc. but also mushi. “Mushi” is Japanese for “bug,” but in this context it refers to a variety of life forms that exist somewhere between “life” and “death,” the physical and spiritual worlds. Mushi may be mindless or intelligent, tiny or huge, harmless or very dangerous. In this respect, they’re just like life forms in the real world.



Only certain people can see mushi, and they often take up the study of mushi as a vocation. These “mushishi” fill a variety of social roles as specialists helping communities and ecosystems with mushi-related phenomena. The series centers on the episodic adventures of one wandering mushishi, Ginko, and expresses its philosophy through his practice as a mushishi.

We All Live with Mushi

Mushi are fictional. And while sometimes they behave rather like real-world organisms, like bacteria, sometimes their action is pretty far out: altering time, turning people into spirits, etc. But if their specific actions feel magical, they, nonetheless, signify the way life forms actually interact in ecosystems.



Mushi are like real-world life forms in a variety of respects. They can be useful or harmful or neutral to humans, but they do not exist for us. First and foremost, they do their own thing according to their natures. They can have coherent thoughts and feelings or some minimal awareness or (as far as we can tell) no awareness at all. They can be as humble as earthworms or immense as a stampede of elephants. Whatever they’re like, they always exist in relation to their environment. Like all living things, they are embedded in an ecosystem: they need food; they have a habitat and a lifecycle. They fill a niche—and sometimes overfill it and cause problems, just as invasive plants and animals (including humans) often do. Mushi are metaphor for the life forms we live with every day, whether they are the bacteria in our guts, an ancient pine tree, a blue whale, or that crow that lives down the block and has decided to dive-bomb you whenever you walk by. By recasting life forms as mystical entities, Mushishi defamiliarizes the natural world and encourages us to see it fresh in all its wonder.

The Wisdom of the Mushishi

Ginko exemplifies the good mushshi. In his peregrinations, he manages mushi-human interactions with expertise and wisdom. His understanding balances concrete knowledge with philosophy. Ginko is a finely tuned observer, a man of great sensory awareness. He is always attuned to the world around him, sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, textures, changes to an environment, geography, weather, seasonality, local species and their relations to each other, soil types, compass directions, and behaviors (of all sorts of organisms, including humans). He is a sponge for information, obtaining it largely from observing his environment but also from talking to people and listening to their stories, as well as reading records by other mushishi. (He also writes records of his own.)



This lifetime of study of the world around him informs his ethics and underlying value system. First and foremost, he is highly conscious of the interrelatedness of things: forces affect each other, and changing one thing will change others. Second, he is strongly aware that humanity is not the center of the world; rather, it is one species existing alongside many others, each doing what it does naturally to survive. At one point, he reminds a boy who is fond of interacting with mushi that they are not his friends but living their own lives, but he adds that the boy is free to like them.

Based on these premises, he acts according to a value system that seeks to maintain balance and minimize harm (harm in toto, not just to humans). The foundational need is to preserve the health of the system: if the health of the system deteriorates, the participants in it will inevitably, progressively suffer. Thus, for example, he counsels that a group of mushi who appear to be one family’s human children must be killed because otherwise they will germinate into more mushi that will progressively infiltrate more human families. Preserving the health of the system sometimes comes at the cost of suffering to some participants, such as the grieving parents of the mushi children (and the mushi themselves). However, wherever possible, Ginko acts to minimize suffering for all participants, as when he cures people infected by a mushi living in an ink stone by taking them to an elevation that stimulates the mushi to leave their bodies. He would rather live in harmony with all life forms than kill or constrain them, but he recognizes that death is a part of life and that killing is sometimes necessary to preserving life and health elsewhere. In his speech, Ginko can sometimes be tactless, but in his actions, he consistently shows respect, awareness, and a morally mature perspective.

The World Needs Mushishi—A Lot of Them

Back in our 21st-century reality, we are facing (in fact, we are causing) cataclysmic climate change, resource exploitation and scarcity, overpopulation, and one of the great mass extinctions in the 4.5 billion-year history of the Earth (its severity comparable to the extinction of the dinosaurs). To any sane person, this should be terrifying.

Yet globally, we keep exacerbating these problems by certain ideological assumptions. Because they are deeply embedded cultural assumptions, we often act in accordance with them, even if we intellectually don’t agree with them or know the situation to be more complex. They describe not only philosophical systems but rote habits of mind. These assumptions include the following (in no particular order):

* Growth, by definition, is good.
* Competition and individual “success” are crucial virtues.
* The non-human world is only valuable as something for humans to use.
* The non-human world is best viewed as a material-energy system not to be invested with soul or sacredness, which would be merely superstitious.
* Economy is separable from ecology.
* Human society is (mostly) separate from nature.

The common denominator of these views is an approach to interacting with the natural world that justifies or trivializes resource exploitation and pollution in the name of maximizing growth and rewarding competitive economic “winners.”

Every episode of Mushishi is an illustration of why these values are deeply unhealthy and what values should replace them. In Mushishi, problems are solved, lives are often saved, and the health of the system is preserved by prioritizing balance over growth, coexistence over competition, respect and reverence over emotionless use, ecological interconnection over abstract economic theories, and enmeshment in nature over division between the human and non-human.

A mushishi practices all these salutary values and teaches them to others. Much of how a mushishi sees the world is akin to modern study of ecology. Indeed, Ginko uses tools of science, like a microscope, and studies mushi with some scientific methodology, including dissection. But a mushishi is more than just an ecological scientist. The world in which Ginko lives is steeped in Shinto tradition, which invests the world with spirit: places, objects, animals, etc. are often revered as sacred. Ginko himself is a fairly unsentimental person, but he shares this sense of reverence. Whether this sacredness is “true” or not, whether trees have spirits, etc., is beside the point. A sense of deep respect for the world is vital to treating the world well. We will always tend to exploit what we objectify. A mushishi, likewise, shares some characteristics with a doctor, using specialized knowledge, as well as caring and communication, to heal. And like a good family doctor, he or she also shares some traits with priest or minister: being aware of the role of psychology in health, listening and counseling. The combining of these healing, counseling, and mystical functions echoes roles often taken by a shaman.

A mushishi is, in essence, an ecological healer-counselor-priest-shaman, a “multidisciplinary” specialist combining advanced knowledge of ecology with caring and service for individuals and communities, human and non-human. St. Francis had something of the character of a mushishi, though he lived in a dualistic society that was losing its deep understanding of interrelations in the natural world. Writer and farmer, Wendell Berry, certainly acts as a “mushishi.” A contemporary example of formally incorporating a mushishi-like presence in human relations with the land is the inclusion of Maori representatives in natural resource management in New Zealand, a country that ranks high in quality of living across several different studies and measures. To be clear, it’s not my intention to conflate Maori culture or any other practice with a fantasy Japanese culture. Rather these are examples of the myriad ways that the values of understanding and respect for the natural world can be incorporated into 21st-century socio-ecological planning.

In the real world, people who fill a “mushishi” function may come from many walks of life. They may belong to any number of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, practice any number of religions or none. Their initiation into the “mushishi” vocation may come through traditional tribal learning, the family farm, love of science, or playing in the woods. We might find them in role(s) such as tribal elders, ecologists, science teachers and docents, counselors, doctors, researchers, writers, farmers, or advisors to government. But wherever they come from and whatever specific path they choose, it is vital that we nurture these people in pursuing their vocation and create meaningful spaces for their action in all our communities, including means to earn a living while devoting significant time to this work. We must honor them and listen to them. It is to the detriment of the world when we don’t.

Is Adoption Hard? Wrong Question

Next week, I’m traveling to Haiti to pick up my two adopted kids. Plainly, this is an exciting time and also frightening. I’ve studied, read, and thought a lot about what to expect. Does that mean I’m “prepared”? Of course not. Check back with me in six months, and I’ll let you know what sort of curve balls our family got thrown and how we hit them, struck out, or ducked and covered.

But for now, one thing is clear to me: I don’t want to hear any more admonitions that “it’s going to be so hard!” This message comes from a variety of directions, ranging from chats with parents to adoption blogs to social workers. It has a certain utility, but I believe it makes up far too much of the conversation.

The message itself is true. Yes, it will be hard. Of the dozens of accounts I’ve read of bringing home older adopted kids, I’ve come across one that said, “It wasn’t that bad.” I could enumerate horror stories I’ve heard, from massive property damage to a mother almost being choked. What startles me is that it has not always been the default to expect such hardship. Apparently, until recent years and revised adoption trainings, it was common for families to believe that older, internationally adopted kids would feel grateful for coming to a new, better home and be generally well behaved. That expectation is unrealistic. Who would be grateful for being torn out of the only home they’ve ever known and taken away from friends and loved ones to a strange place with strange sights, smells, and tastes where you don’t speak the language and can barely communicate your needs and are completely dependent on strangers who speak gibberish at you? Who wouldn’t melt down and behave badly, especially given a child’s coping skills? Yet this, apparently, was a common belief—and continues to linger in some quarters—so as an inoculation against that kind of false expectation, the “it’s so hard!” narrative does positive work.

In fact, it feels like a reaction to a tacit cultural ideal that life and love are meant to be easy: nothing but giggles and balloons? Our culture promotes that expectation: in ads for wonder products, self-help books, a large proportion of our media, as if the goal of modern life should be to expend minimal effort on anything not fun (though, in practice, we Americans berate people who don’t work themselves to the bone—unless they’re rich). To the extent we expect life to be easy, we should quell that expectation. Life has never been like that and never will be. And thank God for that because, if we ever got there, we would be in the Brave New World.

But the flip side of this desire for ease is a fetishizing of our hardships, and it is equally unhealthy. It’s frightening and negative to little good purpose. It cuts apart the wholeness of relationship with another person in favor of scattered puzzle pieces of misery. One friend adopting through the same program as me once said (paraphrased), “If I believed everything I read in adoption blogs, I’d believe that I’ll never be happy again ever in my life.” Why would anyone adopt if that were case? Why would anyone not commit suicide if life were nothing but these lists of unpleasant moments?

Beyond a certain point, this focus on hardship only serves to make a stressful situation more stressful. And though I’m talking about adoption here, I think this is true for our lives in general. A great many things in life are hard: childhood, childbirth, puberty, heartbreak, high school, parenthood, family, poverty, illness, injury, grief, age, death. Life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Life is a “veil of tears.” We can look at life this way, but quite honestly, what good comes of enumerating our slings and arrows? It seems to me to do little besides encourage self-pity and eclipse what really matters, which is acting with love.

As for myself, I’m a person who lives through story, so I look to stories for help with these questions. Let’s take The Lord of the Rings: there’s a lot that happens in this story that’s “hard.” People die (spoilers!), hard lessons are learned, lives are irrevocably changed, and that’s not even touching on the moment-to-moment hardships of terror, injury, hunger, cold, etc. But this is not how we talk about The Lord of the Rings. This is not what the story is about. It’s not some sort of prep manual for being thrown into trench warfare. It’s a story about living and doing what life calls upon you to do.

As help for managing the hurdles of adoptive parenthood, the concrete information behind these “it’s so hard!” communications is very valuable. I want to know what I might expect, both physically and emotionally. But I wish that the general rhetoric were weighted more toward the positive—not the whitewashed but the coping skills, methods for helping children through trauma, moments of play and enjoyment. Finally, I would rather read more accounts from the perspective of “I” vs. “you”: that is, I would like to hear about specific people in specific relationships describing their own specific experiences. I’m tired of being told, “You will be a zombie, and in your few moments of coherence mentally kick yourself for being so stupid as to adopt,” and so on. Dear bloggers, please don’t tell me how I’ll think. You might be right, but you don’t know me or what my specific situation will be.

I’m tired of the dwelling on hardship. I would rather live life.