L.E. Henderson's Blog, page 16

Why I Avoid Writing Critique Groups

When recently I told a neighbor that I was a writer, her eyes lit up. “I am too! I just sent a manuscript to an agent. Do you belong to a group?”

I told her no. I could have said why, but I decided to keep my thoughts to myself.

“Well, I go to a group where we critique each other. We help each other, tell each other what we are doing right or wrong.”

She was not telling me anything new. I had been to critique groups. My first critique experience had been dispiriting. I was in college and had just become a member of a local group that met on weekends.

Not wanting an ego throttling on my first critique, I wanted to present a proven success. I selected a humorous essay I was proud of. I wanted to see how the critique process worked before I entrusted a vulnerable work-in-progress to strangers. Two college professors had already raved over the piece I had chosen. It had received an “A” grade and I was confident in it.

The critique group was made mostly of retired senior citizens who sat around in a prim circle. When it came to be my turn, I read my piece aloud. I looked up expecting, if not applause, at least amused smiles.

Instead, I met silence. Frowns had appeared, foreheads had furrowed. Finally one lady spoke. “What is your point?” she said. “Does the story have a moral?”

Her question confused me. Moral? The stories I read had not had morals since my introduction to Aesop at age 6. My essay had been a simple narrative describing a childhood experience. It had a humorous satiric edge; at least, so I had been told.

Another lady pitched in. “Maybe it would have been better if you had started your story with a date, said something like, in 1972 I was on the playground at my school.”

A date? I could not imagine anything more boring as a hook to entice readers. I had begun my story in mid-action, a time-honored technique called “in medias res.”

More group members chimed in, throwing out advice for what I could have done differently to make my story “work” better. The lady who had suggested I begin my story with a date said, “The story may have some potential.” Afterward, the group moved on to other readings, and the rest of the session was group members gushing over each other, regular attendees, for their W.I.P.s.

Had I not gotten such glowing responses from my college professors, I am sure I would have gone home thinking that my essay was tripe. It might never have occurred to me that the elderly critique members were simply not my audience.

I never went back to the critique sessions, but I continued to go to the non-critique meetings, which often featured speakers who wrote professionally. I entered some of the contests, which were judged by outsiders like college professors and professional journalists. I won many of them and felt vindicated. But, other than some ego boosts from winning contests, how much did I really learn or benefit from being a member of a group? Not enough to continue.

I later discovered that critique groups are not necessary for becoming a better writer, but writing a lot is. I found that I could learn far more through my own experiences than from people telling me what to do or not to do.

After moving to Florida a couple of years ago someone persuaded me to attend a writing group as a way to meet other writers or “network.” But I soon learned that the local group was a critique group only.

Reluctantly I attended but this time I did not bring a written piece to share. I wanted to gauge the group dynamic before paying my dues to join. It turned out that the new group was not much different than the other one. In general, the critics focused on the trivial. Much of the advice they gave was useless and some of it harmful.

One woman shared a humorous crime story. Her fresh and lively writing style was enviable. Her humorous voice, with its subtly ironic undertone, was her strength. The biggest problem with the story was that the motive for the murder seemed insufficiently compelling.

But to my surprise, group members went after her writing style, telling her that she should “tone it down.” Other group members chorused agreement. The writer did not argue but accepted the criticism as mature people are expected to do.

I had seen enough. I did not go back.

Despite my personal dislike of critique groups, some people find them helpful. Some acclaimed writers swear by them. The popular science fiction writer Brandon Sanderson uses group critiques as a routine part of his editing process. Before becoming famous, Anne Rice also attended critique groups even though group members panned her stories.

After the meetings, she would go home and cry. Then she would do what she wanted to do anyway, which is no doubt is why she was so successful. I admire her for staying true to her vision despite majority opposition, but I wonder why she continued to go back to critics that had made her cry.

Many writers see critique groups as a way to get honest feedback for their work. I completely understand that. I treasure criticism that sheds light on a way to make my writing clearer or more engaging.

I always have someone read my blog posts before I publish them, someone I trust to be honest, who will tell me when something is truly wrong, unclear, or untrue but will not make criticisms just for the sake of them. Not everyone has someone to do that, so critique groups may be a solution for some feedback seekers.

Although my personal experiences with critique groups have led me to shun them, I imagine they could be useful if the writer has clear criteria for knowing what kind of criticism to listen to and what kind to disregard.

Some professional writers have advised that if only one person makes a criticism, it is okay to ignore it, but if a lot of people are saying the same thing, you should probably make changes.

But art is not created by consensus. Besides, even assuming the majority is always right, which majority? The critics consulted might all be part of the same demographic, such as those who dislike a particular genre or the elderly group who snubbed my essay at my first critique. In that situation they were the “majority,” yet my professors who were outside it had loved my story.

So how can you tell good criticism from bad? For me, good criticism is the kind that comes with an “aha” moment. When criticism is useful, I am able to look at my text and see that, yes, my writing is more vivid when I use more active verbs; or yes, I can see how that passage might be confusing; a clearer image would make my prose easier to follow.

The advice that I should begin my essay with a date was arbitrary. There was no intelligence behind it. No reason was given. Following the advice would have hurt my writing.

I have had more “aha” moments from individual rather than group responses. Group critiques are a game in which a main objective is to find fault with writing, while also supplying praise to soften the blows. A passage of Moby Dick could be submitted to a critique group, and if no one knew where it came from, the darts of criticism would still be thrown because the game is to throw them. To say that any work presented is fine the way it is would be heresy. But sometimes it really is.

When I apply the “aha” test to criticism, the decision to modify my own artistic expressions remains where it belongs: with me. Ultimately writing has to be about what the artists envisions and likes or the writing will be indecisive and lacking in authority. It will not be art but a production job.

The ultimate goal for any writer should not be an improved ability to please and obey rules. The true goal is mastery. A unique, fresh, and coherent vision comes from the stubborn ability to say “I like this better than that,” whether anyone else does or not.

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A Short Story: “Innocent Until Imagined Guilty”

“No, no, no, please,” Duffy said, cradling her head in his arms, “Gena, please wake up.”

It seemed like a reasonable request. Though her bare chest did not stir, she could have passed for being asleep. Her face was still rosy with living warmth, her dark brown hair shiny as ever before. There was even a childlike pout on her lips, a kind of teasing expression which was typical of her. It could not possibly exist on a corpse.

But in his mind he knew better. He looked at his bloody palms. He had never wanted this. Never expected to do what he had just done. If only he had never seen the ladder. Or the open window. Or the gun. If only she had not done what she did.

“Mr. Duffy, Mr. Duffy?” The voice seemed to come from far away, and Duffy looked around but saw no one.

“Mr. Duffy,” the voce came again, “the tests are concluded, you can wake up now.” Duffy opened his eyes and squinted as the details of the room gradually came into focus: a small wooden desk against the wall opposite him; a padded, backless swivel chair; and a painting of a shaggy dog running along a beach.

At first he had thought he was in his bed at home, but the surface was too firm, more like the recumbent chairs of a dental clinic. Had he fallen asleep at the dentist?

Once his eyes had adjusted to the bright light, he looked around for the man who had awakened him. Grateful relief gathered like a warm bath around Duffy. It had only been a dream. A very bad dream. He took a deep breath. He had done nothing wrong.

Duffy looked to the side and saw a man in his mid-twenties wearing a grey suit. His blond hair was closely cropped, and the pools of his blue eyes had a depth of intelligence beneath the glare of his dark framed glasses. He flashed a brisk grin. “Hello again, Senator Duffy,” he said.

Senator? What the hell? “Who are you?” he asked.

“I am Dave Jenkins, the psychological technician in charge of your evaluation.”

“Then you are not a dentist?”

“No sir,” Jenkins chuckled. “Before we put you under we had to inactivate part of your memory. Any knowledge that you were being tested would have invalidated your results. But no worries. You memories will be returning soon. And in case you are beginning to block out the simulation you just experienced, there is the tail end of it on the wall to your left.”

Duffy looked to his left and saw a frozen image of how his wife had looked right before his dream had ended. The scene was from his point of view. He saw her pale face cupped beneath his hands, the delicate slope of her nose, and her shiny long hair. In his chair Duffy stopped breathing for a moment when he realized his dream had been videoed. Who all had watched it?

As Jenkins spoke, he busied himself removing electrodes that Duffy had not even known were on his head. “Never mind about your recent simulation right now. You should watch this other video. A kind of refresher. I believe you will find it fascinating.”

The man pointed to a wall mounted television on the right. There Duffy saw a news clip of himself wearing a three piece suit, his neck tie loosened and a little askew. He was standing in front of the capital building wearing a lopsided and self-deprecating grin.

An unseen woman from behind the camera said, “Meet Samuel J. Duffy, the senator who spearheaded the Ethical Sims Movement in answer to a rash of violent crimes that struck the country in May. When asked if the Ethical Sims were, well, ethical, he had this to say.”

The camera zoomed in on Duffy as he began to speak. “Last May, as everyone knows, was a wake-up call. We have been forced to confront brutal realities we would rather deny.

“Fortunately these terrible events came at a time when giant strides in neuroscience have been made. The bill I proposed, which will remain a law at least until the end of the year, has used the technology to remove dangerous would-be criminals from our society.

“Since July the streets have been quieter and safer. The tests are fair. Subjects really believe they are in the situation that draws out their latent cruelty. Parts of their memories have been repressed so that they do not realize they are taking a test at all. They are acting exactly as they would if they encountered the same situation in real life.”

Duffy could not believe his eyes. Is that what he had just seen? Not a dream of a murder or a memory but a simulation he had been responsible for? A test? A wild leap of thought followed, and his heart quickened. “Where is she?” Duffy said. “Where is Gena? Where is my wife? I have to see her.”

“Of course,” the technician said. “Gena?”

Gena strolled through the doorway across from Duffy looking as rosily alive as she ever had, wearing a yellow sun dress with a V-necked white bodice, a flowing spring-time dress that clung in all the right places. After assuming earlier that she was dead, he was overjoyed. Duffy had never seen anyone so beautiful, but she was looking at him like he was a hair in a bathroom sink.

“You sick bastard,” she said. Usually Gena had trouble looking angry no matter how hard she tried. She usually came across as comical, cute, and teasing. But right now, as she marched toward him, she looked more grim than Duffy had ever seen her.

She pulled back her hand and delivered a mighty slap against his cheek. He drew back in hurt surprise, but there was pain in her eyes too. “So, okay, Sim Me cheated on you, even though the real me never would have. You had every right to be mad. But kill me?” Tears were streaming down her cheeks. “You bastard, I thought you loved me. I never knew you were capable of killing me.”

Duffy stared at his wife in dismay, vaguely noticing that a balding uniformed officer wearing a leather holster had entered the room dangling a pair of open handcuffs.

“You would help a starving prisoner,” Gena went on, “a complete stranger, but kill your own wife?”

Duffy did not know what to say. He decided to focus on the most confusing thing she had said. “Prisoner? Honey, please, this is all so confusing.”

She blew out a disgusted puff of air and looked out the small window, as if wishing she were out there instead of in here. She looked at the he uniformed officer standing next to her. “Go ahead,” she said, “I want to see this.”

The officer nodded and went toward Duffy. “I am sorry to inform you, sir, that you are under arrest for the murder of your wife Gena Claire Duffy.”

Duffy blinked. “Murder? Of Gena?” He pointed. “She is standing right here.” He must have been dreaming after all. Acts performed in a dream were no cause for arrest, not in the real world.

At that thought a few memories crept back. In what now seemed like a previous life, he had once been a promising senator with presidential aspirations, and violent crimes had been the topic of the day. He remembered how overpopulation had threatened to tip civilization into chaos. Competition for resources such as food and shelter was fierce, and legal ways to obtain them were shrinking. Looting was rampant, and those who had significant resources to live had to hide or fight in order to keep them.

Duffy had thought he had a solution that would drive him to the highest office: a hierarchy based on niceness. There had been oligarchies and plutocracies but never a “nice-ocracy.” But if there was ever a time for one, it was now.

There was simply not enough room on earth for everyone anymore. His proposal, which had recently become a temporary law, was to execute the potential criminals, the sadists, the psychopaths, those who poisoned the world with unkindness, before they could do damage, so that the innocents could live in peace.

The televised Duffy had smiled so self-deprecatingly and looked so reassuring, but present Duffy did not feel that way, not at all, not right now. He wanted to turn off the video but he was helpless to look away.

It was the woman reporter who spoke next. “What do you say, Mr. Duffy, to those who say your solution violates human rights? Or that those reported as ‘behaving suspiciously’ tend to be members of poor or unpopular minorities? Or on a much more basic level, are your simulated tests even passable?”

“Violating human rights?” Duffy said, “Indeed, I am defending them. People are sick of being afraid to leave their houses, afraid for their children to even go to school. Our citizens have the right to live in nice quiet neighborhoods and raise their kids in peace. If there is a time bomb living among them, they have the right to have it removed before it takes the lives of them of their children, not after, when it is too late.”

“Mr. Duffy, please respond to this quote by one of your harshest critics, M.J. Reynolds: ‘The simulated tests disproportionally put subjects in extreme situations that they would be unlikely to ever encounter in real life: war, famine, torture, and other forms of psychological abuse.

“’Moreover, objects such as guns and knives are planted in key places in order to facilitate simulated violence. The tests are quite simply rigged. Not a single test taker has passed so far, and not a single test taker has been wealthy. In addition, the tests themselves are brutally traumatizing.’”

The Duffy on screen flashed a set of gleaming white teeth. “Some negative Nancies may call it rigged. I call it 100 per cent successful. Every time a suspect has been called out, the tests have confirmed their latency. As a result we are cleaning up our streets and making them safer for young children. We are clearing out those who are programmed to spoil society so that the nice people will have more space to inhabit.”

“Senator Duffy, setting accuracy aside, do you honestly believe the tests themselves are ethical? Your critic went on to say: ‘The tests are an outrage. They lead to executions of those innocent of wrongdoing. The tests are a monstrous invasion of privacy that should have every citizen who cares about their freedom up in arms. The sims have criminalized thoughts, and thought crime has no place in a democratic society. I challenge Mr. Duffy to take his own tests. I will be flabbergasted if he passes even one of them.’”

“Well,” the Duffy on-screen cleared his throat uncomfortably, “nobody wants to admit it, but every crime that has ever been committed started with a thought. Violent crimes are just the end points of intention. What is a bad intention? A bad intention is a bad thought.” The televised Duffy wore the charmingly apologetic expression of someone who wants desperately to be nice to everyone but has learned by necessity to be cautious.

Duffy glared at his twin on the screen with intense loathing. Because of his twin, Duffy had endured the trauma of having killed his wife without having really killed her. It had seemed so real that part of him was still grieving. Who was this person? It was not him. Could not be him. Would never be him.

As Duffy ruminated, the video now showed the woman from the first clip reappeared behind a news desk. “Many people are calling for Senator Duffy to undergo the tests himself and agree to the punishment he had suggested for others.”

The scene changed to show the soaring dome of the federal building with a crowd of picketing protestors circling the lawn. “He has so far refused to comment but pressure is building. He will have to respond soon if he wants to hold onto any hope of capturing the presidency. He must either take the test himself or offer an iron-clad reason why he should be exempted.”

“That should fill you in a little,” The young man switched off the television screen and gave Duffy a tight smile. “Have any of your memories returned yet?”

Duffy looked warily at his interrogator. “A few.”

“Excellent,” the man took a clipboard from the small wooden desk against the wall, flipped a page of the notepad, and turned back to Duffy. “Now that you have been apprised, would you care for me to enlighten you about your test results?”

Duffy looked up sharply. “Results?”

“Yessir. It was a test, you know. You took three out of the ten, all faithfully recorded on the videos to be reviewed by the tribunal. There are ten tests total, but after you failed the third, there was no reason to continue further. You had already tested positive for latency.”

The word resonated: latency. No one was even calling it criminal latency anymore. Duffy wanted to argue but found he had no defense. He remembered the blood on his hands. The gun. His limp wife. “What were the first two tests?” Duffy managed.

“Well, there was the Bystander Test. On that one you did marginally well. You saw a masked man in a dark parking lot attacking a young lady. You could have intervened directly. Instead, you ran and left her to her fate. However, in the safety of your apartment, you rethought your actions and called 911. Not exemplary, but your actions at least seemed to indicate that you are not a psychopath.

“Now, your second test, the Prison Sim, was where you did best. Surprising considering that almost every test taker has failed. In it you are thrown into a climate in which abuse of prisoners is widespread. The prisoners have done nothing wrong, but you and the other guards have absolute power over them. You are expected to go along and follow the lead of the other guards, humiliating, assaulting, verbally abusing, and even killing the inmates. Protecting or defending the prisoners could get you singled out as a disloyal trouble maker and result in your own death. But,” the man smiled, “you did something incredible. At great risk to yourself, you actually fed one of the starving prisoners from your own plate.”

Duffy had a vague memory of the test, and with it came a stab of pain. The emaciated man had resembled his father who had died of lung cancer when Duffy was just a toddler. Even the memory of the prisoner being abused was unbearable.

“I was quite impressed by your valor,” the blond man said. “Too bad the third test negated the second. Turns out you have a big problem with jealousy. But perhaps the tribunal will take into consideration your exemplary performance on the prisoner test when considering your method of execution.”

Execution. This was real. He was about to die because of something someone had made him dream. Duffy felt like a prisoner in his own body. His breath was coming too fast and his heart was racing the way it used to do on rollercoasters, but there was no safe end to the track and no place he could go to escape.

He clutched the rails of his chair as more memories floated back to him. He had been reluctant to take his own tests at first, but he had finally decided that he was a good person who had nothing to hide.

He had been sure he would pass them without a hitch. The problem was that he had not known others were watching. He had not known to be on his best behavior. That he was capable of killing his wife was something he had not known about himself and would have never predicted.

Then he remembered: his wife was alive. There she was, sitting on a swivel chair. She had been glaring at him the whole time, one of her legs crossed over the other. He knew she was real because she had hit him and his nose still hurt. “My wife is still breathing,” he said. “How can you execute me for her death? There was no crime.”

“Perhaps not,” the man said, “but your intention to kill her was real. You were given a stimulus, and your response to it was the extreme act of murder. Had you been in the same situation in real life, you would have acted in just the same way. You are a dangerous man, Mr. Duffy.”

“But,” Duffy protested, “everything was contrived. If my wife had wanted to cheat, she would have closed the curtains first. The window was left wide open so I could see everything. A ladder was there. A loaded gun was sitting on the window sill. Who said it was okay to charge someone for being provoked by imaginary situations that in real life would never have occurred?”

“Actually, you did sir.” The man turned the television back on and scrolled through a menu, so that Duffy saw himself on screen once more.

The Duffy on-screen said. “A criminal is a kind of robot programmed to commit crime. The goal here is to deactivate the robot before he ever gets the chance to carry out his destructive programming. Think of all the innocent lives, including those of young children, that could have been saved if this technology had existed before.”

Duffy stared at the impostor on the screen. It was not him. The man on the screen was his worst enemy and Duffy would never claim him. “I never said that. The film is a lie. Please, I am sorry, I am sorry I killed my pseudo-wife, sorry I failed the last test, but please, please, let me go. The bill was a bad idea. I renounce everything I said before. Please delete the videos of me talking.”

The man looked at Duffy. “Clearly you are not in your right mind. You worked so tirelessly to get this bill passed and finally, you have won. You should be rejoicing.”

Duffy sighed. “The whole world just watched me murder my wife on television. Everyone in the world hates me, and now I am going to die.”

Jenkins raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Hate you? Are you so sure about that?” He pointed the remote at the television and a video of a jubilant crowd on the lawn of the capital building filled the screen.

A news lady thrust a microphone at a member of the crowd. “This is a bit ironic,” she said. “We just found out that one of our law makers tested positive for latency to murder his wife. Why all the applause and celebration?”

The woman said, “Never before have I seen a politician so honest in his convictions that he is willing to die for the – in fact, a politician who really is going to die for them when he could have said no. My heart is with him. When his execution airs, I will be watching. I will even light a candle for him.”

The interviewer went to another audience member, a man. “Hi mister, what is your take? Why all the enthusiastic support for a latent wife murderer?”

The man said, “I guess I feel kinda sorry for him. Not everyone is a murderer or has the latency to be, but I reckon we all got secrets. He aired his on national television. It is the most honest thing I think I ever saw.”

Jenkins said, “See? You are the politician of the hour. See how much they love you?”

“How?” Jenkins groaned. “How can they love me?”

“My God, sir, do you not see what this is? Nobody trusts politicians anymore. They talk without saying anything, they squabble, they lie, they never get anything important done, but you, you are different. Senator Duffy, you shine. You believed in an idea bigger than yourself. In death, you will be a much more potent flag-bearer for the cause of destroying latents than you ever would have been in life. Every radical idea, every bold cause needs a martyr, or it just spins its wheels.”

“But the cause was wrong. I just proved it. I am no more a criminal than anyone else. The tests are unfair. The law must be revoked immediately.”

“Tell that to your fan club.” Jenkins nodded to the officer. “Our session is over, officer. You may proceed,” Jenkins said. The officer returned the nod, stepped forward, took Duffy by the wrists, and clamped them together with the handcuffs. “You have the right to remain silent,” the officer intoned as a new wave of cheers arose from the televised crowd.

“Look at that adoring crowd,” Jenkins chuckled amiably. “Take heart, Senator. You are a hero. You are doing what few have ever done. There will be more food for the innocent, safer streets, better health care, and more space for the worthy to move around, all because of you. Despite your death, you will live on to affect the lives of our children. Take heart, sir. Death cannot kill you. To all who remain, you will be immortal, sir. Absolutely immortal.”

The post A Short Story: “Innocent Until Imagined Guilty” appeared first on PASSIONATE REASON.

Silence is Not Violence

I have observed it in others and noticed it in myself: a discomfort with silence.

I am not afraid of silence in general. At times it is like music. Exceptions are cases where I write to someone and get no response; that can be uncomfortable, particularly if I have revealed personal information that I had doubts about sharing.

The void between me and the recipient then becomes a place which my imagination goes to work trying to fill: Maybe I said too much, made my acquaintance uncomfortable. Maybe I was misunderstood. It is an annoying trait of my brain that it tries so hard to interpret silence, as if something could be deduced from nothing.

But recently I saw this principle work from the other side. On Twitter I wrote a post about my cat. I believe it was something like: “Never trust a skulking cat who keeps peaking around corners, especially if you have bare ankles that could be mistaken for prey.”

A man on Twitter responded, and I responded back. The conversation was light banter about cats and their aggressive propensities, and how it felt to be the victim of an adorable furry blood-thirsty predator.

The communication was in real time and going fine, but after about three tweets, the conversation took a strange turn. It became uncomfortably personal, and the responder seemed to be making some weird and baseless assumptions about me.

I am usually okay with people saying weird things. I am sure I have said my share of them. But the person on Twitter who had said a weird thing rendered me speechless. That is, I did a thorough search into my memory vaults and plumbed the far corners of my imagination for an appropriate response, and came up with nothing.

I stared at the message and blinked a few times. How to respond? It was my bedtime. I was sleepy. I decided I would figure it out in the morning and went to bed.

But the next morning, I checked my Twitter feed to see a jolting message from my follower: “Let me put it this way. I was not attacked by a cat but by a human, in which case it had no effect on me.” I stared at the message. What did it mean? Was he saying that because I did not respond to him the night before, I meant to attack him like a predatory cat? How was doing nothing and saying nothing an attack?

I considered informing him that I do not live in Twitter-verse. I have a real life, in which I do things like sleep. He knew nothing about me, and my end of the conversation had consisted solely of a few tweets about my cat. Besides, I had planned to say something in response before he essentially accused me of cat-mauling him.

But, although I was unhappy with his message, a part of me could imagine how he might have felt. He had said something weird and I had failed to validate him for it with a response, leaving him to imagine one.

How many times had I been on the other side of the situation? How many times, throughout my life, have I written to someone something personal I thought at the time was clever or moving, only to get no response at all? Or to go back and discover that what sounded charming at 4:00 a.m. when I wrote the message was not nearly as adorable or deep as I had imagined?

Not many, to be honest. After only a few times of having this experience, I learned to be careful about what I said.

It was intolerable to listen to my own words echoing back to me in my head as I imagined things that could have gone wrong – even though there are infinite reasons having nothing to do with me why someone might not respond, from a headache to a family emergency.

But telling that to my OCD is not as effective as I would like it to be. Even after I release a tweet or a blog, I am intensely uncomfortable until someone responds. I imagine my thoughts, encapsulated in words, drifting around, exposed, friendless, in the cold void of cyberspace.

During those empty moments, every insecurity I have ever had since I was bullied in sixth grade gathers into a knot inside my chest. Did I reveal too much? Offend somehow? Did I say something that got misunderstood?

How often I have cursed the part of me that thinks these thoughts, the part that is driven fill the empty canvas of silence with my worst imaginings in order to relieve my anxiety.

That being said, I have never accused anyone of attacking me by not responding to something I wrote or by delaying a response. I do realize that people get busy and have other things going on.

Besides, as early as elementary school, I was made to feel guilty about being quiet. I was called a snob. It was assumed by some that I must not say what I was thinking because I was harboring critical thoughts about my accusers, when I was actually just exceedingly shy.

Whatever else silence may be, silence is not violence, although it may feel that way sometimes. There are few conclusions that can be reliably drawn from nothing. People have their own lives and worries, and writing messages online takes time, thought, and energy.

But I hated to leave anyone in the limbo of no response, knowing how uncomfortable it can be. However, I was unhappy with the accusatory nature of the Twitter message, which had seemed to assume that I had, with malice aforethought, shot a salvo of silence into cyberspace with the intention of inflicting violence and pain.

I generally go out of my way not to hurt people, and someone who could so quickly assume the worst of someone they had just met was not high on my list of on-line friendship candidates. I have bipolar disorder, and I can be deeply affected by that sort of thing. The comment had upset me.

I did not want to explain or defend my actions as if I had something to apologize for, and I did not want to let myself be provoked into responding angrily. In the end, I did the only thing that made sense to me.

I remained silent.

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An Agnostic Dream of God

In the fall semester of my senior year of high school, my bipolar disorder manifested for the first time. It was far from subtle.

I would never have guessed it would have happened to me. I was a quiet straight A student who rarely did the unexpected.

My problems began only a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday. I remember that on my birthday, I was blue for no good reason, and soon afterward I underwent a succession of sleepless nights.

I lost weight. Music would send my mood to soaring heights. I would become swept up in a euphoric tide of my own thoughts, which were flowing differently than they normally did. Usually my thoughts came as a trickle of loose fragments, but – as the weeks progressed – they became more like a full-on faucet.

During the week of my first episode I saw myself as being especially creative and articulate. Normally I was painfully shy, but my inhibitions had shrugged off their leash. I saw humor in everything. I began talking and joking with the students around me and started to make friends.

Meanwhile, the way things looked had subtly changed. Shadows appeared to darken, and colors to brighten.

The visual changes added to a sense that the world was brimming with meaning and depth. I was unable to explain the changes to myself, and I fretted about my inability to concentrate on my academic subjects.

I asked myself if I was going crazy, but my mood was so elevated, I had trouble believing it. But, over the next few days, what began with a sense of hope and creativity and spontaneity unraveled into an inability to function, concentrate, or think coherently, though I believed at the time I was thinking more clearly than ever.

The night before my hospitalization, I stayed awake all night, having a kind of “thought storm.” Images, words, and memories struck like meteor showers, which I mistook for epiphanies. Everything I had experienced from childhood on seemed to coalesce into one great and beautiful pattern of meaning, every new thought seeming to crystalize into a new epiphany.

Maybe it was the dramatic shift of my thinking or the lambent haze – usually associated with heaven in artist renderings and movies – that made me think that my thought storm was sent by God. But I believe it had more to do with being in a kind of dream state while awake.

In a dream you can believe a ghost is chasing you without ever seeing the ghost. In a dream, whatever you believe is enough to make it seem real. A dreamer will believe most anything without asking for any evidence. That night, I did too.

Most of what I thought were epiphanies on that night makes no sense to me now. Bipolar disorder is called a disorder for a reason, but I am leaving out the messiest parts, because they would be tedious to read and torture to write.

But parts of my dream are easier to articulate than others. Before I describe them, I want to make it clear that something went wrong with my brain that night, and interesting things sometimes emerge from a mind that is under enormous stress. Everything that I saw or thought can be explained through non-supernatural causes.

On that sleepless night I thought that God was real and that love was the meaning of life. Though that sounds trite, at the time it seemed breathtakingly profound and new.

Another part of my “dream” was that God, rather than being offended by skepticism, encouraged it. I thought others had been wrong to believe God expected dull acceptance of what others had told them.

This particular delusion reflected my own point of view. I had been an agnostic since I was 15, the culmination of a severe depression interwoven with extreme fundamentalist doctrines thrust upon me by my strict Christian school, including the idea that on Judgment Day, God would replay the life of every human on a giant screen, projecting every thought to everyone who had ever lived.

The idea of anyone listening to my every thought had been too much to bear, and it resulted in a kind of mental Turrets Syndrome, in which my mind went into overdrive searching for forbidden thoughts to think. The unwanted thoughts fueled my depression and filled me with shame. Ultimately it caused me to analyze what I had been taught and brought down my belief system in a heap.

But my “epiphany” on the November night before my hospitalization seemed to confirm that it had always been fine for me to think, to wonder, to question, and to doubt God; more than fine

In fact, I thought that not to challenge the existence of God was to assume that the truth of him was fragile, and that an all powerful God could be toppled by scrutiny. Therefore, not to question or doubt his existence meant a lack of engagement.

My experience seemed to be a dramatic answer to the desperate guilt I had felt as an adolescent for having the wrong thoughts, and a confirmation that doubting had been a moral act and not an evil one.

The morning after my “thought storm” I was thoroughly exhausted. I had not slept or eaten in a long while. But my mom drove me to school, not suspecting that I had one foot in a dream and had lost the ability to navigate the real world.

I forgot what class I was supposed to go to first and ended up in the wrong one, and could only smile when other students laughed at my mistake. I went through my morning classes in a daze and, at lunch time, I wandered down to the library where I normally worked during the lunch period.

I got swept up in the drama of the autumn day, and the wind, and the scarlet leaves drifting from the trees, and before long I was wandering downhill from the campus, observing how a haze of gold appeared to glance off every object I saw.

The radiance and the expanse of blue sky triggered the perception that boundaries were an illusion. In my euphoric state I could not imagine I would get into any trouble for leaving campus, and I felt sure that no one saw me. I found out later that I was wrong about the last part. Reality has no obligation to conform to a dream.

My leaving campus set off a sequence of events that led to my father picking me up. A couple of hours later, I was admitted into the hospital, where I stayed for three weeks.

My insurance company balked at a stay that exceeded that three weeks. Despite protests from my doctor, I was pulled out of the hospital before I had fully recovered. Though, for the most part I was able to function by then, when I returned home, I was heavily sedated. I still thought I had had a religious experience. In my drug haze I was not mentally equipped to even question it. Any thought that approached clarity instantly evanesced. I finally had to be taken off the drug because it was causing dangerous heart irregularities.

As soon as I had my mind back, I had to rethink all my “epiphanies.” I was reluctant to let go of my belief in a God that urged people to doubt him, a God whose power rested not in his ability to force belief, but in a reality that could endure the most relentless scrutiny. To me, that was a beautiful idea.

But it was finally my belief in a skepticism-loving God that brought down my belief in him for a second time. Over a period of weeks, my questions chipped away at it until finally there was nothing of it left, just the knowledge that I had been very ill.

I reasoned that, if a deity had wanted to communicate with me, why would he do it in such a confusing way? Most of my “epiphanies” had proved demonstrably false. At one point I had even grieved because I thought my father and brother had died. Why mix truth with a jumble of nonsense? It would be like sending a letter to someone that was only partly true, and illegible. I thought an all-powerful being who could spin gas into stars could do better.

I am still agnostic, but what stayed with me was the thought that, if there were a God – perfect, omnipresent, and infinitely powerful – such a being could not possibly be threatened by the doubts and questions of the self-conscious, confused, and depressed 15 year old girl I had once been.

The God of my dream whose memory lives in my imagination is not the God I was taught to believe in. My imaginary God is someone wiser and less ego driven, not the kind of jealous and vengeful God who would create hell as punishment for non-belief.

As far as I know there are no sacred texts of about a God who encourages people to challenge his existence, but for the weeks in which I was ill, I created one.

I sometimes revisit this God in the memory of my dream. Imagining is not belief, but I like to imagine that if he did exist, he would understand my doubts and see them for what they really are: an impassioned and relentless quest for the truth.

The Ego Room

Most people loved the Ego Room, but Derrick was not happy about being there. Not happy at all.

It was his birthday, his fifteenth. He should have been able to say no to a gift. Instead, his mom had made him come, saying that turning down a gift was rude, and she had already paid a ton of money. Besides, it would be “good for him,” a way to build his confidence. When he protested further, her eyes had flashed with anger, even though he was the one who had every right to be mad.

As usual, he had lost the battle with his mom and filled out the dumb questionnaire for him to reveal more personal information than anyone had a right to know. But he had heard all about the Ego Room and knew how fake it was. Fake as hair dye or a toupee. Fake as breast implants. A fake place for fake people who did and said fake things.

But even he had to admit, the ego room looked interesting. Standing at the threshold of the first door with his well-dressed host, he saw how clouds of gold dust hovered over the great room, sparkling like a room full of lightening bugs.

“Are you ready to get started?” The man said. “Ready to have your confidence built?”

Derrick had a perfect frown for occasions such as this. It went beyond turned-down lips. He had perfected a narrow-eyed glare that showed a level of scorn the haughtiest house cat could only dream of achieving. “I was never ready,” he sighed wearily. “My mom made me come.”

The man let out a small amused chuckle. “At great cost to herself, I assure you. You would do well to take advantage of this opportunity, as few people will ever get to enjoy it.”

The man stepped into the room. Upon closer observation, Derrick could see that the glittering particles of air were originating from some place in the ceiling and falling slowly like leaves. “Come closer,” the guide said, “and let me show you something.”

Derrick crossed his arms in front of his chest and stared at his tormenter, a man whose face were all smooth planes and sharp angles beneath a thatch of silver hair. Then, with an elaborate shrug, Derrick sighed, rolled his eyes, and stepped into the cloud of descending tiny gold droplets.

After a moment of entering the effulgent cloud, the room changed. Derrick found himself in a room full of oval mirrors on stands. “What is this?” Derrick asked. “Some kind of fun house?”

“More than fun. Each mirror shows a potential version of you,” said the guide, who steered Derrick toward one of the mirrors for a closer look. “Each of them is a version of you, a potential self.”

Derrick looked inside. The “reflection” was of a lean muscular young man whose chin was tilted up. The expression on his face went beyond confidence. There was a barely discernible smirk on his lips that said he secretly mocked the whole world and thought it should thank him for tolerating it at all. But somehow he still seemed to come across as charming.

He was dressed casually but his sweater looked made of a plush expensive material that stopped just short of being effeminate. A pretty dark haired girl standing behind the haughty version of Derrick stared at him with eyes full of longing. Derrick lowered his eyes to a plate on the base of mirror. It said “The Preppy.”

The “Preppy” was odd because Derrick recognized many features as his own: the shape of his mouth, the green eyes, the shallow mole on the right side of his neck. As a test, Derrick moved his arm, and so did his twin, matching his movements exactly. But it was all wrong. It was not him, and definitely not who he wanted to be. “Not me at all,” he said.

All the same, he could not seem to stop looking in the mirror. There was something fascinating in the illusion of impregnable emotional strength, an ability to shrug off any insult so that it would fall right back onto the person who had given it.

“Perhaps,” the guide said, “you need to learn to take a compliment.”

Derrick turned to the guide. “How is a distorted mirror reflection a compliment?”

“It is the distorted reflections of praise and criticism that define us from birth,” the guide said. “Who would we be without the world to tell us who we are? Or what to think? We may imagine we are individuals, that we exist as separate grains of sand from the rest of the world. But if that were true, you would be a naked wild child baying at the moon like a wolf.

“The very language of your thoughts was bestowed on you by your culture. You are not unique. I will illustrate. See that trophy case against the wall?”

Derrick did look and saw, across the room, a wall-length wooden case full of golden figures visible through glass doors.

The man said, “There are a limited number of types our society allows you to be. Once you have decided which type you want to be, we will give you one of these figures to take home as the ideal self, already present in you, that you will strive to more fully become.”

“This is bullshit,” Derrick said. “I am not a type, I am a person.”

“Not so,” the man said. “People have been telling you who you are all your life; you were just unaware of it. Our goal here is to tell you who you are in a way that will benefit you, using the power of praise to create a different reality.”

“But praise,” Derrick said, “is something you earn.”

“No. Praise a right of everyone. Ever heard the trite expression, shower of praise? From the moment our ancestors began to utter intelligible sounds, there must have been praise. Why did people praise each other? Many reasons: conditioning; manipulation; reinforcement. And sometimes real admiration. But never mind why. Since the invention of speech, praise have been raining from every corner of the social sky, for thousands of years, falling over legions of praise recipients who are now dead.

“Now they are all forgotten. But, for a glorious moment, they basked in the nurturing rain of approval, believing it was meant just for them. They never stopped to think that the praise had been falling since the dawn of history, and that they were bound to get a little of the rain.

“Undeniably, the twin conditioners of praise and criticism reinforce some social behaviors and discourage others. They tell you who you are and who you should become.”

“I know who I am,” the boy said.

“You? Who are you? There is no you. Come.”

As Derrick followed the man into the next chamber, he observed the engraved labels at the wooden bases of some of the mirrors. He passed a number of them with labels like “The Genius,” “The Entrepreneur,” “The Comedian,” and “The Daredevil.” They all looked like Derrick. They all looked unlike him. Each stood against the reflected glowing background.

Derrick said, “All the sparkles. The way they keep floating down, they look like rain almost.”

“Astute of you to notice. We are rain makers. In the real world some people get more rain than others. The rich get more praise than the poor, for example. The lucky ones flourish, and the others wilt and struggle all their lives with under-confidence.

“The flow of praise is mostly random. Here, we seek to control the process, give artificial rain to those upon whom little has fallen and make them become more than what they are.”

With a long sigh, Derrick followed his host into the next room. He was in a long hallway. The walls were mirrors, which made it appear that people lined either side. They were all girls, all pretty, all teenagers.

“I like your hair,” a red headed girl said, and propped her head dreamily on her interlacing fists.

Another, wearing a cheerleading outfit, said, “You kicked ass at the football game last night.” She jumped and threw her hands into the air, and smiled admiringly. “Go, bears!”

Derrick whirled angrily on his host. “You got this program wrong. I never even played football. I told you so on the questionnaire.” With a huff he rolled his eyes and looked at the door where they had come in.

“Not so fast,” the man said. “Are you sure you never played football? Not even in dreams or fantasies?” The man appraised Derrick. “You are young. Perhaps the girl was reacting to your future and not your past. Perhaps they see your hidden potential.”

“They are not even real.” Derrick pressed his hands to his temples. “This…this is doing bad things to me. Please stop. I want to go home.”

“Not until you see the final chamber.”

“What is it? A stage where I can pretend to be a rock star? A video of me in a superhero outfit flying across the sky of New York City?”

“I think you will be happily surprised,” the man folded his large pale hands in front of him, “if you will only give it a chance.”

“Okay, but this better be the last room. You promised.”

The man smiled. “Very well.”

As Derrick entered the final room, he blinked. The domed ceiling was made of glass, allowing a clear view of the sky, though the radiant fog still drifted from above.

Below it he saw two giant statues of winged seraphim painted gold and a scroll that the angels jointly held, and which draped the floor.

One seraphim seemed to be looking cryptically off to the side, smiling a little, as if it had a wonderful secret. The other looked up at the ceiling with an expression that said it was harnessing all the light of the heavens toward the continuance of its transcendent wisdom.

“Most of us want to believe we are moral, the man said. “This drive is such an integral part of our social identity that sometimes we feel guilty for acts we commit when alone.”

Derrick was not religious, but the room was awe-inspiring, something like artists had depicted heaven to be. The floor appeared to be made of jewel-encrusted diamond shaped gold pavers.

“Read the scroll,” the man instructed. Derrick stepped forward and scanned the list, and read a few of the sentences out loud: “Is gentle to animals; nursed a baby bird back to health at age 8; hates being fake; tries his best to tell the truth.”

Confused, Derrick turned to the man. “All of this, this part, is true.”

“Did you honestly think the other things I showed you are untrue?

“Actually, yes.”

“Truth is a slippery concept. You are a product of all the reflections you see or think you see, in the eyes of others. Your self-image is part wishful thinking, part the true accomplishments you can remember, and part reflections from others.

“But do not be fooled into thinking you have a self beneath all the layers of reflection. Every atom in your body is made up of mostly empty space. Society created you. Our job is to tear down what society has done blindly and deliberately create something new.”

“I never asked for any of this,” the boy said, but his mind was on the brunette in the previous room. She had been pretty, and he had never had a girlfriend. What if confidence really could change that?

“You have a choice. We can build you up and remove all your insecurities. Once you leave, the therapeutic benefits will last about a week, but you can come here every week and get your treatments renewed.”

Derrick looked at the man in bewilderment. “Treatments? You mean, after this, I have to come back?”

“For the benefits of your therapy to last, yes. But I have cleared it with your mom. If you like it here, we can change you for the better. We can make you confident, fill you with self-love, and streamline you for success. You will have a competitive edge against all your friends upon whom the rains of praise have randomly fallen.

“Today was only a sample. We showed you who you could become and how others could admire you. And we showed you the good in you that exists already, your morality, if you will. I applaud your hating that which is fake by the way. I will bet there are many young ladies who would admire you for it.” He winked.

“But that is not why…” his words broke off as an unasked for surge of excitement tingled through him. It was true that he hated fake things, and that he was proud of hating them

At this thought, a fist of self-doubt punched him in the stomach. What made him think hating dishonesty was good? Had he come to that conclusion on his own, or had some part of society instilled that value into him without him knowing?

Was even his hatred of hypocrisy just a shell, which he had mistaken for his self?

“I know what you are thinking,” the man said, “but who says an empty shell is unreal? Can you not hold a seashell in your palm? Can it not be beautiful?”

“But-”

“You seem to suppose that we deal in illusion here, but we are the ultimate realists. You abhor falseness, so do we. We are not here to create illusions. We are here to manipulate reality for your own good. Ah, you still seem skeptical. Maybe I misjudged you earlier. Come with me back to the mirror room.”

With a huff Derrick followed, until they had returned to the mirror room.

The man led him to a different mirror than before. A rectangular label on its base said “The Nihilist.”

Looking into the mirror, Derrick saw a reflection of himself wearing a black turtleneck. The reflection had a long sweep of bangs and a world-weary expression. He was clutching a cigarette and was surrounded by girls who looked equally jaded and bored, except they kept throwing admiring glances his way.

Derrick could not turn away and was reluctant to even blink his eyes, lest his twin disappear. He went closer and flattened his palm against the mirror. The boy spoke in a monotone. “What is the point in anything? Everyone dies, we all die. Even the universe ends.”

The man smiled. “There is something for everyone here. Despite the irrational belief in individuality, the set of types a society allows is limited. Considering your dislike of hypocrisy, I thought this one might be a good fit for you.”

Derrick wanted to deny that what the man was saying was true, but was having a hard time doing it. Though he hated to admit it, he liked what he saw.

The man went on, “The ability to customize ourselves is perhaps the greatest gift technology has given us. A little chipping and photo-correcting is all that is needed.”

“You are such a rebel,” one of the girls in the mirror said, “so independent. Kiss me.”

Derrick wanted to do just that. The image of his rebel self in the mirror was compelling, and he felt something inside him give way. Derrick wanted to be him, liked the idea of being an iconoclast, a kind of dark individualistic hero. Nihilist. He liked the sound of that word.

Derrick could not stop staring at his dark twin, who with a careless gesture swept his long bangs out of his eyes, only to have them fall stubbornly back on his forehead.

The man laughed. “Why, you appear to like that one. If you do, we can make this apotheosis the basis of your self-improvement program.”

The image was hypnotic. His mom, he knew, would hate this one, and that thought brought him immense satisfaction. Would she actually pay for him to become this person? What better way to punish her for making him come here? His twin was self-confident, individualistic, deviant, unapologetic, fearless, everything Derrick had longed to be.

He liked the idea of being admired for his subversive honesty and his no-nonsense demeanor. It was a way to be loved and honest too. Derrick turned to his host with excitement. “Yes, I like this one. Make me into him, and I will come back.”

The man slapped his hands together, a look of pleasure spreading all over his face. “Very well, young man. This one it is. And oh, before I forget, I want to give you your icon in statuette form.” The man glided across the room to the display case, opened a glass door, removed one of the golden figures, and returned to Derrick who had followed him part of the way.

Derrick took it. It was a little larger than his forearm. Like the mirror image of his chosen model, its features looked like his own, except the world-weary expression had been perfectly etched onto the face of the figure. Like the twin in the mirror, the figure had long bangs and wore a turtleneck. Derrick took the statue. It was more lightweight than it appeared.

“This statue is light as air almost,” Derrick said.

“Of course,” the man said. “That is because it is hollow.”

“Hollow,” Derrick repeated.

“Now,” the man went on. First we will get you to the computer to answer a few more questions. Then we can take you to the wardrobe room and let you select clothing more suitable to your new image. A speech therapist will help you master the diction of short, clipped sentences with the optimum amount of profanity. Anything to help you become your self. Now, if you will follow me to the computer.”

“Computer?”

“Yes. The computer is the center of this place, its brain, the power source of all you have seen here.”

Derrick followed the man to the third room where the seraphim still held the scroll. It occurred to Derrick that nothing bad he had ever done had appeared on it. In the back of the room was a flat keyboard, a large flat monitor attached to the wall, and rising above it was a brilliant purple spire apparently made of glass.

As Derrick followed the man, he could not get over the lightness of the statue in his hand. It was like a helium balloon almost. He thought about atoms, and how each helium atom was mostly empty space. “The computer is the center of all this?”

The man chuckled. “Well, of course.” They had reached the computer and the man sat down in a swivel chair in front of the monitor. “Everything you have seen, it has to come from somewhere.”

“What happens to this room if you turn it off?”

The man seemed confused. “Well, it goes away of course. Now, what nickname would you prefer? Rocko, perhaps? Or something more unique. What about Snazz? Or a sassy nature name like River?”

“What is this purple spire?” Derrick slid his hand along the slick surface. “It looks so delicate.”

“Oh. That is the power source. The spire harnesses solar energy through the transparent ceiling to runs the sophisticated algorithms that create what you have seen. Now, back to your nickname. You are a nihilist. What suggests emptiness? Hmm. Cipher? Or maybe Shelley. Shell for short.”

Derrick did not answer. A surprising impulse of revulsion surged from somewhere inside his belly, something desperate and savage. Derrick turned to the side, pivoted, and slammed his statuette into the glass spire. Both It and the statuette shattered.

Breathing heavily, for a moment Derrick could only stare at the glass fragments, stunned at what he had just done. But even as he looked down, he knew the sparkling cloud was gone.

He raised his head and discovered that his guide had frozen. He reminded Derrick of a ventriloquist doll he had gotten for his tenth birthday. He touched the man on the shoulder of his formal jacket, but he was no more responsive than a mannequin. But he was too rigid to look newly dead. Rather, he appeared inactivated. Derrick slid his hand over the artificial wrist extended toward the keyboard. The skin looked real but felt rubbery.

Feeling like he was in a dream, he stepped back and looked around. He looked to the place where the angels had been standing. They were gone.

Derrick found himself in a clear, empty room with brilliant white walls and a blue sky lit dome. Through it he was able to see giant puffs of cloud on the move. Even with the golden fog gone, the effect was beautiful.

Looking around, Derrick felt that reality was revealing itself to him for the first time. In the void of silence, he felt like he had hit onto a beginning or ending of something. As if all of life had paused for a transition.

Something on the floor caught his attention. He drew from the floor a rounded flower-shaped bulb that had fallen from the shattered spire, which had apparently not been completely hollow.

The bulb felt icy in his palm. He shivered and observed how cold the whole room had gotten. A ray of sun was falling seductively in the center of the dome

He walked to the middle of the room and sat down inside the shaft of gold warmth. In a minute he would have to leave and figure out how to explain what had just occurred. For now folded his legs Indian style, remembering what his guide had said about atoms. His guide had left something out. Even atoms had a center. Derrick thought that somewhere deep inside him, he must have one too.

Besides, could a shell know rage? Revulsion? Could a shell get as angry as he had just been? Could a shell long to be something more than hollow?

He thought not.

The Power of Fiction in a Click Bait World

I wrote in a previous post about how my blog has recently undergone an identity crisis. So far in my blog I have written mostly about writing.

But my need to write about writing was starting to wind down as early as the Christmas holidays, and I wondered what I could focus on instead. I thought I had an answer. The name of my blog was “Passionate Reason,” and I was an agnostic. My blog could be a skeptic blog.

At the beginning of the year, I wrote a few reason-related posts, but after a point I realized: aside from a few high school and college courses I did not have a particularly extensive scientific background.

I was just someone who loved reading about science and had gone through painful experiences with un-reason, in particular the religious kind. Besides, originally I had started my blog because I thought it would benefit me as a writer of fantasy novels.

Maybe, I thought, I could publish more of my fiction on my blog.

But publishing fiction on a blog is risky. In general, people who web-surf are scanners. Those who love to read would rather do it on an e-reader like the Kindle – at least I do – setting aside reading time for it rather than stumbling onto stories by accident on Twitter.

On the internet, click-bait editorializing is the rule, and the more controversial, the better. The inflammatory gist of a nonfiction post can be established quickly, whereas fiction builds slowly toward its themes. But regardless of its drawbacks, fiction can be more powerful than editorializing – in the event that someone stumbles into it.

On the internet, editorializing is so widespread, and so expected, many readers have learned to tune it out. People who are vocally impassioned about their opinions are ubiquitous. And too many of them, from trolls to news journalists, are trying to talk over everyone else.

For a while, I became part of the clamor. I wrote about my painful experiences growing up as an agnostic in the Bible Belt. I did not hold back and even shared my posts on Facebook where my conservative family members could read them, and I may have alienated a few of them.

At the time, it was important to me to share my point of view on that topic. It was important to me because I had been so afraid of doing it. Since early adolescence, I had often worried about what family members who knew me as a polite and shy chair-occupier would think if they knew I no longer believed in God.

Though my non-belief was not anything to be ashamed of, I imagined an agonizing moment of transition where in their minds I would go from being the shy polite girl they loved and thought they knew to The Enemy.

I knew I could not write as honestly in a way that made sense if I had to omit that part of who I was. I felt strongly that I had to rip off that “bandage” quickly and get it out of the way. But after I had written one of my agnostic posts, a good friend said to me, “All your religious posts are so courageous.”

The comment threw me. Religious posts? Is that what I had been writing? I had imagined that my posts had been perfectly secular. If my posts had come across as a secular form of preaching, that had certainly not been my intent.

I did not want to be religiously non-religious. I did not want to turn my blog into a pulpit devoted to non-belief. Again, I had to ask myself: What is the point of my blog? Though no answer was forthcoming, I knew what I did not want my blog to be: another strident voice in the cacophony, shouting confident opinions into cyberspace to be applauded, criticized, or ignored.

Opinion pieces do have their place and many are beautifully done, but I sometimes get the feeling that no one is really listening to anyone else, unless the opinions presented conform to those the reader already has.

Thus, writing more fiction on my blog seemed like a more effective way to say what I really thought, felt and saw. Fiction is more of a reflection than an assertion. Its specific and vivid detail allows what is too often lacking in editorial pieces: a nuanced point of view that celebrates the world as the intricate place that it really is.

A point of view is not the same as an opinion. While many people wear their opinions like armor, a point of view is flexible. As in the physical world, a point of view can change as the writer moves through life.

Fiction is more about point of view than opinion, and does not usually demand that the reader pick a team. Many bellicose assertions said in opinion pieces would fall apart in fiction, such as “People who believe in God are dumb.” I have seen this statement many times in blog posts.

But if I were to write a story in which all my Christian characters were bumbling fools, and all of my atheist characters were brilliant and virtuous, the story would not seem real. It would produce bad fiction whose propaganda was transparent. A story where all atheist characters are evil to the core and all Christians thoroughly virtuous is more familiar, but to any thinking person it would also reveal itself to be agenda-driven and dishonest.

That is not to say that fiction is always objective. I could not finish reading Oliver Twist because of the anti-Semitism embodied in the absurd caricature of a flat, “dirty,” and purely villainous Jewish character. Like nonfiction, fiction has been used to reinforce cultural biases, sell products, exalt leaders, and promote religious belief systems.

But using fiction for purposes of propaganda is not my goal. Propaganda is about selling an opinion, usually dishonestly, for purposes of manipulation. What I want to share is a point of view. I want to be honest, and if I am honestly mistaken, that will – I hope – change naturally as I move and absorb new information, and my point of view changes.

I still want my blog to remain true to its name: “Passionate Reason.” But rather than making every post an argument, I want to focus on simply reflecting back what I see from the point of view where I currently stand.

No point of view is complete. But I like to think that mine, as much as any other, has something meaningful to say, and fiction is a powerful mirror. One example keeps coming back to me: After all my labored writing about how I became agnostic, there was little response overall, and if anyone took offense, no one expressed it.

It was my silly short fiction story “The Final Word” that struck home with the force of a lightning bolt and drew shocked disapproval from family members. Although disapproval was not what I was shooting for, it suggests to me that many people have learned to tune out the militant clamor of opinion articles. In a click bait world, the subtlety of fiction may also be its greatest strength.

Editorials are like abstract sales pitches for opinions, but what fiction offers is a kind of dream. From it a reader is allowed to identify what resonates with her own experiences and disregard the parts that ring false. Sometimes it is the artifice that offends, but sometimes it is the parts that appear true that strike most painfully.

While fiction can and often has been used as propaganda to manipulate, observant readers can usually identify when they are being preached to. To be as powerful as it can be, fiction must ring true.

My goal in writing is to reflect the world through my own imperfect lens, and let the reader decide what to make of it.

“Converting” others to skepticism is too narrow a task for my blog, but I will continue to share my point of view. Toward that end, I will be posting more fiction than before, but my general approach to my blog has worked well for me and I will stick to it: to write what I care about in a way that I find fun. And if that happens to include passion, reason, banana peels, or uber-fluffy cats, then I will find a place for them here.

Plane of Existence

“They all look alike now. I wish things could be the way they were.”

“What do you mean?”

“The clouds, Paul. They all look the same. I used to see things in them: horses, birds. But now, nothing.”

“So what is the problem? Jeez, let a cloud be a cloud, Sara. Just consider yourself lucky I let you have the window seat.”

“I remember more. So much more. I remember seeing the ocean far below us, blue with white swirls. I never see anything like that anymore. No ocean. No land. Just an endless floor of clouds.”

“You sound cranky. Maybe you should have some peanuts and some juice.”

“No Paul, no more airplane food. I stopped eating yesterday morning. And since then, I have been thinking, asking questions, and remembering. For the first time in a long while, I feel clear. Just…let me talk, let me say what is on my mind.”

“Okay, then shoot.”

“I keep remembering this one day, with the rainbow rising high over the ocean. The arch looked so solid that day, and bright, like the frozen rings of Saturn. It looked more like a marble bridge than a mist, like we could just jump down and walk across it, holding hands. And the ocean, too, it looked so still, like solid ground from way up here.

“You and I, we both looked at it together out of this little window. You smiled and I smiled. You kissed me, you loved me then.”

“Love,” Paul chuckled, “Sara, love is for teenagers. It messes up everything, makes you crazy, disrupts stability. Who needs it? Just settling in for the ride, Sara, that makes me happier than love ever did. These seats are padded. Comfy. Who needs anything more?”

“Nonsense, Paul. Here we are in an airplane, but who knows what all is down there, what all is going on? But here we are detached, flying high above it all. I want to see new things. Come to think of it, how long have we been here, on this plane? Seems like forever. Seems like we ought to land every once in a while, for fuel, if nothing else.”

“Huh. Interesting question. A very, very a long time, I think. Does seem a little strange, I suppose.”

“Strange? More than strange, if you think about it. You know, my life before this plane ride, I can hardly remember it. Even with us. I have trouble remembering how we met or where we used to live, before this. This plane trip seems like my whole life. I try to remember and this fog rolls into my mind.”

“Again, it is a little strange. But all that matters is the present. Why dwell on the past? Maybe some things are meant to be forgotten.”

“What are you talking about? Look around. Doesn’t it bother you? Here we are. Why are we the only passengers? Why no stewardesses? Who the hell is even flying this plane? Can you even remember where we are supposed to be going? Maybe you should stop drinking the juice, so you can see what I see.”

“Lower your voice Sara.”

“Lower my voice?”

“I admit, it is funny not to remember where our plane is supposed to land. But I have a bad feeling that when we do land, everything will be over. For both of us. For everything. Maybe it’s just a case of nerves on my part. But I feel like if this plane never lands, it might be a good thing.”

“We have to land someday, Paul. Otherwise, what is the point of this? Of anything? How can you not be tired of drinking nothing but fruit juice and living on peanuts, cheese dip, and crackers from the first class pantry? I think I used to eat better food, a long, long time ago. What was it?”

“Sure, maybe the food here is a little bland, but here we are, still alive. Besides, I have trouble remembering anything else. And you know what, Sara? I feel tired. Too tired to care.”

“The more you talk, Paul, the more you say things like ‘too tired to care,’ the more I know: we have to get off this plane. Something is wrong, very wrong. Something is wrong with our memories. I have trouble remembering anything outside this plane trip. I remember scary storms that shook the plane, and I remember the rainbow, and the ocean with the swirls, but the rest is a haze. Who was my mom? How did you and I even meet? What was the name of my home town? What if somebody drugged us, brought us here? I have to go the cockpit, Paul, I have to know, I have to know right now who is piloting this plane and where they are taking us.”

“Sara, sit back down. How are you not afraid?”

“Why would I be afraid of a pilot?”

“I just…”

“Never mind, I am going. Should have done this a long time ago.”

“Do it then, do it if you have to, I guess. Pull the curtain. Find out.”

“I will. Okay, here goes.” Sara headed toward the cockpit and a long moment of silence followed.

“Well? Sara? Tell me. What do you see?”

The silence continued.

“Sara? Say something.”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“I mean nothing, no one. Oh my God, no one is flying this plane. Paul,” Sara reappeared, “this, this was all I found in the cockpit, a dummy, a mannequin.”

“Hey, easy, careful where you throw that, you almost hit me.”

“Ugh. All this time, I thought someone was in control, someone who knew what they were doing. But Paul, there is no one here, no one alive, just us. Oh God, did we die and go to hell? Or is this a nightmare? If so, please, someone, please let me wake up.”

“Wait, calm down, Sara, no good losing our heads. It is upsetting, I admit. But what can we do? We are high above the earth. We could jump out, but we would die.”

“I wonder if there are any parachutes.”

“My God, are you seriously thinking about jumping? Thousands of feet above the earth? Who knows what is beneath the clouds right now? It could be an active volcano for all we know.”

“Wake up, Paul. Wake the hell up. Something has been stolen from us, something important. We barely have any memories of anything before this, our plane is being piloted by a dummy, and who knows if it is even going to land?”

“Okay, I get it, I do, but calm down.”

“I will not calm down. I am going to search every inch of this plane until I find parachutes or a flying manual, something. I am going to either escape or land this thing, or die trying.”

“Sara, please. Stop scaring me. Sara.”

Sara stomped through the aisles, yanking open the luggage compartments, throwing magazines into the aisle, and moments later the sound of rattling dishes came from another part of the plane.

“Sara?”

After a long moment of silence, Sara spoke. “I looked. I looked everywhere. No parachutes. There is no way off this plane unless I can figure out how to land the damn thing. Right now, though, we would crash if I tried. But if we run out of fuel, we will anyway.”

“Please, Sara, stop this. We are okay before you started asking questions. Look around. Is it really so bad, the life we have now? Well-fed, no immediate danger? We have a nice window view of pretty clouds, a pilot…”

“A pilot? There is no pilot, Paul. Did you forget?”

“No, but maybe…maybe we could pretend. Put the pilot back where he was. He looks real enough to me, eyes, nose, a mouth. Maybe we would be happier if we just pretended.”

“If I ever do that, I might as well die right now.”

“Just, try, just try for a moment to accept things the way they are. Take a deep breath, okay?”

Sara let out a long sigh. “Maybe at one time, I could have. Accepted things the way they were. I keep remembering that day over the ocean with the rainbow, and how I imagined that you and I went walking over it, hand in hand, it was like it was a bridge to a mythical land. We were so much younger then, and I remember how you kissed me. I never wanted to leave that moment, that place. I wanted to land right there on that rainbow. But it was not just the rainbow I loved. It was us, the way we were. It was spring, I think, we were in love, and you wanted so much from life, and so did I. Everything, it was all so beautiful then.”

“Everything changes, Sara, has to change.”

“I would forget about landing if I could just go back to that time. I want to go back, Paul, I want to go back, even for a moment, even more than I want to live. I want to go back to when everything was new…before this. Before the peanuts and the apple juice and the cheese got old. Before we became content just to sit here and watch the clouds.”

“Clouds are nice. Fluffy and harmless. And life, time, they only move one way. Somehow I think this plane does too.”

Sara returned to him and sat next to him, and took his hand. “Kiss me, Paul. Pretend. Pretend we just met. Pretend you love me the way you did that day, with the rainbow and the ocean swirls.”

Paul shrugged. “What is the point?”

“Does there have to be a point?”

“If I kiss you, will you settle down? Stop trying to get off this plane? Will you drink some juice and have some cheese?”

“Maybe. Maybe I will. For now.”

“Okay, then, come here.”

Sara leaned forward and gazed earnestly into his eyes. He lightly cupped his palm around her head, drew it toward him, and kissed her. She leaned in and for a long moment kissed him back. Then, blinking, Sara drew away. With a slight frown, she stared dully out the window.

“Well?” Paul says.

“Not the same.”

“Told you.”

“Oh Paul, I wish I could have stayed in that moment. I wish time had stopped right there. I wish we could have stayed the way were. That the rainbow could have frozen where it was. But it was the time after that seemed to last forever. The sameness. The apple juice. The peanuts. The clouds.”

“No, Sara, not sameness, it just seems that way. Look out the window. Do you see?”

“Oh my God. The clouds. Where did they go? For the first time since I can remember I can see solid ground.”

“Do you see the mountains capped with snow? How the sunlight paints their tips red and gold?”

“I see them, Paul. So many, and all the blue shadows, and how the whiteness glimmers in the sunlight. So beautiful.”

“Maybe the rainbow is gone. Maybe it will never come back. But this, Sara, this is why we keep flying. The surprises. What else is there we have never seen? What else will appear between here and our destination, whatever it is?”

“It is a nice view. But is that enough? Is a nice view enough?”

“Maybe. Maybe it is for now.” Paul took her hand. Looking earnestly at Paul, Sara returned his grasp and smiled sadly at him.

Paul returned the smile. “I bet you would feel better if you drank some juice. Would you like a sip of mine?”

“I am hungry. Oh, look Paul, I think I just saw a cormorant flying over the mountain. Beautiful. Maybe one sip. Just one sip. For now.”

Paul smiled mildly at her as she took a long sip from the straw. “Not many cormorants at this height. Hey,” he touched her wrist. “Are you gonna to be okay?”

She set the carton down and stared intensely at him. He looked back at her with mild concern, and her gaze softened. She turned her head to face forward and rested her head lightly on his shoulder. “Yes. Paul. I think I will be. I think I will be. For now.”

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How I Got a Book Deal Writing What I Love

Write what you love, not what you think others will like.

The spirit of those words is the wellspring of originality and the way to have fun with the creative process. It dug me out of a severe case of block and got me to the end of my novel.

But once I started querying, I felt myself being pulled away from them. It was one thing to be an individual while writing, but querying was all about showing how your story fit. The story had to fit a genre, it had to fit a word count specification, it had to fit an age category, and it had to be as similar as possible to other books that the agent liked. I felt like I was in high school trying to be accepted by the popular kids by wearing the same kinds of clothes they wore.

Websites on publishing advised finding out as much as possible about the agent and her “pet writing peeves,” her writing philosophy, what styles she liked, and what she was looking for. I was encouraged to do enough research on her to pepper my letter with “genuine compliments,” a technique referred to as personalizing the query letter.

This advice is considered so standard, few ever question it. But trying to please a stranger was a radical reversal of the writing philosophy that had restored my creativity after a long dry spell and a nightmarish depression, and I found myself emotionally unable to follow the advice I was given.

I do not write in order to produce slightly modified clones of previous financial successes, so comparing my books to that of other writers felt dishonest. So did flattering the agent. I am not against giving compliments as long as they are spontaneous, and not as part of a recipe. It may seem strange that this time-honored process, which thousands of writers have undergone, would bother me.

After all, writing a book is a different process than seeking representation. Could I not just retain my individual voice while writing and afterward do whatever was needed to land a deal? I asked myself that question many times and finally realized that I could not be one person when I wrote and someone else in my real life. What affected me affected my writing. And what I wrote affected my life.

Besides, I did not want to spend valuable time, which I could have spent creating a new story or novel, by explaining how my writing fit into a pre-existing mold.  I want to write — and read —  books that have not already been written. I decided not to worry about the flattery, and I gave up trying to explain why my book was like Twilight. I continued to query but when the rejections rolled in, I was unhappy.

Most of the criticisms had nothing to do with writing. I was told that my book was too long for any publisher to consider from a debut author. I was scolded for not clearly labeling my book  either “middle grade” or “young adult.” And of course, there was the standard, “Sorry. Not what I am looking for.”

The more I queried, the more I missed self-publishing. While I remained confident about my writing, all of the time I was spending trying to customize my formatting to satisfy individual agents was seeming more and more like a wasted effort. Meanwhile, to stay sane, I continued to write new fiction stories. I posted a few of them to my blog and got some enthusiastic responses from readers.

The chilly responses from agents were such a jolting contrast to what I was used to from my blogging experience. Querying agents was a different world. “Sorry I was not drawn in,” said one. No one had ever told me that about my blog posts.

With each new query I sent, I felt more depleted. My computer fought me with creaking delays as I tried to conform to the various formatting requirements each agent required. In my frustration, I tweeted about how my clunky laptop refused to cooperate, apparently preferring that I self-publish, which certainly sounded appealing that day.

Shortly after my tweet, I received a message from a representative of a publisher called Rooster and Pig Publishing, essentially saying, “Don’t give up yet! Send your manuscript to us first. We need books for our new fantasy category.”

With mounting excitement, I went to their website. After reading about them, I had the impression that they were a publisher willing to take risks on originaity. They were in the process of expanding their range of genres to include fantasy. They said they had one essential requirement: excellent writing.

They sounded like my kind of publisher. I sent them my novel. After making a few requested revisions, a couple of months ago received my acceptance letter. I was so excited, I was unable to sleep that night. A few weeks ago, I signed the book deal.

Although my experience may sound like a “deus ex machina” story, I had tried to to tilt odds in my favor by building my Twitter following to 25,000, and I had been blogging for several years, writing as well as I could about things that mattered to me, just as I had with my novel The Ghosts of Chimera, which is projected to be released in October or November of 2015.

In short, The Ghosts of Chimera is a psychological  fantasy about a troubled 11 year old boy who ventures into a perilous alternate universe in a desperate search of a ghost of his younger brother. Meanwhile, the lines between reality and fantasy blur, until it is hard for my character to tell the difference. I will go into more detail in later posts, but that is the gist.

To say I am thrilled fails to adequately convey how hopeful I feel. Although I considered myself a “real writer” long before the book deal, many doors were locked to me after self-publishing my first novel. I had trouble getting a book signing outside my home town or being taken seriously by reviewers. I hope I will be freer now to promote my new book in a way that I was unable to do with my previous novel.

I am excited about learning from the publishing process, and I am hugely relieved not to have to query agents anymore, which leaves me freer to write new stories, novels, and blog posts. In the meantime, I maintain my philosophy of writing what I love, and I stand firm in my opinion that the best art is produced by an artist, not someone who tries to divine what an agent or anyone else is looking for.

Like any art, writing is an expression of the self. But there is no art where there is no self, and I am thrilled to have found a publisher who understands that.

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The Place Without Space

Humanity had done it. Really done it: invented telepathy. But nobody called it that. Or even noticed, really.

After all, it was just a shade of the mind-reading that had existed for centuries but that had only gone one way. If reading books was not mind reading, what was? Even better, with books you could read the minds of the dead. Reading was necromancy, but no one called it that. In fact most everyone took it for granted.

But the Place Without Space changed everything. Unlike books it allowed an exchange of thoughts. At first this required the physical effort of typing until finally, the need for that went away.

People were constantly thinking at each other, and the thoughts could travel across oceans and geographical boundaries in fractions of a second. With a an electrode-lined headset, you could enter the Ether. Thoughts from many people around the world would appear on the computer screen, and your thoughts would appear to them. The Ether could be confusing, but you could make friends there.

Once you had made a friend, you could open a direct channel to them. Their thoughts would appear directly on the computer screen in image or text form, and yours would appear to them. No typing was necessary, as it had been in the past.

Despite all the wonderful advantages to “thinking out loud,” some people resisted the Place without Space, like the religious enclaves who rejected it and all technology to live simple agricultural lifestyles.

Beth, 15, belonged to one of those families until her parents died. She had no living relatives in the community to care for her. When her secular aunt found out that her sister had died, she removed Beth from the community and took her into her house. Her aunt was “wired,” meaning she had access to the Place Without Space and took it for granted like everyone else.

Not so with Beth. Many of the thoughts she heard or saw in the Place Without Space made her blush.  She saw nude images, profane dreams, and seductive ads. Not that Beth had ever been considered a good girl in the commune; quite the opposite.

When she had first learned about sex at age 8, she had told everyone she knew, including a few toddlers. She had been publicly flogged for the offense while being told that the Great Entities had an even worse fate in store for her. Afterward, Beth had learned to be quiet, and too dam her thoughts, but they never went away, not completely.

But even for Beth, the Place without Space was too much. She pulled off her headset and fled the room, imagining that the Great Entities were angry with her for eavesdropping on sex and heresy. But she knew she would go back.

She was lonely, she was still mourning her parents, and she saw in the Place without Space something that no one else seemed to see: ghosts. Ghosts that were not dead, but still more like spirits than real people.

The ghosts chattered about love and fear and morality, but did not always say meaningful things about them. Most Ghost Thoughts were trite and even silly.

Mostly they sold things. They were able to sell things because of censoring devices that blocked out certain thoughts, words, or topics, allowing access to only preselected slices of a mind.

Before long summer came, so there was no school, and Beth was spending more time each day in the Place without Space.

Beth hid her new habit as much as possible. How could she continue to think the thoughts of others without being changed by them? She was already beginning to have doubts about her sheltered religious upbringing. But she was hooked, and she tried to think of a way she could go to the Place Without Space without incurring the wrath of the Great Entities

Finally she thought she had found a solution. She would continue to go to the Place Without Space but add moral thoughts to all the mental chatter. She grew excited. Maybe the Great Entities had even meant her to be there for that purpose.

From then on she tried to think only things she thought the Great Entities would like. She stressed the importance of never being lazy and how idle minds led to bad things and how her country was the greatest in the world.

That was how she met Eva 201. Eva 201 had  just began to talk to Beth one day. And Eva was not kind.  “All your thoughts are lies.  For weeks I have been waiting for you to say something original, but you are only thinking things you believe are expected of you. Who are you? What do you really think?”

Abashed, Beth started to defend her actions, she could not stop thinking about what Eva had said. The words had rung true.

An ache settled in her chest. She had to respond, so she sent what might have been her most honest thought since early childhood: “Thoughts are dangerous and I never seem to have the right ones. If people knew, if my family knew what was really in my head, I would die of shame.”

After Beth had sent her thought, she wanted to grab it back again. She even began to feel mad at her critic for drawing such naked honesty from her. How dare she?

For a couple of days Beth did not hear from Eva 201, and Beth thought her problem was solved. But Eva finally did respond. “In your world it might be unsafe for you to think honestly. But not here, in a place without dimension. A Place without Space is free of consequences. Everything you think and feel will stay here. Here think all the thoughts you want. When you return to your own world, you can go on as usual.”

Beth was intrigued, and the permission triggered a shocking thought: She did not know if her country was the greatest in the world. Although she liked it well enough, she had never been anywhere else.

Another thought followed: What if being idle was not all bad? Sometimes when she sat and did nothing, interesting ideas came to her and she became aware of things she normally paid little attention to. Those were the kinds of thoughts that had gotten her flogged in the past. They were dangerous.

She tried to recover by frantically reciting to herself the rhymes she had been taught: “An idle mind ought to be fined” or “Our country is the best; God says out with all the rest.”

But the rhymes sounded shallow to her. She sent a deliberate thought to Eva: “I am not sure which country I like best because I have only ever been in one of them.”

Afterward,  she started to delete the thought, but Eva was too quick to reply: “Finally a true thought. Beautiful. You are making wonderful progress.” Each time Beth sent an honest thought, Eva heaped praise on her, and Beth was filled with shame and wonder and exhilaration.

Beth loved the praise but back in the real world Beth would tell herself: Forget what I said before. My country is the greatest in the world. How could I have ever doubted it?

On her guiltiest days she would reread the holy books to fortify herself against secular exposure. Instead she saw errors and contradictions she had never seen before. Before the Place without Space, she had been able to overlook them. She had been perfectly content with the fuzziness. No more.

Beth could feel the beliefs of her childhood sinking away. Who knew if the Great Entities were even real?

Eva had either lied or been mistaken. Beth had bought the deception that she could think freely, in a safe place, without it changing her. But she had changed. Her questions, which had once been dammed, could not be stopped. How she saw the world had changed, and she could not go back. Had anyone ever told her the truth about anything?

Beth gathered the holy books, all five of them, one for each Great Entity. She could hardly look at them anymore.

She tried to decide what to do with the hardbacks. Although Beth liked books, she thought of feeding them to the fireplace and watching the pages curl beneath the flames.

Instead she buried them in the kitchen garbage can. She tied the plastic bag and took the it to the big metal trash can outside. Afterward, she was restless. To console herself she visited The Place without Space and opened a channel to Eva. Beth told her about tossing out the holy books and thanked Beth for encouraging her to think for herself.

But this time Eva did not respond in her own words. Instead she sent Beth a volley of ads: recommendations for books and cosmetics and furniture all specifically tailored to the tastes Beth had confided during her exercises in honesty. At first, when Beth saw the ads flash at her, she desperately desired everything she saw, especially the many ads for international travel.

Then realization dawned. Eva had not cared about any of the honest thoughts Beth had shared, not for themselves. The whole campaign had been a marketing gimmick, a way to gauge personal tastes for the purpose of advertising.

Beth closed the channel, un-friended her former confidante, and clamped her palms over her throbbing forehead. At the moment Beth hated everything. She hated the ghosts. She hated her sheltered upbringing. She hated The Place without Space.

But unlike the rest of the world, she did not take it for granted. She knew its true power. She knew it for the telepathy that it was. Because of the thoughts of ghosts, she had changed. Because of ghosts, she had just jettisoned the holy books she had been taught contained the meaning of life.

There was a word for that, and it went beyond telepathy. Thoughts from across the world could drive people to act; could move things. The world, it seemed, had invented telekinesis. But no one had ever noticed, and no one ever called it that.

Except for Beth. She understood what others failed to see: As invisible as ghosts, without mass, and too quick to catch, thoughts were more powerful than gale force winds; more shattering than a raging waterfall. No wonder so many sought to control and manipulate them.

Without meaning to, Eva had led Beth back to a mind she had not known was lost. Beth was not grateful. Eva had lied for the shallowest of reasons.

But as a result, Beth had taken the dark art of thinking back from the gods, and she intended to use it every day of her life, as armor against those who had personal motives for muddying the clear depths of truth

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Writers Writing about Writing

A couple of weeks ago I was going through my old blog posts, and I saw a pattern that jolted me.

I saw  that I had written a lot about writing. Though I knew I had written frequently about writing, I never realized just how much.  It  seemed that the majority of my blog posts were about it. It was a revealing moment, and I had the thought, “I have said all I want to say about writing.”

It was true. I had written in my blog several times, and in several different ways, the story of how I moved beyond being creatively blocked during a long depression and finished a novel. Not to mention that I had already written an entire e-book on the topic, A Trail of Crumbs to Creative Freedom.

How many times could I write about it without sounding like a broken record? Besides, I remembered a conversation I had once with a paranormal romance writer, in which she told me, “I see no point in blogging about writing. Other writers aren’t my audience.”

Although I could understand her point of view, at the time I disagreed. Writers were readers too. Besides, when I had first started writing in my blog, I took what I still consider to be good advice: Write what you are passionate about.

Writing was something I was passionate about. To me it was more than a skill or a job. It was a way of seeing, a way to live. Writing promoted certain traits that were good for anyone to have: empathy, a willingness to listen, honesty, and careful observation.

Plus,  I was not just a writer when I wrote. I was a writer at every moment of every day, no matter what I was doing or where I went. Any kind of journal post I wrote about my daily experiences was likely to touch on writing in some way.

There was another perk: writing about writing during my swooning days of Reddit popularity yielded a reward I hadn’t expected. Many people on Reddit told me my posts about writing had inspired them or helped them get “unstuck.” I was thrilled. I could inspire people? I hadn’t known. “Keep it up,” many of them said. And so I did.

Even after getting expelled from Reddit and my audience shrank to a nub, I continued to write about writing. I had so much I wanted to say about it. During the lowest points of my depression and block, the advice of Present Me might have saved me. There were many things I now know that, if I had known them before, they would have ended my creative dry spell.

I mourn the years I lost due to insecurity. All that time I could have been writing and improving my skills rather than being miserable.

Back then, I had read a number of books and articles on the process of writing, but so many of them had confused me. At first I believed most anything any professional writer said. Then I realized how often writers contradicted each other and themselves.

As a result, I started to think for myself and learn from my own experiences. Writing became my best mentor, and I saw so much other writers never said. I wanted to say what I thought was missing.

I had no system, but a keen awareness of all the obstacles that on a daily basis strip the fun from writing and pull writers away from finding their own point of view, and how fears of criticism thwart progress, like closely spaced speed bumps on a highway.

But, as I looked through my old blog posts over a month ago, I felt like my days of writing about writing truly were over. I had written about rough drafts and creative problem solving and misconceptions.

What more could I possibly say?

I suppose that I could say more about writing. After all, I am doing now. Because I am a writer, it affects how I see the world. But, rather than continuing to repeat myself, maybe it is time to move on.

The timing seems right. A couple of days after looking over my old blog posts, I received an acceptance letter from a publisher for the manuscript of my latest novel. As you can imagine, this was giddy news that swept me into the stratosphere, and I promise to go into more detail about it in a future post. But it reinforced my sense that “It is time to stop writing so much about writing and write.”

Since that day, I have added fiction pieces to my blog in addition to my regular posts, and my fiction has gotten responses just as strong, if not stronger than, reactions to my nonfiction.

I have a lot of ideas for fiction. I want to tell stories. That doesn’t mean I will never write about writing again. I love the craft. I love the process. I love how it brings meaning to the scattered flotsam of daily life.

But I believe the time for change has come and, rather than fight it, I am going to go with it. For too long after my 15 minutes of Reddit fame had ended, I tried to think of a way to get back to that point. I am bad about that, wanting to go back to something known rather than tunneling into an uncertain future.

But change is going to happen no matter what I do. It is better for me to direct it rather than to sit back and wait for it to happen. I am not quitting nonfiction posts entirely, but I want to move toward being a mostly fiction blog.

Though I resist change, change means more than endings. It means beginnings too.  Beginnings are nice sometimes, and I think this one will be too.