Plinky prompt: If you could enact one new law, what would it be? How would it improve society?

As I sit here, I’m still working on the morning tea, and my first response to today’s prompt was, “Oh no, are they kidding? Boring, much?” But I’m cranky–not in the mornings, necessarily–and I knew I had an answer for this somewhere; and it only took me a moment. (What, you asked my opinion on something?)

At first I thought, “How about not enacting stupid laws?” Well, what do you mean there, Spanky? “Laws that hurt people.”

Now come there, hon. Let’s cue the background music. (Most good blogs should have background music. This used to have the actual YouTube file until it got pulled for copyright. No worries–you know how it goes.)

*bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do?
whatcha gonna do when they come for you?*

If you think about it, one of the main reasons laws exist is to keep people from being hurt by other people: Don’t shoot each other. Don’t hit people with your cars because you were stupid enough to go too fast or to drive drunk. Pay your freaking taxes so we can send the kids to school–all those kids will help support you in your old age, whether they’re yours or not, and it’ll work out better if at least some aren’t at McDonalds.

Laws make societies, whether they are written or unwritten; whether they are enforced by a cop or by your parents. And if you think about it, what they all boil down to is one thing–and getting that through people’s heads is the most important issue facing humanity:

Be responsible.

Be responsible for helping take care of the poor and weak. Be responsible for living within your means and trying to rise from poverty. Be responsible for maintaining the health of your body and not soaking it in poisons which are broadly demonstrated to be lethal. Be reponsible for making a home where your kids realize that school is important; where you read so that they will.

Be responsible for taking reasonable care that your country not be assaulted by outside enemies. Be responsible in allocating the amount of money your country spends on the military, so it is providing security instead of merely allaying fear. Be responsible in caring for what some people call your soul, and seeing that it is nourished by art and music and kindness.

You get the idea. Go into any tacky store and get some posters. I doubt that you’ll find many people who disagree with the general drift. But right now it’s what’s called an ethic, and I would have it be a law–and of course, it already is; but I would have the simple idea underneath ground into us bone deep.

Have our citizens examined, by essay; by commitee; have them account for their accountability. Assign the kids an exam every year where they talk about what the word means and what is expected of them. Have clever posters in every street announcing “Responsible” as if they said “Big Brother” or “Eat our Bad Food.” Teach from the cradle to the grave what the results of irresponsibility are; provide ministries that halp people who have difficulty in maintaining the idea–some gently (Are you mentally ill? Are you truly too poor to pay taxes? Did the schools and the posters and the parents and the exams fail to be efficient?) and others less so (Do you hear the music?)

*bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do?
whatcha gonna do when they come for you?*

What a better world it would be, if whatcha gonna do is to stand up and look your fellows in the face and say, “I did this. I was responsible; I had a choice, and I went the wrong way. I beat my kids. I chose money right now over my planet in the future. I voted for venal idiots, I hated the different, I twisted my god into my own human smallness. I turned the page of the paper that showed prisoners stacked four to a cell the size of a closet in a country that trafficks in children and lives. I stole what I didn’t need. I helped people destroy other people. I killed that girl. I tortured that dog. I used violence to promote my personal political opinion.

“I shot those people. I watched homeless kids play in the gutter. I avoided paying the taxes which help my society build its bridges and roads and protect me from invaders. I betrayed the trust of those who elected me. I wiped out my company’s pension funds.

*bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do?
whatcha gonna do when they come for you?*

“And I ran that red light, because I was drunk, and you stopped me because I had already lost my license because I had done this before, and my laws were too irresponsible to hold me to it forever. I was going too fast, and I had dangerous things with me which directly encouraged pain. Maybe not all of them, but still.

“And I could have hit that car and killed those people and wiped out the joy of dozens of people who knew them, and all the good they might have done, because they were responsible–and I am not.”

*bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do?
whatcha gonna do when they come for you?*

“You’re quite the sailor,” she said cheerfully.

God, how I hated that line. Every time I came across it, I’d wince and read on as fast as I could jump over it. Why did she say that dorky thing? What was she, eighty? A condescending eighty? I wanted to smack her in her fatuous little chops.

What bothered me most was that she was in the middle of being abducted by a vampire who was taking her to an unknown location–and she was attracted to him, to boot.  Just because she was a nerd developing Stockholm Syndrome didn’t excuse that line. Who wrote this crap? Well, I did.

This piece of writing just sort of lolloped back and forth through a couple of years, as other bits got written (including a doctoral dissertation), but Toria’s plopping out that bizarre little stupidity hung in there the entire time; I’m pretty sure it showed up in the very first draft. And I vaguely remember (or am backediting) that I hated it from the start. It wasn’t my fault, really. At the time, I had no idea who Toria Piper was; I didn’t know her abductor either. They were just people who showed up on Memorial Drive one Cambridge night, and I wrote about them, just because.

So every now and then for two years, I’d shudder and move on. And this wasn’t the only place in my writing it happened: I’d reread, feel ill, and go on to the better stuff that didn’t make me feel stupid.

Then one day a few months ago, I had an epiphany. I highlighted the sentence with my mouse–and pressed delete. It was sort of the way I feel when I take off my bra at night. Why did it take me so long? What was my stupid deal? I owned this work; I owned Toria and everybody she met that night. But it was as if I didn’t; as if I were somehow locked in to keeping it, as if I were in a bad relationship which I was committed to make work.

And I think it was that very thing. I had been in a bad relationship on which I squandered years of my time, in which I felt helpless and passive; it was as if I were reading my life as written by somebody else. Word after word, day after day. I learned that it didn’t matter what you liked or didn’t; that things just were the way they were.

More insidiously, I knew that beneath the talent and pretense, I was actually a pretty bad writer, just as I was a pretty bad everything else. I had my characters say things like that (even if rarely)–and it was a dead giveaway. I had to leave those little breadcrumbs of mediocrity alone, to demonstrate that I didn’t know what I was doing; that I was your basic talentless fangirl who wrote nothing but awkward sententious crap.

Ironically, I’d already been able to make a lot of major changes fairly fluidly–X-ing out pages of longhand; noting in marginal pen things like, “What are you thinking?” and “Oh, just stop it.” Similarly, I’d made many big changes in my life–moved, changed jobs, finished school, had a lot of therapy, etc. But looking back, I think that one little change meant something more.

It wasn’t like when I could see the blinding miserable fact that maybe an entire half-chapter was pointless and really needed to be moved to the outtakes file. The devil is in the details, after all, and when I finally silently bitchslapped that duhhh out of Toria’s mouth, I was taking it out of mine. It said that I had control.

Like so many things I’m actually quite good at, I’d somehow seen the story as something outside myself. It was really decently done, which meant that I didn’t really write it; indeed, it felt–and still feels–almost like automatic writing much of the time. It works best when I get myself out of the way and let the story flow through my fingers. But I am doing it; it’s not a fluke. I am making this good thing from my own cleverness, and because I own it, because I own me, I have control.

There’s undoubtedly a whole lot of dumb left, in both author and work, but when I see it, I can change it. I am not helpless and passive. Sometimes I have to take stock and weigh how much fiddling around it will take to fix it, and sometimes I just do a workaround as I can. But if I am able to, I just hit delete, and make one more dumb thing go away.

 

(Plinky prompt: Have you ever thought of starting your own business?)

OK. Maybe I play okay with others. Most of the time. Especially if they’re gamer geeks or something. Unless they’re a particular kind of gamer geeks (and you know the ones I mean), in which case, definitely not.

I suppose you can substitute any damn thing there for “gamer geeks.” Moving on:

In a way, writing is my own business. It took a while–a long while–to realize that this was the big trick in my bag; now all I have to do is to get paid for it. Well, I have, in tiny bits: I do a little grantwriting for a non-profit that can’t afford to pay me any more until the grants start to come in–meaning it’s in the same boat as most non-profits right now.

But . . . I wrote this novel, see. It’s probably more practical to think of it as two of them, because it’s wicked long. We’re talking Moby Dick here. It’s pretty damned good, if you like science fiction about realtime biological vampires with forays into serial killing and the nightmare of sexual abuse–and (let’s all do the *anime fall* here: some gay characters). An influential friend sent the basic info on to a couple of agents, who have failed to get back to me for several months now.

And all I can do is push back the terror that chunks of five years of my life (off and on) were spent on artistic self-therapy–and keep at it. Currently, I’m responding to my damnably insightful reader (Noooooo. You’re wrooooong. I . . . . Okay. I have absolutely no idea what I meant there at all. Noooooooo. You’re riiiiiiiight. Etc.) on the LAST cleanup of the damn thing. I figure I have time since nobody’s asking me to hand it over. Sob.

But I’m glad I’m in the convo with the reader, because I’m tired of it by now–and am already sniffing at the ankles of the sequel. Or whatever you call a book which might be a sequel or might not, depending on whether the previous work was one book or two. You see the problem here. At least with the numbering.

It really is actually damned good. Evidence: A friend who’s pretty blunt read some of the early still-head-half-up-my-butt stuff–and he said, “It sounds like a real book.” In other words, not the usual pathetic drivel your friends make you read, but unusual and hard-fisted drivel which makes you laugh and cry and write me abusive email.

And here’s the actual pathetic drivel: Part of the “works badly with others” is because I’m disabled. Not badly enough to need a dog, but badly enough for the uncle to hand over a pittance of SSDI–which, for non-Americans (and some Americans) is the sort of government dole you get when you actually worked your ass off and paid taxes. Soooo—

–it’s tiny, and fixed, and insert factual whinging here–but in a way, I can actually afford to not make money at writing, although the actual money would certainly improve my standard of living and that of the kid and the ferrets and cat and whatnot.

But what I WANT is for people to read it. And like it. And want more. For at bottom, that’s the real business writers are about. Unless we are the sort of pretentious literary trash I wanted to dropkick in grad school (now that I’m a doctor I know the zen of them having dropkicked themselves)—unless you’re an idiot, or somebody just wanting Nanny’s vanity pat on the head, we want to be understood. More or less.

After all, being understood (more or less) is our business.

I woke up this morning and discovered that Jared Loughlin “allegedly murdered several people” the other day. I am sure Jared’s defense attorneys are relieved, because as of yesterday, he had definitely done so. In front of witnesses, no less.

al·leged adj.: Represented as existing or as being as described but not so proved; supposed.

For those of you who didn’t click the link, this news was courtesy of  the Huffington Post, which is well-respected and read by many. Let’s put this straight: He allegedly attempted to assassinate Congresswoman Giffords, i.e., to murder her because she was a public figure, and because of her political beliefs. Right now, we don’t know whether or not this was literally his intention–I’m going with “crazy” myself right now.

But there’s nothing “alleged” about those murders, and nobody in the country doubts either that mowing down the congresswoman, the kid, and the other four people, was MURDER.  Did I have to link that to a definition? Thought not. Moving on. This wasn’t an unfortunate shooting accident demonstrating the need for gun control (don’t get me started), Loughlin actually indeed intended to kill these people.

There are fine points to be debated here, and there’s a lot to be said about “innocent until proven guilty,” and the culpability of the mentally ill (just being crazy is not a “Get Out of Jail Free” card); my point is that using this particular term is allegedly irresponsible, and an allegedly poor understanding of our language.

We all know that “alleged” goes along with “suspect,” right? But it’s a) one of the fine points mentioned above and b) something we’ve picked up from Law & Order. Using it here is media jingoism–it’s a two-word word, a phrase that conveys a sense of distance from the visceral–maybe he did it, and maybe he didn’t: Actually, according to that word, he didn’t until a jury of his peers says so. Next?

But he did. He did, he did, he did. Our justice system is charged to prevent Jared from being outright randomly lynched, and that’s a good thing, lynchings being bad things. But telling a country–a world–that mass murder can only be “alleged”–well, that’s a bad thing too.