Anyone remember this Heart song from the late 80s/early 90s? A woman picks up a stranger, has one magical night of love, then leaves? Then he finds out later she seduced him because her husband is sterile and she wanted a child.
I was listening to it on the radio just now and I think it’s the first time I’ve heard her parting words clearly:
“I am the flower
You are the seed
We walked in a garden
And planted a tree.”

I realize it’s metaphorical, but that makes no sense whatsoever.

I thought of this quote from the 19th-century abolitionist as I was finishing Saturday’s column. It’s a great inspiration for any sort of political writing.

“I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate— I will not excuse —I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.
With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.”

I don’t know if anyone reading this remembers Al Capp’s old strip, about a hillbilly family in the backwoods wilderness of Dogpatch, but I do, and I’ve been reading reprints on comics.com for a couple of years now.
The reprints have been from the fifties, then last week they switched back to the start of the strip. While Capp’s writing style is still recognizable, the differences are startling.
The later strips are cartoonish in style; the earlier work is much more realistic. And the characters and situations are a lot less outrageous—the opening plot (Li’l Abner goes to stay with a wealthy relative in the big city) so far resembles a lot of City Slicker Meets Country Bumpkin stories I know of.
Nothing significant, but it’s interesting to see how the strip changed (and improved—Capp was a lot funnier as he went more over the top).

A review of Elmore Leonard’s “10 Rules of Writing” says the following: “Good writing is not about the writer (and the way he sounds or the size of her vocabulary), but about the story. The writer must remain invisible.” I’m not sure if the “invisible” part is a quote from Leonard or a statement by the review, but either way, bunk.

This is a viewpoint I run into a lot in how-to-write articles and books: (which I still read, though less than I used to): To be good, writing must be simple and plain, devoid of any words or phrasing that make the reader conscious that a writer is involved. Just pure story, straight into the brain.

I don’t consider this to be a rule of good writing, it’s simply a stylistic choice. Even before I started writing (which makes me much more aware of other writers’ technique), I liked writers who could play with words: Raymond Chandler’s elegant yet hardboiled prose; Lord Dunsany’s poetic short stories (”The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.”); P.G. Wodehouse’s goofy, giddy fiction; or H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction, wildly overwritten by normal standards, but HPL made work.

I’m not that sort of stylist myself, but I enjoy many such writers who are. So to Mr. Leonard or the reviewer, I’d say, keep your hands off those who like to play with words.

After two weeks with a dead laptop battery, I received my replacement yesterday.

Knowing I can sit for four hours in Starbucks or Barnes & Noble and write without worrying about a plug is a great feeling. Well worth the $135 it cost.

My voice is currently sliding into laryngitis, so I just conducted an interview writing all the questions on my laptop and having the interviewees read the questions off. I think they found this a little weird.

My short story “Others Must Fail” is now available for free download from the online magazine Semaphore.

nbsp;http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/ has an excellent breakdown of why they’re striking (the newest post just now, scroll down if it’s not).

While I’ll miss my shows if the strike runs long, my sympathy is, unsurprisingly, with the writers. Kfmonkey (screenwriter John Rogers) makes a good case that fairness is on their side too.

My short story “Learning Curve” is up on byzarium.com starting today. Feel free to check it out.

As most of you have probably heard by now, Harry Potter’s mentor Dumbledore is gay. What surprised me reading discussions of this online was to hear several people say that Rowling shouldn’t have discussed this at all—not because of the homosexuality but because authors aren’t supposed to say anything at all about their characters outside the books. One writer said he’d be just as annoyed if Rowling had said that Dumbledore were Catholic.
As one columnist put it, once a book is written, the characters belong to the readers, and we should be free to decide for ourselves what the characters were like offstage, whether the happy ending lasted, what Harry and Hermione did later in life. Rowling, by stating her personal opinion on all this, has crossed some sacred line that should have been an impenetrable barrier.
OK, I’m all in favor of speculating about fictional characters. As a lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan, I love reading the fan debates over all that Doyle never said: Did Holmes attend Oxford or Cambridge? How many times did Watson marry? Did Holmes have a love affair with beautiful “adventuress” Irene Adler?
Nevertheless, I’m not the least offended by Doyle having said in the introduction to “The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes” that Holmes retired after World War I and became a Sussex beekeeper.
Nor am I bothered by Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan of Cimmeria) filling in some of the gaps in Conan’s life in a letter he wrote to a friend.
And if I ever have a novel published (no luck so far, but I’m still in there pitching), I’ll certainly have no qualms saying what I think happened after the end.
I think this has more to do with the incredible attachment so many people have to Harry and his friends than any transgression by Rowling.