Ron Hart, a syndicated columnist now featured in The Log grumbles about “liberals who idolized those who marched for causes de jour in the 1960s” and that what he hates about protest marchers is “they tell people about it for the next 50 years.”
Causes de jour? Like marching for civil rights, women’s rights, ending a war (whatever your feelings about the anti-war movement, I assume most people would agree that war is a serious issue)? And in the case of the civil rights movement, marching, protesting and speaking out in the face of death threats, murders, bombings and assassinations?
But yeah, how annoying to have people talk about stuff like that as if it was important, or courageous, or anything like that. So much more entertaining to read through Hart’s sniggering snark about how trivial all that stuff was.

Mailing off my sword-and-sorcery short story, “The Love that Moves the Sun,” yesterday means all my finished shorts are now out. It’s been a while since that happened.
It’s good because it increases the chances of a sale, of course, but it’s also encouraging I’m finding that many compatible markets. So, huzzah!

While flipping through an old Time magazine from 1970, I was amused to come across a list of then hip, cool, new slang words and discovers “trashed” was on the list (in the sense of “trashed the room,” rather than “drunk”). Unlike its fellow travelers “outasite” or “do your thing,” trashed has actually stayed in the language; it’s become so normal a word, it was jarring to see it presented as a linguistic novelty.
I love old and obscure words and slang and I love using them in fiction, since it’s one way to create a feel for another time or place: Throw in a slang term or a curse that’s now archaic (in medieval times, for instance, the really foul language was shockingly blasphemous phrases such as “By our saviour’s tears!” or “By the true cross!”) and it helps set the period.
While I have a lot of words books that provide examples of that sort of language, however, it’s frustrating that I’m not always sure how much to trust them. One of my books, for instance, refers to “flunkenstein” as a sixties term for a computer that grades standardized tests. Was that something that saw regular use, a name used at maybe one college or just something someone made up that never actually caught on? I can’t tell, which makes me cautious about using it.
In the end, I usually play it careful, unless I’m working with language that I know, such as sixties or seventies slang I heard growing up (or even fifties slang which filtered into TV shows a few years later). A shame, some of the old words are just so neat.

Have you guys heard about the case of Alexis Debat?
A consultant/source/reporter for ABC news, Debat has also written exclusive interviews with Alan Greenspan, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Gates and most recently Barack Obama for a French magazine
Which is where the trouble started: The Obama interview never took place, which appears to be the case with most of the other exclusives.
Debat’s explanation: He paid reporter Rob Sherman (no relation) to interview Obama, then signed his own name to it, so all he’s really guilty of is being conned by Sherman—well, and not actually doing the work himself.
Only it turns out Sherman, a supposed Chicago Tribune reporter, is as fictitious as the interview (there’s a Chicago radio host of that name, but he didn’t write the interview either).
Speaking as a journalist, printing these interviews as his own work would be unethical of Debat, even if they’d been real. Having them published with no attempt to verify them (in Debat’s story, Sherman met him at a party and told him he could get the Obama interview but Debat made no attempt to confirm this or check it out) would be incompetent.
And Debat blaming his ghost-writer for fraud is no excuse. Put your name on a ghost-written work and it becomes yours, the same way that a politician has to take responsibility for their speech, even though it was written by someone on their staff. If Debat published lies on his own name, they’re his lies and he’ll have to take the heat.
Debat has apparently already been canned by ABC due to his failure to turn up any record that he has the doctorate he claims to have received from the Sorbonne. I hope they’ll go over his stories with a fine tooth comb and see if any of them can be trusted, much as other news organizations have had to do when journalists were proven as frauds.
Debat should also be discredited from any job that requires anything he says to be taken seriously, but Washington being Washington I won’t be surprised if his career as an “expert” keeps running.

I have a short story out online at allegoryezine.com. Title: “Everybody’s Doing It.” It’s the story of a man who finds that “Do as I say, not as I do” no longer works for him … and what happens next.
I keep going to the allegory Web site and looking at my name in print, because I just get such a kick out of it.

If there’s one thing that annoys me about my cohorts in the national press, it’s their fondness for reading significance into irrelevant details.
I’m talking about the kind of article that points to what people eat, or wear, or the songs on their iPod as revealing the hidden truth about their character. That can be the case–if they like to listen to “white power” songs when they drive, or an audiobook of The Iliad in the original Greek–but in most cases, it’s just silly.
Case in point: Anne Kornblut’s Aug. 17 Washington Post article on Giuliani and Senator Clinton making campaign stops in the Midwest and trying to “convince voters that they are normal people, rather than visiting members of the coastal elite.” Kornblut’s example of how they fake normality? Clinton ordered ice cream from a food stand.
Unless Clinton has a documented hatred for ice cream, it’s hard to imagine that her eating some while outdoors in the middle of summer actually requires an ulterior motive.
As former AP editor Jules Loh once said, what people eat for lunch doesn’t tell you anything about their character unless it’s on the order of filet of rattlesnake.

Last week, Drollerie Press told me my short story “Red Moon Rising” has been accepted for an anthology of Red Riding Hood stories they’re publishing next year.
It’s the first time I’ve ever made it into an anthology, and my third short story accepted this year (the others being “Everybody’s Doing It,” to come out in Allegory, and “You Are What You Eat,” due from Tales of the Talisman). And the nice thing is, the kick of getting published doesn’t fade from repetition, it still feels great.

This is a book–by Michael Pollan–that makes me want to be a better writer than I am. The book is about the convoluted system of corporate food manufacture and factory farming that makes corn an ingredient in most of the food we eat, what effect it has on our society and our health (and the animals involved) and what the alternatives might be.
Like Mary Roach’s “Stiff” (about the uses of cadavers), it’s a well-written book about an interesting topic and it just makes me itch to write something that big and challenging.
Only what? Right now I’ve no idea.And would it be a book? An article for The Log? A freelance magazine piece? Again, no clue.
Books like this make me want to challenge myself, but I’m not sure how.
Then again, both Pollan and Roach sort of stumbled into their topics, so maybe I will too, eventually.

Today, I wrote about the death of Jimmy Shirah, a Destin resident who passed away early Monday morning.
It’s the kind of story I dread.
Not because I knew him, but because I feel so awkward approaching people who’ve had a close friend or family member die and asking them to talk about him.
And because I feel a real pressure to do a good job on the story. Not that I don’t normally do a good job, but the last thing anyone needs is to open the Log and see a story that comes off disrespectful to their deceased spouse, kid or close friend.
And, of course, writing about people passing on always makes me conscious that I may not have as much time as I think I do, which is an unsettling realization to have.
Doesn’t make the job of writing the stories any less necessary though.

When you’ve written one of, or possibly the most popular series of books ever, what do you do for an encore?
Along with millions of other people, I’m looking forward to the finishing volume of the Harry Potter series, but as a writer, I’m also fascinated by what this must feel like for JK Rowling herself.
I’d like to think that becoming a fabulously wealthy, internationally famous best-selling author (I’ve read that the New York Times created a Children’s Best Sellers list because publishers were frustrated that Rowling’s books took up so many slots on the regular fiction list) feels terrific, but where does Rowling go from here? What does she write next?
Whatever she writes, I’m sure it’ll sell: Her fan base is in the millions. And as one of the world’s wealthiest people, she has the freedom to write anything she wants without worrying about whether it will pay the bills.
But on the other hand, everything she writes will be judged against the seven volumes of Harry’s adventures: Is it as good? Is it as successful? While HP isn’t my favorite fantasy work, it is for millions of Rowling fans: Even if her next book is amazing, will it capture their hearts if it’s not about Harry?
If I were in that position, I’d find it intimidating to know that the bar was set so high, especially since I’d set it myself.
Some authors have been in that position and hated it: Arthur Conan Doyle would have much preferred one of his historical novels, such as “The White Company” be the work he’s remembered for, rather than Sherlock Holmes.
Then again, I’d certainly jump at the chance to create a character as successful as Holmes or Harry, even if it meant the rest of my books were neglected. Endless “Well, I didn’t like it as much as …” comments in return for one true classic isn’t a bad trade-off.
So what will Rowling do next? She could spin off adventures in the Hogwarts world and probably sell well for years. She could switch to some completely different field, to minimize how much her next book will be compared with the Harry Potter novels. Maybe she has something in mind she believes will do even better than Harry.
I look forward to finding out.