The mortal sins of fiction

I purposely committed several sins while writing Xmas Carol. If someone tells me something is a sin, I must commit it. It's my nature.

My idea is to admit these sins here and now. This way, I've done it before the crowd (ha!) arrives here after reading the book. (Right after "The End", I provide a link to this blog. I want to get people's feedback on the book and a blog seemed like a great place to do this.) By the time readers get here, this post will be lost in the archives. They'll never see it. So I can speak freely about my sins at this time.

1. I didn't play the First Sentence Game. Truly, I wanted to begin the book with "It was a dark and stormy night," but it didn't fit in with my opening scene. It had to be a nice day. As a fallback position, I spit in the faces of the First Sentence Police by beginning the book with this sentence: "Maria Kennedy felt lucky." I'm not going to play the FSG.

2. I mentioned this before but I'll list it here as a sin. I didn't say one of the characters was African-American until after we'd met him in other scenes. My idea was that it seems offensive to have to say something about a character's race. He's a person. Only after his personality was well established did I added the info that he's African-American. We'll see how this flies.

3. The biggest sin of all, and one that people may harp on, is that I never described the main female character. I say nothing about Maria Kennedy's appearance. She could have short or long hair, blonde or black. It's up to the reader to decide. The reason I did this is that I'm often irritated by descriptions of characters. I thought they looked a certain way -- and then the author tells me otherwise. I don't like that; they looked better my way. Plus, since I'm gay it was easy for me to make the male characters sexy. But I just don't feel that way about women. So rather than paint this character, I figured I'd let the readers choose their own fantasy. And here's the thing: before publication, I let over ten people read the book and no one noticed. Fun!

For the record, those are my sins and I'm happy to have committed each of them. It will be interesting to see who notices.

Happy Halloween!

It's the national gay holiday of Halloween! Hooray! Unfortunately, Hurricane Sandy put the kibosh on one of the finest American Halloween traditions -- the West Village Halloween Parade. Yesterday, the word was that it was canceled. However, a ray of hope appeared today. Here's Mikey Bloomberg at NY1:

"Unfortunately, we just cannot spare the manpower from the NYPD and other city agencies to host the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, so we are postponing it to a later date sometime next week," the mayor said. "We'll work tomorrow and figure out what date makes sense given the resources the city has."

I'm reassured. Some people spend the entire year making their costumes. That's why there are such brilliant costumes, year after year. So the idea of canceling the parade is unthinkable.

When the parade is rescheduled, it will give New Yorkers something to cheer about. Dare I say it will bring a sense of normalcy back to the city? Yes, I dare. Anyway, it's great to hear that it will be rescheduled. And hey, the NYC Marathon is still scheduled for Sunday. We're comin' back, people. Nothing can stop New Yorkers.

Internet tops TV

Hours of watching storm coverage on TV told me very little. They couldn't see the forest for the trees. All I wanted to hear about was the Big Thing: how are the subway tunnels and how is downtown Manhattan? Nada. All they showed me was flooded parking lots.

However, one minute after calling up the Huffington Post (whose site is hobbled by the storm, by the way) I learned:

As of last night, seven subway tunnels under the East River flooded. Metro-North Railroad lost power from 59th Street to Croton-Harmon on the Hudson Line and to New Haven on the New Haven Line. The Long Island Rail Road evacuated its West Side Yards and suffered flooding in one East River tunnel. The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel is flooded from end to end and the Queens Midtown Tunnel also took on water and was closed. Six bus garages were disabled by high water.

That is huge. The city will be hobbled for a long time. Thanks, internet! (The "Hugh L. Carey Tunnel", by the way, is the Holland Tunnel. I hope everyone continues to call it by its former name. Hugh L. Carey, indeed. Bah, humbug!)

The calm after the storm

The power was in and out yesterday. Even when it was on, the lights dimmed now and then. Figuring this would kill my electronics, I unplugged everything except the modem.

In the end, I spent the night watching the storm on my Macbook Air. The news stations were live-streaming, which made this possible. All the while, branches were hitting the roof and sides of my house. It was so windy that I was sure a tree would fall on the house. Never happened.

Checking the news this morning, I see that other people weren't as lucky. The subways flooded, fires took out whole neighborhoods, and people, including kids, were killed by falling trees. The hurricane was devastating for so many. And of course, it's only been light for a few hours as I write this. Who knows what they'll discover later today. I feel terrible about the losses people suffered. I cannot imagine what losing your child or your home is like.

But I'm also relieved to have dodged a bullet. And I'm shocked that my house has power this morning. In this area, the power goes out if someone sneezes loudly. Everything okay in your neck of the woods? Chime in.

If I disappear...

If this blog goes silent in the next day or so, I've lost power because of the hurricane. Nothing else could keep my hands off the keyboard. Good luck to all of us, especially those in lower Manhattan.

Vatican trashed in certain Mohawk circles

There's an interesting AP article at the NYT. It's about Kateri Tekakwitha, the Mohawk woman the Pope recently declared a saint. Apparently this is viewed skeptically by some Mohawks. Not all, but some, see this as an attempt to sideline their traditional beliefs. Plus, it seems KT was a very strange woman:

A Catholic convert at 20, she settled in Kahnawake, a Mohawk settlement south of Montreal where Jesuits had a mission and where she and other women performed mortification rituals such as self-flogging as part of their faith.

Sorry, but that's never a healthy sign. George-Kanentiio is quoted in the article as saying:

"It should never obscure the best elements of our aboriginal spirituality, nor should Kateri's personal behaviors, given their extremities, be endorsed as a model for women anywhere," he said, referring to her self-mutilation with whips, thorns and hot coals.

"Women in particular need not kneel in supplication to any man or any god but to rise to dance and sing in true joy," he said. "We can never accept any institution which actively suppresses women or qualifies their potential." 

Really interesting article; really weird church. Much more at the above link.

The damn robe

Last weekend I watched "Carnival of Sinners" -- not to be confused with "Carnival of Souls". It's a French horror movie made in 1943 and there were subtitles -- which I don't mind as long as I can see them. Anyway, it's one of those pact with the devil movies. I enjoyed it.

Watching this old movie reminded me of something that always irks me. In movies from the 40s, there are often scenes where a woman goes to bed. Of course it's a canopied bed in a palatial room. And just before she tucks herself in, she lays a perfectly folded, diaphanous, multi-layered robe across the bottom of the bed.

And then she slips into bed as easily as if she was a record slipping into its jacket. (Old time reference; seems suitable. Look up "records", kids.) There is no friction. She lays still immediately and goes to sleep.

Later, she's awakened by a sound. She's still lying in exactly the same position. She slips out of bed and reaches for the robe -- which is lying in exactly the same place and position on the bed. This really bothers me.

I'm lucky if the mattress is still on the bed when I wake up in the morning. A robe laid carefully across the foot of my bed? Hah. It'd be on the floor, and somehow would have pulled itself half-under the bed.

But everything was perfect in those old days, and the most perfect thing of all was the women. Women never move when they sleep. They don't perspire. And they wake up with perfect make-up and hair. Super women, that's what they were.