Originally published at An Experimental Life. You can comment here or there.

Disclaimer: I in no way wish to denigrate Ms. Fawcett, Mr. Jackson, nor the pain and anguish of their families, friends, and fans. I feel for them, and I wish them comfort. But let's get some perspective.

Michael Jackson's musical influence and pop icon status are undeniable, whether or not you believe any of the accusations against him as a man. Farrah Fawcett was not merely the quintessential pinup girl of at least two generations of men (I soooo wanted that bikini poster when I was a kid, but my parents wouldn't hear of it.) and, in many cases, women. Post-Charlie's Angels, she used her celebrity to bring attention to victims of domestic abuse, even while fighting her battle with terminal cancer. These things are significant. Did they, and do they continue to, affect our collective consciousness? Is it right and proper to mourn them? Should their deaths be reported upon and discussed? Absolutely, and I criticize no one for doing so.

I strongly suspect, though, that were they were to rise from their graves like the dancers in Michael's Thriller video, zombie-Michael and zombie-Farrah would both say something to the effect of, “Thanks for the attention, guys, but there are more important things going on in the world.”

Whatever your feelings or beliefs on the following issues, no sane person can question their importance.

Originally published at An Experimental Life. You can comment here or there.

The Cemetery Girl is a novel I've been working on (and mucho thanks to Lane, Kij, Erick, Nate, and Aaron for writing advice.) The novel itself opens with the protagonist, Tamara Weaver, and her mother and sister getting into an auto accident during and after which Tam experiences what she had thought was a leftover childhood nightmare.

I've been interspersing the modern day action with little flashbacks, and have also reworked those flashbacks into a short story (which is currently at F&SF awaiting Mr. Van Gelding's acceptance or rejection). The present-day scenes are in a more informal tight third person simple past tense, and, although it may seem counter-intuitive, the flashback scenes are in a more literary present tense.

While I, of course, won't post the entire thing--either the novel or the short story--here is the first scene from the short story version.

Originally published at An Experimental Life. You can comment here or there.

Hey, teabaggers--There's no gun ban in the works, Obama's tax plan calls for lower taxes than under all but the final 13 months of the Reagan administration, and the Employee Free Choice Act allows employees to choose whether to have a card-signing ballot or a secret ballot in order to decide whether to form a union. If you did any fact-checking at all, instead of listening slack-jawed to your far right masters, you'd know that not a damn word out of the far right's mouth is true.

But no, you're buying into it because your far right masters--the ones who do your thinking for you--are following the example of Adolf Hitler, who knew that people would swallow a big lie more easily than a small one. Pretty much everything out of the far right's mouth right now is either a lie or outright sedition, including "and," and "the." They are doing their best to foment unrest--for personal gain--over things that they have made up out of whole cloth.

Originally published at An Experimental Life. You can comment here or there.

You read that right. Now, I didn't say that they denounce Ronald Reagan himself, but they are coming out in opposition to his policies on both taxes and foreign relations.

Originally published at An Experimental Life. You can comment here or there.

I hereby call upon the current leadership of the Republican party to live up to the ideals they profess and start putting their money where their mouths are, or shut the f*ck up once and for all and let decent people take charge. (Note that I specify the leadership here. I know some members of the Republican party who are just as disgusted as I am with the pathetic sacks of shit running things right now.)

Originally published at An experimental life. You can comment here or there.

Karl Rove says McCain is lying, and McCain on the economy? Well... read for yourself. Stranger than anything I could come up with.

Originally published at An experimental life. You can comment here or there.

Apparently not.

According to the latest ad from the McCain campaign, teaching young children about avoiding sexual predators is a bad thing. (Supposedly teaching kindergartners to avoid sexual predators constitutes them "learning about sex before they learn to read," and is a bad thing.)

Hm... And according to recent comments from a campaign spokesperson, character assassination is perfectly honorable.

These guys claim to be for traditional American and small-town values, right? When did making things easier for child-molesters and breaking that commandment that says, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," become part of our values? They're certainly not my values.

Originally published at An experimental life. You can comment here or there.

(I'm quite tired right now, so please feel free to point out any errors I may have made in grammar or in fact. Make sure you check your facts before you try to correct mine, though.)

This is not merely an opinion editorial. Everything here is based on verifiable facts that you can check for yourself.

Of course I recognize that the majority of the far right will consider this an unwarranted attack (Funny, considering they don't believe in warrants--that was a pun, by the way.) But then, the far right generally considers repeating the words of their own people in context, pointing out facts in context, calling them on it when they're caught lying or imposing double-standards, having the temerity to ask for substantiation of their claims, or indeed to ask any uncomfortable question at all, attacks from biased folk who want to destroy America. In fact, the far right rants publicly about "attacks" upon their candidate and his running mate that never actually happened. (How desperate must one be to rely on such tactics?)

From whence do I get my information? Well for starters, I'm one of those people who watch CSPAN (you know--the channel that frequently has live cameras and mics on the floors of congress) to see first-hand what goes on, and who makes an effort to watch speeches by presidential candidates and other major political figures. (If you miss a speech you can generally find them uncut and unedited online.) I go to government sites like senate.gov to fact-check, and liste to both McCain's and Obama's dialogs to learn what their positions are and listen to what they say about each other.

This article will focus mainly on the lies, distortions, and double-talk of Senator McCain and his camp--not so much because I support Senator Obama, but because the McCain camp is the camp playing dirty politics. Indeed, the bulk of the McCain campaign seems to be, "Obama BAD," and McCain and his supporters don't mind blatantly lying in order to make that point. It is no more partisan to point this out than to point out that the Earth revolves around the sun.

Now that my long-winded preamble is done, let's get to the meat, starting with some of the most recent and blatant lies, distortions, and double standards (and it'd take a book to address all of them, so this is just a taste)...

Originally published at An experimental life. You can comment here or there.

(Although I am writing about the Netherlands here, much of this essay applies to other countries, as well--The United States, for instance")

"Tolerance" does not mean tolerating bigots, and some of the alleged "victims" of intolerance are among the worst offenders. This is not to say that there are no honest victims--but many seem confused about the meaning of the word, and their hollow claims of unfair discrimination cheapen and belittle the experience of those who live under genuine persecution.

Originally published at An experimental life. You can comment here or there.

So let's debunk some of the lies...

Local author Lane Robins will be signing copies of her novel Maledicte at the Lawrence, KS Border's at 7th and New (where the first order sold out in one day) Come out with us and lend her your support!

Publisher's Weekly says, "Lane Robins is a fantasist with a future."

"Highly recommended."
--Library Journal
 
"A strong-willed debute whose painstakingly developed characters and tortuous plots exert an undeniably intense, if grim, fascination."
Kirkus Reviews</strong>

You can see a brief excerpt from Maledicte at maledicte.com. (I think the lead-in paragraph for the excerpt is one of the worst in the book, and Lane keeps saying she's going to change it, but hey--Even the worst paragraph is pretty damn good.) You can view Lane's Livejournal here. The Lawrence Journal-World published an interview with Lane at this link.

Lane is one third of my local "writing cabal" that meets each week, so I got to read Maledicte before it came out in stores (nanny-nanny-boo-boo), and it rocks. As you can see from the above reviews, I'm not the only one singing her praises.

(x-posted)

Originally published at An experimental life. You can comment here or there.

I hear a lot of would-be fiction writers say they "don't believe" in studying writing, fearing that doing so will force them to write by some preset formula and destroy their "personal styles."

Nothing could be further from the truth. If you look at some of the greats--who have wildly divergent styles--you will find that they almost universally studied the craft. Until you begin studying the craft, you can't call call yourself a serious writer any more than you could call yourself a neurosurgeon without going to medical school...