Oct. 31st, NaNoWriMo, Exile, "Marriage"

Reading: Ender in Exile, Orson Scott Card

Yes, Oct. 31st came and went, and I still don't have a 2nd draft of Book One. But I sucked it up, and started on Book Two promptly on Nov. 1st. I was making good time, too, until the proverbial shit hit the fan in one of my clinic courses, and I was forced to take a week's hiatus from noveling.

So I find myself behind the eight ball yet again.

I'm going to try to get as much as I can done this weekend--if I can coax a good 9000 words or so per day, I'll be back on track for the full 50K by Nov. 30. Gambaru!

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The recent protests regarding the 52% to 48% passage of California's Prop 8 have pushed me to step up onto my soap box. I usually avoid venting my political views, but it seems that the distinctions that I find to be key to the issue are often overlooked or trodden upon by pundits on both sides.

To begin with, I side with the gay and lesbian viewpoints in that their civil unions should be granted the same rights under the law as traditional married couples. Simply put, it is constitutionally required under the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause, and, even without the Constitution, the time-honored principles of equity, I think, would vindicate their request for equal standing.

Nevertheless, I believe the passage of Prop 8 was a good thing.

The key battleline that most people tend to overlook is one of semantics. The institution of "marriage" extends back into antiquity; it is a cultural touchstone that has shaped human society since the dawn of time, and will likely continue to do so indefinitely. At the same time, inextricably bound up in its cultural significance is its religious meaning--it's no coincidence that the vast majority of marriages take place in churches, and are conducted by religious officials. For a great segment of the multitude of religious perspectives out there, there is spiritual and theological significance bound up in the union of a man and a woman. In this way, the term "marriage" itself is, at its core, a religious one.

Therein lies the danger in the gay and lesbian activists who clamber for their "right" to "gay marriage." They couch their demands in arguments for equal protection, but in demanding that the government sanction their expansive conception of marriage, they seek to have the government impose their view of this quintessentially religious concept upon those whose religious views endorse the traditional viewpoint. That goes beyond the rights ensured by the 14th Amendment; it trods upon the 1st Amendment right to freedom of religion, by demanding that the government impose their conception of marriage upon the masses, or, at least, endorsing it over the traditional conception. Either way, the government finds itself in a position of intermingling matters of church with matters of state, something the founding fathers would find scandalous, and antithetical to the core values of our democracy.

Thus, I find myself in the position of affording gay civil unions equal status under the law as married couples, but insisting that any government recognition of the status of those civil unions restrict itself from treading upon the religious conception of marriage. Some may warn that drawing a distinction between "civil unions" and "marriages" is analogous to the "separate but equal" fallacy of the civil rights era. But I disagree. The inherent weakness of the "separate but equal" doctrine was that the separate institutions provided to whites and blacks simply were not equal--the problem, essentially, was logistical in nature. Here, the separation of the terms "civil union" and "marriage" is semantic: it allows the government to grant equal rights to gay and lesbian unions--rights they are constitutionally due--without taking the extra and unconstitutional step of endorsing the religious viewpoint underlying those unions at the expense of those who favor the traditional conception of marriage. It ensures that neither side of the debate has their constitutional rights abased.

This distinction between "civil union" and "marriage" need only be legal in nature. If U.S. culture grows to include gay and lesbian couples within the popular purview of "marriage," that is something for our culture itself to decide. But the legal distinction must be drawn, lest we, in our zeal to uphold the rights afforded by one amendment, despoil the rights espoused by another.

BICHOK, Exile, Warbreaker

Redraft: Chapter 6 of 33

22632 / 139570

My progress on the redraft has been slow going as of late, in part due to a writer's blockish road hazard that required the scrapping and rewriting of the last scene of chapter 5, and in larger part due to a deadline for a prof's research assignment. It ended up taking far more time that I would have liked, but I managed to get it done by the deadline I'd promised, though it screwed up my neck something fierce to be planted in front of the computer for hours at a time. (Despite the magic of BICHOK--butt in chair, hands on keyboard--as advocated by the crew at Writing Excuses, my neck problems demand that I take periodic breaks from that position. Not taking those breaks inevitably ends with me flat on my back, as I rediscovered yesterday.) I still have another active project for the other prof, but I'm going to try to work in more redrafting time, at least a couple of hours each day.

October 31st won't wait forever, after all.

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Visiting OSC's Hatrack website today, I noticed a banner that announced the November release of Ender in Exile, the long-awaited direct sequel to Ender's Game (i.e. the one that I wanted to read back in the ninth grade, but had to settle for the Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind triumvirate--which weren't bad, per se, but certainly a far cry from what I'd been longing for). I hope that OSC has successfully chanelled at least a spark of the old 80s-era Card magic, as I've grown increasingly convinced that he reached the apex of his writerly prowess before the turn of the 21st century. (One only need compare his earlier work--Hart's Hope, Songmaster, Ender's Game, etc.--with his most recent--Magic Street, Empire--to realize that his style has shifted noticably over the years, and not entirely for the better.)

Inevitably, however, returning to the Enderverse after three years (or, if one discounts the Enderless Shadow books, almost ten) will prove somewhat painful to me, I fear. Back when I first read Ender's Game, it was the gold standard against which all other fiction had to be measured, and found lacking. I really couldn't find anything to critique about it, even if I tried. I still occasionally go back to it, as a portrait artist might refer to the Mona Lisa, to give me insight into the way that a novel should be paced, how a story should flow from point to point.

As of late, however, I've begun to see certain flaws in the story--not so much a reflection of the writing or craft OSC employed, but a reflection, I think, of the potential flaws in the propensities of the author himself. Card has established a career on crafting intelligent, often times genius-level characters, and while he generally succeeds in humanizing them to the point of drawing a reader's empathy, some of the character traits he infuses them with I suspect are ones that he himself shares; and they are traits that serve, as far as I can tell, to alienate them from the reader. Perhaps that could be justified in Game; the whole plot turns on Ender's isolation from his peers, his loved ones, his superiors, and even, to a certain extent, the enemies he is destined to fight. That isolation closely parallels the estrangement many pubescents experience from the world and others around them, a link that may have in no small part contributed to the popularity of the novel, and its retroactive label as a "young adult" work. But I see strains of that alienation--something deep inside of me suspects its roots are in some nascent sense of elitism--pervade practically every character that Card has created since the new millennium. In this respect, there is a danger in borrowing too much from my first writerly shisho when modeling my own fiction.

Fortunately, I've come to know many more shisho in my time, all of whom bring with them their own distinct sets of strengths and weaknesses, both of which have helped me to respectively foster and compensate for my own. Flewelling--her consumate insights into human relationships and immersive world buidling. Sanderson--his immaculate plotting and astounding depth of his milieus. Jordan--perhaps one of the greatest milieu-smiths since Tolkien himself. And now George R.R. Martin--whose strength of prose I noted within the first page of the Prologue to A Game of Thrones, and whose character craft and turns of phrase I'm happily savoring at the moment. There are many more I've yet to look into: Vernor Vinge, Robin Hobb, Tad Williams, James Maxey, to name just a few. The gifts I've received are legion; yet the gifts I still stand to gain outnumber them. I only hope I learn enough to produce works that might serve the same purpose for another in the future that theirs has served for me.

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On the subject of Brandon Sanderson, his online novel project Warbreaker provides fans and would-be writers alike a unique opportunity for insight into his editing processes, one that I hope may aid my own. He's graciously made available the first complete draft of the novel, along with each subsequent redraft all the way up to the current one--version 6.1. The novel will go through a few more rounds of edits that won't make it to the electronic page, and then be released in final form around the same time that A Memory of Light hits bookstores--sometime in the first quarter of 2009. Sanderson's hope is that if people like what they see on their computer screens, they won't hesistate to purchase the print volume when it becomes available.

I haven't read enough of the online drafts to be 100% sure, but given the lessons his drafts are likely to teach me about my own, I'd say I'll be one of those who gladly picks up the novel from the bookstore when it finally arrives.