Libra (www.getlibra.com) XP and Vista
If you’ve ever tried to catalog you book collection on your computer, chances are you’ve installed a program to help you do it, then quickly got tired of entering the information about each of your books. It takes a lot of time and, although it’s probably as good as any other task at helping you put off doing any actual writing, it’s really pretty boring.

I just discovered a free app that makes it easy. All you do is enter the bar code or ISBN number of a book (or CD, or movie, or game) and Libra scans online databases (mostly various Amazon sites, but you can point it to other sites) and pulls in the book’s cover and whatever information about the book it finds. This is much easier than typing it all in yourself.

To make it even easier, you can use a Web cam to scan the bar code to make entering your books even easier. I haven’t tried it myself, and a few people have reported problems on the Libra forums, but others claim it works great. It apparently depends on the type of Web cam you use. And if you happen to have a bar code scanner, it’ll work too.

If a book isn’t found, you can still enter the information manually. This is especially important for books that are too old to have bar codes or ISBN numbers. You can then scan or take a digital picture of the book’s cover to replace the boring generic book cover Libra uses when it can’t find a cover.

But easy entry is just the beginning.

You can track books that you’ve loaned to others, export your library to a spreadsheet or Web file, and add your own notes to the book’s info. The Web site says you can even create and print an attractive catalog of your collection. Supposedly, you can also set up the program to open a copy of items that are stored on your computer, such as e-books, music, or movies.

Your library is displayed face out on a virtual bookshelf, making it easy to find. This looks pretty cool, but my one wish for this program so far is that I could also display my books in a simple text list. Of course, I can export my database to a spreadsheet, but it would be nice to toggle between the bookshelf view and a list view.

So, if you want an easy way to catalog your media, give Libra a try. Oh, and you can ignore the one comment on the download page that claims that Libra contains spyware. It doesn’t.

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Last night the family and I celebrated Michael Collins Day by going to the season opener for our local Pioneer League (lowest level of the minor leagues) baseball team. It seems appropriate for Michael Collins Day. All of the kids on these teams have to a very real extent dedicated their lives to becoming professional baseball players, and they made it, but only a few will achieve the ultimate goal of playing in the Major Leagues.

Now, I’ve been to countless baseball games in my lifetime. few things are as much fun as going to a ballpark, whether it’s to see children play, or a minor league game at any level of the system, or one of the Grand Cathedrals of the majors. But I’ve never had as much fun at a game as last night. It was an exciting game, with extras.

First of all, my local team was playing their in-state rivals, who also happen to be my brother’s home team, so the rivalry adds a little more fun. And, like I said, it was the season opener, so that adds a little more excitement, both on the field and in the seats.

But that wasn’t all. Baseball games can be a little dull, but not this one.

I should mention that during the game, fans were encouraged to take pictures of the game and the people watching and send them to the team. The best pictures would be displayed at the start of the eighth inning. The joys of camera phones. The eighth rolled around, and several of the pictures we had taken of our family were shown, adding a little extra fun and vanity to the game.

The Local Guyz were down 5-2 despite threating to score all through the game. Then, in what would normally be the final innings, they tied the game. That put it into extra innings. For those of you who are less familiar with the game, especially my dear international readers, a baseball game is normally nine innings, but goes longer if the score is tied.

In the 11th Inning, the vile-enemies-of-all-that-is-good scored two, so things looked dire for the home team. But then the other team’s pitcher hit the first two batters who came up for God’s Team, and the next guy singled. Bases loaded with no outs. In an excruciatingly exciting inning, the Home Team scored two but couldn’t get that last run they needed for the victory. The spirit of Michael Collins was obviously hanging around.

The next inning was scoreless, thanks to a spectacular diving catch by the Enemies third baseman that ended a rally by the Localz and kept the winning run from scoring. That took us to the 13th inning. This is when things got really crazy.

The visitors came up in their half of the inning and were stymied by the locals. During their inning, a wind came up, blowing “cotton” from the local cottonwood trees through the stadium like snow. Considering that it was almot 90 degrees when the game started, seeing something like snow blowing through the ballpark was a surprise and was almost magical. Could have been faeries, for all I know.

Then, almost immediately after the third out, the lights went out in the stadium. I mean, it went completely dark. I don’t know if it was caused by the wind, the faeries, or if the lights were just set to go off at a certain time because the game wasn’t expected to go so long, but the lights were gone.

You can’t play baseball in the dark. Oh, sure, as kids we used to try to keep the game going as long as we could, but at a certain point we had to admit that the night beat us and go home, usually when siblings started showing up at the field to tell us that our moms or dads said we had to get home “this instant.” It was usually “this instant.” Like that’s even possible.

To add to the night’s surprised, sitting there in the dark, we started to feel water. A light rain had come out of nowhere and snuck up on us in the dark. (Yeah, I know the word is “sneaked” but that rain snuck if anything has ever snucked.)

Anyway, being opening night, a fireworks show was planned for the end of the game. Since it was dark anyway and it would take some time to get the lights charged back up, they went ahead with the fireworks show before the game was even over. I’ve never seen that before. Neither have you, I’ll wager.

After a nice fireworks display, the lights were still not on. Most of the remaining spectators (there were over 4200 at the game, but many had already left because it was getting so late) left after the fireworks. Can’t blame them. Midnight was quickly approaching and the stadium announcer said it would be another 15 to 20 minutes before the lights were all the way back up.

But no way were we leaving. The game had been too exciting. We’d sat and cheered through too much to not see how it ended. We’d been there so long by that time the it was no longer a game. It was a lifestyle.

Two quick outs convinced us that the game was probably going to last forever. Then two guys got one. A two-out drive to right-center knocked in the winning run. After more than four and a half hours of exciting baseball that could have gone to either team, the game was over, and the Good Guyz had won.

It was a great night. Today we’re all exhausted and bleary-eyed, but it was worth it. Our first baseball game means summer is officially here.

if that game was any indication, it’s going to be a great summer.

I’ve been watching several shows on TV lately about the space program, and remembering how exciting those days were to this little kid. Like everybody else my age, I wanted to be an astronaut.

But one thing strikes me again and again.

Imagine focusing your whole life on a trip to Disneyland. It’s all you’ve ever wanted to do and all of your life and career choices are built around one day walking through those magical gates. Finally, after years of preparation, you pile your family in the car and drive them all the way across country. Then, when you get there, you have to stay in the car and drive around the outside of the park while your entire family is inside, riding the rides you worked so hard to experience.

Sure, it was your expertise that got them there, and your expertise that will get them home. But all you can do is drive around and look at the Matterhorn from a distance and know the family is out there somewhere. You know you were as important as anyone to the trip, and nobody could have gotten there without you. But still, you are orbiting the park and they are inside, exploring Tomorrowland.

No matter how positive a face Michael Collins has put on it over the years, and no matter how true it is that he was as much a part of the Apollo 11 mission as Armstrong and Aldrin, and no matter how much credit he should get for his part, there have to be moments when he feels like he made it to Disneyland but couldn’t go in.

Major General Collins is a true-life hero and he knows it and everybody knows it. But still.

So I declare today Michael Collins Day, and dedicate it to everybody who has worked hard to achieve their goals and who maybe fell a little short through no fault of their own, but in doing so made it possible for others to expand the limits.

And you know what? I’d give almost everything to have been able to do what he did.

So Happy Michael Collins Day!

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I’ve looked into a couple of words recently, and wanted to share my findings. The words are related, so I’ll cover them both in one post.

Today’s words, friends, are: finger and booger. I don’t think I need to dig into the relationship.

Finger

Finger interests me because it’s the same word in German and English. In German, the verb for to catch is fangen, with fing being a common form, so it’s obvious that a finger is a thing that catches. That makes perfect sense.

But what happened in English?

Obviously, the word finger has a history in English that is very similar to it’s close German cousin. Cognates don’t happen by accident, and finger isn’t the type of word to be borrowed from another language. In fact, if you look at the history of body part names, you often discover that the word is either a medical term or describes the part’s function. A finger is a very practical thing, so the function definition makes sense.

But finger and catch are about as dissimilar as two words can be. They are obviously not related. In English, this is not unusual. Turns out that catch shows up in Middle English in the 13th Century, as cacchen. This is well after the Norman invasion, and the word comes from the Anglo-French cacher (also chacer or chacer), to hunt, a word that comes from the Vulgar Latin word captiare. The words, catch, capture, and chase are all related.

So finger must go back farther, and come from a Germanic root, like it’s German cousin. And it does. In Old English, the verb fōn meant to seize. A finger is a seizer and, as it turns out, is related to a fang. This makes perfect sense when you thing about it.

So what is a common thing to seize with a finger? This brings me to:

Booger

I wanted to know more about the word booger because it appears to be a slang word that has completely replaced the actual term. I wanted to know the non-slang word for booger. So I started looking.

In one unreliable source, somebody claimed that the medical term for booger is rhinolith, literally nose stone. This was promising and got my hopes up, but it turns out to be untrue. A person with rhinoliths is an unfortunate soul who has painful stones in his or her nose, not unlike gall stones or kidney stones. This is apparently a miserable condition, and one I’d rather not have. It’s rare, fortunately, and can cause all sorts of trouble, from nasal obstructions to headaches and sinusitis. It’s icky enough, but not a booger.

To my eternal disappointment, I discovered that the medical term for what we know as a booger is dried nasal mucus. That’s it. It’s not even a word. It’s a definition. There is no non-slang word, only a phrase. Booger is the American form of the British bogey or bogie. What’s worse, the best boogers aren’t even dry. They’re gooey and stretchy.

I couldn’t find definite confirmation, but I suspect that bogey is related to bog. It’s not hard to see how a booger might be related to swampy, wet, spongy, ground. So booger has an apparent etymology and is exactly what it is.

I say we start a movement to make medical science accept the word booger as an official term. If they want to define it as dried nasal mucus, that’s fine with me. We all need to compromise now and then. But it’s a pretty sucky definition. You’d think all of those years of medical study would have turned out a word and a better definition. But nooooo.

But what do doctors know, anyway? Obviously nothing about boogers.

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I didn’t mean to skip the whole month of May in this blog. I’m hanging my head in shame.

You know, when I started working at home, I expected to have a little more time for my fiction projects. I’ve been so busy with my freelance tech writing and editing (a good thing, when you consider that it’s how I make my living), that I’ve had trouble spending as much time as I should on my other writing. I usually manage several hours a week, but it’s not nearly as much time as I need, considering the states of my three projects.

How do you make time in your busy lives for writing? And are you like me? Do you feel like, no matter how much time you can devote to the writing, it’s never enough? Truth is, when I have managed a couple hours a day for several days in a row, I still don’t feel like it’s enough.

But I’m not going to whine about it. For a long time I’ve wished I could work at home, and I’m doing it for almost eight months. So far, I’ve been really busy. That’s a very good thing. And I am able to make time for the writing that I’d like to have eventually become the money train. And, even when I’m not working on my fictions, I’m still writing and making a living at it. In the time since I started working at home, I’ve completely rewritten one project, made good progress on my newest project, published two articles, and started a major rework of my first project (as an experiment, to see if it helps add some needed oomph to the story). So it’s not like I’m not working. It just never feels like enough.
All this is to say that the blog has been a little lower priority. I’ll try to remember to post more in the future. I have a list of things I want to post about, when I can get to them.

On a positive note, I finally have my business name, Write Field Documentation Services, LLC. Next up, when I find the time: a Web site, and maybe a tech writing blog.

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In my first Free Software post, I mentioned the mac-like RocketDock launcher as a way to start your favorite programs and open folders. It’s still one of my most-used utilities. It looks cool, and works great, and keeps my icons easy-to-find but out of the way. There’s no need to close windows and search through gobs of icons on the desktop to open frequently used goodies.

Now I’ve discovered another app, Kana Launcher, that is sure to help me in my quest to break free of the Start menu and desktop icons.

Kana Launcher might not look as cool as RocketDock, but it has some great features. Basically, you can set it up as a menu in the system tray or a pop-up menu (my choice). Either way, you can load it up with folders and programs–even Web sites–that you frequently access. Then, with a simple keystroke, you can make it pop up on your desktop, select the item you want, and send it back out of the way. There’s no need to stop what you’re doing, minimize windows to get to the desktop, and find your icons.

Cool. But why am I recommending it for writers?

Because of one particular feature: Group Start.

With Group Start, you can open multiple items at once. So, let’s say you have three files that you open when you’re working: your manuscript, your outline, and your notes. In addition to those, maybe you use a spreadsheet to track your time, word count, or whatever metrics you use. Normally, you have to open each of those files separately. With Kana Launcher, however, you can create a group and open all of those files at once, with one click. The program remembers where each item was on your desktop when you closed it, so if you like to arrange your windows in a specific way when you work, with one click you can open everything and have it right where you like it.

This might not sound like a huge deal, and it’s probably not, really. It won’t help you get over your writer’s block or get rid of your excessive adverbs. But what it does is help you set up your work area so it’s exactly the way you want it. And you’ll save time by not having to find your files in the Start menu, on your desktop, or in Windows Explorer.

And I say anything that helps make your work environment more comfortable and more personal is a good thing.

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In the early stages of a writing project, it’s often hard to know whether the thing is worth writing. That initial flurry of ideas is an instant high that makes you think it’s going to be the best story since The Iliad. Then you sit on it a while and the idea starts to cool and doubts set in. That’s often as far as a writer or wanna-be writer ever gets.

I’m in the early stages of a work, and have been for a long time. It’s an idea I first had about two and a half years ago, and I was really excited about it. The first sign that it’s worth working on came a year or so again when I started to get serious about planning it, and I discovered that I still liked the idea.

Then, slowly, I started to weave time for it in among my other projects. After a couple of false starts, it started to move. Good sign number two. I enjoy writing it. The bits I’ve shared with my critique group have been mostly well received.

True, one of my friends, after seeing nothing but my initial plot summary, declared it “my least favorite of your projects.” Believe it or not, that’s good sign number three. I trust her opinion, and she was a tremendous help with her reviews of early drafts of my first novel project. That her comment didn’t make me doubt the story or my ability to write it is another sign that this is something I need to work on.

But the kicker is, this project is hard. I don’t know whether it shows on paper, but this has been a hard project for me to work on. Not that the words don’t come or that it feels bad or anything like that. It’s hard because I have to stretch, and because some scenes scare me because I know that they’ll be difficult to write, either psychologically or otherwise.

For example, I’ve been dreading a scene that’s approaching fast, a scene that will be unlike anything I’ve ever written, and where the mental anguish my main character will go through is unlike anything I’ve ever felt. That scene is one of the reasons why much of my writing time has been spent on much-needed revisions of other projects.

I really think that struggling with this project for the reasons I have is further evidence that the thing is worth writing. I’ll have to stretch to pull it off.

Now, I don’t know whether the story will be any good. It feels good so far, but that means very little at this stage. If it’s hard for me to write, and I write it anyway, I’ll be a better writer for the effort, even if it turns out to be no good.

And that makes it worth writing.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve examined the history of a word in the blog (although I’ve done it plenty of times without writing about it.) So I thought today I’d examine the word shine and see if it has the relatives I suspect it has.

Shine comes from the Old English scínen and is a congate of the modern German scheinen and the Swedish skina, as well as similar words in other northern European languages. But where did it come from? How did it get into those languages?

I’ll put on my linguistic detective hat and see what I can find out. And you get to see my investigation in all its stream-of-consciousness glory. Aren’t you excited?

The Old English scínen has the same meanings as the modern shine. It meant to illuminate, be resplendent, flash–all the things you expect shine to mean. It also had an adjectival form, scínendlic, that corresponds exactly to the modern shiny. That’s no surprise. I expected to find that.

The related scinn is interesting. It’s a noun that, according to OEME meant “an extraordinary appearance, a deceptive appearance, illusion, a spectre, evil spirit, phantom; magical image.” It also meant skin.

So shine and skin are related. That’s interesting. The overall meaning has to do with light and appearance. That meaning of skin is interesting. It leads to other words, like shingle and shin. And in its German form, the noun Schein is used for official papers, such as paper money and driver’s licenses. It’s not hard to see the relationship between slips of paper and skin, especially if you look at the history of paper.

If we move forward into Middle English, we get even closer to the connection with German that I suspected. In Chaucer and other ME sources, you find the word scene. As in Old English, that sc- is pronounced like we say sh- in modern English.

In Middle English, scene could be used in a couple of ways. According to the University of Michigan’s Middle English dictionary, one meaning of scene is: “Of the sun, moon, a star, etc.: bright, shining, luminous; also fig.; also, as noun: the bright sun.”

Another definition is: “Of a person, esp. a lady: beautiful, fair, handsome; also used of a group of people; bright and ~; (b) as an epithet for a lady; the ~; (c) of Christ, the Virgin Mary, a supernatural being: beautiful, glorious; (d) of the human body or a part of it: beautiful, fair, handsome; (e) of a person or a group of people: illustrious, noble, excellent; (f) as noun: a beautiful person, esp. a fair lady; also, beautiful people.”

This puts us exactly into the territory I expected to end up in. The modern English shine is, then, a very close relative, in fact the same word (etymologically speaking) as the modern German schön.

So shine, sheen, skin, shingle and similar words come from the same root somewhere along the line, a word that has something to do with illuminating or shining forth which, due the metaphorical nature of languages, also came to mean something with a shining appearance, something beautiful. It’s not hard to figure out how it is related to another word that refers to something (hopefully) beautiful shining forth, sing (OE singan, to sing, chant, recite), especially since in olden days, people became illuminated by listening to somebody sing, chant, or recite. This root must be very old for it to have come into our cousin languages with pretty much identical meanings.

When seeking a common root word, none of the online dictionaries I checked went beyond Old English or Old German. I’d have to find this one on my own. I sought beyond Proto-European and went straight to Sanskrit, where the roots of many northern European words can be found.

I wasn’t disappointed. Hindunet.org has a list of Sanskrit verbs. Among them, I found s’cand, which means shine. Throughout the ages that led to the development of English and its cousins, the Sanskrit s’cand turned into scinan and its similar forms in the other languages, and gave us today’s shine.

This led beyond where I expected to wind up. That same Sanskrit root, which can also be written as cand because the s’ prefix can be dropped, led to the Latin candesco, which means “to begin to shine.” Candesco shares its root with other words like candidatas (candidate), candidus (shining white, fair, beautiful) and candela (a type of candle, often held in a candelabrum, or candlestick). It is also the root of candor, a shining whiteness or luster of character. And, of course, that root also gave us the English words chant and cant, in case you doubted the connection to sing earlier.

So look how rendundant this sentence is: I really appreciate my candidate’s candor about his having shingles; he is a shining candle.

There you go. That’s the skinny on the word shine. It’s beautiful. I hope you feel illuminated.

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It’s been hard to get to this blog for the last few weeks. I’ve been so swamped with work that I just don’t find the time.

But I read something last night, and I have to write a little about it.

I was reading “The Knight’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and I came across the word “axe,” meaning “ask.”

Now, you ask most Americans and they’ll tell you that axe (or ax) for ask is Ebonics, or black English. It’s not true, though. I mean, it is, and it isn’t. Ebonics speakers definitely say ax for ask. But so do some New Yorkers, and people who speak other variants of American English.

It’s actually very old. In fact, 100 years ago, Old English speakers used two acceptable words that meant the same thing as today’s ask: ascian and axian. Chaucer’s Middle English axe was just a modernization (for his time) of axian.

The -sk/-x thing also occurs in task and tax, as in, “That task really taxed me.” They used to be the same word, but have evolved into words with separate, but similar, meanings.

That’s one reason why reading Chaucer and his Middle English compatriots is so much fun. Every time I pick up one of those authors, I find some interesting little linguistic tidbit, like axe or German cognates. Maybe sometime I’ll write about how starve, spelled sterve in Chaucer but pronounced pretty much the same, is the same word as the German sterben (to die), and, in Chaucer’s day meant the same as the German word, and how it came to mean “to die of hunger.”

Some time when I have more time to play with words.

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Ray Orrock, my first writing hero, the man who made me realize that a writer is something a guy could become, died this morning.

I’ve known he was sick for a little while, since his family shared the bad news with me, so I knew this time was coming. But today’s e-mail still took me by surprise.

I don’t want to say a lot in this post. There’s really not that much I can say. The first sentence kinda says it all. But I do want to say a little bit about Ray.

When I was a kid, first thing I did every morning was go out and get the Argus, the paper Ray Orrock wrote for. My first stop, at least during the summer, was the first page of the Sports section, to see how the Oakland A’s did. Baseball was paramount. Then, I went to Ray’s column and read it. Devoured it. The A’s score was news I had to have. Ray’s column was what I had to read. After reading it once, maybe twice, I went back to the sports page and checked the rest of the box scores.

In a lot of ways, Ray Orrock taught me how to write. He taught me how to look at the everyday things around me and find something wonderful and worth writing about. He taught me a lot about humor.

He taught me how to use a paragraph break.

He wasn’t alone, of course. I had great teachers, encouraging parents, and I read a lot. But when it came down to it, Ray’s daily writing lesson, a lesson I didn’t always realize I was getting, made him one of the most influential and enjoyable teachers I ever had, and I owe him a great deal.

But there’s something even more important. So often in this mixed-up world, we develop heroes only to learn that, no matter how much we admire their work, as people they are tremendous let-downs. Their work might be genius, but once you learn more about them, you realize there is nothing heroic about them. They just did good work.
That’s not how it was with Ray.

Since I wrote my tribute when he retired, I’ve heard from a few of his family members. They all say the same thing: he was their hero too. If a man can be a hero to his own family, then it doesn’t matter whether he was a brilliant writer or if he picked lettuce. That man is a hero. As his daughter Eileen said in her e-mail breaking the sad news to me, “He was our everything, and we’ll miss him.”

God bless you Ray Orrock, and your family too. You really are a hero.

Today I’m going to review a chocolate bar I was given last fall when Berthold visited. He brought this delight from the Jaegers, Jana and Andreas. It’s a chocolate bar I approached with some distrust, only to be very pleasantly surprised.

Who would think of putting together bitter dark chocolate and whole fennel seeds? The artisan at Bovetti, that’s who. Leave it to the French to do something weird that works. It’s a great combination. The licorice-like fennel seeds add an interesting dimension to the very dark chocolate (73% cocoa). It reminds me a little of the Dolfin anise-flavored chocolate from Belgium. The chocolate could be a little creamier, but crunchiness is forgivable (and inevitable) when the amount of cocoa rises above 70%. The fennel seeds, in addition to their delicious flavor, add an unusual texture, a seedy crunch not normally found in chocolate. But then, this is no normal chocolate bar. It’s an experience.

If you like unusual chocolates (and I do), give this one a try. You’ll be glad you did. Plus, because it contains fennel, it might just help that cough of yours, and keep the witches away.

What other chocolate bar can do that?

Here are links to two really helpful blogs from today.

First, AuthorMBA posted an interview with agent Kate Schafer, followed by a Q&A session in the comments. It was very informative.

Second, if you’re interested in writing for magazines, don’t miss Bruce Byfield’s post, “What Editors Want.”

Finally, if you care, here is Utah Senator Chris Buttar’s “apology” for the racist remark I blogged about a few days ago. days ago. It’s only fair that I link to it, since I had so much to say. I have more to say, but I’d rather go back to my regularly sporadic posts about writing.

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I was talking literature with my son Kyle last night, and something in our conversation sparked a story idea. The spark found a protective spot in the back of my mind, where it could smolder in peace, practically unnoticed, until time to burst out into hot flames.

For me, that usually takes a while. There’s usually so much burning in my head that I don’t notice a smoldering spark for several days, even weeks. Sometimes it’s years.

So today, I’m sitting here working, trying to make a living, and suddenly, out of nowhere, last night’s idea explodes into my consciousness. Now I have that feeling that comes with a new idea.

if you’re a writer, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a lot like that feeling you used to get in school when you realized you had a crush on this girl. There’s the usual nervous fluttering of the gut that moves up makes the tops of your arms itch. Your cheeks burn. Your hands shake. It’s terrible and exciting and pleasant and sickening, all at once.

It’s taking over my brain. I have work to do, but this thing is getting in the way. I have a feeling I’m going to have to take a break and scratch the itch by at least writing down some of my thoughts about this idea while it.

Here’s the thing: I’m working on three projects at various stages, but now this one is demanding my attention. It would be short, a middle grade story, so it’s tempting to go with it. I’m afraid if I jot down some notes and add them to my idea file, it’ll get lost.

I have quite a few things in my idea file. If I ever run out of ideas, I know I can go to my idea file and find something that I at least thought was interesting once, interesting enough to write down. And, actually, I check the file now and then, and I like much of what’s there. Problem is, old ideas are always pushed back behind new inspiration.

So now what do I do? Do I put everything else on hold while I explore this new idea? Do I let it burn untended? Or do I take a few minutes to make some notes, put out the fire, and go back to the notes sometime when I have less going on? It’s a tough decision.

That latest crush is awfully hard to resist, after all.
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Believe it or not, my political rant yesterday got me thinking about characters. Some days, it seems like everything makes me think about writing.

The real-life character I wrote about last night makes me angry, in case you couldn’t tell. He holds some views I find despicable, and those views lead him to despicable actions. Therefore, I find him despicable. If I were stuck in a story, I’d be the protagonist and he’d be my villain. At least, that’s how I’d see my story.

Here’s the deal. I don’t know about his personal life, but I assume he has a wife and children, and maybe even grandchildren. I have no doubt that his family adores him. To them, he’s the hero and I’m the villain. They don’t understand how people can say such hurtful things about him. And, in fact, my villain thinks he’s a good guy who is being picked on for sticking up for his ideals, and he probably realizes what he said goes to far. As he said in another instance when he was accused of being a racist, “I don’t have a racial bone in my body.” He might even be reflective, and be thinking about what his words revealed to himself about views he thought he didn’t have. At least, that’s how he sees it, misguided as he is.

Few villains think of themselves as the bad guy. They want something, and they are convinced that they are justified in getting it. They are the good guy. Somebody loves them. Anybody who gets in the way is the villain because they want to stop him from achieving his well-intentioned goals.

Every once in a while, you get a bad guy who just wants to be a bad guy, like a school bully. But guess what. The school bully’s mother loves him and thinks he’s the sweetest boy, and that the teachers and principal pick on him for just doing what boys do, and it’s not fair. If all we see is him being the bully to other kids we don’t know, though, we’re likely to lose interest in him, unless he acts out in ways that violate our personal sense of righteousness and fairness. If it’s personal, we care.

If even the bully’s mother thinks he’s evil, he might really be. But it takes a highly skilled writer to make a purely evil character interesting enough to hold a reader’s imagination. Any time something or somebody is single-faceted, you learn all you need to know about them in the first few minutes, and then they get boring.

You want an interesting story? Mimic real life. Make your good guys bad and your bad guys good, at least to each other. Create a villain who doesn’t merely want to be evil for evil’s sake. Make him totally convinced that he’s right, that he’s doing what’s best, and if that means he has to do things that others think is bad, it’s just the way the world is. If others understood how much good he was doing, they wouldn’t be so hard on him. After all, an awful lot of good guys have had to push the boundaries of goodness to get the baddies out of the way. It’s necessary in the quest for ultimate good.

Likewise, your hero is bad from certain points of view, such as the antagonist’s. In his quest to do good, he has to do bad things (even if they are only bad from the point of view of the villain). Just like the bad guy. There’s really not much difference between the two, except that they have opposite goals. That, and the narrator is creating sympathy for one of them and doesn’t understand that the antagonist is trying to do what’s best for the world.

That’s what makes the Godfather movies so compelling. The characters you care about are terrible people, killers and crooks of the worst kind. But we see Vito’s love for his children and grandchildren, and understand that he does what he does because it’s necessary for business. We see Michael and care about him and want him to succeed and maybe even get out of the crime business (his stated goal, though his actions say something else). We watch him lie to his wife’s face about his involvement in his brother-in-law’s killing. We watch him at the baptism pledging to forsake evil, while his henchmen are running around killing his enemies, the bad guys who really aren’t any worse than Michael. But we root for him, even if we feel guilty doing it.

In the Godfather movies, we think the other families are the bad guys because we’ve been manipulated into sympathizing with the Corleones, and the others get in the way of what the Corleones are trying to achieve.

Granted, the Godfather is an extreme example. Your good guys don’t have to be murderers. Maybe your good guy is a five-year-old girl who is trying to find her puppy that ran away. The villain is the puppy, who keeps running and hiding. The puppy is cute, but we know it’s a bad dog because we sympathize with the heart-broken little girl, and the puppy won’t go to her when she calls.

Bad puppy.

But is it really? The puppy doesn’t want to be confined. It wants to run. That’s what dogs like to do. They like to chase things and sniff things. The puppy has its goals, and to the dogs reading the story, the puppy isn’t doing anything wrong. The girl is evil. She’s trying to stop the dog from sniffing the pee on every tree in the woods, and from adding his own to the mix. Besides, the puppy wouldn’t have run away in the first place if the girl hadn’t scolded it for chewing on her mother’s best shoes. Of course it chewed on the shoes. You would have too, if you were a puppy.

Bad girl.

As a final illustration, I want to mention a scene by Sandy, one of the people in my critique group. She’s writing this novel about an Italian-American girl named Angelina. Her immigrant father is unreasonable. He wants to follow Italian traditions and keep the family Italian. He doesn’t realize that this is America and things are different here.

Bad Domenico.

But Sandy wrote a scene I adore, and I can’t get it out of my head. In this scene, Angelina confronts Domenico and says nasty things to him, even blaming him for her mother’s death in childbirth. Angelina is completely out of control and unreasonable in this scene. We see her father’s pain and see him try to reason with her. He’s trying to hold the family together and she’s trying to tear it apart. We know what he’s saying is right and she’s wrong.

Sandy turned the tables and masterfully showed us that Domenico is not a bad guy and Angelina’s not a good guy. They just have different goals, and this leads to conflict, to story. But she doesn’t stop there. In the end of the scene Domenico lashes out and hits Angelina. It’s a terrible act. We know it’s terrible because we’ve had several chapters to fall in love with Angelina and to sympathize with her. But in this scene, we understand Domenico’s action. His anger and violence are justified, even if hitting his daughter is appalling. And this causes conflict in the reader’s mind. At that moment, we don’t know who to like and who to hate.

It’s a brilliant scene, especially in the context of the whole. if you were to read only that scene, you’d only get an inkling of the power. Put it in context, though, where you’ve seen how Sandy builds the conflict between Angelina and her father and creates sympathy for the girl, then turns the tables, and the scene becomes something else totally.

So, even if your bad guy is a racist politician who says disgusting things, show that he’s tender with his children and grandchildren and that, deep down, he’s an idealist who means well and is dedicated to public service because he really cares about his misguided pet issues. Then, make your sympathetic good guy an idealist with opposite views, and make him lose his temper or do something terrible in his quest to rid the world of this racist nasty.

In other words, make your characters real people we can believe in. Give them layers beyond good and evil. Give them a goal, a cause. Give each character his own script. They clash because their ideals clash. Make them each Right, from their own perspectives. Make somebody love the villain, for good reason. Make somebody hate the hero, for good reason. In end, make sure justice prevails. I didn’t say whose justice. The good guy could lose. Even that kind of ending works if the justice is an understandable result of the villains ideals, even though we disagree and find it unjust and unfair to our hero.

That’s how you make complete, believable characters and create conflict between them to tell a complete, believable story.

I try not to get political very often in this blog, but I’m outraged by an event that occurred a few days ago in my adopted state.

Utah State Senator Chris Buttars said the following in a Senate meeting: “This baby is black, I’ll tell ya. It is a dark, ugly thing.” You can hear it for yourself on youtube.

Needless to say, there is a great deal of public outrage over these statements from the same man who said that the law ending school segregation was a bad thing and who time and time again spouts hatred against gays and others who do not see the world the way he does.

Maybe the thing that has me most disgusted is not that this idiot said those words. Worse, the President of the Utah Senate, John Valentine, other Senate leaders, and even the governor, refuse to condemn the words and censure the man who said them. What they should be doing is demanding his immediate resignation, but if they don’t have the balls to that, they should at least publicly censure him.

I just sent the following letters to Mr. Buttars and Mr. Valentine:

Mr. Buttars,

As the step-father of two half-black children, I was appalled by your comments the other night, essentially calling them ugly. Any man, especially a public figure, who would utter the words you did needs to take a good hard look in the mirror. Nothing is uglier than hatred and bigotry. If this had been your first offense, I might be willing to look the other way and figure you were just another ignorant politician, but you have a long record of hate-filled speech.

To say you spoke without thinking is no excuse. In fact, what you did was speak what is really in your mind, what you truly think, without making the effort to filter your words.

You, sir, are the “dark and ugly thing.” Your way of thinking was exposed for the vile thing it is a century and a half ago.

You are an embarrassment to the people of Utah. Do the right thing, the honorable thing (if you have it in you): resign immediately.

Scott Rhoades

Mr. Valentine,

A few minutes ago, I copied you on a request for the immediate resignation of Chris Buttars. As President of the Utah Senate, you have a responsibility to the people of Utah. To not censure Mr. Buttars for his appalling comments, to not do so much as make an official statement condemning his words, and, indeed, to not demand his resignation, is a sign that you agree with the sentiments he expressed.

Rest assured that my family and I, and many other Utahns who are disgusted and embarrassed by this “dark and ugly” man, will remember who speaks out in support of Mr. Buttars, and we will not only cast our vote for their opponents, but actively campaign for them.

If you are a man of principles, do the manly thing and speak out against this clown and the hatred he spews over and over again. If you do not, you are condoning his 19th Century hatred, and, by your silence, you are shouting from the rooftops that you agree with him.

Honor the people of this great state, many of whom are descended from people who were hated and persecuted. Condemn those ugly words and the man who said them.

Scott Rhoades

If you feel like I do on this issue, here are a couple of e-mail addresses for you (and I hope the spambots find them too): [email protected] and [email protected]. It doesn’t matter whether you live in Utah. If you hate bigotry and agree that this disgusting behavior embarrasses the state, a state that keeps trying to rise above its embarrassing image and failing because of people like Mr. Buttars and those who support him, let these men know that the state is damaged by this kind of crap. In fact, when public officials are allowed to get away with these kinds of comments, it embarrasses the entire nation.

OK, enough politics. Back to the fun stuff.

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