Statue of Lord Shiva in Bangalore, India. Photo by Deepak Gupta. From Wikimedia Commons. Used per Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany.

Today was Third Thursday: which means an evening write-in with my NaNoWriMo peeps, who continue to meet every third Thursday of the month for just such a purpose even when its not NaNovember.  For me, a good productive evening worth 1,277 words, some of which were background/thinking my way to the story writing, but some of which handsomely completed a scene I’d been semistuck with in “Asura,” one of the stories I’ve got in the Long Dark/Cold story universe, which is about murder, Lord Shiva, and restorative justice aboard a spaceship on the way to another solar system.  A welcome break from Sullygate, tea party news, & other politics.

This is why I did my taxes last night, instead of waiting to the last minute like I usually do.

And then a brisk walk home, most of the way accompanied by one of the best damn songs for walking I know of: “Storming New Caprica” by Bear McCreary from the Season 3 “Battlestar Galactica” soundtrack.

Walking is a Very Good Thing, & something I’ll be doing even more of now, along with other exercise (rowing, dance, etc.) — as I enter a new fat-loss phase with a little Start Walking program I’ll be doing with some of my officemates (seeing as the university as a whole is not doing one itself).

And here’s today’s tweets.  Happy to learn one of my NaNo peeps really likes the stories I bit.ly link over the course of the day.

• RT: @kesbian_latie: Photo of the day: http://bit.ly/cN7SJT -This photo was my first exhibited piece. / I remember it! I love that photo. #
• Usually Tax Day sucks. But I did mine last night, so it doesn’t suck after all. Esp. as I avoid all tea parties as a waste of brain cells. #
• Ask the card-carrying socialists: Is Obama one of them? – CNN.com http://bit.ly/cZqj7P #
• The KFC Double Down: One Sandwich To Kill You All http://huff.to/dspK1g — this really is 1 of the most disgusting food items i’ve ever seen #
• Barney Frank: ENDA language finalized – time to lobby your Reps & Senators for LGBT equal employment. http://bit.ly/cth3Gt #fb #
• RT: @nethenekhthon: 3rd Thursday write group tonight! 7pm @ Denny’s on Denali. Bring supplies, write furiously. // I’ll be there! #

Related posts:

1. Writing life: Politics short-term & long-term
2. Storyminded
3. Writing life

Mel the disheveled writer at a NaNoWriMo write-in in November 2007, where I began "Cold." I already had my 50K the day before, but the writing I did at this write-in & up to 3 AM that night -- to the tune of an additional 3455 words -- was some of my best.

There are several cool things I could do tonight of a (contemporary) political nature:

• I could attend the UAA Polaris Lecture I just advertised in my last post: Cliff Groh speaking on the wide-ranging federal investigation of public corruption in Alaska.
• I could head over to Bernie’s Bungalow Lounge to be part of the taping of Shannyn Moore’s weekly TV show Moore Up North.  Tonight’s taping will feature a citizen panel drawn from people who email Shannyn today to explain why they’d make a great panelist.
• I could stay home & finish the great-grandmother of all Sullygate timelines that I mentioned the other day I was preparing.

But I am doing none of those things.  Instead, I’ll be heading over to Denny’s to join my NaNoWriMo peeps for an evening of writing.

NaNoWriMo, as I’ve mentioned before, stands for National Novel Writing Month — an annual month-long (& actually international) event which calls upon its participants to write 50,000 words of a “novel” over the course of November — the equivalent of about 6 pages double-spaced for each of the 30 days of November.  I did it first in November 2007 as a way to get my writing chops back; started it in November 2008 but didn’t complete that year due to personal issues; & did it again last November.  The 2007 & 2009 NaNos are where my science fiction novels-&-stories-in-progress Cold and Long Dark originated.

But this is March, so why am I getting together with my NaNoWriMo buds tonight?  Well, back in November 2007 as that year’s NaNo came to an end, we decided amongst ourselves that we would continue to meet for a write-in throughout the year every third Thursday of the month.    And today’s third Thursday.  I hold it sacred.  So no contemporary politics for me tonight.

But please note the qualification:  contemporary politics.  I’ll still be present in the political world, just not the one I’ve been involving myself in with my work on understanding Sullygate, or reminding people about the federal probe into Alaska public corruption, or saying anything (ack!) about Palin, or preparing an update on Miller v. Carpeneti, the rightwing lawsuit against the Alaska Judicial Council that’s attempting to toss out part of Alaska’s Constitution.  (The suit was dismissed in District court, but has been appealed to the Ninth Circuit; I’ll be uploading briefs in the case over the weekend.)

The political world I’ll be present in tonight is my invented Consensus society that I’ve been building into the story universe of Long Dark & Cold, as I’ve partially described in a couple of earlier posts (“Good for my worldbuilding, bad for my world” and “Building Consensus”) — a society based on governance by consent, in which every individual without exception has a say in every decision that affects their life and work.  I’ve just completed reading a couple of books about collaborative decisionmaking &  consensus-style governance, both of which have greatly enriched what I know about how my invented society runs itself — & also sent me into a paradigm shift with regard to the dysfunctional government & politics — local, state, national, & international — that we’re all putting up with right now.  I just finished reading two books in my reading list —

• How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions
  by David Straus (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2002)
• We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy — A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods by John Buck and Sharon Villines (Washington, DC: Sociocracy.info Press, 2007)

— which I will be writing more about after I finish my Sullygate timeline.  And I think I’ll be putting together a bibliography on consensus & sociocracy stuff too — a bibliography fitting not only to my background research for writing, but also to exposing other people, I hope, to some stuff that works a whole lot better than the messy adversarial way we’re trying to run things now.  All in all, learning about this stuff & writing it into my fiction — & in nonfiction commentary on my blog — seems a whole lot more important in the long term than any of the other political stuff I’ve written about — however important that stuff is in the short term.

At the moment I’m writing a story in the Long Dark end of things (that is, in a time period about 3 centuries before the events of Cold), working title “Asura,” about the murder of one of my principal characters Jyoti by a confused young man who is attempting to effect an intervention by the Hindu god Shiva.  Yep, really.  (See my post “Storyminded” for what I’ve previously said about this story.)  Jyoti is a farmer of sorts — a “farmer in the sky” who is expert in the production of food within a closed ecological life support system (CELSS) (which, yep, I’ve written about this before too, in my brilliantly named post from last September, “Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space”, and in a second one just before last NaNovember, “Taking life support for granted”)— that is, an artificial biosphere such as what would be required for human survival in one of the sublight interstellar space ships that Jyoti & her community live in as they cross the Long Dark from our solar system to the next one.  Jyoti’s murder is a resounding shock to the community of the ship Celeritas, & not only to her partner, Esti Gusev.  But what do you do with a murderer in a CELSS? And what do you do with a murderer in a society that governs itself according to sociocratic principles of consent?  And how do you address the needs of the victim’s survivors?  Here’s my chance also to mess around with how practices of restorative justice might play themselves out in a sociocratic society.

So nonpolitical?  Not hardly.  Just not contemporary.

Should be fun.

Related posts:

1. Writing life
2. About "Cold"
3. Cold, the blog

I’ve still got a couple of politically oriented posts to write, including some self-examination on the whole civility thing from the past week, & another for a little self-assigned project to learn a bit more about the Tea Party movement as Tea Partiers themselves see it (rather than through the received wisdom I have from my usual sources in media & blogs) — as best I can.  But having stayed up late last night with a political post, I’m tired & too mindfried to even respond to comments; plus I’m in need out of political stuff for a few.

Time to get my geek on to the stuff I really want to do: write.  Too mindfried for that too, unfortunately.  So instead: just a relaxed little post about where writing has been this past week, if only to remind myself that I’m getting somewhere with it these days.

I’m in the midst of reading two books at once, both having to do with consensus & collective decisonmaking.  This is as background research for Cold & Long Dark — for the Consensus government I talked about in my Building Consensus post the other day.  One of the books I’ve been reading on my iPod while riding the bus with the Kindle for iPhone app — well, how I’m reading it is less important than what I’m reading: How to Make Collaboration Work: Powerful Ways to Build Consensus, Solve Problems, and Make Decisions by David Straus.  The other book, which arrived at my door maybe a week & a half later, is We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy — A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods by John Buck and Sharon Villines.  I’d never heard of sociocracy before encountering this book.

Between the two of them, I’m learning one heckuva lot — & more often than not while reading, storymind is fully engaged, figuring out how to take this stuff & weave it in with what I already know about how the Consensus government of my story universe works.  But I’m glad I’ve already done as much thinking about Consensus before reading these books — because it’s already mine.  This reading is just to refine & expand my understanding, so it works better. I’ve got some other books on my “consensus” reading list too, but I’m not gonna list ‘em all now.

So, Friday night went out with my friend Marcia, & exercised her ears by blabbing all over the place in my story — from Oikos, the planet my characters are terraforming in Cold, & back 300 or so year to Mars, where the very important figure of Esti Gusev is born & spend the early years of her life.  And how she came to learn of Consensus by way of an earlier figure whose philosophy influenced its formation — who turns out to be none other (to my surprise) than the main character from my older novel-in-progress, Mistress of Woodland.  And then I took Marcia here & there, & found myself surprised at how well I know this story universe… even though there’s still lots more I need to know.  But wow, it was fun talking about it.

Then Saturday I went to Side Street & wrote.  Was working on a story called “Trading Shirts” from Cold that features Bai & Boleyn — same characters as in the story “Cold” that’s been published — & got a fair headway.  This was for a story contest that had a entry deadline Monday.  But I ended up deciding to hold that story for another online publication, & decided to dust off & revise a different story from even yet again a different project called Finer, which is a fairly basic (but I hope interesting) non-SF lesbian love story set in 1980 in a small town in northwest Montana — not much different from where I grew up.  Even to the aluminum reduction plant that the main character works in.

So got that finished. I think I may do more writing in the Finer world while I continue doing some of the research reading I’m doing.  Will see.  I still need to finish “Trading Shirts” too.

So that’s where that is.

About the pin

The “Write Hard Die Free” pin in the photo at the top of this post was designed by William Spear of Douglas, Alaska. That and other great pins are available at wmspear.com.

Related posts:

1. Writing life: Politics short-term & long-term
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-04-15: Writing life
3. My October reading list

Consensus as the form of government in my fiction came about from a combination of personal experience with consensus used in a collaborative project (in this case, Wikipedia) & the influence of another science fiction story, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars).  I’m doing a lot of reading nowadays about consensus, collaborative decisionmaking, sociocracy, etc. as background research for my writing.  I’m also becoming convinced that those forms of decisionmaking are our best means of recreating our own society & government into one that really is of, by, & for the people.

But for now: just the story of how I decided on Consensus to begin with.

Storymind

When I first decided to write Cold for NaNoWriMo 2007, I didn’t know much at all about the government or society in which my characters lived.  I only knew that the story began with a question — What does cold feel like? — out of which emerged the story’s setting & first characters: a planet in the late stages of terraformation, and two young women, one who had never lived outside the enclosed habitats of her space-born society, & one who had.  These two characters, Bai & Boleyn, are the center of the story of Cold; but of course there is a world in which they live, a society in which they live, more questions to be answered.  For instance, how did Boleyn come to have experience outside the closed biosphere?  Okay, her family was exiled for a time to a remote facility.  But why?  How?  Where?  And so on.  Well, that’s storymaking, to me: it’s about asking a question, & trying out answers until you come up with one that you like, which will generate more questions, more what ifs.

I made the decision to do NaNoWriMo 2007 in about February of that year.  But I had to constrain myself from actually writing it until November, when NaNo actually began.  Didn’t stop me from thinking about it, though; & so what I call storymind became engaged pretty continually.  For instance, I remember walking across the UAA campus one day on a work-related errand. It must’ve been February or March, still winter, so I stuck that day to what we at UAA informally call the “spine” — the enclosed walkways that make it possible to walk most of the way across campus without going outside.  And I thought, hmm, wouldn’t the closed habitats on my story’s planet be build in a modular style, with closed in walkways like the ones I’m walking in now to connect them?  Why, of course they would. Thus in my storymind I began to design the structure of the enclosed community that I later named Turnbull, which is essentially a collection of several enclosed habitats called Commons that are connected together with “tubes” aboveground & tunnels belowground.

(Turnbull itself is named after Margaret Turnbull, one of the two astronomers who compiled the Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems (HabCat) to narrow down the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), obviously useful in the search for systems with potentially habitable extrasolar planets like the one my characters were terraforming. The other HabCat compiler was Jill Tarter, who was the inspiration for the main character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, played in the movie by Jodie Foster.)

The battle of the Battle of Washita River

Cold wasn’t all I was thinking about over the course of 2007.  Life stuff, of course, including a trip to Seattle & Spokane to visit family.  Also, I got heavily involved in active editing of Wikipedia.  This began more-or-less by accident when I discovered that the Wikipedia article about the Dena’ina elder & writer Peter Kalifornsky indicated he was alive.  Hold on, I thought, didn’t I recall him having died sometime within the past few years?  Yep, about four years previously — so next thing I knew I was researching him, correcting the article, & doing even more research… on an article which even now I haven’t completed (!!!).  But I sure learned a lot along the way about Dena’ina language, culture, & history (Anchorage is situated in Dena’ina country) — some of which entered storymind to influence some aspects of Cold.  But of course I also got pulled to other Wikipedia articles, & pretty soon Wikipedia editing became a major focus that largely drew me away from my writing life (at least in terms of writing my stuff) until November, when NaNoWriMo helped me to break that fixation.  Nowadays, I do Wikipedia editing only here & there.  (Though it would really be nice if I finished that Peter Kalifornsky article!)

But my Wikipedia experience went into storymind too.  Of particular relevance: I got caught up in huge dispute on a particular article (the Battle of Washita River, if you want to know) with a certain editor with strong anti-Indian bigotry who wanted to paint the Cheyenne people in general & the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle in particular as unqualifiedly evil, & George Armstrong Custer (this editor’s personal hero) as unqualifiedly good & wonderful & perfect.  Never mind historical facts; & never mind Wikipedia policies of neutral point of view (commonly abbreviated in Wikipedia background discussions as NPOV), “no original research” (NOR), & verifiability — policies that are intended to protect Wikipedia’s integrity as an encyclopedia by founding its articles on reliable sources, verifiable facts, & neutral presentation of all sides of contentious issues instead of presenting only “one side of the story.”

Battle of Washita River as depicted in Harper's Weekly for December 19, 1868, three weeks after the event on November 27. Through Wikimedia Commons.

Dealing with this dispute was a big learning experience.  Given my lifetime of socialization in 20th & 21st century U.S.A., my first reaction in dealing with a clearly biased “one side of the story” breaker of rules was to look for an authority figure to whom I could appeal to bring this editor into line: Someone is breaking the law: where are the cops, the judges, can’t we ban this guy?

The closest thing you have to “authority figures” on Wikipedia are admins… but it doesn’t take long on Wikipedia to discover that an admin is not, in fact, a cop.  Wikipedia governs itself by processes of consensus: if you appeal to an admin about a dispute on an article, the admin isn’t going to automatically kick someone’s butt unless there are clearcut problems like edit-warring or personal attacks.  But if the disputes are over content & bias, the admin is going to advise you to discuss the problem on the article’s discussion page, & try to come to a consensus.  Yes, there we go: consensus, one of Wikipedia’s six core policies regarding personal conduct, which also include a demand for civility and no personal attacks, refraining from edit warring, welcoming everyone to edit (assuming they abide by Wikipedia’s core policies, including the conduct policies), & collaboration on, rather than individual “ownership” of, articles.

Okay, but we’ve got a content dispute with a biased editor here, & we’ve been told to take our dispute to the article’s talk page & come to consensus.  But what if agreement can’t be reached there?  Then there are additional processes used in Wikipedia through which disputes can be worked through, some of which might result in sanctions against problematic “I refuse to abide by Wikipedia’s policies” type editors (like the guy we were dealing with).  Our problem guy did get the occasional sanction for edit warring & personal attacks (as did one of the folks supposedly on the “right side” of the content dispute, who has since gone on to a long career in getting banned for incivility & edit warring under a variety of different sockpuppet usernames), but it took us a long time to bring the content dispute into some kind of control, just a couple of months before NaNoWriMo 2007 took me out of the Wikipedia biz.

If you’re curious, check out the Talk page & its archives for Battle of Washita River to see all the crap I & my fellow editors had to go through.  Especially see the RfC (Request for Coments) on the article itself & the related RfCs on our two problem editors.  (I’m the user Yksin.)  It took us two months to move from the article being locked down in a biased & inaccurate form to be able to edit it again after the disputes had been more-or-less settled.  It took a long time, but we did it right.  If you think I’m being a naive idealist when I talk about the need to be civil in discussing Sarah Palin, then read through this stuff, & try to convince me that civil, factual discussion doesn’t, in the end, win out over the kind of offal that our problem editors were continually unloading on us.  Patience helps.  I’m proud of the way I handled myself throughout.

Wikipedia was a great experiential education for me in at least some of the possibilities of consensus.  It was also instructive about how “knowledge” is constructed.  I grew to have a great deal of respect for Wikipedia as a source of information — as long as you know how it works & how to evaluate the information there.  (I typically look not only at the articles themselves, but also their edit histories & talk pages.  But I also never consider a Wikipedia page the last word on a topic.  I still sometimes log in & correct typos or misstatements of fact, or to revert vandalism.)

If you’re interested in seeing how consensus operates in a huge collaborative project like this, you can do like I had to do: go into the behind-the-scenes of Wikipedia. See how editors & admins & bureaucrats (another level of Wikipedia adminship) talk with each other about articles & the processes by which articles are written.  Look at article talk pages & see how disputes over content are resolves.  Check out the process called Request for Adminship, or RfA by which admins become admins & bureaucrats become bureaucrats — which is partially what Cold‘s process of Examination is based upon.  There’s a lot there.   And it’s very geeky but also very cool.  I still think very highly of the numerous people who work really hard to make Wikipedia a good encyclopedia.

A constitution on Mars

Mars Global Surveyor image of Pavonis Mons, a broad shield volcano (similar to the volcanoes of Hawaii) located on the martian equator at 113°W. The volcano summit is near 14 km (~8.7 mi) above the martian datum (0 elevation); the central caldera (crater near center of image) is about 45 km (~28 mi.) across and about 4.5 km (~2.8 mi.) deep. Pavonis Mons is the site of a settlement in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Blue Mars where the Martian Constitution was written. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems via JPL Photojournal.

At the same time in 2007 that I got caught up in Wikipedia editing, I was following my friend Chris’ advice to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Hugo & Nebula-award winning Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, & Blue Mars — because of one of its overall themes, the terraformation of Mars.  But, as I wrote the other day, I also discovered another them theme —

the long & arduous struggle of Robinson’s Martian colonists for freedom from the political & economic domination of Earth. Freedom not only from Earth’s numerous governments — but especially from Earth’s corporations, which have become so powerful that they are in many ways more powerful than governments themselves, both on Earth & on Mars.

The Wikipedia article about Kim Stanley Robinson observes,

Robinson’s work often explores alternatives to modern capitalism. In the Mars trilogy, it is argued that capitalism is an outgrowth of feudalism, which could be replaced in the future by a more democratic economic system. Worker ownership and cooperatives Green Mars and Blue Mars as a replacement for traditional corporations….

Robinson’s work often portrays characters struggling to preserve and enhance the world around them in an environment characterized by individualism and entrepreneurialism, often facing the political and economic authoritarianism of corporate power acting within this environment. Robinson has been described as anti-capitalist, and his work often portrays a form of frontier capitalism that promotes ideals that closely resemble anarcho-syndicalist and socialist systems, and faced with a capitalism that is staunched by entrenched hegemonic corporations. In particular, his Martian Constitution draws upon social democratic ideals explicitly emphasizing a community-participation element in political and economic life, while a persistent threat to social democracy is embodied by transnational corporations, the characteristics of which resemble those predicted by institutionalist and socialist economists such as Ted Wheelwright and Karl Marx.

It should be no surprise to anyone, given my already vociferous criticism of contemporary corporatism (not to mention the foolishness of granting corporations the legal fiction of “personhood”)  that I like this about Kim Stanley Robinson.  A lot.

Wikipedia goes on to say,

The environmental, economic, and social themes in Robinson’s oeuvre stand in marked contrast to the right-wing Libertarian streak prevalent in much of science fiction…  and his work has been called the most successful attempt to reach a mass audience with a left-wing libertarian and anti-capitalist utopian vision since Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed.

Ursula K!!!  What greater recommend could there be for Kim Stanley Robinson than that?  And The Disposessed is a great novel — thanks, Wiki editors, for the reminder to read it again. If all I am at the moment is a barely-published writer of only a couple of things here & there, still, let it be known — I aspire to stand in their tradition.

(Though I hesitate to call either of their visions as utopian.  I think societies such as they’ve invented are possible & desirable.  But it’ll take us to make them.)

By the beginning of the last book of Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, the Martian colonists have finally succeeded in kicking the corporations off-planet (by means of the trilogy’s Second Martian Revolution in the year 2127); but in order to maintain their independence from Earth governments & Earth-based corporations, they decide they need to adopt their own constitution & government.  Thus, a congress is convened in a settlement at Pavonis Mons — one of Mars’ great volcanoes — where the new Martian Constitution is drafted, later to be ratifiied by 78% of Martians who voted (the novel says that 95% of eligible voters voted).  (Tip o’ the nib to MangalaWiki, a wiki-based encyclopedia on the Robinson’s works, which helped me keep my facts on track.)

Here’s where Robinson & Wikipedia collided in my storymind: the people who did the actual drafting of the constitution at Pavonis Mons worked collaboratively — &, of course, using computers. —

“At least the points are there to discuss,” Nadia said.  And along with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions with their sections headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have to come to grips with: “Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police… [and so on]. (my paperback copy of Blue Mars, p. 125)

Later, after they complete their work, they attach all the numerous written documents & discussions that had been generated during the process for reference by courts, historians, & other interpreters who wanted a better understanding of the framers’ intent.  (Much as Alaskans can refer to the minutes of the Alaska Constitutional Convention in order to better understand the Alaska Constitution & its framers’ intent.)

And I thought, what if they actually used wiki-type software, similar to what Wikipedia itself uses,  to draft their constitution?  That way, there would always be a running record of the proceedings (at least, any that were in written form) — edit histories, talk pages to discuss differences & disagreements about difference, & to develop agreement & consensus — the full gamut.

I’m not sure exactly the moment this stuff germinated to such an extent that it fledged itself fully into my story’s Consensus government — but I had it by November 1, 2007, when I did my first day’s writing on Cold — the same writing that became, with not as many revisions as you’d think, the short story “Cold” published in Crossed Genres Issue #12 exactly two years later.

But come to think of it — there was also a third influence in the mix, which I’ll call —

Influence of the Self

— the Self in this case being myself & my beliefs, especially the content of my beliefs with regard to selfhood.

Best expressed by some of my writing about halfway into NaNoWriMo 2007, when I was reading Robinson’s The Martians, which collects a lot of stories & sketches related to his trilogy & its characters.  Among them were some pieces about the Constitution of Mars, with commentary from one of Robinson’s fictional constitutional framers. These pieces led me to additional thinking about Consensus in my story.  On November 19, 2007, I wrote in part,

Two chief principles exist in dialectic, as can be encapsulated in the statement held to by one of the spiritual movements within Consensus: Harming none, do as you will.  I think what I’m getting to is some of my own deepseated beliefs, which that statement plays a large part in.  Basically, whether at the individual level or the community and government level, the  principle of sovereignty over one’s own actions (“do as you will”, self-government) is always balanced against the the principle of nonharm: the recognition and respecting of the rights and autonomy of others.   Consensus has as one of its fundamental principles, which is legal, moral, and spiritual all at once, that the integrity of the Self is paramount, whether that Self be an individual or a body of individuals joined together into a family, a community, or a large body of society.  Violation of such integrity or wholeness through the causing of harm is conceived of, legally, as crime; morally and spiritually, it may be considered sin.  The principle is established in the very name of this type of government: Consensus, indicating the consent of those who make it up.  Government, rather than being something imposed, often coercively, upon the people by a hierarchy above them, is made up of all of the people in a very direct way.

Later that same day —

There is no such thing, in Consensus philosophy and culture, as a government separate from the people.  Everything begins with the Self, the first Self that is each individual human being.  Inasmuch as humans as biological beings are also social beings, Self is also expressed in the yearning for Other, which finds a home in relationship, each relationship or group of relationships themselves forming their own Selves: friendship, sexual pairing and partnership, family, community, Consensus.  Because all levels of society begin with that fundamental Self of each individual, therefore the Self is sacrosanct; its autonomy is the first building block of society.  To violate the Selfhood of an individual is like the breaking open an atom: it’s the beginning of destruction.  The Self, of course, is much more fragile than the atom: it took until the 20th century C.E. for humans to learn how to split the atom; but it didn’t take us long at all to come up with all manner of ways to cleave the human soul, and the chain reaction from that has never ended.  Only some have learned to restore it, only some have learned ways of living with one another in such ways that the violation of soul and Self isn’t inextricably a part of human education, of human “conditioning.”  Even the most intelligent and soul-preserving societies make mistakes.

Consensus begins by recognizing those two aspects of what it is to be human: Self, and Other, in which each Other is also a Self. Society, culture, government is nothing more and nothing less than the provisional solution humans have come to in any given time and place to balance between Self and Other; or shall we say, the multiplicity of Selves, each with its own sacrosanct Integrity.  Thus, the laws of Consensus begin with the laws intended to protect the Self at its most basic level, that of the individual.  Everything else flows upward from that.

And now here I am reading more about consensus & related ideas — collaborative decisionmaking, collective intelligence, sociocracy — all of which reflect the ethic that I was writing about: the idea that every individual has value, & that the integrity & selfhood of every individual must be protected.

But the books I’m reading are taking me even one step beyond that: recognition that each & every individual, without exception, must have a say in any decision that affects her or his life. Government not through the coercion of the powerful over the less-powerful, but government by the consent of all.

Not only are these books helping me to articulate this, but they’re also teaching me the techniques & strategies that can make it possible.  Both in my stories, & in the Real World of which we all are part.

Needless to say, I’ll be writing more about this.

Related posts:

1. Good for my worldbuilding, bad for my world
2. Writing life
3. Terraforming notes

And so I begin the new year by coming out of a period of silence.

A silence, to be sure, less profound than the one I inhabited this time last year.  And for different reasons.  In the last month or so, mainly I’ve just needed a break.

1. The cave

But on New Year’s Day 2009, I was living in a kind of emotional cave, with no desire or wherewithal to communicate with anyone outside my day-to-day life except immediate family.  Especially my dad, who I’d learned just a couple of weeks before had been diagnosed with a terminal lymphoma. That news came on top of stuff I’d already been struggling with for some months, after my then-partner, Rozz who is now Ptery, made the decision while in school in Seattle to transition as a female-to-male (FTM) transsexual, & made accompanying decisions that have essentially ended our partnership as-it-was.

Thus, the cave, about which I wrote on April 2, a few days after coming out of it,

I seem to be have come out of the cave now. Not just feeling better — I’ve felt better a number of times (only to then go back into the grey again) — but actually able & willing to communicate. Maybe it was that I’m finally accepting the inevitable with my partner. Maybe it was finally getting the plane tickets bought to fly down in late April to see my dad. Maybe it was taking enough 5-HTP to keep the serotonin cooking in my brain. Maybe it’s the light coming into the days after a looooooong winter. Maybe it’s all just been perimenopause. Anyway… seems I’m back in the world again.

Now, before I go on, let me explain: this post isn’t just about the history of what I did or experienced in 2009: it’s also about what it meant.  Or, better yet, the meanings I’ve made of it — because that’s what it’s all about, for me — the story, the stories each of us make of our lives.  And this is my blog, of course, so this is my damn story.

And the story of coming out of the cave also has these meanings attached to it:

(1) The cave itself became a new term, describing a new form, of that rather large aspect of my life popularly known as depression (or, sometimes, despair): along with the grey, along with the pit, along with limbo — all of which are described in my late 2006 post The grey — the newly-discovered environment of the cave can include any one of the first three, or exclude all of them; it is chiefly characterized by that deep inability & lack of motivation to communicate.  Big whooptie, a new term — but I do find the language useful in understanding myself around this stuff.  Since, hey, halfway through my life give-or-take, I don’t see the depression/despair gunk suddenly evaporating from my life.  It’s a part of who I am.  I’m just lots better at handling it than before, & part of that is in refining my understanding of how it works in me.

(2) If I were to mark the exact date the cave walls dissolved around me, it would probably be March 30, 2009, which coincided with some important phone calls with Ptery, & also with my brother Mark & I buying our tickets to Spokane to see our dad for what we both understood would probably be the last time this side of our own deaths.  And also on that day, I wrote a lengthy post in memorial to Nicholas Hughes, a fisheries biologist formerly at University of Alaska Fairbanks who had taken his own life the previous week.  I hadn’t known him, but he was the son of the poets Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes, & Plath especially had been an significant figure in my life.  Not for the right reasons, initially — but the post explains that: it was my effort to honor Mr. Hughes not as mere adjunct to his famous parents’ biographies — as many of the news accounts of his death seemed to view him — but for who he himself was & for what he brought to all the people in his life, who were mourning him that day.

(3) My dad knew I’d been having a hard time. He was at peace with his own approaching death, & wanted us to be too.  But beyond that, he wanted our happiness.  He was so glad when he heard I’d come out of the cave.  That was one of the very best things about it.

2. Lima beans against WAR

Wow, after the Summer of Hate experienced by the Anchorage LGBT & allied community over Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64, one almost forgets its political prelude, when then-Gov. Sarah Palin named Wayne Anthony Ross — widely known by his license-plate acronym as WAR — to succeed the disgraced Talis Colberg as Alaska’s Attorney General.  Alaska’s top LGBT blog Bent Alaska informs us that its post about WAR, “Palin’s AG Pick Called Gays “Degenerates” (3/29/09), was one of its two 2009 posts to go viral — & that was even before he compared gays to lima beans, a vegetable that he “hates” but still claimed he could represent if he were, say, the lawyer for “United Vegetable Growers.”  We lima beans were, needless to say, not favorably impressed.

Ross also had a history of biased & even misogynistic attitudes in relation to domestic violence, sexual assault, & violence against women; hostility to Alaska Native sovereignty & subsistence rights; a mediocre reputation as a practitioner of law amongst his fellow members of the Alaska Bar Association; & a pretty shaky attitude about executive branch ethics.  Bad news all around: it motivated me to spend a considerable amount of time & energy researching him, listening to legislative confirmation hearings, & writing a very long letter to legislators, which I posted on my blog — thus embarking upon a part-time career as an occasional political blogger.  I wrote a few other posts about WAR, & commented on other sites’ coverage of him (especially Bent Alaska), & celebrated with most of the rest of Alaska when the Alaska Legislature rejected him by a vote of 23 yeas to 35 nays — an unprecedented rejection of a governor’s cabinet pick.

It took a day or two for the Alaska Department of Law to remove WAR from its website. This screenshot was taken on April 16. The red X is mine.

3. Dad

I flew to Spokane with my brother Mark in late April to visit Dad.  We also saw my sister Mer & brother-in-law Julius, with whom my Dad lived, and my brother Dave drove over from Montana.  Ptery hitchhiked up, at my request, so I got to see him too.

Dad was so happy to have all of us there. He had a lot of energy too, considering how ill he was; but near the end, as we began to return to our homes, he took a turn for the worse, as if he’d been holding to life so that he could see us all before he left us to be with Mom.  She had died in November 2005.

I took this picture during that trip: Dad telling one of his wonderful stories about growing up in the lumber camps of eastern Oregon in the 1920s where Grandpa Claude ran locomotives on the Sumpter Valley Railroad for the Oregon Lumber Company; or about the bootleg operation he & his pals in the Army Air Corps had in England during WWII; or about how he met my mom when he was looking for a job, & guy at Ellingson Lumber Company suggested he head to Izee because the camp cook there had two beautiful daughters. It was the younger of the two daughters, my Auntie Pat, who actually introduced my parents after Dad gave her a ride into John Day, where Mom was then working.

That photo on the wall behind Dad was his favorite picture of Mom, taken by a professional photographer shortly before they met. When I look at this photo, I feel his yearning to be with her again.

I last saw him on April 29.  He died not quite a month later, on May 27.  My sister was with him.

I’ve been at peace about Dad’s death almost from the beginning, partly because the peace he himself had about it put me at peace, & partly because of what for lack of better words I will call the messages that came, three of them — two of them to other family members, & the last one to me. My message was from my mother, in the form of sunflowers.  It told me that Dad was with her, & they are both okay.

On July 12, as many family members as could make it, including me & my sister & brothers, all gathered together in Spokane to remember Mom & Dad & to celebrate all that they gave us.

I love you, Mom & Dad.

4. Anchorage Ordinance 2009-64

The Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO 2009-64 was introduced in the Anchorage Assembly on May 12, & thus was my career as an occasional political blogger made much less occasional.

AO 64 would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list of personal characteristics in Title 5, Anchorage’s equal rights code, which prohibits discrimination based on those characteristics in employment, housing, financial practices, education, and practices of the Municipality of Anchorage. The summer of 2009 in Anchorage featured a protracted period of public testimony at the Anchorage Assembly, with accompanying sign-waving and letter-writing both by ordinance supporters and those who opposed equal rights — led in particular by Jerry Prevo of the Anchorage Baptist Temple, who used “perverted” and other hate-terms to describe LGBT people, hence the name given the summer by commentator at the Anchorage Press: the Summer of Hate.

Identity Reports (1989) and One in 10 (1986)

From May to September, I wrote in the area of 60 posts about the ordinance, including a number that delved into the background & prevarications of its most vociferous opponent, Jerry Prevo.  I also testified in support of the ordinance on June 16 ( the second of five nights of public testimony). My testimony was based on two major research efforts in the 1980s for Identity, Inc. in which we documented the rampant discrimination in Anchorage & in Alaska based on sexual orientation. (Our research unfortunately did not cover discrimination on the basis of gender identity, which we knew little about at the time.)

The ordinance passed the Anchorage Assembly on August 11, 2009, but was vetoed the following week by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the third time in Anchorage history that equal protection for at least some LGBTQ people in Anchorage was first granted, & then stripped away again.

We weren’t real happy.

5. Friends & allies

The Summer of Hate wasn’t all hate & horror.  There was also some really cool stuff.

Cool stuff was people like Vic Fischer, Jane Angvik, & Arliss Sturgulewski testifying for the ordinance — people with just a teensy bit more credibility than, say, self-declared homophobic Bible-thumping Nazi “rascist” Eddie Burke.

Cool stuff was the huge number of people who turned out on the lawn of the Loussac Library to dance, blow bubbles, & hold signs upholding equal rights for all. The second week of public testimony, on which testimony was heard on two successive nights (June 16-17), was also the run-up to PrideFest, & every time I stepped out of the Assembly chambers for a breather, I felt like PrideFest was already in progress (once, that is, I got past the ABT redshirts & their hot dog tables).

I remember going out there one day & seeing how everyone — members of the LGBT community, & lots of non-LGBT folks including my nephew Miles & some of his friends — was celebrating equality & love for their fellow human beings, as sour-faced, red-shirted opponents stood nearby with their preprinted “Truth is Not Hate” signs agitating against equality.  I thought to myself, I’m so proud of my people — & I found myself for the first time consciously including in my people not just other LGBT people, but all the numerous non-LGBT allies who took it for granted that equality meant all of us.  And were as dumbfounded as we were at the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech dropping out of the mouths of red-shirts both inside & outside the Assembly chambers.

On a personal level, I was lucky to make some new friendships.  John & Heather Aronno, both now of Alaska Commons, who I met a few days before the first public hearing, became my favorite folks to sit next to at Assembly public hearings: three bloggers, all in a row.

One of my other favorite new people was (& is) Janson Jones, whose fantastic photography at Floridana Alaskiana v2.5 (including of the ordinance battle) first drew my attention. He’s also an all-around cool guy who also became a new dad over the summer — & his photos of his precious daughter Aurelia are pretty wonderful too.

Thanks to the ordinance battle, I also got reaquainted with a friend from way back, Linda Kellen Biegel of Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, who I hadn’t seen in years. I’d known Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska through email, but not until this summer did I meet him in person. I’ve known M.E. Rider of Grrlzlist, E. Ross of Bent Alaska, & longtime activist (& maker of Equality Works buttons) Stef Gingrich for years, though it was only through the summer that we saw much of each other, since normally — yes, true story — I’m pretty much a hermit.

It was the ordinance that brought me out, for ill & for good. Despite the ordinance’s eventual fate — for me personally, thanks to people like these, it was mostly for good.

6. Palinesque

Somewhere in the middle of this was Sarah Palin’s announcement on July 3 that she would be resigning her position as Governor of Alaska.  I don’t blog that much about Palin — there are other Alaska bloggers who cover her quite thoroughly (thank goodness!) — but within a few days after her announcement, I got fed up with how the national mainstream media was uncritically passing along what I dubbed the 2 million dollar meme: Palin’s claim that $2,000,000 taxpayer (or rather, oil revenue dollars — this is Alaska, after all) had been spent on responding to ethical complaints against her. So I started taking it apart, & continued to do so over at total of six blog posts.

Wow did that raise traffic on my blog. I got nearly 1,800 hits on the first post of the series the first day after it was published; to date it’s gotten 5,530 hits, making it the most read post on my blog.  The pie chart I created for that post also proved to be pretty popular.

My stuff didn’t stop Palin from repeating her lie; but then, who expected that it would?  I’m no fool.  I just hoped the damn mainstream media would wake up & do the job they’re paid to do — so that bloggers like me wouldn’t have to do it for free. I am proud to say that my efforts, which Anchorage Daily News reporter Sean Cockerham picked up on, contributed to Linda Perez of the Governor’s Office being forced to admit there were errors in the hokey spreadsheet the Governor’s Office had cooked up in an incompetent attempt to back up Gov. Palinocchio’s claim.  Cockerham’s story (posted, as far as I know, only on the ADN’s Politics blog, but not as a full-fledged ADN story) said that Perez was going to follow up on further questions he’d brought up — I’ve seen no sign that she ever did, or that ADN itself cared.  I didn’t follow up further myself because by time Perez ‘fessed up as much as she did, I was in Spokane with my family remembering my mom & dad.  I have a feeling everyone who had actual responsibility (because, of course, they were more than mere “community organizers”) decided to drop it.  Gee. I wonder why.

7. I got a new couch

More properly, it’s a futon loveseat. Whatever.  I got it in August, & I’ve been vegging more happily (when I vege) ever since.  My cat loves it too.

8. An effort to up-end the Alaska Judicial Council

Other things were going on in my life too, of course.  But the political stuff stands out, because political blogging is not my great purpose in life — writing my own stuff is. And yet, I kept doing it.

And so it happens that in late August I learned of a lawsuit by which certain Alaska conservatives, most if not all of whom have ties to the so-called right-to-life movement, had filed suit nearly two months before — a fact not covered at all by Alaska’s mainstream media in spite of all of them having received the press release when the suit was filed — which would, if successful, overturn major provisions of the Alaska Constitution with regard to the selection & retention of state court judges. The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, James Bopp, Jr., is a big name: he has litigated similar issues elsewhere.  My own feeling is that this guy is more likely to have shopped around for the Alaskans who could be named as plaintiffs in this case, than that the plaintiffs shopped around for him.  His agenda appears to be a nationwide effort to politicize judicial selection, so that candidates can be selected through popular vote based on litmus test questions on hot-button issues (“What is your opinion on abortion?” — “What is your opinion on same-sex marriage?”), instead of being selected for their judicial integrity & knowledge of the law.

Through my job on staff of the Justice Center at University of Alaska Anchorage, which I’ve held since 1990, I’d become very familiar with Alaska’s judicial merit selection process, & have a lot of respect for it too, & for the quality of judges we have in this state.  Not perfect — but a helluva lot better than in states that have the politicized & often politically corrupt types of selection processes that Bopp seems to prefer.

So, I read about Miller v. Carpeneti, & I wrote about it, & I even took a day off work to attend the hearing before Judge John W. Sedwick in the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska on September 11.   I’m not a lawyer, but I read through most of the briefings, & it didn’t seem to me that Bopp’s arguments held much water.  Judge Sedwick apparently agreed: he heard arguments from both sides & then dismissed the case. His opinion was published on September 15.

But we haven’t heard the last from Mr. Bopp: he’s appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, last I heard, the last briefs in the case must be filed no later than February 10, 2010. Oral arguments might then follow.  If Bopp fails at the Ninth Circuit, there’s every possibility he might appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court — he’s argued before them before, & won.

Meanwhile, I continue to wonder what in hell is wrong with the Alaska mainstream media, including our supposed paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News. First they all failed to follow up any further on Palin’s spreadsheet-of-hooey in support of her 2 million dollar meme-of-hooey; now it turns out they sat for nearly two months on a press release issued in early July about a lawsuit that could theoretically undermine our state constitution with regard to judicial selection.  Phil Munger at Progressive Alaska has drawn attention to numerous other instances in which the press has sat on its duff instead of investigating & reporting stuff that in some cases is right in front of their faces — for instance, the numerous lies propounded throughout Palin’s putative “memoir,” which the ADN has yet to write any review on.  What else are they sitting on?  How are we to have democracy that way, if the MSM isn’t doing its job?

Oh yeah, I remember now.  Bloggers like me are supposed to do that job nowadays.  In our spare time.  For free.

(All due respect to those reporters who as far as I can tell are doing their best to do their job — but are being shut down by management. I know you guys are out there.)

9. True Diversity Dinner

In the aftermath of Sullivan’s veto of AO 64, several of us bloggers who had been heavily involved in writing about it started talking about what we might do keep the flame alive.  Several of us met at lunchtime one day, & out of someone’s suggestion — I don’t remember whose — next thing you know, the True Diversity Dinner was born.  Its immediate impetus was that the upcoming Mayor’s Diversity Dinner, an event originally created during the administration of Mayor, now Senator, Mark Begich, had been renamed Mayor’s Unity Dinner by Mayor Dan Sullivan — the same guy who had just vetoed equal rights for Anchorage’s lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transfolk.

Instead of protesting, we decided to celebrate the rich diversity that the Mayor’s renaming of the dinner seemed designed to whitewash away. The True Diversity Dinner was our alternative, with the motto, “Because we all deserve a seat at the table.”  It was organized by the bloggers of Alaska Commons, Anchorage Won’t Discriminate, Bent Alaska, Floridana Alaskiana v2.5, Grrlzlist Alaska, Henkimaa, and SOSanchorage.net — but especially by John & Heather Aronno (Alaska Commons & SOSAnchorage.net), who I fear fell far behind in their studies thanks to the dinner.

But it was well worth it, right guys?  It was a tremendous event, with great speakers including my Assembly person Elvi Gray-Jackson, former Congressional candidate & longtime activist for Alaska Native rights Diane Benson, Rev. Marquita Pierre of the Center for Spiritual Healing, & radio host & blogger Shannyn Moore.

On top of that, I was honored to be the recipient of a True Diversity Award for Excellence in Online Media for coverage on my blog of the battle for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance.  Booyah!

10. Hilton workers

And more occasional politics.

When the True Diversity Dinner was first thought up, I hadn’t known that Mayor Sullivan’s Unity Dinner was booked for the Hilton Anchorage Hotel — which was (& still is) under boycott by its workers due to the bad faith practices of its management on orders of the Hilton’s owners, Kentucky-based Columbia Sussex Corporation.  A blog post by Shannyn Moore brought my attention to the fact that the Mayor’s Unity Dinner was also a union-busting dinner. I spent some time researching & writing about the labor dispute, & also attended the Hotel Workers Rising March from the Sheraton (which is now also under boycott due to similar management abuses of workers) to the Hilton two days after the True Diversity Dinner was held.

11. But I’m really about writing my own stuff, & that’s what I need to do now

I’d like to follow up on the hotel workers struggle, both at the Hilton & now the Sheraton.  I hope someone will.  But I can’t.  Here’s the deal.  There are people on this planet, there are people in this state, who thrive on political blogging, & what’s more excel at it.  I think I’m pretty damn good at it when I’m doing it — but I don’t thrive on it.  I start with enthusiasm, but over time… I wear down, my spirit flags, & pretty soon it winds right back into what I started this post with: depression & despair.

Midyear, in the post in which I claimed to be an occasional political blogger, I wrote,

The main reason I set up this site & blog was to help me get back into the flow of writing, of living my life as a writer.  And while writing about politics is writing — well, it’s not my writing, the stuff close to my heart.  Besides, I also work a full-time job.

Besides, sometimes the political stuff can really whack me out….

Another factor about how I handle political posts is that my style isn’t really amenable to fast-response writing, which is a feature of a lot of the best political bloggers I read.  But me, I like to think a lot about what I’m writing.  I like to go deep.  I like to be thorough & as comprehensive as I can.  I like to source all my references thoroughly.  I like — apparently — to write term papers.  (I sure never thought so when I was in college).  And that takes a long time.  Especially since, as previously mentioned, I work a full-time job.  And I also need a certain amount of down time or I am liable to put myself into a depression.

Sometimes, writing my own stuff actually feels like down time.  Reason: I said it above, it’s stuff that close to my heart.

So October saw me returning to writing — at that time, mostly background stuff or responses to stuff that I was reading in preparation for National Novel Writing Month 2009 (NaNoWriMo).  In looking back, I remember that True Diversity Dinner month — that is, September — also saw a bit of focus on writing: a couple of politically-oriented pieces about homophobia in science fiction, including one involving a publication I was writing a story for.  As it happened, I wasn’t far enough along on that story to meet the submission deadline of September 30 — so I picked up & polished an older thing instead.

And whaddaya know! in early October, I was told they wanted to publish it!  Which did much to make me feel like a writer again.

“Cold” was published on October 31, 2009 in Crossed Genres Issue #12, the LGBT issue, & you can still read it online there.  (When it’s no longer live there, & my contract with Crossed Genres permits, I will republish it right here at Henkimaa.com.)  “Cold” was also selected for inclusion in Crossed Genres‘ first-year anthology, which will include one story from each of the magazines first 12 issues.  I think it’s still on schedule for publication in February.

My username on NaNoWriMo: yksin.

November for me was the headlong hurry of NaNoWriMo.  As a result, as anyone who knows this blog saw, I didn’t do much blogging at all.  Such blog posts as got posted were mostly automatically generated “Daily Tweets” posts from my Twitter feed.  And I haven’t done much blogging since NaNoWriMo ended, either.

But whoa! I did a lot of writing — 51,607 words worth of it in November, making me a NaNoWriMo winner this year…. er… I mean, last year.  I was writing in the same story universe as “Cold,” which is about two young women on an extrasolar planet (that is, in another solar system) in the late stages of terraformation, which I’ve finally named Oikos — but my NaNovember 2009 writing was mostly about three centuries earlier in the timeline, before & around the time the ships that will eventually arrive at Oikos leave our solar system.  I called it Long Dark.

And a lot of it was background writing, rather than the story itself.  Because there is so damn much science that I need to have at least some kind of grasp on before I can do the story for real.

Though I came up with at least four stories over the course of the month that I know I can shape into good damn stuff.  And I also discovered that a character of mine from a supposedly completely unrelated project is, whaddaya know, an important historical figure for the society in Long Dark and Cold.  And since that character is very closely based on me… whoa, it’s an awful lot like, well, writing myself into history.  How cool is that?

(Or how egotistical?)

12. Since then…

… that is, during December — what have I been doing?  Not blogging, clearly. Except for one extensive rant about the leakage in various portions of my ceiling.  (Now cured, but the holes in the ceiling still need patching.)  Other than that, lots of vegging out, some writing, lots of reading — my latest topics have included atmospheric pressure, altitude sickness, & spacesuit design (background research for a story in the Cold universe) & how people with strabismus or amblyopia (the latter being the case for me), most of whom grow up stereoblind, might be able to develop stereo (binocular) vision.  Even at 50 years old. Which is what I am now.

50 years old, soon to be 51. And now I reflect on where I was at when I turned 50, early in 2009.  I was still in the cave.  But there were inklings of possibility.  I was still in the cave, for instance, when a confluence of ideas led me to decide how to go about my writing life, which included blogging & other forms of social media to get my stuff out there, instead of just through the old “send out craploads of query letters & get a shitload of rejection letters back before someone finally decides your stuff is good enough to publish” method that has been standard for a very bloody long time.  I knew I’d feel a lot more at ease finding my own audience through social media than going through the query letter drudgery.  It was still pretty remarkable that I made such a decision at such a time, though: social media? for someone who, at that point, was incapable & unmotivated to communicate at all?  But then, I knew the cave walls would dissolve sooner or later.  And they did.

I was also deciding, back in February of 2009 that age 50 was a good time to reach the milestone that I had apparently reached in the sorrows of that time.  The boy that I & Rozz-now-Ptery raised from age 9 was now 21 (& now, some months later, is actually 22), & is setting out on his own course in the world.  He’s in a residential job training program; I seem him some weekends when he comes into town.  Ptery is embarked on another course, living a nomadic life mostly off-the-grid in the Lower 48; we are no longer partners, however much we still love each other. So, I am single &, except for my cat & the boy’s dog, essentially alone.

When I was in college & took a class on Hinduism, I learned that the traditional life path for very pious Brahmin males was supposed to consist of several stages — four of them, I think — with the third stage being that of husband, father, & householder.  When the householding stage was over, these guys were apparently supposed to just up & lickety-split out to the forest to become religious ascetics.  Or something like that.

And when I turned 50, I thought: that’s it, I’m no longer a householder.  Well, I still have my apartment.  And I don’t plan to go live in the woods as an ascetic.  (Ptery’s path is a little closer to that, really.)  But I no longer have the responsibilities of a spouse/partner or of a parent to a minor child.  I can do what I want.  And what I need.

Which is to write.  But dang, it sure takes me a long time to get the politics out of my way to do it.

But I got to that point, & now I plan to continue.

That’s my story.

I’m such a cathead.

Related posts:

1. True Diversity Dinner 1 & 2: Video by Janson Jones
2. True Diversity Dinner video, part 3: Hotel workers, & Elvi's speech
3. True Diversity Dinner: September 25, 2009

Canadian dogwood, October 2006

October.  Change of season; change of gears.

I wrote sometime back about how, despite my intention that this would be primarily a writer’s blog, I’d also become an occcasional political blogger. By the time I wrote that post, I’d already written about the nomination of Wayne Anthony Ross to be Alaska attorney general (remember lima beans?), lots & lots about the battle for the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO 64, a thing or two on the adventures in falsehoood-telling of “Dr.” Jerry Prevaricator, & several posts about about Sarah Palin’s 2 million dollar meme regarding ethics complaints (my most visited posts to date).  Since then, I wrote a lot more about AO 64, its passage by the Anchorage Assembly & veto by Mayor Sullivan, about the Miller v. Carpeneti lawsuit to interfere with the processes of judicial selection mandated by the Alaska Consitution (now being appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals), then the True Diversity Dinner, & most recently the struggle of workers at the Hilton Anchorage for a fair contract.

Whew. That’s a lot of politics.

Change of season, change of gears. And that means, amongst other things, that the political stuff — well, it won’t be going away.  But it will be more occasional.

National Novel Writing Month

Right now there’s a bunch of us gearing up for the month-long writing frenzy known as National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I first did NaNoWriMo in 2007 as a way to get my writing momentum back after the slowdown caused by — well, life.  Death. And so on.  So: did a NaNovel called Cold that, being something written in a headlong hurry, is far from finished as a publishable novel. But there was some good stuff, & I like the story.  Last year I started NaNoWriMo again but was forced to stop midway through by new life events.  But nothing’s stopping me this year.  And once November’s done, I plan to maintain momentum. Complete those projects, complete others.

So here’s my plan for October: in preparation for this year’s NaNovel, I’m gonna be doing a heavy load of reading on space exploration, terraforming, CELSS (Controlled or Closed Ecological Life Support Systems) blah blah — & blogging about it & other stuff having to do with the premises of what I’ll actually be writing in November.  Kinda like I did the other day, with my post Eating (& breathing & crapping) in outer space — hopefully entertaining, if not to everyone’s taste.  I’ll also be working offline to get my place sorted out, all nicely feng-shuied for writing & plain old living.  I originally vowed to get it done before the snow flies… whaddaya reckon? — but I’m gonna try.  I’ll also be trying to sort out this website a bit more to serve the purposes I have for it.  It might get messy here & there as I work on redesign.

And in November: write write write.

Mel the disheveled but victorious writer at a write-in one night before the end of NaNoWriMo 2007

With Phil Munger & Janson Jones outside an Assembly hearing this summer, the first time I met either in person.

When Phil Munger of Progressive Alaska made it to the Snow Goose last Friday at the tail end of the True Diversity Dinner, I told him that I’d been simultaneously sad & happy a month ago when he announced he was going to be blogging a lot less — sad because I think his has been an important voice in the progressive blogosphere in Alaska, but happy because he was going to get back to his music.  He needs music, & music needs him.  And that’s the way it is with me & writing, too.  Besides which, neither of us is exactly apolitical in how we approach our art.  — At any rate, I told him: but here we both are, still writing all kinds of political posts! & we laughed.

But I think he might be starting to keep his promise to devote more time to his musical composition. I sure hope so.  As for me: back into storymind.  It’s a very good place for me to be.

I’ll still be an occasional political blogger.  But writing my own stuff is where my spirit lives.

Oh yeah.  And that story I talked about in that science research geek post, the one called “Long Dark” I intended to finish & submit to Crossed Genres? Wasn’t far enough along with it to have any chance of finishing it by the deadline on September 30.  Bummer.

But I was able to take the first day’s writing from my 2007 NaNovel Cold, dust it off & revise it, & submit it as a short story instead.  And I’m very well-pleased with the result.  So are my friends I’ve shared it with who’ve come back with comments.  I hope the editors of Crossed Genres like it as much.  And if they don’t — well, heck.  Maybe I’ll post it here.

I feel like a writer again.

The “Write Hard Die Free” pin in the photo was designed by William Spear of Douglas, Alaska. That and other great pins are available at wmspear.com. Mine was given to me by my brother Mark & sister-in-law Linda as a gift some years back. I’m about to order another: somehow mine fell off my hat in the last few days.

Related posts:

1. About "Cold"
2. My October reading list
3. Cold, the blog

My Aussie friend Sian told me a few years back that the difference between the Aussie (& British, no doubt Commonwealth) usage whinge & the word more commonly used by Americans, whine, is that to whine is simply to complain, whereas to whinge is to complain about something that you are justified in complaining about.  Though either one can, of course, be annoying to the ears of those in proximity.  (But maybe those are just her own connotations.  Interestingly, though, turns out the two words have different etymologies, which may also be read into what follows.)

I have no idea if my recent whinges about RSIs on Twitter have been annoying to anyone.  If anything, followers of my tweets have possibly been annoyed by not knowing what in heck an RSI is.  They’re more likely to know the term carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS), identified in Wikipedia as “median neuropathy at the wrist” which is

a medical condition in which the median nerve is compressed at the wrist, leading to paresthesias, numbness and muscle weakness in the hand. The diagnosis of CTS is often misapplied to patients who have activity-related arm pain.

I’ve never definitively been told I’ve got CTS, but then I tend to be shy of accepting diagnoses in the first place, since they are so often lead to boxing people into thinking that whatever diagnosis has been applied to them is a permanent condition of their lives.  To a lot of people, carpal tunnel syndrome leads automatically to the advice that “you need an operation on your wrist,” just as gall bladder attack means “you need to have your gall bladder removed” or depression means “you need to take antidepressants.”

Well, in some cases.  But not in others.  For me, having suffered from depression off & on all my adult life, having had the at least one gall bladder attack that landed me in the emergency room at Providence Hospital, & having suffered from RSIs — which I will now tell you (as if you haven’t already gotten it from the title of this post) stands for repetitive stress injuries or repetitive strain injuries — for about 15 years, off & on, I have in fact subjected myself to none of those treatments.

I first started having problems with RSIs around 1995, primarily because of my job, which involved not simply working on a computer all day but of doing a lot of fine-tuned mouse-work editing documents, doing document layout, creating tables & charts.  That year — I think it was summer — I was working on a particularly huge pile of tables & charts belonging to an annual report, & I was simultaneously creating some complex templates to keep the formatting standard from year to year.

It killed my hands.  Especially my right hand, which, since I’m a northpaw, is my mouse-hand.  And the pain was not only in my hand, but traveled up my arm, all the way up into my right shoulder.  It felt sometimes as if my bones had been twisted into pretzels inside my arms — a kind of pain both chronic & excruciating.

Nowadays it’s not usually so exruciating, but it’s still chronic. How else could it be, given I still work the same job?  But thanks to my ergonomic split keyboard (I was the first in my office to get one), thumb trackball, the right chair, exercises to keep my wrist open, occasional visits to a chiropractor or massage therapist, aspirin or other anti-inflammatories, & Mineral Ice — in general, I manage quite well.

But sometimes the pain flares up, and then I don’t want to write — whether with keyboard & computer, or pen & paper, it hurts.

That’s a part of why I’ve been less verbose as of lately.

Related posts:

1. The Daily Tweets, 2010-01-11: Crazy like a Faux News correspondent
2. The Daily Tweets, 2010-02-11: Another leak in my ceiling, more gnashing of teeth

Dan Froomkin, formerly of WashingtonPost.com, where he wrote a web-only column from January 2004 to June 2009 called White House Watch (originally White House Briefing). Modified from an original photograph by JD Lasica (jdlasica); used under a Creative Commons license. Click on photo to get full licensing info.

I’ve been catching up somewhat on stuff in the wider political world outside the Anchorage equal rights ordinance battle. Having been so focused on AO 2009-64, it wasn’t until early this morning that I learned Dan Froomkin had been fired from the Washington Post — more properly, from its online version at washingtonpost.com —  & wrote his last White House Watch web column today.

I’ve followed Froomkin’s column, originally called White House Briefing, off & on since it started in January 2004, especially in the run-up to the November 2004 presidential election .  I’m sad to see it go. White House Briefing/White House Watch was one of the most important watchdogs & fact-checkers on the numerous abuses and lies of the Bush Administration, & that kind of work is still needed.  As Froomkin wrote in his final column,

Obama is nowhere in Bush’s league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

There’s some disagreement as to why WaPo dumped Froomkin — with some saying it was for political/ideological reasons, & others say for economic reasons.  The latter is the opinion of Erik Wemple of the Washington City Paper — Froomkin just hasn’t been generating enough hits since the end of the Bush Administration.  Wemple writes:

The Obama administration has offered a less juicy target, in part because it hasn’t had quite as much time to screw things up. In the past six months, accordingly, hits on White House Watch have dropped to the point that Post officials cite traffic as a reason for bagging the column.

Though Wemple goes on to say,

The Froomkin axing is a red-letter event in Post history because it’s the first time that a major personnel decision has hinged so squarely on Web hits. For years, the orthodoxy from Post leaders is that the paper produces journalism that it believes in—mass popularity be damned. Perhaps that’s no longer the case. Questions on this matter were sent to newspaper spokesperson Kris Coratti but went unanswered.

So maybe Froomkin’s column was no longer journalism that WaPo believes in? — or at least not enough to overcome the paper’s economic considerations.  If so, that argues for ideology being a component, if perhaps not the biggest component, behind WaPo’s decision to sack Froomkin.

Regardless, it wouldn’t be the first time that a newspaper’s overall excellence in journalism has leaked away due to decisions that are based in some part on economics.  Witness our own paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News, which has lost a lot of ground both economically & in overall quality of coverage over the past few years.  From stuff I’ve read over the last several months, both about the ADN in particular & the newspapers in general, the papers are being hit hard by loss of revenues from classified ads as more people turn to free online ad solutions like Craigslist, not to mention the public’s increasing dependence upon online sources — including blogs — to get their news.  And then there’s just the economic downturn itself.  And there’s blogs, many of which have stepped into the journalistic realm formerly reserved for traditional media like newspapers and broadcast news to take on stories that traditional media either don’t know enough about or don’t dare to report on.  Think: who first broke the story last year about what became known as Troopergate?  Not any of Alaska’s newspapers or news stations: it was Andrew Halcro on his blog.  Who took the lead in giving the rest of the country needed perspective on Sarah Palin when she became John McCain’s running mate?  It wasn’t the Alaska mainstream press: it was Alaska’s progressive bloggers. It’s been an adjustment, & the traditional media are still adjusting.

But wait: I was talking about Froomkin.  “I remain a big believer in the ‘traditional media,’” he wrote in his final column,  “especially when it sticks to traditional journalistic values.” But he also gave every evidence of respecting & making use of the new (blogger) media — at least when it adhered to the same values, identified in his essay Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapers thusly:

The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.

His entire series for Niemen Journalism Lab on the future of news journalism is worth a read.  For political bloggers, too.

Some quotes about Froomkin from other people:

Equivocation, hedging, shading, tiptoeing—none of those turn up in Froomkin’s toolkit.

— Erik Wemple, “Why Did the Washington Post Sack Dan Froomkin?” (Washington City Paper)

Providing ample proof of why he couldn’t coexist with the go-along ethos of High Broderism. He reads, and links to, bloggers! He’s intellectually consistent, willing to criticize both Republicans and Democrats! That’s perhaps the rarest commodity in a Village that seeks at all times a political equilibrium that won’t endanger its cocktail circuit invite.

— McJoan,  “Froomkin’s Last WaPo Stand” (DailyKOS)

Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

— Dan Froomkin himself, “White House Watched”, his last “White House Watch” column for WashingtonPost.com

What I found in Froomkin’s work was:

• He researched thoroughly, gave his sources, & based his opinions on facts;
• He was, as McJoan on DailyKOS said, intellectually consistent, & didn’t pull punches with what he saw.

Nor do I expect he’ll change in the future (he’ll be taking some time off, then launching in some new direction he’ll announce at whitehousewatch.com).

* * *

Plenty of lessons in how Froomkin for Alaska, I think.

For one: the Anchorage Daily News is Alaska’s principal statewide newspaper-of-record — Anchorage’s Washington Post, if you will.  But for whatever reasons — & it seems ever more so over the past few months & years — the ADN  often acts as the same kind of “stenographer to liars” that Froomkin criticized in his final column.  Which isn’t to say the ADN is all bad — but it’s struggling in this environment, & all-too-obviously doesn’t have the first idea of what to do about the independent bloggers springing up all around it, or how to balance its own strengths with theirs.

Which is why, for Anchorage, the Anchorage Press, web-based newspapers like the Alaska Dispatch & Alaska Report and independent bloggers like the Mudflats, Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, Progressive Alaska, Shannyn Moore: Just a Girl from Homer, Immoral Minority, Alaska Commons, SOSAnchorage.net (the factchecker version) — just to names some of those I follow — are so very crucial.  Especially if they do their jobs wisely & well, with the same kind of integrity that Froomkin displayed in his column.

I should say, if we do our jobs wisely & well, because I’ve become part of it too, at least when the public sphere of the polis is what I’m writing about, as with Wayne Anthony Ross’ nomination for Alaska attorney general back in April, as with the Anchorage equal rights ordinance & the activities of Jerry Prevo now.  As I wrote in the introduction to my anti-WAR letter to Alaska legislators,

I’m a writer-blogger, not a political blogger — though I did try it out a little last fall after Palin became a vice-presidential candidate. But it proved too emotionally exhausting for me, & other Alaska progressive bloggers were doing it better. Sometimes, though, you gotta take a stand on something.

But I want to be honest & based in factual reality when I do.

Integrity is a big word with me — central to my own spiritual worldview. It’s what Job had when his friends so-called were “comforting” him in his losses by telling him that the horrible things that happened to the people he cared about, & to himself, wouldn’t have come down on him if he hadn’t sinned. Except that he hadn’t. I often think of integrity as being like a pole at the center of oneself — in one part a navigational aid, in another something to hang tightly to in the midst of the storm. If you let go of your integrity, you lose your way, you lose your Self. If you hold to it, you always know where you are & who you are. It can still be plenty damn painful, but it’s far less painful then letting go & losing your Self.

The hard part of doing what any of us who write about the stuff  in the political world is knowing when to withhold judgment — because we don’t know all the facts — & when to apply judgment. “Stenographer” reporting is not so much reporting as simply copying: dutifully getting on record “both sides” of any question, but never having the moral courage to go in there & make a judgment: are the sources reliable? what might their agendas be? what’s the context, what else is in play? But then there’s the other bad way to do it: judging willy-nilly, without ever bothering to seek out the facts, depending only on what what feels or believes: truthiness not truth.

But then there’s what I believe Dan Froomkin did, & what we are all called to do: to ask questions.  And, if necessary, to make judgments.  To hold those who claim authority over our lives accountable.  No matter how damn painful it is — holding on to our integrity all the way.

Here’s some good stuff I know about because of Dan Froomkin:

• Niemen Watchdog: Questions the press should ask. A site for & about watchdog journalism, from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Froomkin is deputy editor of this site.
• Niemen Journalism Lab. “a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.” Also from the Nieman Foundation’s
• whitehousewatch.com. The site where Froomkin will announce what he’s going to do next. Also links to archives of his columns on the Bush Administration and Obama Administration.

Tip o’ the nib to Amanda Coyne of Alaska Dispatch, relevant discussion with whom coincided with news of Froomkin’s firing.

Related posts:

1. Chuffed
2. A word about our friends
3. Three things I did at lunchtime

I did this icon, based on the main NaNoWriMo icon, for a Facebook group for lesbians/dykes who are writing novels during NaNoWriMo this November, and/or who have lesbian/dyke characters in the novel they’re going to be doing; or who are friends/family offering moral support to either of the above. Dunno if anyone will join; guess we’ll see. Meantime I’ll use this for my NaNo posts here too.

Related posts:

1. NaNoWriMo 2007: What I'm gonna write & how I'm gonna write it (the origin of "Cold")
2. About "Cold"
3. Writing life: Politics short-term & long-term

I wear this pin on my hat. My brother & sister-in-law got me one of these pins for Christmas, or maybe it was my birthday, several years ago — maybe back in ’97 or ’98, because I remember telling people on a writing list I started about it, & one of them even ordered her own. (If you’re reading this, you can too: this & other great designs by William Spear of Douglas, Alaska, can be ordered through the William Spear website.) Then, during or right after a trip to the Lower 48 in 2001 (just before 9/11), it got lost somewhere. So I ordered another.

Time to remind myself of this too. Not only that we’re in that kinda situation now in this country that is being run increasingly for the benefit of the few at the expense & often to the harm of the many, but also… well… I just haven’t been writing enough lately. Not really since my mom’s death at end of November.

Not that I think it was Mom’s loss in itself that’s lessened my writing — I think I was having problems with my focus before then too. And since then, it’s been all about health health health. A good thing, surely, but on Sundays (my regular writing gig) & the Saturdays I’ve been trying to add in, I’ve done more reading of books about diabetes, the glycemic index, good fats vs. bad fats, etc. instead.

A good thing, yes. But my health requires this, too.

Related posts:

1. Blogging health
2. Legacy
3. On a health road