In The News

A 16 year old Guinean girl in NYC was plucked from school and is being held in a detention centre in Pennsylvania, apparently as a high risk terrorist threat. It seems that no-one who actually knows her has any idea why

"I just can't fathom this," said her teacher, Kimberly Lane, "she's just a regular teenager. Two weeks ago her biggest worry was whether she'd done her homework or studied for a science test." This story follows the recent incarceration of another 16 year old from New York, a Bangladeshi girl now held at the same detention centre. According to the FBI, the teenagers are "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based on evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers." (via)

...

FBI Agent, two weeks later: "Err, well, you see .. we might have acted in haste. But after two weeks in detention, we are now sure that, if we release them, they WILL become suicide bombers."

A Poem

Suicide Note

I used to think that suicide was wrong.
Why would someone just throw their life away?
We have too much to live for, I'd say.
But - Ah! I'd forgotten there are things more
Important than survival and living.
There is love, and loyalty, and choices -
Choices made where there is nothing to choose
Except walls and hard places, like closets.

I knew my mothers would not understand.
There is more to life than mere survival.
There are times when we have to take a stand
To tell the truth, decide the way we face,
Ad accept finally who we will be.

I sat them down and told them I was straight.
The guys at school were just friends, nothing more,
And I snuck looks at girls on the beach, and
I wanted to marry one and have kids.
My mothers looked at each other, silent
In the way that adults communicate.
Having whole conversations in silence.
I felt I had lived my life in silence,
Stepping out to find the whole world was deaf
And no one would ever understand me.

They don't wish to know me, won't accept me,
Say there are support groups I could attend.
I said I love them, they ask why I betrayed them.
They always said they'd love me but I knew
There exists no love without conditions.
I tried to make them see but they were blind
And my mothers looked at me as if I
Was a televangelist preaching sins.

Facing their hurt and angry confusion
("Don't you love us? Why are you hurting us?
Was it something we did wrong? Is that it?")
I couldn't face them like that and fled outside
But there is nowhere to hide from myself.

If there was someone I could have talked to
To explain all the shame and hurt I felt
I would have tried to understand the hurt
I caused my mothers and maybe they, mine.
But who could I have tried with my pain?
Everyone I knew was a friend of ours:
Gay, or hiding (like I) being straight inside.

And so, out of options but with one left
I act, knowing I'll hurt you more this time.
I only hope words can explain it:
The indoctrination "support group" failed.
When you find my body please forgive me..
I felt like you couldn't hear me at all
So maybe now, too late, you will listen.

(This was inspired by an article in the paper that quoted a woman saying how her 14 year old nehpew had come out to his parents, been carted off to a religious conversion camp, and killed himself four months later. Things like that really, really piss me off. So My response was to invert the situation entirely, since the exact opposite could happen just as easily.)

Well.

Also knows as: deciding to use a blog more, and then forgetting about it for several months is sad. My xanga blog is in a similar state of general neglect. So, to update:

Ghosts in the Water failed around page 11 unfortunately. It was nicely surreal, and someday I may give the idea more thought and tackle it in depth, though I don't expect the result to net more than a novella.

Socks, which is (was?) going to be a novela bout a guy and an alien, died because where it wanted to go and where I wanted it to go were entirely different. I wanted a real alien. It wanted to be a tulpa. And thwe family dynamics ended up sucking. Badly. But the first 3 chapters worked, and part of the fourth, so I'll give it a few months and look back on it with fresh eyes.

Working on another untitled fantasy novel dealing with honour, politics, and other such fun stuff. It is NOT set in any middle ages, and I'm actually doing research. It's quite fun, but discovering that dissections were basically a salon event in the 1600s is quite disturbing.

YAY!

Waking The Dead is done. Two months, one first draft. Am very pleased with the result, though I am sure it will need to be edited extensively. Starting on Ghosts in the Water soon....

The average amount of winter rainfall in downtown Los Angeles is 15 inches, but about 21 inches had fallen as of Monday, including a Jan. 9 record of 2.6 inches, said National Weather Service meteorologist Bruce Rockwell.



"I've never seen such a sustained event like this," Rockwell said.

... Bets they won't be saying that in 40 days time?

Going okay...

The YA novel, that is. The working title is now Waking the Dead, mostly to have a working title. Am currently at an interlude involving a discount store, men in black, and magic. Unfortunately the MIB have proven themselves pretty useless. And, for some reason, I suspect there will be another novel set in the same world down the road, using Pat and Shuck.



The fact that I have been told that Ritalin is crack for those who do not need it only makes the idea that much more interesting :)

PIc

Actual resolution

To actually *use* this blog for things. Mostly writing bits, odd news, links, and the like.



Not that anyone ever looks at it, but stilll :p

Snippet from the barely begun novel Ghosts on the water



Another year rises from the dust and debris of the last, leaving behind flotsam and jetsam littered about like discarded candy wrappers. Resolutions are made, the same as were made the year before and perhaps the year before that as well - the first act of the year to make promises we know will be sundered. Unbidden, the mind begins to fashion lists of accomplishments that seem hollow when taken as a whole. A new list is drawn up, of things loved and cherished, and it comes out shorter than the list of accomplishments that now seem banal and inconsequential when other years are added, tacked on like footnotes to give meaning to life in small type.



After a time I stop writing. Even though there may be more to say the words have run dry and their seems to be nothing of use I can place on the page, nothing that matters. I begin to write a list o things lost, a harvest of bitter memories and long-dried tears of yesteryear. They come quickly, filling a page before I have time to do more than acknowledge then as one would a distant acquaintance on the other side of a road. They, too, do nothing. I crumple the paper up into a ball, then slowly fold it open again to shred is slowly and let it drift to the ground like snowflakes.



This year will be better, I think, as I always thought before. But now I wonder what there is for it to be better than, what heights I can reach I have not reached before. Perhaps it is only such ephemeral things I can wait before because the practical reality offers nothing it has not offered before. What kiss can compare to my first one? What loss to that of my mother? On reflection, I find I do not wish to know.



My resolution was one word, written down in a precise hand drilled into me by teachers who thought penmanship was next to cleanliness as a way of proving we are proper and right. Ennui. a resolution worth of the name, a goal worthy of achieving. I tell those who ask I made no resolution, because it is broadly true. If pressed, I say that I have resolved to write no more lists, not even for groceries. Everyone laughs, even though I don't smile.

Nanowrimo 2004

Well. Planning for this years nano proceeds well. Have a web page set up, a setting done, and lots of fun planning things out. Now, if only I could sleep.....