When Our Science Fiction becomes Our Reality

"At the front of the room, Chang had told the Waterbaby to watch his right hand, which now held a small green cube. Its head tracked the movement, glass eyes tracking in perfect time. Then, Chang wrapped his hand around the cube, hiding it from sight.

“What is in my left hand,” said Chang.

Pause. “There. Is. Nothing in. Your. Left hand.” Chang closed his left hand, and then held left and right hands together in front of him, the green cube neatly hidden.

“Follow the hand with the green cube,” Chang continued. He moved both hands in opposite circles. Waterbaby diligently tracked the hand with the cube.

“Like magic for really stupid people,” Jim snarked.

“Shut up,” Jo muttered back, with a tired smile."

From the table, Chang picked up a mirror, a flat thirty by forty centimeter rectangle, with a hard black plastic backing. He held it up to the crude face, in front of the glazed lenses.

“What do you see in my hand,” Chang asked.

Pause. Pause. “A. Rectangle.” A longer pause.

“And what do you see in the rectangle?”

Silence. Then, “I see. Nothing. In the. Rectangle.”

Jo shook her head. It was more right than it knew.

FROM THE WATER, p 35

-----

The recently circulated video of Figure's new OpenAI powered bot stirred a memory of that snippet in my mind yesterday, for obvious reasons.

I wrote that ten years ago, in what was the first of a trilogy of A.I. novels that never found a publisher.  In FROM THE WATER, I explored two ideas.  First, the idea that AGI...Artificial General Intelligence...would only arrive at the point where we moved beyond language models and into A.I. systems that could connect their semiotics to the material world.  Meaning, simply, that words had meaning.  

When we think the word "water," for example, it doesn't simply inhabit a web of linguistic interrelation.  It is "wet," and we know what that means because we can touch it, and taste it, and see it.  We can hear it dripping and splashing and flowing.  

In order to achieve sentience, or so I argued from the basis of my then-reading of early two-thousands A.I. theorists, a system must be able to perceive itself.  Sentience requires the capacity for self-awareness, not simulated, not virtual, but actual.

Secondly, such a neutral network wouldn't be physical.  It wouldn't be a matter of interlaced hardware and chipsets, but a software construct.  In FROM THE WATER, I'd envisioned a virtual network, in which a complex neutral structure was simulated.  But as it turns out, you don't need that.  The complex and probabilistic interconnections within language itself can be pressed into service for that purpose.  They're already neural.  

The advances in A.I. we're seeing right now have met the terms and conditions of the science fiction of the recent past. 

We're at functional Turing compliance with our LLMs.  We're starting to see those constrained intelligences connect to the real world.  There's no reason to believe we're not on the edge of a epochal shift, one brought to us by the same earnestly blindered quants who were convinced that the internet would bring about world peace, and that smartphones were a great idea.  

It's peculiar watching the fiction you've written become reality.

The Fiction of American Fiction

So.  I watched American Fiction last night, as it was movie night with Mom, and both Rache and I had wanted to see it.  As a writer and author with four traditionally published books and three agents (fic/nonfic/book-to-film), this spoke right into my existence...and to the peculiar place intersectional orthodoxies inhabit in the contemporary publishing world. 

There were some excellent performances, some early moments of real feeling, and it was often entertaining.   But at other points it felt...off.  It frequently pulled punches, drifted into intermittent bathos, and had a logically incoherent ending.

As a satire of the publishing industry, it just didn't feel like it cut close enough to the mark.  For readers of fiction with a surface-level grasp of what it means to publish and be published, perhaps.  But for me, the satire didn't cut deep, and the further we got past the premise, the more shallow it felt.  

Much of that came from the "authors life" that was presented in the film.  Our protagonist is purportedly a "struggling writer," meaning his books are excellent but unsuccessful.  When he presents on a panel at a conference, his panel is attended by fewer than a dozen extras who have clearly been told to look like they'd rather be anywhere else.  He's rejected, over and over again.  His whole schtick is supposed to be that he's barely making it.

Yet when he arbitrarily goes into a franchise bookstore, there are a solid dozen of his books on the shelves.  The "black" shelves, which troubles him, but shelves nonetheless.  If you can walk into a random bookstore and it stocks multiple copies of several of your books, you're not struggling, honeychild.

He meets with his agent in a big shiny downtown office, because that's how all agents are, right?  I've got three, and while my LA-based book-to-film agent might have an office, I wouldn't know.  I've never met him in person.  My fiction agent...London-based, a successful and reputable agency...works from home.  We Skype.  My Austin-based nonfic agent?  Works from home.  We talk on the phone.  We Zoom.  We've met once in the last ten years.  Again, if you're a mid-list author, it's not 1997.  You don't get flown places or spend the money to do so unless you're in the very tippy top of the list.  Publishing doesn't work that way.

A substantial subplot thread involves the author asserting control over the title of the book, to the point where they can pitch a hissy and get it changed late in the pre-production process.  If you're a name, maybe.  But if this is your debut novel, ain't no way that's happening.  Just no way.  In the same way that you're not gonna be writing the screenplay for your novel, particularly if you don't have a clue how screenplays work.  Because screenwriting is an art in and of itself, as I've learned in conversation with the gifted show runner/screenwriter who optioned my own novel.  

And if your books are scraping by, is anyone you randomly meet...like the attractive and recently single public defender who lives across the street of your beautiful Hamptons-Vineyard beach house...likely to ever have read them?  O Lord no.  With three thousand new titles burping out of tradpub, POD, and self-pub outlets every single day?  Not gonna happen.  That space is too supersaturated.

Other things bugged me.  Like, does he even have an editor?  AN EDITOR?  Apparently not.  I mean, books don't have editors, right?  Or copy editors.  You just write it, and rich white publisher ladies publish it and give you tons of money. 

Then there's the money involved.  Seven hundred thousand dollars for an unknown author is a preposterous advance, a fantasy advance.  Yeah, it's satire, but c'mon.  And four million for the immediate purchase...not option, but purchase...of film rights?  The industry usual and customaries on that number are a set percentage of total production budget.  Four mil assumes, what, a final production budget in the hundred million dollar range?  Given the current market, and the nature of the film that would be made, that's preposterous.  You'd take a bath.  Maybe if it's a write-off, but jeez louise.  And the film gets made IMMEDIATELY?  

There's more, particularly around what actually happens to a book and movie deal if an author fundamentally misrepresents their identity.  Which, er, isn't what happens in the film.

Much of the dissonance in the film may be a factor of the vintage of the book upon which the film is based.  Percival Everett published ERASURE back in 2001, which means that the narrative was conceptualized, constructed and written in the late 1990s or very early 2000s.  That was, obviously, a very different time in the life of the publishing industry. 

Perhaps that's why American Fiction felt rather more...fictional...than I'd expected.

On the Writing of Conservative Science Fiction

Can sci fi be conservative?  

It's typically forward-thinking, after all, because of course it must be.  But does that mean that it must by necessity be progressive?

It does not.  Again, of course not.  Why should it be?

I understand conservatism, in its best sense, to be defined as "holding on to what is good."  Change is not always positive, and the embrace of change...for the conservative...comes only after it has been carefully considered.  Does it lessen the grace in the world?  Does it diminish us, or dominate us, or break us?  Then it is to be avoided.

Much of the greatest science fiction explores this theme.  

Fahrenheit 451, for example.  Or Brave New World.  Or Parable of the Sower.  Or A Clockwork Orange.  Or The Lathe of Heaven.  Or War of the Worlds.  In each of these seminal narratives, the world has changed, but in a way that threatens something fundamentally good about humankind.  Literature.  Liberty.  Not being gassed to death on the regular by Martians.  Those things.

In sci fi as dystopia, the assumption is that the timeline has arced in a maleficent direction, and these stories challenge both the present and the future against the creeping depredations of decay and decadence, of fascist brutality and mechanistic inhumanity.  It is a critique of both a possible future and the bitter seed of said future in the present.

As an author, many of my novels explore this.  My postapocalyptic Amish fiction, for example, explores the place of a deeply-held and authentic faith as a bulwark against the collapse of the saeculum.  My AI uprising narratives...those that haven't already been dated by the great onrush of AI these days...explore how a culture that does not provide purpose and meaning can prime us for totalitarianism.  My current work in progress, which fits neatly into the Cyberutopian Regency Action/Romance genre?  Its core theme is the necessity of tradition and discipline for the maintenance of cultural and personal integrity.  

These are conservative things.

Of Art and the Machine

When I listen to creatives raising the alarm about artificial intelligence, there's a consistent theme.  

Looking at what the LLMs (ChatGPT/Bard) can write, and the images produced by diffusion systems (Dall E/Midjourney), there's been a terrifying surge in machine capacity in the last five years.  We're now at full Turing compliance for Generative Transformers, meaning that we've blithely skipped over the threshold that twentieth century AI pioneer Alan Turing established for determining the presence of synthetic intelligence.  There is no reason that machines couldn't soon do every form of work requiring awareness, other than that we're restraining them.

As it so happens, the first place that seems to be having an impact is the arts.

It's to the point where writers have begun to feel that their livelihoods are threatened, because they are.  Machine intelligence is great at burping out new content, and can do so at a hundred times the pace of human writers.  Almost all of the writing for the internet content mills, with their lazy listicles and corporately sourced content?  They could be done by AI.  This is equally true of most of the derivative romance novels out there, and the plot of every film in the Fast and Furious franchise.

Commercial artists are doubly threatened, because you can produce an image in seconds, and refine it in minutes, replicating the hours of focused labor necessary to make a single finished piece of visual art.

The image that accompanies this post is flawed, sure, but it took me a single minute to produce.  Just one prompt to Dall E, then another, and then I was like, eh, sure.  That one'll do.  For a graphic designer, that'd take days.

If writers and artists think their livelihoods are threatened, it's only because they are.  In a capitalist economy, AI means artists and writers can no longer expect to make a living through their work.

Which, I think, is the point we creative souls are all missing.  Writers and artists are seeing this through the wrong lens, seeing it as we have been trained to see it. 

AI isn't the problem.  Capitalism is.

There's nothing about AI that prevents me from doing what I love, from creating and sharing what I create.  The joy of writing is a human joy, and while I am slower at it than a machine, I still love to write.  The act itself is part of who I am.  

But we have been taught to view art as a commodity, as part of a system of economic exchange, as something that derives value only insofar as it can be marketized.

That understanding won't survive an AI era.

But then again, neither may capitalism.

Christian Storytelling

Over the course of the last month, I've not been blogging.  Instead, I've been hammering away on this year's novel.  It's part of National Novel Writing Month, which I've done for the last three years, and it's been great.  The structures and disciplines and insta-community that springs up around this month-long blast of writing is great.  Every year, it's helped me punch down a full draft 50,000+ word manuscript, going from concept to dang-there-it-is in a month.

One of the recurring of my writing has been developing stories with Christians woven into them.  Being a pastor and all, I suppose that isn't surprising.

My first year's output revolved around the Amish.  The Amish after an apocalyptic event, admittedly, so it's a harder and more brutal narrative than your typical pastel romance, but the Amish nonetheless.  That one found a publisher, and should be out there...God willing...in eighteen months.

Last year's manuscript included two significant Methodist side characters.  Methodists, aliens, and robots.  And Russian hit men.  Who were not Methodist.

This year, my protagonist is a charismatic evangelical, an evangelical who has an encounter with pandimensional extraterrestrials whose appearance is an homage to H.P. Lovecraft's Elder Things.  Because for some reason, those two things go together in my mind.

Besides just pitching out a good yarn, one of my goals in the midst of all of this: to attempt to write stories in which Christians are actual human beings.  In my reading and in film, I find that I'll encounter Jesus-people who are cast in only the broadest-brush stereotypes.  They're too often Elmer Gantry charlatans or bible-thumping hypocrites or other two-dimensional tropes, and it bugs me.   Jesus people are, in my experience, not all like this.

But neither are they the cookie-cutter drones we too often encounter in contemporary "Christian" literature and film, that alternate reality where human complexity gets obliterated by blow-to-the-forehead messaging.

As I prefer to write 'em, Christians make mistakes, and do stupid things, and continue to be genuinely Christian in a world where that's increasingly not the norm.

Which brings me to a point of fuddlement as I've been writing.  My Christian characters inhabit a world populated by people who neither think nor speak in particularly Christian ways.  Because I'm trying to write in a way that reflects reality, there is profanity.  There is violence.  And there are Christians, some flawed, some kind, some less so, mixed in to the whole mess.

I do wonder, honestly, how that will work for readers.  To what extent can there be faithful Jesus-folk presented in literature that can be horrible or rough or profane?  Is that encounter too jarring now, for the Christian reader, trained to expect watered-down and simplified literature?  Is that encounter too jarring for the secular reader, who expects easy stereotypes in place of the human complexity that exists among the faithful?

The only way to find that out, I suppose, is to keep writing.

All the Time in the World

Last night, as I finished up writing a Goodreads review of the really rather marvelous The Hare with Amber Eyes, I counted back out of curiosity.

Just how many books have I read this year?  Not counting ones I read in late 2013, but dropped in for completeness sake.

The total count in 2014: Fifty one so far.

Which seems like a fair number.  Not insane, but still many more than I've managed in prior years.

 Generally, I'd gobble down around a dozen books a year for pleasure, and an equivalent number for work.

Those numbers have risen over the last few years, and I wonder...where exactly did I find the time?

Oh, I still watch movies, and still game.  Just...less.  What I don't do, pretty much ever, is sit down to watch television.  Just don't do it.  I have no "shows," though I know there are some excellent, funny, well-scripted and acted vids out there.  I don't choose to noodle through Netflix on my own.  We don't have cable.

And my kids are older, requiring vastly less wrangling than they used to...or at least, wrangling that's considerably less invasive of time and overall capacity to focus.

And I choose to delimit my external commitments, one of the collateral blessings of introversion.

And, as I write more, I find my hunger to read increases.  The worlds and stories others spin weave into my own.  The turns of phrase and voices of those I read--those I enjoy, at least--are subtly integrated into my own voice, in ways I can't always consciously perceive.

Where does the time come?  Ultimately, it comes because I make it.

If you're going to read, you must set aside space for the written word, for the stories that tell themselves in that peculiar, magical space between an author, the page, and your own soul.

Writing, Vocation, and Relationship

Last Friday, I took a walk to the bank.  It was a gorgeous day, a little warmer than I'd expected for mid-October.

In my pocket was a check, the depositing of which was the whole purpose of my walking.  Oh, sure, I could have driven.  Or I could have used one of those check-scanning apps my bank keeps pitching.  But neither of those things gets me out walking under a crisp blue sky on a beautiful day.

The check itself was something of a novelty.  It was the first half of the advance from my publisher in anticipation of my novel, which in and of itself remains sort of bizarre and unreal seeming.  By first-novel-author standards, it was remarkably generous, large enough to represent a couple of months worth of my appropriately modest half-time pastorly salary.

What struck me, as I took this...writing income...to the bank was that it marked the first time writing has yielded much more than nominal returns. So far, my efforts have yielded the kinds of income that has my wife patting me on the head and saying "That's nice, dear."  Then we'd go out to Chipotle to celebrate, and blow the whole wad on burrito bowls.

As much as I love to write, I'm fully aware that writing isn't the most reliable of professions if you're planning on eating and/or having a roof over your head.  It's a work of love, a thing I do because I like to do it.  I am not alone in this.  There are millions like me, millions, a sea of authors out there fervently cranking away on their novels and memoirs and illustrated books of Esperanto Haiku.  Por infanoj! Infanoj amas Esperanton!

Last year, when I wrote the manuscript for The English Fall during National Novel Writing Month, I was one of over 310,000 folks who completed a novel-length work of fiction.  I was a writer then, in that I was writing.  I've cranked out a number of silly little self-published books over the years, short stories here and there and a modestly received little ebook on God and the nature of creation.  Do they make me a writer?

Sort of, which is the peculiar thing about writing.  The act itself is not the fullness of being a writer.

Neither is the receiving of income.  Am I more of a writer now that I'll have to attend to it on my next tax return?  Now that, for this moment, at least, I can think of myself as...professional?

Again, sort of, but not entirely.

What makes a writer vocationally a writer, I am convinced, is not the act of writing itself.  That act is as intimate as a thought, as solitary as a daydream.

It is the relationship the written word establishes when others read what you have written.  You are a writer when those words you have crafted carry your dreamings over into the soul of another.

I am a writer for you when you see, in the eye of your imagining, something like the world I have seen in my own.  If I tell you, hey, I'm an author, that reality remains an abstraction until you have engaged with those thoughts, and let them play through your mind.  It is only real when you have known the voices of my characters, felt the road beneath their feet and the rain on their faces.

It's like saying, "I'm a pastor."  It is a vocation...a calling, a state of doing...that is only truly known when it is witnessed or encountered by another.

The One Who Writes with Fire

It came in a moment of reflection.  It was a brief meditation over a concept, or rather, a meditation over the interplay between two ways of conceptualizing the divine.

On the one hand, the concept--often troubling--of God as a consuming fire.  Generally, we do not want to be burned.  Burning is bad.  Burning hurts, a bunch if it's you encountering a hot pan, rather more so if you're Servetus after a particularly contentious Presbytery meeting.   Despite all the emo-Jesus Christian Contemporary Music that tries to make it seem romantic, fire-language still feels more than a little bit too reminiscent of Tomas de Toquemada.

Plus, there's a strong negative theology of burning.  Burning is what happens to bad people.  Lakes of fire!  Hot coals!  Sinners get the weeping and gnashing, plus, did we mention you'll be on fire?

Mysticism, of course, has always embraced the divine fire.  It is that light that is kindled in us.  It is the light that awaits, and that we will embrace as it consumes us.

This is the mystic vision, in both Christianity and every other human religion.  It's what Jesus brought and lived out, and what Paul affirmed and spread.

But America is not a very mystic place, and the idea that we will be subsumed into anything annoys us.  That'll destroy our individuality, we grump.  America has always been fiercely self-oriented, but now, it's reached a fever pitch.  Our consumer culture needs us to be distinct and separate and conveniently trackable, more than any culture in human history.

Consumed by the Numinous?  Really?  How will Netflix know our preferences in heaven if it can't pigeonhole our demographic profile?  Think what being indistinctly suffused into the nature of the Holy would do to Amazon Divines business model!  And the Google AfterLifeAds?  They'd be completely random!

The horror.

To my reflections on this idea came another image of the divine, that of God as Author.  I like this image, for reasons that are very slightly transparent.  Yeah, I like to write.  So sure, I see God as an author.  And yes, there's a wee bit of projection involved.  I get that.  But I'm aware of the limits, and aware that it's metaphor.

It just happens to be an excellent metaphor.  The very best.  Ahem.

God is the storyteller, the one who spins out the narratives of our existence and of time and space.  He tells not just our story, but ourselves, writing us into being.  He has authorship over us, and authority, and yet allows us to participate in the telling of the tale, like a master DM spinning out an elegantly complex D&D campaign for a circle of dear friends.

Two different images.  There's the One who Writes.  And the One who Burns.

When I was a little child, those would have been very different metaphors.

But what struck me, in my reflection, was that "burning" and "writing" are now interchangeable words.  They have become synonyms, in this digital age.  Burning is how we write, how we set data into a physical medium.

The two wove up in a reflection, of a God who writes us out with fire, burning the truth of our life into creation.

All this before my second cup of coffee.  What a productive morning.

Audience

"So who do you think is going to read it?"

I get this question, this question about audience, frequently.   As the final iteration of my manuscript sits in Dropbox awaiting the review of my publisher, I confess that I ask myself that question too.  Here's this book exploring a new way of understanding our universe, and the implications for theology.  The Multiverse!  God!  The Many Worlds!

It feels so wildly impractical, a great hoohah gulliwumpus of a book, so big and floaty and removed from our day to day existence.  It's the stuff of academe, of abstracted philosophical discourse.

And yet it isn't, which is why I've written it as accessibly as I know how.  We are creatures of story, we human beings.  We have been made to understand ourselves in terms of narrative.  The tiny spark of our lives as we burn our way across space and time creates that sense of narrative, after all.  

We begin.  Things happen.  We end.  

And in that sense of our own story, we experience all of being as story.  But what does that story look like?

The way we conceptualize Creation makes a difference.  It does.  If we view the universe as one great cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, with us as the Good and those who disagree with us as Evil, that impacts how we treat others.   Lord have mercy, but does that impact how we treat others.  

If we view the universe as a void, empty of meaning, just a great cosmic nothing that serves no purpose, then that shapes our actions.  If we see ourselves as simply mindless cogs in an impossibly complex machine, then we will treat other beings with that in mind.

So a book about faith and the nature of reality?  I can see the reason to read such a book.  If I hadn't written it, I'd want to read it.

And I do have a spiel, when asked that question.  People of faith who appreciate the insights of science, I say.  Spiritual seekers who want to understand their place in the universe, I say.  Folks who thrived on those late-night dorm room conversations that stretched their minds, I say.  I think those folks are out there.

But honestly?  I have no idea.  I'm going to have to wait and see.

My Mission to Mars

The first edits are back on the Believer's Guide to the Multiverse, and I'm psyched.  First, my editor seems to like it, which is a significant bonus.  And second, well, it's a small step closer to that place where I can for the first time in my life move past saying "I'm a writer" to saying, legitimately, "I'm an author."

But mixed in there is a bit of angst.    What I'm dreading is the reality that in order for a book to be read, it has to be marketed.

While I love writing, I wrestle mightily with marketing.  I hate the feel of it, the taste of it, the way that approaching another person with a pitch can dehumanize the soul you're encountering.   They can become an object, an implement, something you're seeking to manipulate rather than someone you're standing in relation to.

I'm going to have to get over that, or at least reconceptualize the effort that goes into marketing.  Ditching the word itself seems a good start.   To get the word out about something, you have to believe in that something.   It has to matter to you, not in a manipulative way, but in a genuine way.  I'm not selling you something.  I'm offering you something.  I'm not pitching you something.  I'm opening up a conversation.  It's not scripted prosthelytizing, it's real evangelism.  

But really, that effort to really connect has to begin as you write.  Whatever you're trying to convey, you also have to speak it in such a way that people can hear what you're saying.   If you're a writer, that has to happen on the front end.  Are you articulating what you care about in such a way that other human beings...literate ones, at least...will be able to receive it?

One lament I'll hear occasionally amongst progressive Christian writers is that, well, no-one seems to buy books anymore.  "Why does no-one read," we lament.  "They are all so stupid!  Stupid stupidheads!"  This is fundamentally not true.  Christian books still sell like hotcakes.

Take, for instance, the books of Stormie Omartian.

Though I try to be aware of all things Jesusy, I'd never even heard of Stormie Omartian before I went onto Twitter.  There, amidst the churning thickets of tweet-quotes, I saw the name...and needless to say, it piqued my curiosity.   I discovered that beyond having a name that is beyond epic, she's an amazingly successful Christian author by almost any metric of success.

If my wee book sells more than a couple thousand copies, I'll be quite pleased.  That doesn't even begin to hit the 30,000 copy metric I used to hear pitched for entry into the "successful" author club back in the print era.   But Stormie? Stormie's in a totally different league.

Her books, which she writes from the perspective of a nondenominational layperson, have sold millions upon millions of copies.  Her Power of Prayer books have sold so well that her publisher has copyrighted those words.    "The Power of Prayer (R)."   I'll have to remember that the next time I consider using those words in a sermon, I guess.

So after finishing up my time with philosopher/mathematician/theist Blaise Pascal, I went to the library. There, in the spirituality section, Dewey Decimal Code 248.32, right next to a Brian Mclaren book, was a pastel-hued hardback, which I dutifully checked out.  I could tell by the cover that this was going to be...different.

Time to take a trip to Mars.

Another Book I'll Never Write

The idea popped into my head the other morning, as things often do when I'm out walking the dog.  It's a potent time of day, that morning walk.  During the week, the boys have been gently or not-so-gently cajoled into getting themselves off to the bus, and I've got the little snuffler-pup wandering around on the far-edge of the extendo-leash as I give her the opportunity to stretch her legs and...um...empty her bowels.

But in my quest to fulfill that rather basic function, the morning remains the morning.

The sky is shot through with color, or grey with rain.  The air is bright and sharp and crisp in winter, or cool and moist in the summer.  And every day is different, even though the arc of my walk is almost always one of two routes.  It's a potent time, each deep breath of cool air mixing with the taste of coffee in my mouth, the brisk pace of my walk stirring my dream-rested mind.

Almost every day, something pops into my head.  It's the reason I'm sure to walk the dog early on Sunday morning, for example.  When I return, that paragraph that just wasn't working or that concept in the second-to-final draft of the sermon that seemed unformed suddenly becomes clear.

The ideas come every day.  And as I walked the other morning, I suddenly found myself thinking...gosh...what if I wrote these thoughts down every day for a hundred days?  What if I wove every one of these mornings into a series of three-to-five hundred-word reflections about dogs and faith, about creativity and morning light?  People love those books of daily reflection, don't they?  And it almost writes itself.

But then my muse giggled to herself, and struggling to stifle a laugh, whispered the inescapable title of the book-thought into my ear: "A Hundred Bags of Crap."

Hmm.   Not quite sure that'd ever find it's way to any Christian bookstore shelves.

Ah well.

Resolution 2012

Last year, I rolled into 2011 promising myself that I would do a range of things.  There was the usual weight loss/fitness yearning, of course...but I've found that's a commitment best made continually.  Linking it to the New Year has just never quite worked out for me.  Instead, I pledged myself to e-publishing a book I'd written in college.  That was done, thank the Maker.

This year, the creative project that's sitting on the back burner is an exploration of M-Theory, multiverse cosmology, and the Biblical narrative.   It's tentatively titled, "New Heavens, New Earth," but I'm thinkin' that feels a bit grandiose.  Ah well.  A better title will come.

It has sat untouched on this laptop and my backup drive for a few months, crowded from my day-to-day by the demands of kids and work and my D.Min. program.  But I'm 20,000 words in, almost half a book.  I'm still hoping to get it finished.  It's still interesting to me, dagnabbit, and even if it goes nowhere, I want to get 'er done.

So...that's the resolution.  I'll get this manuscript done by the end of August, hopefully well before the Mayan universe comes to a crashing end in December.

To stir my discipline in getting it done, I'm also hoping to make it an independent study elective for my doctoral work.  Structures of accountability are remarkably efficacious in getting yourself motivated to do the things you know you really need to do.

The Stories We Never Write

This morning's Washington Post contained a book review that was somewhat painful.  It was for a book entitled Zone One, by MacArthur Foundation "genius" Colson Whitehead.  It's a book about...well...it's about zombies.  More interestingly, it's about someone charged with eliminating the nonviolent zombies, the ones that just go about their mindless, day-to-day lives, oblivious to the fact that they are no longer alive.  It's an existential commentary on the sad pointlessness of most human existence, writ in the reanimated flesh of zombie-chic.

It looks to be a good book.  It'll sell well, and is winning accolades for it's already well-regarded author.

And I had pretty much the same core idea...with some minor variances...a couple of years ago.  But there was no time to write it.  I'm not a certified genius, of course, and I'm also occupied with other things.  But it's always funny seeing an idea you've never seen before and seems to have sprung freely from your mind surfacing in the mind of another. 

One could get resentful, of course.  You could be filled with accusations, as Newton was with Leibnitz over who came up with the ideas behind calculus.  Or you could be filled with regret.

There's no point in that.  Things are as they are, and I wasn't planning on writing that book anyway.  It's kind of fun seeing the concept surface elsewhere.

And fortunately, I had a much better idea for a chilling, groundbreaking, redolent-with-human-meaning zombie script yesterday afternoon.   And no, Colson, I'm not sharing this one yet.

Gotta love that zombie muse.  She just keeps moaning incoherently in my ear.

Former Selves

Today was strikingly gorgeous, one of those days-without-flaw when its hard to do anything other than bask in the Maker's work.   After a week of stanky moist Washington heat, this morning came crisp and perfect in the 60s.  Skies?  Blue and clear.  Clouds?  Intermittent and puffy as unspun cotton.

With the missus off in El Ay for a few days doing her jet-setting Executive thing, I herded boy number one off to the bus, and then wrangled boy number two to the bus stop, all prepped for Field Day.  From bus stop number two, I took our faithful pup for an hour long walk through the 170+ acres of heavily-wooded county parkland right near our house.  It was, in every way, lovely.

And then I came home, and settled in behind the keyboard, and kept up with a promise I made to my former self earlier this year.

This Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eleven, I resolved to get a children's novel I wrote back in college into e-publishable form.   It's been a challenging year personally and vocationally, which has occasionally gotten in the way of getting things done.   But once I make a promise, I'll endeavor to keep it.  Even if that's a promise I made to me.

One manuscript remains.  Scanning it?  Too messy.  Even with good OCR,  I'd have to significantly edit it.  So I'm doing it the old fashioned way.  I'm retyping it as time allows.  One page here.  A couple of pages there.

Today, I worked my way through 12 pages of text.   It's a bit odd, like reading an old journal.  Here are these words, this story.  I wrote them.  But the "I" that wrote them was very different.  I was twenty-one.  I was half my age.    I knew far less than I do now.  I was in a long-distance relationship with the woman who would become my wife, in an era that was pre-email.  Pre-Skype.  Pre-anything-but-expensive-long-distance-phone-calls-and-long-handwritten-letters.    This "me" was very different.  I'd never seen a child born, let alone my own sons.  I'd never seen another human being die.   So much life had not yet happened.

Yet this was me.  I feel myself in the words.  They're somehow still mine.  It's my voice.  Different, but still my voice.

Typing it again, as I physically connect with the text by recreating it in the same way I created it, stirs so many memories.  Of being in a computer lab where not a single computer was connected to the internet. Of the feel of 5 1/4 inch floppy disks.  Of walking home to 1508 Grady Avenue in Charlottesville in the early morning after hours of writing, breathing the cool spring air as I walked dead center up the Lawn, alone,  towards the lit Rotunda in the darkness.

Sixteen thousand, five hundred words down.  Another fifteen thousand words to go.

Drunken Preaching and the Skeletal Remains of Sermons

Two things happened over the last week that caused me to make a change in worship yesterday.

Thing Number One: The Sunday before last, I awoke with a fever. I was a mess. Chills and aching and a deep cloudiness let me know that I'd let an internal infection go too long. Through the miracles of ibuprofen, I was able to get the fever under control before going to lead worship, but my brain wasn't firing on all cylinders. This is not conducive to good preaching under any circumstances. Mostly 'cause folks asked me to, I've moved away from using a written text for my sermons, meaning I've got presentation software to give it form, but have to come up with the words as I go along. Normally, I can do this just fine. But illness worketh not well upon my cortex. I was able to mask it through most of my sermon, clinging to my Keynote like a crutch. It was a bit rambly, but that's just me, so people are used to it.

Then it came time to end the sermon. I like sticking the landing when I preach. That means bringin' it home. It means summing it up. It means using chiastic structure to conclude where you began. That's a good sermon, baby!

But...I couldn't. I couldn't seem to finish. I'd start what I was sure was the sentence that would lead to the paragraph that would end strong. But it would veer off. I'd start in again, swooping downwards towards that perfect summation, only to drift away clumsily. I felt, quite honestly, like I was engaged in the homiletical equivalent of trying to land a Huey after having downed four single malt whiskeys in rapid succession. I finally bounced in to a hard landing. It was ugly. Or so it seemed to me. I'm not sure anyone else noticed.

Thing Number Two: Last week, I sorted through the files of the church computer, after things had gotten too cluttered. As I neatly sorted all of the records into nice hierarchical files, I noticed that my collection of sermons over the last year was...well...limited. I had all of the presentations I'd prepared. They were all there.

But as I looked at them, I realized they were lacking something. The framework of the sermon was there, sure. Images and bullet points, all right there. But what was missing was the meat of it. There was none of the language I'd used. There was very little indication of the bible study and work that had formed my labor for a year's worth of Sundays. It was like coming across the skeletal remains of six dozen sermons. Yeah, with some forensic exegesis, you could reconstruct what they once were. But as a theological resource or a record of my work? They were dead things. Useless.

Those, I think, are two of the problems of moving to an outline and presentation-driven style of preaching. It's easier to stumble if you're not "on." More significantly, it means there's a loss of memory...a forgetting of the things you've thought and said and prepared.

So for a little while, at least, I'm going to go back to written texts. Maybe just for the summer. We'll see.