This is a general comment, but goes particularly to the person who I recently booted off a thread and subsequently sent their comments to the trash:

As a point of information, when I’ve decided that you’re done with a thread and that your subsequent comments will not show up on the thread, I don’t actually read any of the comments you attempt to post after that point. They just go straight to the trash, unread, at which point I delete them, unread. So writing ten or so follow-up comments, presumably to make some point or other about something, or to communicate your ire to me, or whatever, is the blog equivalent of you talking to wall. No one is listening, least of all me, because I decided you were done talking here. If you have a problem with that, consult the Site Disclaimer and Comment Policy, which should inform you of my response on the subject.

Also, as a general rule, if I’ve deleted your comment, for whatever reason, if you want to attempt to complain about the deletion, the best way to do it is in e-mail, because bitching about having your comment deleted is just boring derailing nonsense, so I’ll just clip that out too. If you send me an e-mail to gripe, I might respond, but if you try to turn a comment thread into a referendum on how you’ve been wronged, I definitely won’t respond, save to snip out the comment and dump you into “trash” queue. Contrary to your apparent opinion, moderation of the site is not a debatable topic, nor do I care what you think of my choice to moderate the site.

The correct response in a comment thread to a deleted message is to either apologize, if you feel my deletion had basis, or to continue your discussion in a less contentious manner, which I’m generally happy to let you do. Either way, deal with it and move on.

Thanks.

It is:

Query first, and don’t write up a Big Idea piece until/unless you have a confirmed date from me. Why? Because there are going to be times when I say “sorry, no space,” and you’ll have written that essay for nothing. And I’d hate for you to waste your time like that.

So, please query first. Thanks.

Got faith? This question is more complicated than it seems here in our world — and in the world of Mark Teppo’s Codex of Souls series, of which the newly-released Heartland is the second installment, it’s even more complicated than that. Why? Because in Teppo’s world, faith has a quality to it that’s distinctly different than it is in our world — a quality that, at the very least, makes the world of the Codex of Souls a lot more interesting, in a teleological sense. Here’s Teppo to give you the lay of the land.

MARK TEPPO:

It starts with the idea of faith.  One of the underlying conceits in modern thrillers is the occult macguffin–some divinely blessed thingamajig crafted from technology so otherworldly that our ancestors immediately shat themselves in fear when they realized what it was and then scattered it across the known world like Set hiding the evidence after he dismembered the body of his brother, Osiris. Typically, what separates the rag-tag group of heroes from the band of villains is the idea of faith:  one group believes in the power of the thingamajig, one doesn’t.  These secular empiricists, through the right and principled application of their rational minds, triumph over the apocalyptic dementia of faith and belief.

Or do they?  Because the little trick these writers always pull is to tag on an epilogue wherein they show the reader that maybe–just maybe, if you let them take you down an alternate path a little ways–the zealots weren’t crazy.  Maybe there was something to the mystic device they were seeking.  Maybe God does live in the Machine.

Now, there are two ways to read this technique.  The cynical way, which is to say that writers are aware of the preponderance of some manner of religious belief in their readership, and they don’t want to alienate their audience by sticking to the hard and fast definition of a scientifically discernible universe.  In which case, this little nod and wink at the end is to say, “It’s okay; I understand that you need a little mystery, so here, let me give it to you.”  Or, they actually want to hedge their bets.  They want to leave the door open on the idea of faith.  Perhaps it isn’t such a bad thing, religious zealotry aside.  There may be more things in Heaven and Earth than our wee brains can discern, and we shouldn’t discount the possibility.

But the trouble with that tiny quibble is that it is a thread that will unravel everything.  If the author, who has just spent several hundred pages discounting the religious and philosophical implications of the occult macguffin, suddenly flashes you the secret hand signal–It’s okay; I’m in on the secret!–where does that leave the heroes?  It makes their rational pragmatism just another crazy dogma, and their victory dance into the sunset is the Fool dancing off the edge of the cliff.  Indiana Jones stands on the steps of a building in Washington, D.C. and says, “Damnit, the government can’t take the Ark and put it in a box; it needs to be studied.”  Then Marion sidles up to him and says, “Hey, sailor, can I buy you a drink?”  Really?  These two just witnessed the power of the Hand of God, and they’re heading off to the nearest bar for a drink?

If you’re going to suggest the world is not as it seems, why be so coy about it?  Why have only a few of your characters believe that something lies beyond the Veil?  If you’re going to hunt for occult artifacts, then why wouldn’t people who believe in the occult be working for Team Heroic as well as Team Nefarious?

Once you go there, the rest is easy.  Magic is afoot.  The Grail, the Spear, the Ark of the Covenant, the Emerald Tablet:  they’re all real.  Alchemy works.  Astrology and tarot are viable means of charting and seeing the future.  Aleister Crowley’s maxim of “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law” becomes the driving principle of how the world works.  Occult knowledge is knowledge of the secret workings of God, and you had better believe that everyone who is looking for the secrets is going to know how to use them.

This is the basic premise of the Codex of Souls series.  I assume every occult conspiracy theory, every scrap of religious doctrine, every third-world myth, every blood-soaked grimoire, and every justification for sacrificing babies and cute animals is true.  The entire occult history of the human race is up for grabs, and the rest is a matter of finding patterns in that world of crazy.  You know what? After a while, you start seeing some.

The first two are called Lightbreaker and Heartland, and they’re about faith.  Our hero needs to discover how to have faith in himself, because in a world where everything is true (and nothing is permitted, says the Old Man in the Mountain), believing in yourself is the first step toward discovering some real truth.  If, like the Gnostics attest, you can’t trust the Demiurge, then who can you trust?

—–

Heartland: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Visit the Codex of Souls web site, which includes the short story “Wolves, in Darkness,” taking place in the CoS universe. Visit Teppo’s LiveJournal.

Surely, I thought, surely there is not such a thing as a cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” where the word “guitar” has been replaced by the word “keytar.” But then I remembered: this is the Internet.

I’m as appalled as you are. Appalled, you hear me.

For everyone congratulating me today on the tidiness of my workspace, I present to you the uncropped desk:

I hope that puts to rest any accusations of personal desktop organization. Thank you for your time.

This is how I’m working today: Manuscript for the Tor version of METAtropolis on the desk (which I am proofing), with keyboard to the side just in case I need to type something. On the monitor: my inbox and a PDF of the Subterranean Press version of METAtropolis, from which I am double-checking the Tor version. Below, completed proofed pages. Coke Zero to the right, gum to the left. Mirror so I can’t be snuck up on by ninjas. Speakers playing classical piano, which is perfect music to proof by. And in the background to the right, just visible, The Mallet of Loving Correction. No, it’s not just a metaphor. I actually have a mallet.

And there you have it: my workspace.

Shawn Powers, a friend of Whatever and also a frequent commenter here, has had a very bad day: His house has burned up. The good news is Shawn, his wife and children are safe; unfortunately their pets were victims of the fire.

Friends and co-workers have set up a place for other friends and concerned folks to chip in to help Shawn and his family get through this really terrible moment in their lives: It’s here. If you have a bit to spare, I’d appreciate you thinking about sparing it. There are also more details about today’s events at the link.

Thanks, and feel free to spread the word.

So I won’t be here. If you have a family, why not spend time with them too? Unless, you know, you don’t like your family, in which case I guess you can just sit at home, dreading Thanksgiving from 11 months off.

But to keep you busy whilst I am away, a question:

So, ever been to a laser show? What’d'ya think?

If you’re wondering what to do with your Sunday, I’ll note you can spend about fifteen minutes of it watching me being interviewed on Cult Pop, the Michigan-based interview show specializing in science fiction and fantasy. The interview was done during last year’s Penguicon, so I’m being interviewed about Zoe’s Tale and METAtropolis, both of which were up for Hugos at the time, and I also talk about Stargate: Universe. And when you’re bored with me, there’s also Jim Hines on the program, chatting up his own books and projects. And that’s another fifteen or so minutes of your Sunday squared away. But after that, man, you’re on your own.

(If you’re seeing this more than a week after the entry went up, the show in question is #34.)

“D’oh!” is a shockingly (and perhaps, depressingly) useful addition to our matrix of human verbal expression.

Discuss.

(Also, this is all I have for the day. Hey! It’s Saturday! Cut me some slack.)

So, I had about a half hour to kill so I asked people on Twitter to ask me questions that I could answer in a podcast. And here is that very podcast!

It is 29 minutes and 5 seconds of only the finest of ramblings. Enjoy. And if you wish to download it, here you go.

Apropos of nothing (no, really), here are some things from life which no longer really exist and which I am glad do not.

1. Stupidly expensive long-distance charges. After I left college, I tried to keep in touch with all my friends by phone, and it added up because depending where they were, calling pals could cost up to 40 cents a minute. When my sister briefly lived with me when I was in Fresno, between the two of us we could generate $600 phone bills on a monthly basis, at a time when I was paying $400 a month for an apartment. Yes! I was occasionally paying more for my phone bill than I was for having a place to eat and sleep. Naturally, this was madness.

These days, my long distance phone bill is a flat fee of something like $25; I literally can’t think of the last time I had to think about how long I could afford to talk to someone far away on the phone. The phone companies appear to have shifted their Egregious Profit Center from long distance to text messaging, which, as I am not one of Those Damn Kids and rarely text message (and have a $5 add-on to my cell phone account which covers the first 250 texts a month, which is more than I use), suits me just fine.

The real irony here is that I’m rather more likely to e-mail or IM friends than phone them these days, so likely my phone bill would be lower now than back in ’91 no matter what. But it’s the principle of the thing.

2. Crappy old cars. Which cars qualify as crappy old cars? In my opinion, pretty much all of them. Pre-catalytic converter cars were shoddily-constructed, lead-spewing deathtraps, the first generation of cars running on unleaded were even more shoddily-constructed 70s defeat-mobiles, the 80s were the golden age of Detroit Doesn’t Give a Shit, and so on. You have to get to about 1997 before there’s a car I would willingly get into these days. As opposed to today, when even the cheap boxy cars meant for first-time buyers have decent mileage, will protect you if you’re hit by a semi, and have more gizmos and better living conditions than my first couple of apartments.

Yes, I know. Car lovers scandalized. Well, look. First, watch this:

Which I think makes the point about “death traps” I was mentioning earlier.

Second, every time I go back to LA, you know what always surprises me? The mountains. Because when I was kid growing up in LA, you couldn’t see them. I lived at the foothills of the damned mountains and I still couldn’t see them most of the time. Whereas these days first stage smog alerts in LA are a relative rarity, not even bringing into the discussion second stage alerts (in which you could see the air directly in front of you) and third stage alerts (in which you could chew it). And this was in the 70s and 80s, which were substantially better than the 50s and 60s. No, I don’t miss crappy old cars one bit.

3. Physical media for music. Audiophiles like to wank on about the warmth of vinyl, and you know, maybe if you take your vinyl and put it into special static free sleeves and then store those sleeves in a purpose-built room filled with inert gases, to be retrieved only when you play that vinyl on your $10,000 turntable which could play a record without skipping through a 7.5 earthquake, ported through your vacuum tube amplifier that sucks down more energy than Philadelphia at night, maybe it is warm. Good for you and your warm vinyl.

What I remember about my vinyl was a) it warped, b) it skipped, c) it wore out, d) any sonic benefits of the medium were compromised by my basic turntable and all the dust the damn LPs accumulated. Cassette tapes wore out even more quickly, their sonic reproduction was even worse, and they would get randomly eaten by your Walkman as a sacrifice to the music gods, and it was always your beloved music, not that Poison cassette your great aunt got you because she knows as much about your musical tastes as she knows anything else about you. I would have gladly sacrificed Look What the Cat Dragged In to the music gods, in their mercy. But it didn’t work that way. It never works that way.

Let us not even speak of 8-tracks.

CDs were the best possible physical music medium, for all the crap they get from audiophiles, but even CDs pale against the awesomeness that is the intangible digital music file, stored in a tiny, pretty little handheld computer that also plays video and games and lets me read my e-mail. I have three decades of curated personal music, enough to play straight for week without interruption or repetition, with me wherever I go. And while the encoding rate I used to rip “Don’t Stop Believin’” might not give me the crystal clarity I could get listening to it on vinyl, on a $10k turntable and through a McIntosh amp, I’ll say this: It sounds a hell of a lot better than when I was 12, listening to it on cassette through a mono tape player, or through the transistor radio alarm clock by my bed. Which is to say from a practical point of view it’s just groovy, thanks.

4. Smoking allowed everywhere. You know what? It did suck to have smokers at the table next to you at a restaurant. It did suck to have a movie theater haze up. It did suck to be walking in the mall and have some wildly gesticulating smoker randomly and accidentally jam the lit end of his cancer stick into your face. It did suck to be trapped in a tube hurling through the sky at 32,000 feet, sucking down recycled air for six hours that had cigarette smoke in it. It did suck to have everything everywhere smell vaguely of burnt ash and nicotine addiction.

Now, I’d note that it also sucks to be a smoker today, as they are exiled to the outdoors in every sort of weather, to huddle together for warmth and companionship in their devotion to the demon weed. They have my sympathy. But given the choice between telling them to go outside and having to suck down their smoke whether I want it or not, I’m good with the current state of affairs.

5. Pull tabs on drink cans. One less bit of ubiquitous trash to be annoyed with. To the dude who invented the stay tab: Bless you, sir.

Over at the AMC column this week, I answer questions on whether Avatar is actually more popular than Transformers, what’s going on with the Spider-Man franchise, and what the heck Blade II is doing in my list of decade’s best science fiction. Won’t you go have a look? Presently?

Offered up mostly for that speck in the upper left, which is Jupiter.

Received a package from Germany today which was not full of marzipan and schnitzel, damn it, but was full of copies of Agent der Sterne, the German version of Agent to the Stars, complete with the now-standard Laser-Shooting Spacecraft Not Appearing in the Book. This is not me complaining, however, as Heyne, my publisher, seems to know what they’re doing; my books sell better in Germany than just about anywhere else outside the US, and if random laser spaceships are part of that equation, well, that’s fine by me.

In any event, thank you, German readers, for picking up the books. You guys are swell. Even if you do love laser spaceships more than is absolutely necessary.

It is:

It’s been a clarifying couple of days, it has.

Following up on my recent kvetch about lazy interviewers, Justine Larbalestier has a rather more useful piece up on how to interview an author. If you’re planning to do an interview of an author at any point in your life, ever, you might as well go check this out and follow its advice. The only point I quibble with is doing an interview via IM, and that’s a personal thing (done it; don’t like it) rather than something universal. Everything else is pretty on point.

Little bits, because I can’t seem to think at length today:

* Clearly the most important topic of the day is whether one is on Team Leno or Team Conan, and while I am personally on Team Why Would I Watch TV When There’s Left 4 Dead 2 To Play, I think it’s pretty clear that Conan O’Brien is being totally screwed here. Here’s a guy who did everything he was supposed to do, did nothing wrong, and his now being crapped on because of the incompetence of his bosses. Inasmuch as my heart can go out to any fellow who makes exponentially more than I make in any given year, my heart goes out to O’Brien. Rich or not, it sucks to be reminded that at the end of the day you can have your job yanked out from under you because someone else did something incredibly stupid.

* Another from the annals of How Disconnected Political Appearances Are From Political Reality: Obama’s Winning Streak On Hill Unprecedented. The story notes how the legislation favored by Obama passes through Congress with a higher success rate than just about any other recent president, including famed arm-twister Lyndon Johnson. The secret to Obama’s success? a) Democratic majorities in both houses, b) the man picks and chooses his battles, c) he’s willing to compromise and get something passed than dig in his heels and have it fail.

I recognize that depending on one’s own personal politics, any or all of these could be a bug rather than a feature. But I don’t know. I think capitalizing on advantages, minimizing disadvantages and a certain willingness to compromise on details to achieve a larger goal is what used to be called “doing politics.” I certainly like it better than the apparently more current definition, which appears to be “scream a lot, be inflexible and don’t actually get anything done.” Which is a funny definition of politics, if you ask me.

* I’ve been asked what opinions I have on the Proposition 8 constitutional trial going on out there in California, and I have to say that I think my answer is fairly standard, in that I worry that taking a same-sex marriage case up to Supreme Court as currently constituted will doom same-sex couples to a much longer road to equality. But at the same time I think that if Olsen and Boies can make their case legally and intellectually, then asking the plaintiffs in this case to wait for a time more convenient from a strategy point of view in order to ask for what should morally and justly be theirs is neither moral nor just.

Basically: I worry about the timing, but then I suppose there’s never a good time for people to ask for their rights from people who don’t want them to have them. I just hope Olsen and Boies know what the Hell they’re doing.

And that’s where my brain is today.