Demo of The Digital Storm Podcast

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The podcasting network Radiotopia (home of great shows like The Allusionist and 99% Invisible), is hosting a contest (the Podquest) to find another show for their network. Great timing, Radiotopia, because I've been writing the script for a new podcast since July of last year, and I plan to release it this summer. Here's the two minute demo of The Digital Storm. (I went a little over, so I hope I'll hook them enough to have them listen for a few seconds beyond the 2 minute mark). Check it out and let me know what you think!

Want an update when the show becomes available?

Stop It! There Is No Such Thing as 2nd Person Narration

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First, let’s stipulate that it is a marvelous time to be a writer. All kind of walls are crumbling. We can create online communities with writers around the world, follow and interact with our literary heroes on twitter, circumvent the traditional publishing structure (or weave in and out as it suits us), and take advantage of lowering barriers of entry in other media to get our writing more easily turned into audiobooks, indie films, graphic novels, and more. Writing is flourishing within genres, too. It’s tempting to think all the rules can suddenly be broken...

But they can’t. So please, as you head off to that writer’s conference or polish that query letter, save yourself from a tiny bit of embarrassment and save me from having an embolism.

There is no such thing as “2nd Person Narration.”

There is no. Such. Thing. As “2nd Person Narration.”

I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard writers say things like, “Oh, I like to experiment in my writing. I write in various tenses. I write in different genres. I write in 1st person and 3rd person and sometimes in 2nd person…” I start off by nodding, then getting excited because I think I’ve found kindred souls who don’t limit themselves to just one kind of writing. And then, when they say “2nd person,”  I tackle them and start strangling them, shaking their heads back and forth while I scream, “Shut up! Liar! You cannot defy basic laws of physics or tear the fabric of reality!” Okay, I’ve never actually strangled anyone in my life, nor have I ever met anyone who I thought deserved it, but the 2nd person thing makes me reconsider. In order to keep my hands off of other people’s necks and keep myself out of prison, I thought I’d explain this calmly and clearly. Later, I can point people to this explanation. Insulting? Perhaps. Pedantic? Certainly. But more civilized than strangling!

1st Person

I know this is review for all you writers out there, but just in case you missed it at some point, the terms “1st Person” and “3rd Person” are used to identify the point of view of the narrator who is telling the story. The analogy I always use for my students is that of video games. As they are experiencing the story, from whose perspective do they experience the action?

If a game like Halo were turned into prose, my students all recognize that they would describe this scene by writing, “I point my rifle at the aliens.” I. That’s the key to understanding perspective. Look to the pronouns.

“1st Person” and “3rd Person” are references to the way linguists categorize pronouns. 1st person pronouns are all the ones that I might use to replace my own name or the names of groups to which I am a member. I, me, my, mine, myself, we, us, our, ours, ourselves. Consequently, a story is written in the 1st person if the narrator is also a character in the story (or multiple characters, like a Greek chorus).

If the narrator says, “I”, even once, it’s written in 1st person. The narrative voice has injected itself into the story. The narrator is now a character.

Most of the time, it’s very easy to tell if a book is in 1st person, especially when the protagonist lets us know that she is telling her own story. Katniss Everdeen starts off The Hunger Games by telling us “When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold.” Even when the character is not the primary protagonist, he often makes his presence known right off the bat. The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway immediately lets us know that book is in 1st person, too: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” The first sentence has three of the 1st person singular pronouns already!   

Not all novels are quite that clear. C.S. Lewis, in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, plays with this convention to create a kind of intimacy, as though the character telling us the story is barely there in the story at all, but exists as the identifiable storyteller who sits us on his knee and recounts the tale. While the narrator hides through almost the whole story, he sometimes slips. For example, when the narrator is describing the house that contains the titular wardrobe, he writes, “It was the sort of house that is mentioned in guide books and even in histories; and well it might be, for all manner of stories were told about it, some of them even stranger than the one I am telling you now.” See what he did there? Dostoyevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, plays with first person narration in a similar way; the narrator will relate characters innermost thoughts, then reveal that he was present when events occurred. (This characteristic of playing with perspective is called “polyphony.”) Still, if the book must be categorized as a whole, it’s written in 1st person. And even when the perspective shifts, it never shifts into 2nd Person because THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS 2ND PERSON NARRATION.

3rd Person

If a story told in 1st person is a story told by a character in that story, a story in 3rd person is one told by a voice that is not coming from a participant in the action. I tell my students that this is the disembodied VOICE OF GOD because that’s empowering; they too can take on this voice and decide exactly what occurs in a universe of their own creation. On a more mundane, day-to-day basis, we experience this 3rd person voice when we pick up a newspaper or a magazine and the reporter adopts this distance to creation the illusion of objectivity. She’s calling attention to the facts by deflecting attention from herself. It’s a combination of Joe Friday’s “Just the facts, ma’am” and The Wizard of Oz’s “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

There’s a marvelously subtle deception going on in any story told in 3rd person, the same kind of slight-of-hand that is the root of all good magic tricks. The writer calls our attention to the characters, the setting, the action, and pretends the narrative voice isn’t making choices about what to reveal and what to hide. This is effective precisely because it’s difficult to attribute choices to an entity that seems to have no identity. Your invisible narrator knows what Keyser Soze knew: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

There are two variations on this trick. One is to create maximum distance between the narrative voice and the characters. If the narrator is aware of things going on in multiple locations simultaneously, it must be greater than we mere mortals, right? So it gains a speacial measure of authority. Similarly, if the narrator knows what multiple characters are thinking, it must possess an incredibly powerful form of telepathy. Who am I to question a being who can know what’s going in everywhere, and who knows what everyone is thinking? It must be telling the story perfectly! This narrative trick is accomplished through the use of 3rd Person Omniscient narration. It also has its video game analog:

In prose form, my students would describe this action differently than 1st person narration. “The tank is firing on the aliens. The soldiers are running over to assist in the attack. They are unaware of it, but, far off in the distance, a large alien ship is walking towards them.” Just as 1st person pronouns (I, me, my, mine, myself, we, us, our, ours, ourselves) are the clues that identify 1st person narration, there are clues that identify 3rd person omniscient narration, but they aren’t pronouns. Instead, they are words and phrases that reveal how much more the narrator knows than the characters. These are words and phrases like “meanwhile,” “unbeknownst,” and “little did he know.” Unless the narrative voice goes out of its way, sometimes twisting itself into knots, to let the reader know how it later became aware of a particular detail because it is, in fact, a character in the story, then these words reveal that the narrator is all-knowing (at least in the universe of the story).

There’s a compromise position between 3rd person omniscient narration and 1st person narration, but it isn’t 2nd person. (Why not? Because there is no such thing as “2nd Person Narration.”) Instead of a narrator who obviously reveals that it is aware of everything, a writer can choose to place that narrator very close to a single character. This is a compromise position, and, like all compromises, it has advantages and disadvantages related to the original polar options. Unlike 3rd person omniscient, our limited narrator can’t tell the reader all the characters’ thoughts, or tell us what is going on in distant locations. Instead, the narrative voice can create a special kind of intimacy with the character it follows while still allowing the reader to learn about that person from the outside. J.K. Rowling uses 3rd person limited narration (almost exclusively) in the Harry Potter series because she wants us to focus on Harry’s experience of the events but also needs to be able to tell us when Harry is being fooled or is fooling himself. The later is particularly difficult in 1st person narration. Characters can’t freely admit when they are deceiving themselves because, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein correctly pointed out, “If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.” In other words, we do not have the necessary language to express that we currently believe something which we know to be untrue. No language develops that particular conjugation of a word, because it’s a concept we have no need to express since we can’t think it in the first place. Consequently, it’s much easier for J.K. Rowling to tell us what Harry Potter looks like because her narrative voice is slightly outside of him, so she can simply and clearly describe his unruly hair and his lightning scar. Suzanne Collins has a much more challenging task when describing what Katniss Everdeen looks like because Katniss is deceiving herself about it. Katniss cannot say, “I am beautiful, but I do not know I am beautiful, so I think I look plain.” We have to discover that Katniss is incorrect via the incongruous reactions other characters have to her supposed plainness.

There’s a video game version of 3rd person limited narration, too:

If my students were describing this scene in prose, they would still use the same kind of 3rd person pronouns they would use when writing about the view from the sky, but this time they would find themselves using “he” (or “she” if the armored character in the foreground is female) a lot more frequently. “The character in blue aims the chaingun at the rocks ahead of him.” It’s still using third person pronouns, but we, as readers, feel like we’re on one particular character’s side. Notice, he isn’t “I.” He’s “he.” But because of the limitation of the narrative voice, I’m biased towards him.

 2nd Person

There are 2nd person pronouns. You use them every day. They are you, your, your, yourself, you, your, yours, yourselves. (Why the repetition? Because, in English, we use the same pronoun for both a single you and a plural group of you.) Do “you” have a perspective, a point-of-view? Certainly. Can “you” tell a story? Of course. But can you tell it in 2nd person narration? Absolutely not. This isn’t because you lack skill as a writer. The greatest writer in the world couldn’t pull off this trick. As soon as “you” tell the story, “you” aren’t telling it in 2nd person. You would never describe your experience, say, going to the beach, and say, “You went to the beach.” You would say, “I went to the beach.”

You might tell me a story about a friend, but you wouldn't describe her as “you.” You’d say, “She went to the beach.”

You could tell me about my own actions, but that wouldn’t be my point of view. You could say, “You were driving too fast.”

I might reply, “I’m sorry, Officer.”

But when you continued, “I’m going to have to give you a ticket,” that would not be my perspective. I don’t want that ticket. That’s your perspective!

When people argue that they do, in fact, write in 2nd Person, they generally bring up two examples. One is a novel composed of letters (these are called epistolary novels). I guess they are under the misconception that, because the novel is not written from a single perspective. 1st Person plus 1st Person equals 2nd Person. I see the attraction of this kind of mathematical reasoning, but it’s incorrect. 1 apple plus 1 apple might make 2 apples, but no matter how many you put together, you still have apples. At no point do crates full of apples become unicorns or leprechauns. Unicorns and leprechauns are more likely to exist than 2nd person narration.

The other example I hear are stories in which “you” are the protagonist. These kinds of books do exist. I loved “Choose Your Own Adventure” when I was little. There are books wherein you are the protagonist which are targeted towards adults, too. Here’s the rub; you might be the protagonist, but you aren’t the narrator. Of course someone else is the writer. But these books have a narrative voice that should be distinguished from the writers. Some voice is telling you what you did, or what you are doing, or what you might choose to do, and that voice then tells you what happens to you as a consequence. In Choose Your Own Adventure books, you get to be the hero. That’s the fun! You even get to make choices as though you were the hero. But you don’t get to be the hero and the storyteller. Those books have a 3rd person narrator, and it tells you what happens to you. It. Not you.

If a nameless, disembodied voice tells you a story, that’s 3rd Person.

If I tell a story to you, that’s 1st Person from my perspective.

If you tell a story to me, that’s 1st Person from your perspective.

I have tried to imagine how a 2nd Person book would look. I thought it might be one in which all the pages were perfect mirrors, and the cover bore the title, “Tell a Story to This Book.” I suppose, in that case, the book itself might technically be considered a book of 2nd Person narration.

But the story you told it would not be.

 

 

Poem: "For a Friend of Mine"

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I wrote this for a friend who has been going through a rough time but is coming through it in a way I find admirable. She's an inspiration in more ways than one. She said I could post it. I'll bet many of us have friends like my speedometer!

For a Friend of Mine

 

My speedometer was broken

    is broken

         but less so.

 

When I drive at high speeds

 

    it sticks

         accelerating higher

              and higher

until it says I'm going 150 miles per hour

    even when the car is stopped.

 

But if I wait until the next day,

 

    it does come down

         just a bit

and after a week of

    low-speed days

it's back to

    working.

 

The repairman said he could fix it

 

    for slightly more

         than the car is worth.

 

I'll have to get a new one

 

    (speedometer or car.

         Haven't decided.)

but in the meantime,

 

I'm enjoying

 

    traveling in a metaphor

         for a friend of mine

              who was also broken

                   and gets a little more fixed

                        each day she starts.

 

New Cover Contest: We Have a Winner!

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Back in August, I announced that Not a Pipe Publishing would be holding a contest to seek a new cover for my novel Corporate High School.  Three finalists were selected, and in January, the voting opened. It closed at midnight tonight. I'm pleased to announce we have a winner! The beautiful submissions by Brittney Nikkole Bettles and Sannel Larson both had strong showings and garnered very close vote totals, but the winner by a healthy margin was...

Anna Martin with this submission:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to Anna. Thanks to Sannel, Brittney, and all the other people who submitted. I'd also like to thank the people who gave additional feedback about the cover. I'll be taking those suggestions into account as I work with Anna to finalize the design and get the new cover ready over the next month. Thank you all so much for your support with this project!

 

Some Obama-Hater Keeps Daring Me to ...What?

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Today on twitter, I saw someone post a link to a letter that was supposedly by Clint Eastwood. The letter immediately seemed fishy due to the last paragraph which is just a litany of childish name-calling that I found to be beneath Mr. Eastwood. I don't know the guy personally, but Eastwood has always struck me as someone who is intelligent and thoughtful, not foolish or childish. So I took the two seconds necessary to find out that the letter is a fake. Big deal, right? Someone posted something that was false on the internet. Let it go. But I freely admit that I've made that mistake before (more than once), and I genuinely appreciated it when friends poited out that the attributions were incorrect, so I thought maybe I would be doing this person a favor by letting him know. If not, who cares? He gets to hold on to his belief that it's the real deal, and I move on with my life unscathed.  

So I let him know. I was pleased that the gentlemen didn't try to persevere in the illusion that the letter was actually written by Eastwood. But he held on to the sentiment of the letter. Again, that's fine. When I've been duped by a false meme, I did so because I agreed with the quote and was flattered by the false notion that some person I respect had voiced the opinion. When I was shown I was wrong about the attribution, I was disappointed, but it didn't alter my admiration for the sentiment. I just felt like a boob for being too lazy to double check the attribution.

Here's where it gets weird and noteworthy, though. The poster didn't just double-down on his agreement with the sentiment expressed in the string of vitriol. He continued to tweet at me, challenging me to "address the argument." "Lemme know when you work up the nerve to address the argument," he tweeted. And, "It's still a devastating argument the Constitution haters won't like. Or dare address." And, "You didn't dare address it. " Are you sensing a theme?

I feel a bit like Marty McFly taking the bait because he keeps calling me "chicken," but the fact is I CAN'T address the argument because there isn't one. It’s not an argument that can be refuted because it’s not an argument at all. It’s barely a series of assertions.

The letter is structured like a joke. There’s a set-up in which this not-really-Clint-Eastwood writer starts with some heartwarming pablum about facing your mortality and caring for your family, and then there’s a pivot about doing your friends and family a favor by letting them know where you stand, and then a punchline:

“So, just in case I'm gone tomorrow, please know this ...

“I voted against that incompetent, lying, flip-flopping, insincere, double-talking, radical socialist, terrorist excusing, bleeding heart, narcissistic, scientific and economic moron currently in the White House!”

Ha! So funny! See? You didn’t think it would go there, and then it did. It’s a riot.

But it’s not an argument any more than your average “Your mama is so fat” joke. Demanding a rational response is like saying, “Nanny nanny boo boo, stick your head in doo doo. Now I dare you to address that!” Address what? It’s just name calling.

I’m guessing the guy posting to my twitter feed wants me to take on the names one by one (or else I’m a “Constitution hater”). Sorry, buddy. I don’t owe you that. I think the charges are wrong, but so what? The President is the President. This tweeter can think the President is all those things and a lot worse, and, if he is a Constitution lover instead of a Constitution hater, then he knows he has the right to voice his opinion, and that’s about it. The President will still be the President. The tweeter can follow the letter’s advice and let his friends know where he stands, but then he’ll just be another guy who doesn’t like a particular politician. Big whoop.

I’ve repeatedly asked, honestly and openly, for an explanation for the level of vitriol this President receives from his critics. I received explanations ranging from a faux-Presidential seal some supporter made that was somehow proof of the President’s arrogance, to that misguided sting operation that allowed some guns to get into the hands of Mexican drug dealers (an operation conceived and carried out by some low-level DEA agents, not by some nefarious Presidential plan), to a ham-fisted PR spin on an terrorist attack in Benghazi. Oh, and President Obama uses executive orders when Congress won’t do its job, though about half as many as Bush and Reagan. And he pushed people into the private, capitalist insurance markets in order to get healthcare to some 15 million uninsured people, and that somehow makes him a socialist because, I guess, socialists now make people participate in capitalism rather than waiting to go to emergency rooms and not paying for it. That’s what socialism has come to; paying private companies for goods and services. Obama is also the “Confiscator-in-Chief” because ...well, he hasn’t confiscated a single gun from a law-abiding gun owner, but some folks are damned sure he’d gonna at some point. He’s letting in all the illegal immigrants ...except that the number of illegal immigrants living in the US is actually going down. He’s ruining our economy and giving all our economic power to China ...except that we’ve had nearly continuous growth during his presidency while China’s economy is currently tanking. He did give a speech in Egypt where he admitted that the US government hasn’t always done the right things. That was called an apology tour because ...what? Because he’s supposed to bolster our image by lying and claiming the US government has never done anything wrong? I guess only conservatives are allowed to badmouth the federal government. When a liberal does it, it suddenly becomes unpatriotic.

I still haven’t heard a satisfactory explanation for the degree of hatred. I’m still trying to figure out a way to explain it that doesn’t involve dismissing the President’s most vitriolic critics as racists or tribalists who see the very same thing done by a white, professed conservative and a black, professed liberal and freak out about one and not the other. Some DEA agents give a few guns to Mexican drug dealers and it’s proof that the President is incompetent. Reagan’s administration gave and/or sold weapons to Iran, Iraq, and the Taliban. Many of those same guns were later turned on our own soldiers. But Operation Fast and Furios is the bigger outrage? Benghazi was insufficiently defended and the administration tried to blame the attack on a video before they knew the real cause. Our own homeland was insufficiently defended on 9/11, and the Bush administration tried to blame it on the wrong country long after they knew better, causing an unnecessary war and thousands of American deaths, but Benghazi is the scandal that we’re supposed to be worried about?

I just don’t get it. I know. I know. “Lib-tard.” “Drinking the Kool-Aid.” I’ve heard all that before. What I haven’t heard is an explanation that has much more substance than this supposed argument penned by not-Clint-Eastwood. I have more specific criticisms of this President than my conservative friends do ( 1. The ACA isn’t socialist enough. 2. “Race to the Top has been terrible for public schools. 3. Not prosecuting Wall Street crooks was a mistake, and 4. So was not going after the people who ordered illegal torture after 9/11), but I’m not the one screaming online about how the President is ruining the country.

So, to my new twitter friend, I will dare to address your argument as soon as you dare to make one. Use a specific example. Cite a source. But if your “argument” is that President Obama is a secret Kenyan, secret Muslim, secret atheist, secret Black Nationalist, secret communist, secret alien, secret lizard-person, secret head of the Illuminati, secret anti-Christ, will you please keep your theory a secret? You are not-so-secretly revealing a lot more about yourself than about the President of the United States.

 

Help Me Plan my 39th Year!

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[Editor's Note, 1/7/2016: As pointed out by keen-eyed Craig Hirt, Benjamin Gorman turned 39 and therefore can't plan his 39th year. Years don't work that way. His 39th year is done. He needs help planning his 40th year leading up to his 40th birthday. So thanks a freakin' lot for pointing that one out, Craig!]

First, I'd like to thank you for the birthday well-wishes:

So I'm turning 39. I'm not sure how I feel about that. My thirties have been pretty cool, over all, but there have been a few hiccups, so it's entirely possible my forties will be even better. As I wrap up my thirties, I'd like to get some help from you, my friends, regarding how best to finish out this decade and start the next. So, in the comments section below, if you are fewer than 39 years old, please write something you would like to accomplish before you turn 40. If you are more than 40 years old, please write something you wish you'd done in your thirties. Regardless of your age, write down your idea for the ideal fortieth birthday party (I have a year to plan it!).  Let the fun begin! 

Vote for the New Cover of Corporate High School

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As described here previously, Not a Pipe Publishing has been holding a contest for the cover art of the forthcoming second edition of Corporate High School.  We've been accepting submissions since August and have even extended the deadline (accidentally), so the period of public voting will begin on New Year's Day and continue until midnight on Friday, January 15th.  You may vote once a day for only one of the cover designs (as there can be only one winner), but please feel free to chime in in the comments section below if you have ideas about how the different artists' work might be mixed or modified in some way. Before the votes are even cast, I want to thank all the folks who submitted. Here are the finalists:

Anna Martin's submission: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brittney Nikkole Bettles' submission:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sannel Larson's submission:

Get your copy of the first edition of Corporate High School on Amazon here.

A Bit of Arithmetic for Gentiles

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2016 is almost upon us. Or most of us. Most of you, anyway.

I've always measured my life by the Gregorian calendar like just about everyone else I know. However, over the course the last few months of 2015 (mid-5776) I've been learning a bit about my Jewish heritage. I'm a quarter Jewish. My (obviously also quarter Jewish) brother's (100%) gentile wife got excited about helping my nieces learn about their father's heritage, and her enthusiasm has been infectious in that it got me curious, too. (I think my brother has remained largely immune.) So, as we come up on the Gregorian New Year, I'm looking at it in a new way. 

I'm only 25% God's Chosen. That's something I have to live with. But when it comes to the year, I think it means I am celebrating a new year differently than most people.  

2016 times .75 =  1512

5776 times .25 = 1444

That's right, my 100% goy friends. Tomorrow I'll be celebrating the beginning of the year 2956.

To my brother, Happy 2956, Joe! Unless our cousin, Rachel, is part Jewish on her mom's side, Happy 2956 to Rachel, too! 

As I mentioned, my sister-in-law, Patti, just gets plain old 2016. My sister, Jill, and my wife, Paige, are both adopted, so they get to celebrate 2016x, with x being the variable quantity of Jewish/Islamic/Chinese/Japanese/Old Icelandic/Hindu/Coptic/Zoroastrian they might be able to claim. 

My dad and my uncles get to celebrate a different year.

2016 times .5 = 1008

5776 times .5 = 2888

Happy 3896 to Steve, Doug, and Jeff! Cheers/Lechaim!

Now, I understand that, for this to mean anything, it has to have real world consequences. So, I pledge to only drink 75% as much as your average gentile on Gregorian New Year's Eve. And then, at sundown on October 2nd of 2016, I'll only drink 25% as much as much as your average Jew for Rosh Hashanah as I ring in the year 2956.25! 

 Do Jews drink at all at Rosh Hashanah? I clearly have a lot more to learn.