The Pecman

Now let's see the Mac OSX list!

Very funny! Apple's stock just went way up and sales are up on everything except iPads (interestingly enough).

I didn't believe Arthur Conan-Doyle's stories about them, either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

Doh, it could've been improved by having a conventional structure and getting to the point! 40 chapters? C'mon... But it is a good idea, and I'd encourage somebody to pick it up. If they'd like some assistance kibbutzing behind the scenes, let me know. I thought of another very dramatic development: we carry the relationship of these two boys for about 2/3 of the novel... and then one of them dies! And yet the psychic connection continues... for awhile. That could be interesting.

I just read a review of a movie that I think could be the core of a good idea for a gay story. Two people, each living in radically distant parts of the United States -- say, one in Maine, and one in Nevada -- each grow up but occasionally have "phantom pain"... moments where they feel the other one's physical pain. Over time, the feelings grow more intense, and they even begin to hear voices. Could they be going mad? Their relatives are concerned, and their friends think they're strange, but the two people seem completely normal other than that. Eventually, the psychic connection becomes so strong that they're able to see what the other sees. One stands in front of a mirror and for the first time, the other sees who the first one is. They manage to get in contact with each other by phone... and the story ensues. The movie is a small indie supernatural film called In Your Eyes, and I can see it also has some vague connections to the 1970s film The Eyes of Laura Mars. Where I'd take this story is I'd write it with two young boys, maybe starting at the age of 5 or 6. One breaks his arm, and the other one immediately feels it. Similar experiences happen, and we break the segments over a period of time with other incidents happening, culminating when they're (say) 16 or 17, when the psychic connection almost becomes overpowering. Maybe it could be complicated by the fact that one boy is gay and the other is straight, but because their psychic connection is so strong, the straight boy can't help but... well, you know. Like I say, I think there's a nugget of a good story idea. God knows, I already have two novels in progress and am overwhelmed with personal grief, so I'm not the guy who could tackle it just now. But I just throw it out there as a possibility. Full review of the film here: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/your-eyes-tribeca-review-698050 Note that the film is an adult man and woman, but I think this could be altered for story purposes and still preserve the essential idea, yet make it radically different from the movie.

Great essay, Steven, and I really appreciate it that it's written from the viewpoint of somebody who's literally been there and done that. I have screamed for years that all extremist fundamentalist religions are wrong. They scared me in the 1960s, in the 1970s, and they still frighten me today. Anybody who immediately says, "my religion is right, therefore if you believe differently, you're wrong" is an F'in' asshole. I can't for the life of me understand why people don't have a "live and let live" philosophy, provided nobody's being hurt, nobody's being victimized, and people have basic human freedoms. I do agree that it's amazing to see how much American pop culture has spread to other parts of the world. It's amazing to me to be in a taxi cab halfway across the world and hear Justin Bieber on a foreign-language radio station. Maybe you're right: maybe young people will eventually embrace a more enlightened way of life and reject the repressive history of their parents. I just wish they'd hurry the F up.

I also fear this is happening, and I'm baffled why people would move to an entirely new country and embrace the idea of assimilating: learn the language, understand the customs, and fit in. That doesn't mean you have to leave your old culture behind, but I definitely believe it means following the laws and freedoms of that country. And that particularly includes freedom of religion. I'm perfectly willing for people to follow any religion they want, but I get very angry when they start to impose those beliefs on me.

Howard Stern played portions of a lecture by Franklin Graham (son of the famous evangelist) where he railed against gay people getting the right to marry. The minister went on and on and on about how gay people could never procreate, and I thought, "well, I know several gay people who managed to have children by using a surrogate, and others who were able to adopt, and their kids were raised just fine." 90% of his argument hinged around the fact that gay people cannot physically reproduce and have children between themselves. Stern was outraged, and so was I. You gotta wonder if Graham's ire would also extend to straight couples who deliberately choose not to have children, or straight couples who can't have children for medical reasons. Couples like that are clearly having sex for non-procreation reasons. These religious nuts seem unable to grasp that it's possible for gay people to raise children and give them a sense of morality, with or without the church. Ironically, all five or six of the gay couples I know who've raised children have straight kids. Go figure. So any theories about molestation or recruiting or any of that crap is all bunk. It's the person who determines how good or moral they are... not their sexual identity.

Ugly typesetting and layout, too. Appropriate for ugly writing.

Man, the effort to legalize gay marriage goes back a lot earlier than 2008, which is where this author started her history. It's ludicrous to believe she's told the whole story. I can remember protesters in the Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood going back to the early 1980s asking for the right to marry.

God, I did that for 15 years, because my best friend from Florida drank Mountain Dew by the case. I eventually stopped it because my doctor said I was killing myself with the caffeine. I used to do what I called "a poor man's Speedball," which was Mountain Dew + a Vivarin. Kept me going for hours, working on bad TV shows late at night. You want unusual tea, try it in Asia. I had quite a bit of it in Japan, and they like it very weak there, served in special ceramic cups, all done in a very special ceremonial way. They seemed to frown on tea & sugar, so I just had it straight and put up with it. I suspect I'm more a coffee guy, but I don't even do that very much.

One clever thing they do in a lot of American network TV shows is they name a real town and a real street, only they give an address number that doesn't exist. I once worked on a police show where they said "4500 Ventura Blvd.," and we all laughed because we knew there was no such address. (I think it starts above "9000.") So it's kinda real, only it's not precisely real. It's rare I give an exact address in a novel, but I might give intersections; I think it's a writers' choice as to whether they want to pick two streets who really intersect or make it up. In LA, if you were to say, "oh, it's near the intersection of La Cienega and Ventura Boulevard," that would be hilarious since they're about 10 miles apart and never really meet. In San Francisco, you could say "meet me on the corner of Market Street and Mission," and that would be equally wacky since they parallel. Or you could combine one real street with a fake street. "It's on Market Street right where it meets Hilliard Avenue"... and there is no such place, but at least that wouldn't knock readers out of their chairs. I also know of situations where a screenwriter picked a peculiar name out of a phone book (like "Schnedelooper"), but if the show is set in (say) Indianapolis, they'll make sure nobody has that specific name in the city. If it's a very common name, like "Phil Smith," there's bound to be 40 of them in that city so it's doubtful anybody could sue. I like the idea of putting as much real stuff as I can in a story. I kind of wince when I read online fiction where the setting is so vague, we don't know if it's East coast, West coast, the South, the midwest, or wherever. Coming from a journalistic side, I want more specifics, so I can relate to the exact time, exact date, and exact place of where the characters and story are. It doesn't necessarily have to be a real town -- they could say, "it's a suburban neighborhood about half an hour south of Chicago," or "it's a sleepy little town on the West coast of Florida" -- but at least I have a sense of where it is. All of that makes it much more real to me. And if they turn on the TV and see Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News, or they watch Anderson Cooper on CNN, I feel like the story is happening in the same world I live in. If it's "Joe Blow on World Cable News," I'm immediately reminded that the story is fake. But... maybe that's just me.

J.K. Rowling was once asked about the gay fan fiction about her Harry Potter characters, and she kind of shrugged and said, "what are you going to do?" She acknowledged that if it was just sitting on a website, it'd be hard to go after the thousands and thousands of people writing amateur fiction based on her work. But Rowling famously did sue a website owner who published the contents of his website as a printed book, and she won big-time on that. She's adamant on maintaining print rights of anything that specifically derives from her work. And yet... you can go on Amazon and see dozens of fan indexes, criticisms, and analyses of the world of Harry Potter in print form. The line between fair use and copyright infringement is blurry, especially with fictional characters. I think with real-world celebrities, it's more cut and dry, but I think making them a key character in anybody's story is a bad idea and not a good precedent. Although... I'm currently writing a historical novel that will have some extremely famous (dead) celebrities in it. My take is, after 150 years, there's nothing they can do. Plus, I'm not having the historical characters do anything they didn't do for real in their time.

Good exception! That's an excellent observation, Graeme. And I would also add that American race car driving has had women drivers on the track (some of whom are very good), if you consider that kind of a sport. I'm not sure why they won't let a woman on a college baseball or pro baseball team, because -- theoretically -- it's a non-contact sport. And I bet there are women who could qualify. I've always been 100% for the Equal Rights Amendment, and I've been sad that after all these years, it's still never been passed, mainly because of these complex legal issues and fear about lawsuits. But I think everybody should be given a fair shake, within reason, and while I might balk at a 120-pound girl wrestling a 200-pound boy, I'd have to think about whether a 120-pound girl wrestling a 120-pound boy was inherently wrong. Same thing with boxing. Very complicated issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment

I think that's covered under the rules of satire, which did go all the way to the Supreme Court (the famous Mad Magazine case on "Superduper Man"). Mad won that one, on the basis that no reader would ever mistake a comical Superduperman for the DC Comics superhero. I think Disney has also lost some lawsuits on people clearly making fun of Mickey Mouse, but calling him a slightly different name. But a novel is not necessarily satire, so that could get into dangerous territory. My take (and the above links seem to agree) that if you keep the use of a famous person very limited and don't have them speak more than a few sentences, and keep it non-controversial, nobody's going to care. If you have a scene where Donald Trump has graphic sex with a llama, then that could be a problem. If you called him Tonald Dump, you might be safe. But then again, maybe not. My partner the attorney says, "free legal advice is worth what you pay for it."

Read faster!

I grew up in Tampa, where the common request would be "gimme an RC-Co-Cola and a Moom' Pah!" It's true that in parts of the South, all soft drinks are referred to as "Cokes." Often the waitress would ask, "y'all want a Coke? What kind?"

I think equality is equality. If a girl can qualify for a boys' team, then I don't have a problem with it. And most schools still have separate locker rooms and showers for different sexes, so I think that's kosher. I think there are some sports where it could be an issue, like wrestling. But baseball and basketball... no problem. I would be nervous about the potential liability if a 120-lb. girl were tackled by a 200-lb. linebacker on the football team. On the other hand: the Olympics still won't let men and women compete against each other in their sporting events, so I can see the logistical argument against it. And again, trying to qualify is the killer: men's times in racing events are almost always significantly faster than women (running, swimming, etc.).

But I again ask: how was Tom Clancy able to publish Patriot Games in 50 countries around the world? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_games I think there's such a thing as being over-cautious, and nobody is going to sue you for online fiction if their appearance in the book is clearly Fair Use. For example, if a character turns on the TV and Barack Obama is giving a speech, is that really going to be an issue? On the other hand, if you wrote a novel where a fictional character decided to murder the President and you provided lots and lots of exposition, dialogue, and details on how it was done, then I think some could construe this as a threat. But that's not the same thing as having a very minor background character deliver a couple of lines. On the third hand: J.K. Rowling created a fictional Prime Minister in her final Harry Potter book, and all the UK government officials mentioned are all invented. Here's a couple of good essays on the pros and cons of using real people in your novels: http://litreactor.com/columns/keeping-it-real-a-rough-guide-to-using-real-people-as-fictional-characters http://www.rightsofwriters.com/2010/12/could-i-be-liable-for-libel-in-fiction.html http://www.fictionaddiction.net/Ask-the-Expert/real-names-fiction.html The upshot is that it's much more dangerous to use private individuals as characters in your work, since they're not public figures. Whenever I've done that, I've changed the names, altered physical characteristics, and combined certain aspects with other people so they're pretty much unrecognizable. At best, the characters are an amalgam of several different people, to the point where nobody would know who inspired them but me. But if somebody turned on the radio and heard The Beatles, it's actually that group on the radio. There's no risk of the Beatles suing me. (Although... quoting from the lyrics is technically a copyright infringement if done without permission, but that's another problem.)

I believe your professor is mistaken. Again, go back and look at the books I've referenced, and you'll see that it can be done. In truth, though, nothing can stop you from being sued... but the question is whether they really want to go to that trouble. And if it's just online fiction, posted for free, nobody cares. The only possible exception there might be plagiarism or libel, but those are very separate issues.

Standard American book disclaimer: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. All trademarks and copyrighted material mentioned are the property of their respective owners; no infringement is intended or should be inferred. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Having said that... if anybody wants to sue you, they can, but it's tough to prove damages. If you wrote a book and made it entirely a story about a famous person doing things they would never do (or maybe even things they would do), that person could in theory sue you for trying to make money off their name. Same thing if you tried to publish a novel featuring -- as one example -- the Star Trek characters. Fan fiction is tolerated to a point; even Lucasfilm gave up trying to chase down all the fans who wrote their own Star Wars stories, and basically said "you can do it as long as it's not done commercially or for profit."

This is one flaw with Cloud storage: what if the cloud evaporates? On the other hand: I just bought a new Mac last week, and damned if it didn't know all my favorite websites, bring over a bunch of files, and do all kinds of stuff saving me time... because it was all in the Cloud. So there are some benefits, assuming Apple doesn't go bankrupt anytime soon.

GREAT start. Sincere congrats to Free Thinker!

I don't think there's a problem when you take a celebrity of some kind -- TV figure, sports star, politician, singer, whatever -- and make them a minor background character. The problem is if they interact with your characters and actually become part of the story... which Tom Clancey clearly did with Prince Charles. Since the book sold around the world (including England and Australia), I'm inclined to think it's OK in this context. Me personally, I would be reluctant to do anything more than make a living person just a very minor background character who has two or three lines. Then again, there's Stephen King, who made himself a pivotal character in book 6 of The Dark Tower, to the point where a significant character sacrifices his life saving King! But at least in this case, King didn't have to pay himself royalties.

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