as I live a few more questions

Second Chances: Illustrations for a Future Chapter.

I know that some of you are waiting for more chapters of Second Chances, my contribution to  Madlori's Human Interest/Two Crows Joy alternative universe.  I've been letting things percolate while I focus on Second Life, and here's something to tide you over: a couple of illustrations for a future chapter of Second Chances, when Karen, Jean-Guy and Jacqui visit Brokeback Ranch.  Click on the picture for the link to its flickr page and to see the images
full-size.

More info on Second Chances here.

Writing Second Chances

Yes, I said "writing fiction" in my previous post.  I had made an aborted attempt last year, and this year I decided to try my hand at it again.  Writing for a fan fiction community is a great way to test your writing chops.  You use existing characters from a TV show (e.g. CSI) or movie (e.g. Star Trek) or a book (e.g. Harry Potter), and it's like writing with training wheels.  You've got a built-in and appreciative audience in the fans of that particular fanfic, and you can post one chapter at a time to a community, thereby getting instant feedback.

My fiction is in the popular Brokeback Mountain slash fiction community.  It won't make a word of sense to you unless you've:

1. seen the movie Brokeback Mountain (reading Annie Proulx's original short story wouldn't hurt either); and

2. read Human Interest, MadLori's (Lori Summers' pen name on livejournal) popular "alternative universe" (AU for short) Brokeback Mountain fan fiction, which splits from the "canon" short story at the point when Jack receives notice from Ennis about his divorce, and drives up to see him.  From that point the storyline diverges, and MadLori gives us a rich, warm, detailed look at what life would have been like if Jack and Ennis had actually managed to get that "little cow 'n' calf operation".  (Note that there's a sequel to Human Interest called Two Crows Joy, which is still in progress, but you only need to have read the first story to understand my fan fiction.)

So, once you've done number 1 and number 2, you can start reading Second Chances.   Second Chances is a story which switches back and forth between three time periods:

 

1. 1963-1976 – the Brokeback Mountain short story/film canon (with a few new scenes inserted). I am using the same convention as MadLori: the storyline is exactly the same up until the point where Jack drives up to see Ennis when he receives Ennis' postcard telling him about the divorce.
2. 1976-1987 – MadLori’s Human Interest/Two Crows Joy canon (with a few new scenes inserted, and one significant storyline difference). You should have read at least Human Interest before you read this story.  This story contains spoilers for those of you who have not yet read Human Interest.  
3. 1997-2007 – the present day, where a wedding is being planned.  Perhaps more than one?

Note that my story is still in progress, but the first thirteen chapters are already up.

Second Chances Chapter 1  Chapter 2  Chapter 3  Chapter 4  Chapter 5  Chapter 6  Chapter 7  Chapter 8 Chapter 9  Chapter 10  Chapter 11  Chapter 12  Chapter 13

Future chapters will be posted to the Brokeback Moutnain Slash Fiction community on Livejournal.

I'm baaack...

...ya miss me?  ;-) 

Well, one thing I have discovered in my Internet "diet" (I won't say I was off the Internet completely, because I was checking my email and my facebook page every so often) is that, while you can certainly spend too much time on the Internet, it's also very difficult to live 100% without it nowadays.  As an example, I spent part of August writing fiction for the Brokeback Mountain fanfic community i am part of, and you would not believe how frustrating it is not to be able to quickly check some fact without the Internet handy.  For example, for one chapter I needed to understand exactly how one makes a Molotov cocktail, since one of my main characters has one thrown through her kitchen window (remember folks: conflict drives plot).

Anyways, to get the ball rolling, I wanted to highlight something that I found on my one of my favourite browse-through sites, metafilter.  A comment on a recent post about polygamous Mormons has put into writing something that I have often used in my arguments against those who want to deny same-sex marriage rights to queers because the Bible lays out the guidelines for a "traditional" marriage.  I have argued that there has NEVER been a "traditional" standard of marriage, that it has varied a lot in differnet cultures and eras, and this commenter backs my assertion up:

I'd like to point out - because I've not been given a chance to yet on metafilter - that whether you're a fundamentalist Mormon, a fundamentalist Baptist or a fundamentalist Presbyterian, there is simply no valid argument to be made for "traditional" marriage by drawing on scripture. None. Not in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. The Hebrew Bible is quite possibly the worst place to start - the language it was written in doesn't even contain a word for "wife." It has the designator "his" - as in, "his woman," even for "his first," or "his second" woman and so on. But there's no word for wife. Women are purely property - utterly in the same sense as "his oxen" or "his seventy two slaves and fourteen comely eunuchs." The New Testament is an even worse place to begin - if that's even possible - Paul sure as hell didn't want us getting married. ESPECIALLY (you can tell I'm using science) because the world was about to end - which is what most fundamentalists believe! He says, "Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife." He goes on - "Yet those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that. I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as thought they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as thought they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away."

He also states clearly that marriage is not a sin - but there are plenty of things that aren't considered sins in the Bible (drinking wine in moderation) that fundamentalists avoid.

This has always been something that bothered me.

Of course, I suppose I shouldn't look to the fundies for a bastion of clear scriptural interpretation.

So far that one comment has received an amazingly high number of "favorites" among metafilter readers; obviously it's struck a chord.

Fantasy And Reality

(click photo to see original size on Flickr)

I actually feel a little sorry for Britney Spears.  Apparently she checked into rehab in Antigua, checked herself out after less than 24 hours, flew back to the U.S., shaved her head and got a couple of tattoos.  The linked report also states that Britney landed up at L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai hospital emergency room early Saturday morning, but was discharged.

What's magnifying the situation and making it worse, is that she's a celebrity and plays out her life (and her troubles) in front of the paparazzi's cameras.   That's why I highlighted that particular, poignant quote from the gossip coverage.  Fame is a double-edged sword. 

And I wonder how long Elizabeth Arden will continue to market Britney's Midnight Fantasy, especially when the fantasy has come apart at the seams.

tonight god cut me open

 
tonight god cut me open
and i found myself inside

i stood in the holes in his feet
and we danced

i am fearfully
and wonderfully

good enough
   
   
   

Chiron, Parts 1 through 4

Here's a link to the first four parts of the Brokeback Mountain fanfiction I've been writing, called Chiron.  You'll have to read all the comments in Part 1 to figure out how it got that name.

This is the first time I have ever submitted fiction I've written to an audience.  I've received some very nice compliments, which is great since I'm such a feedback whore ;-)  And it's been interesting to actually write a story where the constraints are set in place: a person (Lureen), a place (Savannah), the previous events, etc.

You'll have to read Lori Summers' 24-part Human Interest in order for Chiron to make any sense.  Both are based in the alternate-universe (AU) she created, where Jack and Ennis get that "sweet life" Jack had dreamed about: a cow-and-calf operation in Vermont.   My story takes off from where hers ended, and follows the character of Lureen Newsome Twist in particular as she moves to a new city and copes with all the tragedies that have befallen her. 

In other words, I'm writing fanfic based on Lori's fanfic based on the Brokeback Mountain short story/movie.  How's that for obsessed?  Good thing I have LOTS of company: there are over 2,000 people in the Brokeback Wranglers community on LiveJournal, and 3,800 people in the myriad discussion forums at Dave Cullen's Ultimate Brokeback Mountain Guide.

Typedrawing

This is one seriously. cool. tool.

(Make sure you turn off pop-up blocking for this website.)

Chiron, Part 1.

This is the first time I have tried my hand at fan fiction.  I'm trying to post this to the Human Interest community on LiveJournal, since this is a Brokeback Mountain fanfic set in the Human Interest alternative-universe created by Lori Summers.  But I'm having technical troubles, so I'll save a copy here, juuust in case ;-)

Another Rilke Quote

I found this purely via serendipity, in a new e-zine about heartbreak advertised on tribe.net. But it does seem to fit where I am tonight.

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divination, perhaps we would then endure our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

(Source: Broken Heart Zine (PDF file)

Looking for source of quote...

I have recently read a great book by historical philosopher Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress.

Blurb is: In A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright shows how
our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year
experiment we unleashed but have seldom controlled. Only by
understanding the patterns of progress and disaster that humanity has
repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the
experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its
outcome.



My problem: I am searching for the source of a great quote that I had
thought was from here originally, but I've skimmed through the book
twice and not found it.  It has to with the income gap between the
richest and the poorest peoples of society, about that today's income
gap, say between any Fortune 500 CEO and a poor Haitian, is much wider
than in ancient Egypt, between the Pharaoh and a serf.  Can anyone
help me source this quote?  I've done a fair bit of hunting and
have gotten nowhere.

Here's a quote very simiar that I like from this book:

During the twentieth century, as I noted earlier in this book, the world'a population multiplied by four and the economy by more than forty. If the promise of modernity was even treading water—in other words, if the gap between rich and poor had stayed proportionally the same as it was whn Queen Victoria died—all human beings would be ten times better off. Yet the number in abject poverty today is as great as all mankind in 1901.



By the end of the twentieth century, the world's three richest individuals (all of whom were Americans) had a combined wealth greater than that of the poorest forty-eight countries. In 1998, the United Nations calculated that US$40 billion, spent carefully, could provide clean water, sanitation, and other basic needs for the poorest on earth. That figure may be optimistic, and it may have grown in the past six years. But it's considerably less than the funds already set aside for the obscenely wasteful fantasy of a missile shield that won't work, isn't needed, yet ccould provoke a new arms race and the militarization of space.

(Source. Wright, Ronald. A Shrt History of Progress, Anansi Press, 2004. Page 128)