A couple of nights ago I caught most of Philadelphia, from the point where Andrew excuses himself to go vomit in the bathroom and ends up in the hospital to the freeze frame of the home video from his childhood.

I was very moved. I cried. Not great sobbing gouts of tears or anything, just a quiet happy-sad little trickle from both eyes and a short little catch in the throat.

The value of a film like Philadelphia, a toned-down mainstream look at an alternative lifestyle, is that it forces us to see the adherents of that lifestyle as people like us. They have hearts that can be wounded and broken. They have families that love them and whom they love. They have friends they care about and who care about them. They have their loyalties and disloyalties, their heroisms and betrayals. From a distance, in the words of the song, they are pretty much like everybody else. They just dress differently, eat different food, have sex with a different gender.

That's one side of a very valuable coin.

The film makes a point, through the person of Andrew's lawyer, Joe, of bringing up mainstream objections to homosexuality and neatly disposing of them. Joe, like the mainstream viewer, comes to see homosexuals as people, not problems, people with hopes, dreams and needs, people with lives they deserve and have the right to keep, people with secrets they have the right to keep. We rejoice with Andrew in his victorious bid against callous, abusive prejudice. We grieve with Andrew over the loss of his life, both physical and social. We laugh and cry with his family over the antics of a curly-haired little angel as he plays on the beach with his siblings and drags a heavy picnic basket to the porch steps. The film draws out our sympathies–and rightly so.

The film also makes a point of showing us a member of a recently abused and maligned minority in a position of unchallenged power and authority. The message here is that the still feared and suppressed sexual minority deserves the same acceptance and assimilation as the mainstream now cherishes for the once despised and oppressed racial minority.

The film likewise draws a distinction between moral and legal attitudes toward homosexuals. Joe's opening address to the jury asks them, and through them the mainstream viewer, to remember that what matters in the courtroom is not morality, but law. It is a question of the legal, not moral, code whether Andrew Beckett was wrongully dismissed. It is a question of the legal, not moral, code whether homosexuals may occupy positions of influence in our communities, from the highest offices of government to the lowest offices of education.

That's where it gets tricky. It's easy for me to accept that some people desire or need to be actively homosexual. But I get uneasy when personal active homosexuality breaks down the bedroom door from the inside and becomes public homosexual activism. This is the point that Joe attempts to make when propositioned in the drugstore. It's one thing to be yourself. It's another to shove your individualism in other people's faces. Put another way, it's one thing to come out of your closet and quite another to walk into mine. Or my children's.

People like me are in something of a bind. We are educated intellectuals (that is not redundant), liberal in outlook, conservative in lifestyle, morally religious, professionally secular. We see homosexuality as a sin, not a crime; as not a crime, and yet a sin. We believe, as Joe declares, that all men (read humans) are created (or evolved) equal, whatever their sexual orientation, and that most things in life have nothing to do with sexual orientation. We wish to see everybody free, happy and fulfilled. We try to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves". But being wise as serpents, we know that people affect each other, even without trying, and that not all effects are good (read desirable, positive, expedient).

The law reflects our tolerances, not our morals. That is, it directly reflects our tolerances and only indirectly reflects our morals. We are generally happy to tolerate diversity "out there", but we are occasionally loathe to admit it "in here"–and rightly so.

You may read the word rightly in two ways: right as in correct and right as in having a prerogative. If I do not wish to raise my children with the notion that homosexuality is a viable option, equal in physiological naturalness and social value to heterosexuality, is that not my right as a father? What I would do if one of my children chose to experiment with homosexuality or pursue a homosexual lifestyle is another matter and a very complex one that I'll address below. For the moment, I am concerned with my "natural" and "socially sanctioned" responsibility to nurture and socialize minors. If I am to socialize them, I must teach them values. What values shall I teach them and what weight shall I give to those values? How far shall I go to reinforce, or even enforce, those values?

To be continued

For discussion of a related issue, see A Clairvoyant Selfportrait of the Artist as a Published Author. See also the story A Dream of Fortune/The Fate of Meteors.

It's been a good month for spookers. Just yesterday, sitting and standing in my morning writing class, I started developing, out of the blue, it seemed, a new one about a mixed-race family stuck in the mountains of central Taiwan with a family of crash victims. It uses the idea of "hungry ghosts", spirits looking for new bodies. I kid you not: some people around here are afraid to go anywhere near a lying in state in case the departed's spirit is on the prowl for new digs. In two or three free moments, I jotted down the first three or four paragraphs. Before bed, though deadly tired, I wrote out the last two paragraphs.

The premise is that the husband/father in the family group, being a Westerner and no believer in ghosts, is entirely unaffected by the activities of the dead in Taiwan, but his wife and children are very directly affected. I don't want to spoil it for you, so I'll say no more, even though I believe a really well conceived and constructed story can easily stand a spoiling.

This afternoon I asked one of my mystery colleagues what he thought of “The Ice Cream Truck’s Song” (now “The Ninth, Not Final, Plague”). He said frankly that he frankly didn’t get it at all, even after reading it twice. Interesting. Here he was a native speaker and he’d fared worse than my students. They at least knew it was a ghost story. Hmm. We talked about the title, which I admitted was misleading. He said it made you think something nice was going to happen. Well, something nice did happen, from a certain perspective. He said it reminded him of Poe’s madmen stories. Lots of detail. I can’t remember what triggered it, but he suddenly shouted, “Oh! I know who the ghosts are!” I must have said something about its being a ghost story. I think that’s right. The minute he knew it was a spooker, everything clicked. Hmm.

The conversation reminded me that I’d planned to write a brief treatise on how to read certain of my stories which begin “in medias res” and don’t supply obvious hints about what’s going to come in handy down the road. I’m referring here to things like the James Bond movies, where Bond invariably pays a visit to Q, who invariably hands him a set of disguised weapons and other gear, which Bond invariably calls upon in a tight spot, or the Harry Potter stories, in which one or two magical gadgets introduced casually early in the tale end up being crucial to the plot (think of the time-turner in The Prisoner of Azkaban, the portkey in The Goblet of Fire, the pensieve in The Order of the Phoenix and the vanishing cabinet in The Half-Blood Prince).

While I don’t mind, and even enjoy, this obvious style of presentation in other people’s work, I like to do it more subtly myself. I like to show you the world and let you notice what you will, the way it works in the real world. Of course, there are myriad differences between any story and the real world. Any report or representation of reality is going to be restricted in content, our attention is going to be funneled to a few pertinent items, but I so like those moments in M. Knight Shyamalan’s movies when a whole mess of seemingly insignificant details or oddities suddenly string together into one tight and intense realization (as when Malcolm Crowe can’t open the basement door in The Sixth Sense, David Dunn sees Elijah Price’s diagrams in Unbreakable, and Graham Hess confronts the alien in Signs).

And so to “The Ninth, Not Final, Plague”. I’m not entirely pleased with that title, which may be the subject of a future entry called “Evolution of a Title”. It’s a good title, but it’s a bit heavy for the story, just as “The Ice Cream Truck’s Song” was too light. Anyway, let’s talk briefly about how the story works.

It starts with what for some readers would be, and is, an obvious clue: “I myself would not believe it, if not for the bell.” This is a pretty plain tip off that something weird is about to be described. If that isn’t enough, we have the next sentence: “Every night it rings–and rings and rings until I open the door and find–nothing.” What else could we be talking about but ghosts, especially after the next paragraph, which tells us that “there was no one there. The elevator had opened and was closing and stood empty on my floor. There was no one in the stairwell for two floors and not a soul on the roof”?

Next thing you know the narrator is hearing voices. Not much later he is making them out. It could only be ghosts, ba.

The question for most of my students is “Who are the ghosts?” They really puzzle over that one. Yet the clues are so numerous it’s almost embarrassing. You could be forgiven for thinking the narrator was freaked out until you read paragraph five: “It seemed like a game. It was a game. I had played it before.” If that doesn’t help, he tells you “I would have let it ring a decade if I could”, not what you’d expect from someone experiencing fear, unless you take it to mean he’d rather hear the bell ring than face the ghosts in the corridor. Ooh! That gave me the cold pricklies! But then he goes on “grasping at shadows”, actually trying to touch the ghost that rings the bell, so he’s obviously not afraid of the ghosts, and then he claims to know where the ghost’s hand, arm, shoulders and head should be–even what the look on its face must be! If that doesn’t do it for you, he digresses about shoes and dust and about an apartment that hasn’t been looked after for a while. Then there’s the perfume, a sly little twist to show he has a grip on reality. He’s sure he must be imagining the perfume. It wouldn’t be so apparent if its wearer were returning.

Then we have paragraph eleven, which spells out in huge flaming letters the relationship between the ghosts. Taken with paragraph ten’s “family grave” simile for the vacant parking spot that neighbours wish to buy or rent but which the narrator refuses to sell or rent in case “they” return and paragraph eight’s dust and shoes description, paragraph eleven amounts to a statement of the relationship between the narrator and the ghosts. The second to last paragraph talks about fear, but not of the ghosts: of their eventually not coming anymore, a fate the narrator would rather avoid. Why? Well, you figure it out.

This type of story I call a brain bomb. You go along, wondering or not, and somewhere very close to the end, it all clicks and your brain explodes with it. In the explosion, all the subtle hints come rushing together to be relived, everything takes on new meaning (or just meaning, if you didn’t start to get it earlier), and there’s this intense, exquisite paroxysm of understanding and awe, awe not for my finesse with the pen or keyboard, but for the splendour and terror of the human soul, the beauty and horror of our state.

Does that help anybody?

I was spooning out the cat food when I started thinking about an HBO feature I'd seen on Mission Impossible 3. I'm going to skip the gimmicky spelling here. Tom Cruise and JJ Abrams had shared how the city of Shanghai had really opened its doors to them. This struck me as interesting, because some bureaucrat probably had to look over the script for the flick before approval could be given and the portrayal of Chinese military intelligence in the script was probably obviously less than flattering. You'd think they'd have run into problems on that count. Perhaps they did and were just keeping the fact under wraps.

In any case, my mind turned to the question of art and what it consists of. Readers of my previous post will remember that I spoke of communities and their aesthetics. What if a human filmmaker submitted a script to an alien bureaucrat and the bureaucrat judged the script on its artistic merits? And what if the alien world's aesthetic was worlds apart from ours?

Sounded like a good premise for a story. Sci-fi, of course. A one off? Hmmm. Maybe I could fit it into a series. How about TEAL (Teaching English as an Alien Language)? Hmmm. How would I fit in an English teacher? Aha! The English teacher is recruited as consultant and translator. He or she observes and participates in the process. Now we're talking!

All this happened before I'd finished spooning out the dog food. That's where ideas come from. From spontaneous associations, not from dog food.

Hmmm. What about dog food? Alien dog food. Alien dogs. Really intelligent alien dogs. Hmmm. Attitudes toward intelligence. Measures of intelligence. Roles of intelligence. Slavery. Cultural prejudice. Hmmm. An English teacher is hired to teach an alien dog English. The dog is as intelligent as any of us. The masters refuse to learn other languages. The dogs handle interracial relations. Hmmm.

Two ideas in one day. Not a record, but not bad.

Just yesterday I read Henry James's "The Tree of Knowledge" in Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine's Short Story Masterpieces.

A devastating and exalting little piece.

In the story, a self-styled great and little-understood sculptor, Morgan Mallow, aka the Master, sends his son, Lancelot, aka Lance, to Paris to study painting. The son discovers that he himself has about as much talent as a can of paint and that his father has less talent than a chisel. "I'm a hopeless muff [loser, bungler, incompetent]…, [b]ut I'm not such a muff as the Master!" he exclaims to the Master's long-time friend and his own godfather, Peter Brench, through whose eyes, if not voice, the story is told.

This is just one angle of the story (there are also the friend's heroic success at keeping his contempt for the work of the "artist" a deep and abiding secret without claiming the least respect for it, the son's struggle to keep his new and enlightened opinion of his father's work to himself, the son's apparent unfitness for any calling, the friend's deep and abiding secret love for the artist's wife, and the wife's subjection of her chronic and acute awareness of her husband's failings as an artist to her all-consuming and all-subsuming love for him and the concomitant care of his ego), but it's the one I want to deal with.

I'll bet it's the greatest fear of anyone who thinks they have talent but is aware that they might not that they will turn out to be one of those who has none but is unaware of it. You follow so far?

It is unlikely that either Morgan or Lancelot had no talent at all. The one could probably sculpt recognizable likenesses of people and things, and the other could probably paint recognizable likenesses of people and things. That's better than I can manage without a supreme effort.

The problem lies not in the ability to sculpt or paint, but in the power attributed to the sculptures and paintings. The problem lies in discernment. The Master's sin is not so much a lack of talent as a lack of discernment. He is able to sculpt likenesses, but he is unable to discern their ineffectiveness as works of art, their lack of power. If he claimed only to sculpt likenesses in a certain disproportionate style and made no claim of creating art, he would be neither contemptible nor pitiable. He would be normal. Because he so obstinately, in the face of the public's informed rejection, claims to be creating art but is so decidedly not doing any such thing, he is contemptible–or at least laughable, most likely slightly and harmlessly mad (that is, mentally out of alignment with his culture). Because he so naively persists in the belief that his work is simply not understood and because this naiveté is so essential to his self-esteem, if not his sanity, he is pitiable. There is no hope for the man. He will either dig in against the awareness of his own insignificance on that front, or crumble like Jericho when the reality penetrates his illusion.

The beauty of the story lies in the friend's, the son's and the wife's self-sacrificing subterfuge. They will quietly or vociferously, as they choose, align themselves with the Master's folly and bear the buffetings of a more discerning and less compassionate society rather than shatter the man's self-image or his image of the world. They are voluntary hostages to his benevolent but unsparing pride.

What does this mean for the rest of us, particularly us writers?

Whenever we write a story and friends or family applaud it, we must ask ourselves what motivates the applause. Is it genuine, discerning appreciation of our work, or is it self-sacrificing subterfuge, an inability or an unwillingness to confront us with the failure of our attempt? Conversely, whenever we submit a story for publication and it is rejected, we must ask ourselves why it was rejected. Was it because we failed in our attempt to create something of value, was it because there was no more room at the inn, or was it because a work of art was simply not understood?

A question might be asked about the Master's work. Was it really the pathetic scraping that his intimates and the larger public saw it to be? To him it was not. To him it had power. To him it was art. It had meaning and that meaning was conveyed. From this perspective, the question of whether a work is art depends ultimately on who is looking at it. If somebody thinks it is art, it is art. That is, it is art for them. And that is acceptable.

If you want to write, write. If you and others like what you write, then it's good writing. If what you write powerfully conveys meaning for you and others, then it is art.

The difficulty lies in the composition and conceits of the community within which and for which you attempt to write. In the story, the Master's son only sees his father's folly when he views his father's work from the perspective of an education in art in Paris. In other words, he had been brought up at home to admire his father's work, but when trained in a different aesthetic, the dominant aesthetic, he came to despise his father's work. He suffered a paradigm shift, a dramatic and traumatic one, one his godfather would have spared him. Such shifts occur all the time. What happens to any country boy or girl who moves to the city, any city boy or girl who moves to the country, any boy or girl who goes off to university, anyone who lives abroad? Do not they all come back, or at least look back, with some degree of pity or contempt on the aesthetic and cosmology of their neighbours and kin, their old community? And do they not often resume the old aesthetic and the old cosmology when they return?

So it appears to be a question of community. But then, that is what folk art and world art are for. We are quite capable of discerning power in an alternate aesthetic and the works it generates. Given a basic understanding of the aesthetic, we can say something of the success or failure of a work rendered within that aesthetic. Indeed, we may even be able to recognize art without any other introduction to its inherent aesthetic than the common aesthetic of humanity. Cross-eyed, short-sighted aliens from a planet that only shows blues would probably be unanimous in their judgment that every piece of visual art created on earth looks pretty much like every other, the way all country songs sound nearly identical to the uninitiated and all heavy metal sounds like a car crash to the violently unrefined.

Is this to suggest, then, that there really is such an objective quality as art? I suppose it is. At least, there must be some such objective quality at a certain level. That is to say, there must be degrees of art. This notion is adhered to by Penn Warren and Erskine, who quip in their introduction that "if we had got together within our available number of pages what we considered the best thirty-five short stories there would be fewer authors." They elaborate.

William Faulkner, for example, would have more than one, and, among others, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Frank O'Connor. There are few such real masters of the short story…. But there are others who have produced one or two stories so memorable that they must find a place in a book like this, which aims to give some representation to the considerable variety of good stories that have been written in our time.

I admit that when I read Faulkner's "Barn Burning" I was, or at least thought I was, conscious of a certain lushness not common in stories of any kind, let alone short ones, a sort of density of detail not attributable to length of sentence, paragraph or passage. On the other hand, I wasn't much impressed by Hemingway's "Soldier's Home", perhaps because I found no redemption in it (typical of Hemingway), but also because the rhythm seemed clumsily off. I'll have to go into depth about that later.

As I wrote about the subjectivity of art, or of the perception of art, it occurred to me that the aesthetically misguided may be guilty of a baser crime: vagueness. Could the Master have minutely defined in what the power of his sculptures lay? Or did his perception that his work was art spring from his belief that he was an artist and that all that he produced must by the nature of its origin be art? Can we pinpoint in what the art of our work resides? Can our friends and family when they applaud us?

Krashen (2006) outlines three important hypotheses in the field of applied linguistics:

1. The Natural Order Hypothesis
2. The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis
3.  The Monitor Hypothesis

The Natural Order Hypothesis posits that we acquire (as opposed to learn) language items in a restricted order, so that items of grammar, say, taught or studied out of order may be learned (i.e., memorized) for probably short-term use in form-focused environments such as tests, but normal language production will not reflect such learning.

The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis posits that we acquire language by observing it, so that speaking and writing practice do not serve acquisition (though they assist learning), but rather serve to demonstrate level of acquisition.

The Monitor Hypothesis posits that items of grammar learned but not acquired will not be tended to unless spontaneous speech is reviewed and revised by an "editor" before being uttered. Where speakers or writers are focused on meaning rather than form, many errors of form will occur. Where speakers or writers are focused on form, meaning may be hindered.

Based on these three hypotheses, I've come up with a couple of guidelines for writing ESL materials (and conducting ESL classes):

1. Natural Order Comprehensible Input
2. Acquired Language Output

The material presented, whether written or spoken, should contain a wealth of items within the learner's current "acquisition range". If the learner is at the stage to acquire the ing form, the material should be saturated with ing-form vocabulary. More advanced forms will by necessity also occur, but they should not be emphasized in either number or prominence.

Language produced by the learner should be assessed based on his or her acquired level. If the learner has recently acquired or is in the process of acquiring the ing form, only errors within range of the ing form should be corrected by the instructor. S form errors should be ignored, since correcting them will not assist acquisition at the ing form stage, and such unhelpful correction may activate the learner's Affective Filter.

Krashen, S.D. 2006. English Fever. The Crane Publishing Co., Ltd. Taipei, Taiwan. 13-18.

Krashen (2006) identifies  six habits of good writers:

1. Plan before writing.
2. Revise after writing.
3. Delay editing while writing.
4. Reread while writing.
5. Write daily.
6. Incubate.

So how do my habits compare?

Well, let's see. I generally do plan before writing. If it's a story, I don't even start before I have a premise. If it's an essay, I don't even start before I have a topic and theme. If it's a story, I think about how it will likely develop, how the action will progress from beginning to end. I also give some thought to the characters. If it's an essay, I consider the points I wish to touch on and how they interact.

I haven't been in the habit of revising stories. What revisions I've undertaken generally consist of little tweaks, often where tweaks were needed while writing. A good revision requires distance, anyway, so most of what I've written in the last year or two is waiting for the day I can read it critically. My essays are usually so well planned that little revision is required, but many an essay has felt the axe in places as I've adjusted for length.

Although I do tweak a bit while rereading, I don't get bogged down in editing before the piece is done.

When I get to the end of a section, or run out of ideas, or just get tired, I go back and reread what I've read. I look for inconsistencies and discontinuities, and hone in on the style and tone.

I keep daily journals for myself and three sons, write almost daily blog entries, and keep several logs related to work and study, so I most definitely write daily. I don't write stories daily, however. There isn't always time.

I work on a piece until I run out of exciting ideas for it or until a fresh piece suggests itself. After a break to look after the fresh piece, I return to the old piece, especially if I've come up with new ideas for it. For a lengthy piece, this process could be repeated numerous times.

I guess that puts me in contention for the label of good writer.

Krashen, S. D. 2006. English Fever. Crane Publishing Co., Ltd. Taipei, Taiwan. 35-36.

Stephen D. Krashen, a bigwig in the study of language acquisition and an ardent proponent of so-called "comprehensible input", maintains that language competence is most efficiently acquired subconsciously through reading in one topic, by one author, or in one series. It stands to reason, I suppose, then, that reading a series of pieces by one author on one topic would really do the job.

I've long considered a foray into ESL/EFL/ELT writing. Some of the graded readers I've used with students have been half decent. I bet I could write better ones, though. Most of the readers I've experienced have a dessicated quality, whether adaptations or originals. They feel like they've been written for a level rather than at a level. I'm going to take a crack at writing, within vocabulary limits, stories that feel alive, that feel as if they were written at the right level.

Progress on "Into the Fire"

I mentioned this story briefly below. It's one of four (the others are "Sutler's Vale", "Since the Green Folk Came" and "The Flight from Home") currently putting themselves together in my notebook (the old-fashioned spiral-bound paper type). It's one of a set (not a series) of four (the others are  "Moonshadow", "Auld Lang Syne" and "The Craving Vein") that center on events surrounding the disappearance of a supposed lunar observatory.

"Into the Fire" is the story of the wife of a man whose former girlfriend, the love of his life, returns with an offer: to take him back through time and accept rather than reject his offer of marriage.

 My reasons for writing "Into the Fire" are somewhat complicated. Basically, my mother felt that, as intriguing and, as always, well-written, as it was, "Auld Lang Syne" was going to hurt my marriage, because it was so obviously autobiographical in origin, if not plot (for the record, none of my former girlfriends has returned with an offer to accept an offer of marriage, let alone take me through time to do it). Based on reactions from two of my brothers, my father and a friend, this seemed to be a uniquely feminine, if not maternal, perspective. I seriously considered never publishing the story in any form, since, like Sauron's ring to Isildur, Smeagol, Bilbo and Frodo, my marriage is precious to me–though without the dark lord overtones, if not entirely free of orcs; however, the story meant so much to me and resonated so powerfully with most of its male readers that I preferred to find an alternative. The first alternative to come to mind was to make a few small repairs, make the wife, who, as I've said below, was so marginal to the narrative as to be not even minor, more important, back up the denouement with references to the marriage, that sort of thing, but the story had been such an exercise in honesty that I quailed at the thought of twisting it even that far. It needed to stand alone.

At the same time, I recognized that I hadn't told the whole story. The protagonist's marriage deserved some detail and the wife deserved a say. So I decided to write a companion story from the wife's perspective. The prospect was intimidating. For me, a man and an accused sexist, to write a story about a woman from a woman's' perspective seemed pretty audacious. I still think it audacious, but I also think I'm pulling it off. As I've mentioned before, it's been educational and I believe it's even helped my marriage.

Speaking of the marriage, I brought up "Auld Lang Syne" with my wife one morning when she was obviously feeling cheerful and sociable. Timing is everything when it comes to rings. She listened intently and said she could relate. Ow. We had a good talk about our disappointments in our marriage. I also told her about "Into the Fire", of which I'd written several pages (it's a paperback-sized notebook), and about how it was teaching me about her side of the marriage. She didn't disagree with a thing I said–and believe me, if she'd disagreed, she'd have let me know in unmistakable terms.

I think "Auld Lang Syne" will give a lot of male readers a voice when it comes to their marriages and ex-girlfriends. Reading it will be cathartic for them. It will help them exorcise old demons, so to speak. "Into the Fire" will, I dare to hope, give women a voice when it comes to their marriages, families and husbands' ex-girlfriends. It will also teach men a bit about what it's like and what it means to be a woman in a marriage, especially a traditional single-income marriage.

By the way, readers familiar with the work of Dan Fogelberg (not Robert Burns), Shawn Colvin, Cat Stevens (now British Muslim Yusuf Islam: banned from American airspace if not American airwaves) and Bruce Cockburn will have noticed (consciously or subconsciously) that the titles of all four stories come from songs. Dan Fogelberg wrote a song called "Same Old Lang Syne" in which he "met [his] old lover in the grocery store" and "her eyes were just as blue". Shawn Colvin co-wrote a song called "Sunny Came Home" about a woman who gets fed up with her marital life and decides to do something about it with a match (the refrain ends with the prepositional phrase "into the fire"). Cat Stevens wrote a song called "Moonshadow" about being followed by an optical phenomenon and how to cope with possibly losing various parts of one's external anatomy. Bruce Cockburn wrote a song called "Don't Feel Your Touch" about saying goodbye to the "closest thing [you] have to home", one chorus of which is built on the image of "a junkie's craving vein". The significance of that allusion will become apparent when I get to "The Craving Vein".

Because of events detailed in my blog Bli-fi, I plan to put together an electronic tool which will allow authors and their helpers to save time and money as they attempt to market pieces of writing. I call it MAPP (Match Author and Publisher Profile).

MAPP works on the principle that any journal, magazine or publishing house can be profiled on the basis of identifiable (though not necessarily quantifiable) criteria such as the lengths, themes and genres they publish, and that authors and their works can be profiled for the same criteria. A MAPP user will be able to profile an author or one of his or her pieces of writing and, using a database, match the author or a piece with a list of publishers. Acceptance is not guaranteed, of course, at any given time or ever, but the chances of acceptance should rise substantially based on MAPP comparisons.