Month: June 2012

When it’s not raining, or cold, I like to write outdoors. All I need is my pen and my legal pad, a chair, some shade, and my pipe–and I’m off to Obann.

This is when my neighbors like to play the game, “Talk to the Writer.” If I were just sitting there doing nothing, I could have beanstalks growing out of my head and no one would notice. But as soon as they see I’m working, everybody wants to come over for a chat. On occasion, I have been visited by three or four neighbors simultaneously, while trying to write.

They’ll talk about anything under the sun, but fairly often someone will want to talk about writing.

The question most often–indeed, always–asked is, “How long did it take you to write that book?” For the life of me, I never can see what that has to do with anything. But everyone wants to know. I have no idea why.

And the most common comment is, “I think I’ll write a book someday, if I can ever find the time.” Like it’s something everyone can do! Rocky Bridges once said, “There are three things which everybody in the world thinks he can do–run a hotel, manage a baseball team, and write a book.” He was right.

Many people seem to believe that books and articles write themselves, and I don’t even really have to be there. So the writer is bombarded with invitations to stop writing and come over and see if he can find out why the air conditioner is making strange noises, or what-not. Well, of course, if it’s so easy that literally anyone can do it, I really shouldn’t have to spend that much time on it, should I?

I am convinced they know not what they do.

A recent study by the prestigious British medical magazine, The Lancet, shows that New York City residents are living longer, these days. How come?

“Experts… are crediting Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s health initiatives during the last decade” for making New Yorkers live longer–banning smoking, banning trans-fat, banning soda, and so on. Maybe it only seems longer to those who have to live under the Bloomberg regime. A lot longer.

I do wish the experts would leave the fantasies to us fantasy writers! Hello! Can anybody do simple logic around here? There is no evidence of a cause-and-effect relationship between Bloomberg’s meddling in people’s lives and the length of those lives. There is no longitudinal study. You’d have to follow the lives of people born at the same time those policies were instituted, keep the policies in place throughout those people’s lives, see how long they live–and then compare them to the life-spans of New Yorkers who lived before Bloomberg started banning everything.

It would be just as logical to say New Yorkers’ life-spans have increased since Alex Rodriguez started playing for the Yankees.

In fact, it would be just as true to say they started living longer since my book, Bell Mountain, was published. I knew it had to be good for something beyond mere entertainment!

Please feel free to pass this good news on to your friends who want to live longer.

Have you noticed that, in the United States and Canada, you cannot possibly get into trouble for saying vile things about Christians and Christianity? But oh, boy, are you in hot water if you venture to speak even the slightest discouraging word about any other religion!

Even more zealously protected than non-Christian religions, and held much more sacrosanct, are the various perversions celebrated in our senile Western world these days. There are Democrats who will actually condemn you for “transphobia.” And what the dickens is transphobia? When I type it out, my computer puts a red line under it, indicating there is no such word. But it seems to denote, in the so-called minds of liberals, an unreasonable aversion–by which they mean any aversion at all–to persons whose whole lives revolve around trying to inhabit the gender opposite the one they were born into.

But if you are out there to say false, insulting, and filthy things about Christians, you’ll get an invitation to the White House if you say it loud enough.

How did this come to be the case, in what once were Christian countries?

I dreamed of Narnia last night. No kidding–I was there. You should have seen the colors: indefinably different from ours, and overwhelmingly beautiful.

I found myself in a forest, in an army. An old knight with a long, white mustache was handing out… umbrellas, of all things. I got one, too. “Aslan says this is all we’ll need today,” he explained. Then it started to rain: and I understood we were going to go into a battle in which God had already won the victory.

Then, of course, I woke up. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Couldn’t get back, either. But I’m thankful for the bit I did receive, and I find my spirits buoyed by it. You don’t easily forget a dream like that.

I’m a fantasy writer. I make things up–the wilder, the better. Years ago, I was a horror writer. I made up things that were intended to be scary.

Meanwhile, back in the real world this week, the New Mexico Appeals Court ruled that of course the state government can order Christians to do things that violate their religious beliefs. The court was referring to the 2006 case of a mom-and-pop photography business, owned by Christians, that declined to memorialize a lesbian pseudo-wedding. The fine for such “hateful” behavior was in excess of $6,000–a sum that is able to ruin a small business. Do what the lesbians want, or you lose your livelihood.

The original decision was made by the New Mexico Human Rights Commission. You would think these bloody things were unconstitutional. “Human Rights” denotes the practice of elevating the rights of homosexuals over the rights of everybody else. The practice has been honed to a fine art in Canada, where there is no constitution–only some “Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms” that somehow allows Canadian jurisprudence to proceed according to the assumption that Canadians have only those freedoms which the government says they have–on any given day.

As an example of fantastic thinking that would do credit to any fantasy writer, we have this from the official website of the Ontario Human Rights Commission: “The Supreme Court of Canada has made it clear that society must be designed to be inclusive of all persons…” Therefore, the OHRC has the authority to police the “organizational culture” of a company or a voluntary association, right down to the level of “informal social behavior, such as communication, decision-making and interpersonal relationships, which are the evidence of deeply held and largely unconscious values, assumptions and behavioral norms…” (emphasis added)

Warning, warning, warning! They are coming for your freedoms, people. Who’s “they”? The progressives; the elite; the wise; the whoopee crowd–why even answer? You know right well who they are! They mean to erase your liberty, and it’s already late in the day to stop them.

I’m a fantasy writer, and I can’t even begin to make up stuff like this.