Flash Fiction Wednesday: When Foxes Have No Holes

I'd already made plans for today when I saw East Coast Ink magazine's promotion of Flash Fiction Wednesday; so while I didn't have time to write a new story (600 words max., apparently), I'll post this one that qualifies, which I wrote pretty recently, as part of a much larger story cycle. The only disclaimer I'll add is that the use of meter is very deliberate: to convey a dog-like dissatisfaction with being enclosed, the narrator's voice slips in and out of (usually trochaic) meter -- and not just in the parts that are set in verse. 

“When Foxes Have No Holes”

            Bark! Bark, my kits!

            Bark across the empty space until it carries sound.

            Bark as if keen ears could hear your echoes coming home.

            Bark: the Farmers weren’t the ones who drove us from our dens, yet they fend us off and Fence us out into the dark.

            Bark! The Fence! It keeps us prowling, searching out ways In.

            Can’t you all remember how and when we met the Fence? Come! We’ll catch the tale in our paws so it can’t (yip!) escape. It begins:

            First Outfoxes saw the Fence

            (sitting there, all innocence!),

            Metal balls, misthrown and lost;

            Outside noses caught their scents:

            Lonely, shiny outcasts.

            Nosed and pawed, the balls bit back

            (in an unprovoked attack)

            There, Outfoxes learned, beware:

            Pouncing Fenceposts in the Black

            Punish those who trespass.

            And the sentries spied, we found,

            Those who sought out routes around

            Digging under, jumping o’er,

            Foxes tasted vacuum, drowned

            In the airless reaches.

            Then would all the Fenceposts speak

            In that whistling, rasping squeak

            Painful to Outfoxes’ ears,

            Squawking while we cowered, meek

            Animals, mere creatures.

            Stay, they whined. You can’t come in. There’s no controlling you. You’re uncivilized. You’re wild. You’re robbers. Now go home!

            Go home, kits? How could they?

            Driven from their planet-den by Vermin long ago, now the Fence had locked them out; they never could return. Days when kits could chase and play and loll in warm sunlight, growing into sandy-whiskered gentlemen: all gone. Even days of sauntering and hunting 'cross the stars, catching prey as chickens in their interstellar coops – never caring what it was or who it was we ate – all gone now, too, my kits!

            Soon they found that Fenceposts, like Outfoxes, like to move: discontent, unjust, their border migrates as they go. Piece by piece expanding, yip! so gradually it grew, spreading civilized space, shrinking ours; for we could sense larger predators out lurking, out beyond the stars’ firelight.

            Would the Fenceposts listen, when we whined of this?

            No, the biting toys squeaked, still you can’t come in, you dogs, good barbarians! (Bark!) Noble scavengers! Protect our border that we share. Guard our space. You’ll keep it safe from darker animals.

            What to do, my kits? What Fencepost knows nobility? Are we noble, living witless, carefree lives? And weren’t we more helpless than so many creatures, worrying bones of helplessness? But when we gnawed the problem down – so the caught tale tells – we saw what we must do to let our barks be free, be heard!

            Settle down! Now settle down! What taming irony: minding what the Farmers and their Fenceposts asked of us, settling down against the Fence, nomads no longer. Leashed our caboodles, panting ships, together, save for scouts sent to roam the Fence in search of holes or gaps, where Outfoxes might slip through. We bark! in savage protest, bark! Not so noble, but defiant: outside, barking in.

            So bark! bark! for our remembered home.

            Bark again! at those who Fence us out.

            Pant! with gnawing hunger for the day

            (Yip!) when hole is found, or hole is made,

            When Outfoxes find ways In,

            Lollop, hunt, and feast again.

            Bark, bark, my kits!

The Temporary Grease Monkey

Occasionally, during the long haul of our renovations, amid the self-castigating hollers that emanated from this or that corner of the house, Karen would hear a satisfied little chuckle, often followed by my observation that she, in her wisdom, had married "a clever little monkey": some little detail of a renovation task had finally gone just like I wanted it to, and though this was not what I had trained for, I could be momentarily proud of an accomplishment.

Well, after months of job-searching and continuing to work on little bits and pieces of the house, it's time to see how well this clever little monkey can pick up some new manual skills: for about three months, I'll be helping out in a friend's auto shop.  Again, not my first choice, but I'm happy to do it, and I may even survive it (though the first six weeks, where the job overlaps with the second half of my thrice-weekly stationary cycling workouts, should be, um, interesting).  It'll bring in some of that very helpful stuff called money, and it should end, neatly, just about the same time as the New Testament survey course I'll be teaching at Tyndale begins.  But it does mean that I'll have to reassess (again) just how to fit writing into my schedule.  It's likely I won't have a lot of time to reflect on that here -- but I've already created some space in the fall schedule to work on book reviews and a few other small projects, and hopefully whatever God has in store for me after that will allow a little more writing time than full-time automotive work does.  Maybe I'll even manage, through this interval, to learn a little more discipline with my time, so that I can make better use of what time I have after that.  Here's hoping.

Being Like Ridley

If you've been following this new daily-blogging of mine and you're becoming concerned that this habit's going to eat up another small chunk of your day (and mine) ad infinitum, fear not: for at least the next week, I'll be transplanting the daily habit from blogging to fiction writing.  I'm not in the least giving up on finding "real" (read: paying) work, but I'm eager to see whether I can write as regularly as I have been doing lately here, even if it's just a few paragraphs -- but in a different medium.  

As I've mentioned before, I have a reasonably good-looking CV of nonfiction writing, but I've also published one (very) short story and am eager to publish more.  I've finished a few others and started several more, but I need to quit stalling and follow through on getting these finished, polished, and published.  Why the urgency?  Three reasons I can think of offhand.  One: as new ideas for fiction and nonfiction writing bubble up, I worry that some of the older ones may fall off the back shelf of my brain, so I'd like to get them on paper and "out there" to see if they're worth anything in anyone's estimation besides mine, Karen's, and occasionally Chandra's.  Two: for those who've picked up on a resurfacing theme of mortality and fragility in my recent posts, that's largely due to the fifth anniversary of my father's death; I chose not to blog about it, but Chandra did so with tender depth here.  Our earthly father often dreamed up ideas for stories and novels, but as far as I know he only committed one of them to paper in his adult life, a novella that he attempted to publish but (again, as far as I know) took no further when it was turned down.  I'd like to get further than that -- preferably quite a bit further -- in whatever time I have left, whether that's forty days or forty years.  

Three: I like creating things.  That desire shows up in cooking and baking, and over the past year it's been evident in the satisfaction of taking on and completing tasks in our renovations, but it's most apparent when I write, especially when I write stories.  Science fiction has known many skilled world-builders, both literary and cinematic; one of the best-known of the latter category is Ridley Scott, whose place in SF canon would probably be secure even if he'd retired after making Blade Runner.  But here's something he said about building another richly detailed world, that of Gladiator: "I love to create worlds, and every facet of that world has to work within the rules of the story. You must smell the battleground and experience the beauty and light of the golden city.”  Sir Ridley makes world-building sound lovely and poetic, and it is; but it's also hard work, fun work, and as he acknowledges, consistent work.  I'm not assuming here that I can create worlds as spellbinding as his (but taking the moral of The Lego Movie to heart, I'm also not assuming that I can't!), but with a little -- okay, a lot of -- practice, we'll see just what I can do.

Psalmody Psunday: 123

What better way to keep up a new habit of blogging daily than by shamelessly showing up late to the party that my sister Chandra and cousin Jenny have been hosting on their blogs?  “Psalmody Psunday” is an idea that Jenny came up with as a ten-minute devotional/writing exercise/mutual blogging accountability tool for herself and Chandra; you can read her explanation and first Psunday entry here, Chandra’s here, and then consider joining in and sharing if you blog.  For my first attempt at this, I’ve chosen Ps 123 -- not because it’s the one Jenny began with (I’d read her inter-textual meditation on 123, but later forgot about it until I reread it this morning; thankfully my interpretation doesn’t repeat much of what she says!) mainly because it stuck with me a few nights ago when I couldn’t sleep and was reading the Psalms/Songs of Ascents -- the portion of Israel’s hymnbook devoted to songs of pilgrimage, to be sung especially while journeying to Jerusalem/Mount Zion, as for Passover.

That night, with brain unable to sleep but with eyelids sandpapery with fatigue, I must have been particularly prone to noticing the images of eye movement: I lift my eyes to you (123:1) as the eyes of slaves look to their master’s and mistress’ hands (v. 2); so our eyes look to the LORD our God, till he shows us his mercy.  Not by any means the only time the Psalms refer to our eyes “looking to” the Lord, but one of the most stark, because of that unapologetic use of the story of slave and master/mistress.  Nothing those who are willing to sing this song can do will introduce the mercy required; it is in the master’s hand to give or to hold onto for another moment.  The slave can only choose whether to keep “looking” -- or not; the singer or worshipper can only choose whether to sing, and thus to rehearse this story, to take on such a role, and to worship -- or not.  For to enter and rehearse is to begin to see the comparative “so” in this simile as more causative, like a so that means therefore.  So our eyes look to the LORD our God, till he shows us his mercy.

Gearing Up, after Forgetting

For many writers -- certainly including myself, and my sister Chandra, as frequently noted over at her blog -- the hardest part of writing is getting started, and getting started, and getting started again.  Yes, writer's block can be paralyzing in the midst of any project, but it's especially so at the beginning, and at each new beginning-over (or "reginning"?) when momentum has been lost, or not yet built up.  

I talked a little about this in my very first post, quoting other authors in support of the point; here, I'll do the same with Vincent Lam's words from a July 2012 interview with George Stromboulopoulos.  Every book project, Lam said, was akin to "jumping back into an abyss...the work of fiction is so intense, so personal, so demanding, that you have to be up for it. You know, it's got to be from you. Otherwise, it's not going to be right."  The principal fear, of course, is that it will never be right, that even if you've succeeded in writing before, you won't be able to repeat the feat on demand.  At some point in there, other priorities begin to crowd in, like they do, and suddenly your number of blog posts (for example) for a given month, or even a given year, is accusingly small.  And it becomes that much harder to start over again.  The lesson applies to other areas of life, too, but it's at least as clear in writing as in any other field.

But what can we do but pray, take a deep breath, and then pick ourselves up and start forward again?  I've heard and read Philippians 3 many times, but it's only today that I've noticed that the "one thing" Paul claims he does, in the marathon of his life and ministry, is forgetting.  Or at least the one thing begins with forgetting: "Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 3:13b-14).

So, following Paul (as imitating him, as he imitates his Lord, is much of what the rest of that letter is about), I choose to forget, and to strain forward, toward the prize.  Right now, as I continue to job-hunt and figure out what my spiritual and compositional rhythms will look like now that our home renovations are "done," the shape that "straining" forward takes may be choosing to go to bed earlier, to get up earlier, to have more time to reflect, read, and write before the demands of each day begin to make themselves known.  Probably to blog more consistently, too.  (Or at least to try.  Again.  Have I failed to do so before?  ...I forget.)

What is it that you need to forget?  And what will your "straining" look like? 

Inspired, with a Medium-sized "i"

On and off for the past several months, I've been slogging through deeply enjoying N. T. Wright's 2013 book, Paul and the Faithfulness of God.  On page 1370 (just 150 pages to go!), I came across this:

"To approach the frontier between the human and the divine is also to approach the borders of language. The problem emerges, for instance, when [Paul] talks about 'the divine spirit bearing witness with our spirit' [Rom. 8:16], and the problem is only slightly alleviated when he talks instead about the divine spirit residing in a person's 'heart'. The questions English-language exegetes [interpreters] sometimes ask, as to whether 'spirit' should have a capital letter or not, indicating the divine spirit rather than the human one, shows well enough that there is fluidity of thought at this point."

This struck me particularly because of two recent items; bear with me, since they take a moment to join together.  Item One: a conversation I recently shared with a few colleagues, concerning whether or not God still calls people to be apostles today.  Leaving aside the more prickly questions of whether (and how) spiritual gifts like prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues still function today, we talked about what it was that made Jesus' original apostles, well, apostles: they were commissioned as such, and sent as such; they were first among Jesus' companions and witnesses; empowered by Jesus' commissioning, and later more directly by the Holy Spirit, they did some pretty amazing stuff ("that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons," Mark 3:14-15). But then of course there's somebody like Paul, who gets to define himself as apostle to the Gentiles/nations, talks about himself as the least (and most undeserving) of the apostles, yet also tries to dictate what kind of spheres of authority he and other apostles have.  (And, Paul might well add, he also added letter-writing to the apostolic job description!)  All of that is to say that if we were to imagine an "apostolic" calling today, there might be considerable variations in what that would look like between those called.  To take some of the loaded-ness out of that term, apostolic, maybe we should place it within the current conversation of the mission of God and his people: where those original, capital-A Apostles were commissioned in some sense directly by Jesus himself, today a lowercase-a apostle could be one who is sent on a mission, not unlike a missionary, as part of the larger mission that God has given his people, the mission that reflects and expresses God's own mission to this beautiful but broken world.  For the individual, that's a powerful incentive to do the things one is called to do, to live out a commission most faithfully (in some cases probably including, but not limited to, blogging more consistently).

Item two: a nearby Christian TV station has been using the Twitter hashtag "#inspiring" to promote discussion of its programming -- including its reruns of, say, Gilmore Girls and The West Wing.  I happily admit that there are plenty of "inspiring" moments in these and other shows, and West Wing more than most.  But it's almost always lowercase-i inspiring.  Not that anyone can decide firmly where the break should be between capital and lowercase inspiration, much as Wright says about the use of Spirit and spirit above.  The most stirring, Capra-esque moment of compassionate politics in Jed Bartlet's White House is still a far cry from the literal in-spiration of the first Pentecost; but who's to say that the Spirit cannot or would not move in and through that former moment, at which point inspiration becomes, arguably, Inspiration? 

So: what do you think?  What do you make of Wright's point about the limits of human language here, or my reflection on them?  How are we supposed to work out these questions of big and little A's and I's (without getting too far into Dr. Seuss's ABCs!) that can make such a big difference in our spiritual formation and mission?  Is there a happy medium-sized expression between the two extremes -- and if so, what does it look like?

Living on Consecrated Time

Writing is hard.  Writing consistently is much harder.

I'm sitting between flights at O'Hare, feeling like a zombie after yesterday's stomach flu, but that's okay here -- most people look like zombies at airports.  I'll be better tomorrow, probably, and better still the day after that.

But my writing, and my writing habits, may not be better, unless I do something about it.

It's two days later, and I'm feeling almost myself again.  I've been thinking and praying over this for a while now.  Here's where things stand: I've had some success over the past several months with my writing, with three short articles published in a popular magazine; several papers and workshop presentations given (which often/eventually become articles or book chapters) and several more to come over the rest of this year; and ideas that continue to percolate in my fiction writing, which still comes in fits and starts but continues to be both fun and rewarding (aesthetically, if not yet financially).  And other good, sustaining things are happening, too, as the plans for the spiritual direction and retreat center that Karen and I call Lectio House are growing well.  But my blogging (obviously) and my literary journalling (trust me) are occasional at best, and everything I've tried this year to make more consistent time for more consistent writing has been, for all intents and purposes, a bust.

It's time for that last part to change.  At a particularly frustrated point a few weeks ago, I assessed all this, looked at my calendar, and admitted to myself that I wouldn't have any time to make effective changes until after our recent (local) move and a conference that followed shortly afterward.  So I picked today, June 7, as a day to start making the aforementioned effective changes.  A moment to question my own commitment to writing (and more broadly to study as a spiritual discipline; see my earlier posts on a rule of life).  A one-day reminder to myself that I am living on what we might call consecrated time.

Consecrated time.  Time set apart for a holy purpose.  Time to ask (often, and honestly) whether I'm doing the things well that God has made me to do.  Time to write, without neglecting my relationships or my responsibilities -- but without letting either of those things become idols, either.  Time to make the most of whatever time I have left on this earth, refusing to let that become more cliche than it already is.

Time to get started (all over again, "for reals," etc.).

Think I'm not serious?  (That's at least partly rhetorical.  And self-addressed.)  Then watch this space.  And watch me.  While you're at it, read Philippians 3:16-17.  (That's somewhat self-addressed, too.)

Time to get going.

The Steinbeck Experiment

Happy Boxing Day, everyone!

Yesterday, one of the Christmas gifts my wife opened (and in a few cases, treasure-hunted for) from me was a pack of sketchbooks, one of which was designated for me: on the insides of an unfolding paper box placed under the tree, I explained that I'm going to be keeping a writing journal this year, addressed to Karen.  She's welcome to read from it as she likes during the year, but next Christmas I will present it to her as a (hopefully) completed gift, showing each day how I have practiced this thing that's supposed to be my craft.  She can read intensively, skim, laugh or roll her eyes as she likes -- and while she can ask how my work is going from day to day, the journal frees her from any obligation to do so in much detail, even as it provides me with day-to-day accountability for Getting Work Done.

But Matt, wherever did you get this idea of such surpassing brilliance?  From John Steinbeck, of course.  As he was writing East of Eden in 1951, he kept an epistolary journal of sorts, addressed to a friend and editor.  When one reads it today, it comes across as a proto-blog, as Steinbeck tracks his progress, wrestles with problems of pacing, plotting, and procrastination, waxes on (and on) about his obsessions with finding exactly the right pencil, and occasionally reflects on what's happening in his family life and the world around him.

In my case, the journal idea remains the same, but it's addressed to Karen.  She's not always my primary audience, but as I explained in the first post in this blog, her influence makes me a better writer, not just a better person and a stronger follower of Jesus.

It'll be interesting to see how this gift develops.  I'll try to report in on that occasionally here -- without letting such posts, or the journaling itself, become procrastination.

Of Book Proposals and Invitations

Over the past few weeks, I've been hoping, praying and working toward the goal of having at least one book contract underway in the new year.  Among the various motives -- e.g., knowing that I need external deadlines to keep myself motivated when working, and wanting to be invited to an authors' dinner or two at my next major conference -- let's focus for now on that of professional, vocational development: I want to produce a book to share my thoughts, yes, but also to demonstrate that I can hack it at a whole 'nother level above that of articles and essays.

To wit, I'd been working on a book proposal, on a topic that I'd rather not talk about here just yet.  One major publisher's guide for book proposals suggests the submission of two chapters of the prospective volume, one introductory, the other of more substance, from later in the book.  It was a wonderful surprise when I was able to hammer out a more-or-less-finished form of the introduction in something less than four hours; my usual writing rate is a good bit slower than that.  So now I need to think about which of the later chapters to try next -- once I clear out some current and overdue projects between now and the beginning of 2013.

The big news is that this cleaning-house stage isn't just for that book proposal, but because I may very well be revising my dissertation for publication very soon.  Last Friday, a senior colleague whom I met and evidently impressed at a conference last spring invited me to submit my dissertation for publication in the series he edits, Emory Studies in Early Christianity.  No contracts signed yet, but I have his and his co-editor's blessing to say that I have been so invited and that things "look promising"; over Christmas break, they'll be looking over the diss. as it stood when revised and bound in May of last year, and they'll let me know what revisions they expect early in the new year.  

So hooray!  It's encouraging when someone takes this strong an interest in my work.  In a variation on a habit we've seen modeled by friends, Karen and I keep a collection of glass beads on one of our bookshelves, beads that we label with reminders of recent gifts of God's grace for which to be thankful.  Suffice it to say that the Emory invitation warrants its own newly labelled bead.  Provided that the publication goes forward, I'm sure there'll be times next year when I am less than thankful for the work entailed -- but this is something that I want and need and am called to do.  More than that: it's an answer to prayer, albeit one that will require much more prayer down the road...!

The Marathon Continues

Karen and I referred to the past month as the Apoc-tober-lypse, on account of how busy it was: Thanksgiving, several major church and family events, helping one couple to move and another to get married, plus the usual barrage of church and life stuff, and setting up The Scaffold in anticipation of the coming book launch event.

And then there were the conferences and conference preparations.  The Canadian Evangelical Theological Association and McMaster Divinity College hosted the "New Voices in Canadian Evangelical Theology" conference on Oct 20; I presented a paper on reading Paul's images of presence and calling in Romans over against the Roman Empire's propagation of Caesar's image and its practice of evocatio (inviting an enemy's patron god to abandon his city in favor of better worship, bigger temples, etc. in Rome).  The paper was well received, my friend Sylvia Keesmaat gave a wonderful response to it, and the themes of both the paper and the response resonated very nicely with the plenary talk given by Brian Walsh, an extended re-wording of the entire book of Romans along the theme of homecoming (vs. the home-wrecking, or "domicidal," ways of empire).  And a senior scholar, in thanking me for my involvement in the conference, tells me that he's going to be citing my dissertation in a forthcoming book.  ...The other conference, still on the horizon, is the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, where I'm presenting two papers.  One I was preparing for the advance deadline of the 31st, when suddenly the other session announced that they had a deadline, too -- retroactively!  So the last two weeks have meant a lot of writing, note-checking, and so on.  Not that I didn't deal with deadlines like these in school, but those projects weren't usually for such public presentation, critique, and publication.

Now that both papers have been turned in, it's time to catch up on a lot of things that had to be shelved until after the deadlines.  And to remind myself that if I want to call myself a writer, then this is not a time to rest, at least not for very long: there are other things that tell me they need to be written, and soon.  The past ten-days-plus were something of a sprint, but the marathon is far from over.

A.I.-fi

Most of my writing is nonfiction, but I've experimented at odd intervals with fiction, too.  The latest interval has actually met with a little success and might well turn into something really cool, not to mention remunerative.  But before we get to that, let's review:

Late in high school, I read the Worst Star Trek Pulp Novel Ever and decided I could write something better.  I succeeded, barely: I produced a novella about a human who becomes accidentally entangled in an interstellar organized crime network.  It wasn't completely original, and it was often cheesy, but it was better than that pulp novel, and helped me to realize that I could write this kind of stuff, when I put my mind to it.  A seminar in my senior year also helped me to look critically at my own work and to try out other forms of fiction.

In my second year of undergrad, I took an advanced fiction-writing course from a professor who asked that we learn by imitating techniques modeled by famous novelists.  The exercises could have been excruciating if he hadn't also given us some freedom to continue to seek our own writing voices in the process.  The results, for me, were some interesting short stories, little thought-experiments, some of them derivative -- there's one that reveals, in retrospect, how many of Piers Anthony's fantasy novels I'd read up to that point -- but again, each was a chance to break new ground.

During my twenties and early thirties, I kept coming back to short story-crafting, writing more originally, but still struggling to find the writing voice I'd been looking for since high school, with mixed results.  (It should come as no surprise that this period overlapped with some particularly difficult stages of development in my doctoral dissertation.  Writer's block can be contagious that way.)  I showed a story or two to friends; I entered a public library's all-night story-writing contest; but I was still looking for that One Really Good Idea.  Maybe that's especially important for those who write and hope to publish science fiction -- there's so much, and so many good ideas (and more than a few bad ones!) already out there, that the finding of one's voice is inextricably bound to the discovery of a distinctive feature that nobody else (to one's knowledge) has yet developed.

That brings us to the recent past.  In trying to "write what I know," I had been kicking around ideas about an artificial intelligence (or "A.I.") as a narrator, ever since I had first encountered narrative transmission models in the field of literary criticism.  Without going into exhaustive detail, some critics have suggested that reading is a communication process that happens not just between author, text, and reader, but between imagined folks within the text itself: the "implied author" as s/he is represented in the text, the narrator who relates the story, the narratee to whom the story is told, and the "implied reader" for whom the text is intended (the model can get much more complicated, though we don't need to go into that here.  But I know a guy who wrote a dissertation about this stuff.)  For example, in the case of this blog, a real author with flesh-and-blood fingers is typing it, and a few (presumably) fleshy readers are reading it, but within the blog itself, one could posit that there's a Me as I present myself in here, and a You, an "ideal" reader, that will get and appreciate everything I have to say.

What I had begun to wonder about was the prospect of an AI as an implied author and/or narrator: how a computer would present itself and relate a story to an audience, who that audience would be, etc.  This led to a story about an archival computer from Earth, recounting the manner in which Earth was attacked and incorporated into a vast empire called the Magistracy.  Other stories followed, and ideas for more pop up all the time.  This unfolding universe is at least as much a philosophical thought-experiment as that of others whose work I've enjoyed; Ursula Le Guin, for example, draws on her father's work in anthropology when she writes sociologically rich stories about the worlds of the Ekumen, while Robert Sawyer has speculated that so much of "sci-fi" is philosophical in nature that it could be just as accurately called "phi-fi."  Well, welcome to "A.I.-fi."  Certainly fleshy creatures, humans included, are involved in this batch of stories, but the accounts themselves belong to machines who live among them, pilot their ships, etc.  Part of the fun of creating and writing these characters lies in imagining how differently they might see their world(s), and what they make of ours.  And of course a fair amount of my background in ancient-imperial ideology and biblical theology comes through, too.

The Magistracy stories completed so far received some very positive feedback from my sister, a (recovering) English Major now well-versed in the publishing world, and from one Karen Elliott Lowe as well.  Finally, with fear and trembling, it was time to submit a few for publication.  Last week, a small Canadian publisher wrote to congratulate me on the upcoming publication of one of my stories in their very short story collection (contest entries were limited to 750 words.  You try it.  It's fun and frustrating by turns) this coming December, with second-round contest results TBA.  And I'm still waiting to hear back from Asimov's, one of the premier SF magazines, about what they think of another, much longer story.  But hooray for external, blind-review validation, and here's hoping for more to come!

I'll keep you posted.

Writing about Writing

I've been reflecting lately on writing as a vocation and a discipline.  Certainly I was doing so before I read and responded to my sister Chandra's post, "Going Public," on her excellent blog, "several drafts & a loving Editor" (which you should go and read as soon as you're done reading this... http://severaldrafts.blogspot.ca/2012/08/going-public.html), and more so since then.

Like Chandra, I call myself a writer, and again like her, I do not write enough.  If writing is (one of) my vocation(s), one of the things for which I am made and to which I am called, then in a sense I am neglecting that which I was created to do when I am not thus engaged.  If I do not consistently practice this as a discipline, it is difficult to say with any integrity that I pursue it as a vocation.

That doesn't make the writing easy.

Part of what I have been thinking about is that it seems to be easier to write about writing than it is to write otherwise.  Writers whose books I otherwise skim through turn suddenly engaging, insightful, and even funny when they write about writing.  Two examples:

Mark Buchanan (The Holy Wild [Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah, 2003], 9) recounts that God made him “a monk’s failed cousin, a writer. Both callings render you slightly odd, a man alone in a room, denying one part of his manhood in order to awaken another. Both force you to shape silence and darkness and waiting into prayer. Both teach you the agonies of silence and of speaking, and the way God’s voice can brim in each. Both require you to listen much, pray much, study much, plow much. One demands you drink much wine, the other much coffee. I’ll let you figure out which is which. Both are lonely vocations.”

Mitt Romney (No Apology: The Case for American Greatness [New York: St. Martin’s, 2010], 195), remembering the solid foundation in compositional skills he received in junior and senior high, desires for the U.S. a “national rededication to the practice of writing,” but adds parenthetically, "Those who read this book may quarrel with the success" of his school's writing program "in my case.  But at least I gained the confidence to give it a try."

The urgent need for a renewed focus on writing is one of the few points on which Romney and I agree; and of course that commitment to better writing needs to be personal, not just institutional.  Buchanan's description of the writing life as a lonely vocation is one part of what sparked this blog; others have applied the same descriptor to writing, as well as teaching, public service jobs, and other careers (so saith Google, in all its oracular wisdom).  It's a helpful reminder of the solitude, and with it the focus and dedication, one needs in order to call oneself a writer, in order to be a writer.  But for me, it isn't quite as lonely a vocation -- for at least three reasons.

First, whether in my nonfiction writing for academic journals, books, and conference presentations, or in my tiny-but-hopefully-growing record of published fiction, writing and the study that informs it are forms of worship.  As long as I am deliberate about it, then time and energy so spent are spent with and for my Creator, in his presence and for his glory.

Second, all my vocations -- or all the facets of my vocation, singular -- are intimately tied to my role as husband to my wife, Karen.  If I am a helpful resource for pastors and other Christian ministry leaders, it's because I learned (and continue to learn) much of how to do that by discovering what is most helpful to her.  If a point in my teaching or nonfiction writing is clearer and more accessible than it might otherwise be, it's often because I ran it past her first.  And if the artificial intelligences that frequently serve as narrators and principals in my short stories seem more credible, more human, easier to relate to, it's often because she's encountered them first and made suggestions that flesh out the stories and those who relate them.

And third, as this blog's description indicates, writing has company in my life; it's never complained about being lonely.  I am an editor, in freelance capacities for an academic publishing house (hopefully with more to follow) and for projects authored by friends, family, and colleagues.  I am a professor/teacher, both informally and in lecture halls whenever I get the chance.  And lately, I am becoming a manager of The Scaffold, a missional/theological book room affiliated with the TrueCity movement here in Hamilton.  On paper, as it were, that last facet will give me more time and space to write, once it gets going over the next few weeks.  But as with the worship aspect, that will happen only if I am very deliberate about it.  My prayer is that this blog will be, among other things, a means of holding myself publicly accountable to my overall goal -- to pursue my not-so-lonely vocation(s) passionately and wholeheartedly.