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I think it’s been ten years since the last time I said that.

The more I’m loving revision. 

This too shall pass, my son.

I switched one chapter from Ven’s point of view to Tita’s, and I love the way it works now.  A bunch of stuff is better-explained than before.  The only downside is that I had to give up on the closing image of the chapter, but, on balance, that may be good as well; the new chapter close seems to have a lot more movement in it, despite conveying the same events in the same order.  The magic of POV..

I have a number of clear memories of this day five years ago:

• My company setting up a TV in the main conference room where the whole company was invited to watch.  Being surrounded by sobbing coworkers.
• Bryant Gumbel announcing, in portentous tones, “Important news from Chicago.  The Sears Tower…” Long pause for dramatic effect. Moans from around the conference room. “…has been evacuated.”  I think that made Bryant Gumbel the first person to leverage the fall of the Towers cynically for personal or professional benefit.  Way to go, Bryant!  To this day, I feel a twinge of nausea whenever his face comes on screen.
• Interview outside the Capitol building with two Republican congresscritters, who lambasted the Clinton administration for unexplained failures which were, in their opinions, to blame for the attack.  I don’t remember who these were, but they were the second and third figures to take cynical advantage of the attacks for personal or professional gain.

It goes back that far - the manipulation of 9/11 by Republicans with their willing accomplices in the media.  It’s going on this week on ABC, whose miniseries invents counterfactual scenes in which Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright take deliberate actions to allow bin Laden to survive - didn’t happen, folks.  Same miniseries DOES in fact omit that Bush received a memo titled ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States” while on vacation - and blew it off with the statement “OK, you’ve covered your ass, now.”  And that it was in fact the Bush adminstration that more or less allowed bin Laden to escape from his mountain base in Tora Bora, and that continues to prop up the one government that continues to support him - Pakistan, of course.

Meanwhile, many of the same lawmakers who insisted that perjury in a civil case amply met the Constitution prescription of “high crimes and misdemeanors” now strives mightily to paper over the Bush presidency’s open, admitted, and grotesque violations of the very civil liberties we hold most dear, to grant retroactive legality to invasions of privacy, imprisonment without charges, and torture.  These same leaders now plan another war of conquest, in Iran, having failed any conceivable standard for success to pacify a much weaker, tactically vulnerable, impoverished nation.

My people! What has become of you?

With Craig Shaw Gardner and Jeffrey Carver!  Ten weeks, this fall, workshopping with two people who have written and published dozens of books.  I’m really excited; my friend Chis & I are both going.  Here’s the link to Craig’s announcement. 

Here’s Pandemonium Books in Central Square, Cambridge, where the class will be taught.  It was the first time I’d been there since they moved from Harvard Square, and the first time I’ve ever been able to wander the stacks at Pandemonium without getting hip-checked by other geeks and nerds.  Tons more room.  Great location, lots of room, same great store.

Welcome to my new blog. I’m a software architect and an ardent consumer of fiction and unusual pop music, and I’m finishing my first novel. You may already be reading theophrast.us, the writing blog of my friend Chris Howard, but then again, you may not.