Elections 10-3-04

Things I expect to lose if GWB is elected:

• My right to choose


• Any tenuous legality of gay marriages or civil unions


• My privacy


• My pension


• My job


• Any school system both good enough and affordable enough to send my children


• The ability to travel safely abroad


• My freedom of speech


• My trust in the basic intelligence of the American people

I keep having thoughts with headers like "New American Dark Age," and I keep thinking about the 1930s... we're going to have to spend the next forty years as a persecuted minority to undo all this damage. If it ever gets undone at all.

EDIT: Oddly enough, sanity came to me from the vehicle of Slashdot. Yes, most of the above things are true at least in part. But what am I going to do, jump ship and move to Canada? No. I stay here and fight against a government that I think is idiotic. I don't sit around and suffer through it, I find something I can do about it.

That's all there is to it, really. Time to step up.

Novel (update) 11-3-04

5100 words in, exactly on schedule (just 1700 words a day!). As expected, much of it is crap. But I'm beginning to find things that I really like in it. This sucker will probably be 50,000 words on the nose when it's done, then be hewn down like a clear-cut forest and rebuilt from scratch.

But I'll have the materials. I'll have a novel at the end of this. I can't believe it. :)

By the way, the novel is called The Year of Saying Goodbye and is twelve connected vignettes which will NOT have the same narrator. Currently a lot of it's in first person, and I think I'm probably going to stick with all-male narrators for this one just for cohesion-- but we'll see how things turn out. The novel is fiction straight-up, no science or fantasy chasers.

This is a good time. I highly recommend it.