[Note: This post is mostly regarding attitudes towards homosexuality in America. I'm Dutch, and while we are certainly ahead of the pack when it comes to the whole "treating gays as if they're human beings" thing, there's definitely still plenty of homophobia to go around here. But I want to focus on America because even though it's clearly an empire on the verge of collapse, the rest of the west (who are similarly on the verge of collapse, but haven't been able to rule the world on the backs of slaves for a while now anyway so the effects are less) still look up to them. America still dominates Europe culturally as well, because while they give us this:the best Europe can come up with is this: Also to fully analyze the attitudes towards homosexuality accurately would require too much reading and research for me right now. I have a Forensic Linguistics exam in a few hours, and I just need to get some of these ideas out there. Nobody reads this blog anyway.]

Quoth the bible:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination.

-Leviticus 18:22

Let’s leave out the fact that a  two thousand year old text that has been translated and retranslated, edited and re-edited, can’t possibly have retained its message over that time. We can’t even understand some of the things Shakespeare wrote down, and that stuff is technically modern English. Those who believe in the Bible consider it the word of their god. Fine. Good. That’s what faith is. Alright then, why leave out all the other things? Why is nobody raging about blended fabrics? Why aren’t the physically deformed kept the hell away from churches? Why is slavery banned?

The Bible, like all successful religious texts, is so successful because it so easy to pick the things you like from it and ignore or bury the things you don’t. I mean look at it, it’s huge. You don’t really think that those who quote Leviticus to turn gays into subhumans have really read and studied the whole thing, do you? Ok then, fine, so why do they choose 18:22 over the passage that tells them they should be executed because they’re pissed at their parents?

Because it has nothing to do with the Bible. For most people who identify themselves as Christian, the Bible is in the background. It is the basis of their religion, and possibly their faith, but it isn’t more than that. Most Christians (and yes, I’m generalizing here, as indicated by my usage of the word “most”) are not Christian by conscious choice, but because they were raised Christians. Oh, there are plenty of people who may have doubted their faith at some point during their lives, and then still decided that they wished to follow Christ (whatever that may have meant for them personally), but it’s not really hard to decide  you’re a Christian after all in a culture which has historically always been, and still predominantly is, Christian down to its core. I will most definitely concede that many of the values which are dominant in western society have Christianity as a source. But keeping it at that would ignore both the moral and cultural elements that Christianity itself had taken from the Romans and the Greeks, both during its early days and during the various revivals over the centuries. It would also ignore the moral and cultural knowledge taken from other, non-western cultures over the millennia. Most importantly, it would ignore the increasingly rapid moral, cultural, and even technological developments of the last century. To say that the majority of Christians get their morals from the Bible is as ignorant as to say that homosexuals enjoying the same rights as any other human beings is a threat to the stability of society.

For the politicians it’s, well, political, of course. Repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was a compromise for Obama. It was an easy way to convince those who voted for him on the basis of HOPE that he actually did have some form of power, however symbolic it might be. The current circus show of Republican candidates don’t believe in compromise or moderation, so they’re just screaming loudly over each other. Whatever active brain cells they still have remember that the gay marriage debate, much like the “debate” around evolution, riles up the base like a pack of howler monkeys, and more importantly gives the media something to distract us all from the real issues with, and confuse this with actual popularity.

Ok, so it’s an easy issue to distract people with. But what are we being distracted from? Lizard people? Donald Trump notwithstanding, no, it’s not the lizard people. Those screaming the loudest, the white Christian majority, are realizing what white supremacist racist dickshits have realized for a long time now: They are losing their monopoly. It’s not that their morals are actually being corrupted, it’s not that society is actually in any risk of decaying (at least for these reasons), it’s simply that they have always been the ones who were in complete control, and that’s now changing. Oh, sure, it’s still a ginormous majority. The western governments are still composed mostly of White Christian Males, after all, and a huge influx of poor non-white, non-Christian immigrants doesn’t change anything that much, as they would have to assimilate themselves into white Christian society to get anywhere anyway. But it’s no longer a monopoly. If 9/11 did anything outside of give the west excuses to invade the Middle-East, it’s that it put a big fat spotlight on the Muslim communities living in the Americas and Europe. Not always in a good way, as my pathetic excuse for a fellow Dutchman Geert Wilders so clearly illustrates, but we are no longer in denial. These people are here. They have been here for decades now. They are as much a part of our society as we are. This is an irreversible realization. That’s why you have people like Wilders proposing desperate solutions like “let’s just throw ‘em all out and go back to the way it used to be, please?”

And it spreads, of course. It starts with the Muslims. In the Americas, the realization that Mexicans are there to stay is leading to cognitive dissonance among hicks on a scale previously only reached by the Vatican. The idea seems to be that as long as they’re able to send the illegals back and prevent more coming in, all the legal Mexicans will stay quiet and not influence things too much. But more and more people are realizing that, hey, those Mexicans aren’t Mexican at all, they’ve been American all along! The majority Americans also realized that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to elect a black president after all.

Things are changing, and it’s scaring the hell out of the White Christian Majority. The funny thing is, of course, that the majority of the Majority doesn’t care. They couldn’t give two shits about the color of the president’s skin or the geographical origin of the country’s immigrants. So the Majority isn’t a majority at all, but they still have some power, and they’re screaming and shouting as if they’re going to lose it any day now.

So why target the gays? Aren’t most gays in the west white and Christian by default? Sure, but gay bashing is still morally accepted or at the very least ignored by a large section of the population. Overt racism just isn’t accepted anymore, which is not to say that all old white men get this, or that it doesn’t happen in the background anyway, but at least we’re living in a time when saying “fuck dem niggas” would swiftly end anyone’s political career (luckily I don’t have political aspirations). Racism itself causes some form of moral outrage these days, which only supports my point, but gay, uhh, -ism, doesn’t. It’s therefore a great political tool. And this does not just apply to those who are running for or are already a part of government. Anyone who is in a position of power, or believes he should be, whether its political, religious, or someone in the media, can easily rile up anger at, well, anything, either to get people to follow him directly, or to distract from the real issues like their actual impending loss of power. You see this happening in some African nations too, where to increasingly educated populace gets misled into hunting down gays by those who can feel the power slipping out of their hands. You might as well blame this for a shitload of injustices inflicted on the people of Middle-East by their leaders as well.

This is the true source of all racism, populism, homophobia, nationalism, etc. It’s not the fear of the thing itself. It’s not people reading the Bible and then all of a sudden realizing “hey, God doesn’t like this after all.” It’s preachers, politicians, the media, (unfortunately) influential people in power who are ridiculously desperate to maintain that power in the face of a changing world.

So don’t worry, gays, there’s nothing about your behavior that these people really think is wrong, nor are they actually afraid of you. You’re just a symbol of a world that is changing, and has in fact never really ever stood still anyway.

And to you homophobes out there, reality is hard to face, isn’t it?

Today I am 25 years old.

I’m happy.

Here’s a picture of a couple of cute, colorful birds.

A bit more than a month ago I decided to give National Novel Writing Month a shot again. The goal: 50,000 words in one month. I had tried NaNoWriMo twice before. In 2009 my total word count was an amazing 1748. More words of fiction than I had ever coherently written, but only a bit above the daily average required to reach the total word count: 1667. In 2010 I tried again. I did better this time, beating my old record by writing a grand total of 1749 words. That’s right, exactly one word closer to the goal. Reading this, you may assume that I have had problems with completing goals. Looking back at my previous creative attempts and academic nonchievements, this was absolutely 100% most definitely true. Was.
Because it’s 2011 now, and NaNoWriMo is over, and my final word count for this year’s attempt is: 50,183

Yep, not only did I win this year, I did it with a few days to spare. And now I’m going to explain to you how I did it.

1.  The Difference

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” – Not Albert Einstein

Now, I’m not going to claim that I’m not insane, but I did think it would be a good idea to try things differently this time around. Step 1: Get a support group. Nothing motivates me better than showing off to people, it’s the only reason I do, uhh… anything. So, I joined fellow NaNo’ers on a particular forum I’m not going to mention because I don’t want worlds colliding. I would say that posting my word count there (almost) every day and discussing my progress with other people really helped to keep me going. There is one thing that motivates me almost as good as bragging, though, and that’s shame. So I decided to post all my writing on a public Tumblr, letting everyone who would be interested know that I failed. I posted my progress on Twitter for extra attention/threat of shame.

Another change I made was not using an ordinary word processor. Distraction-free writing is very important to a hyperactive-procrastinating-oh-look-how-many-funny-pictures-and-videos-there-are-on-the-internet-and-also-look-how-many-unplayed-games-there-are-in-my-Steam-list kind of guy. So I started with Ommwriter, and boy did it help. A soothing background, soothing music, soothing typing noises, it was all very soothing indeed. Unfortunately it started acting up after a while, with the on-screen text lagging behind my keypresses by a microsecond. This may seems like nothing, but a microsecond lasts a lifetime when you have ideas bursting out of your brain, so I sought an alternative. I found one in WriteMonkey. It isn’t quite as polished as Ommwriter, but I set a soothing blue background and typey sounds, and replaced the music with Grooveshark’s Ambient radio station, and I was set. I could write without distraction… as long as I kept my fingers away from alt-tab…

So outside of software, how did I keep myself from being distracted too much? More software, of course, come on. For a bit more than a year now, I’ve been adhering to my own interpretation of the Pomodoro Technique, using a simple little app called Focus Booster to measure how much time I’m actually spending getting work done. I plan all Pomodoros in a little notebook, and check them off whenever I’ve completed one. Keeping to this routine has given me great results both for school and work, so applying this to the writing of a novel seemed like an obvious choice.

Oh yeah, I kind of had an outline for the story. Not a real outline, mind you, I didn’t even have any idea what the ending of the story would be until about a day before I finished it, but I did have a setting, a few characters, and an idea of what kind of tone I wanted. This helped, but I do find that making shit up as you go along is, well, fun.

And lastly, I made sure to use Dropbox to keep a cloud backup of my text. This didn’t really increase productivity, but it did save my ass a bunch of times. My computer is a piece of shit that sometimes has random Blue Screen of Death attacks, and getting one of those while you are saving your txt files leads to, guess what, a blank text file. I almost had  heart attack when it happened the first time, as I was closing in on 25,000 words, but good ol’ Dropbox keeps older revisions, so I was saved.

I’m sure there were some internal psychological thingamajigs going on which also made a difference, but they wouldn’t have been reinforced if I hadn’t taken action to be better prepared.

2. Numbers

 ”I couldn’t think of a good quote for this section.” – Me

Here’s my progress chart from my NaNoWriMo profile:

As you can see, I kept a pretty steady pace with the benchmark in the first week, lagged behind a bit in week two, and then sat on my ass for most of the third week. I hadn’t given up, I was just very busy with school and such, and couldn’t find any proper time to write. But then I got over my slump, and used the last two weeks or so to gloriously sprint to the finish, completing the goal a few days before the end of the month. I’m not gonna waste time posting the daily numbers here, but you can find them on the top of every post on the Tumblr.

Speaking of the Tumblr, I made sure to add some Google Analytics to it to see if anyone actually read it. I linked to it on the forum I was active on, my Twitter, and my Facebook, but of course I didn’t expect much. Still, I’ll post the some of the totals of November here for posterity. I had 111 Unique Visitors and 368 pageviews. This is much, much higher than zero, so I am happy.

Lastly, I want to take a look at how many hours I actually spent writing. This is easy because I recorded all the Pomodoros. Keep in mind that some of these I spent outlining, and every now and then I wrote on paper in the train or while away from home. In total I have 110 Pomodors of recorded work, which averages out to roughly 55 hours of writing.  Dividing my total word count by this number gives me about 912 words written per hour, which matches my observations. There were plenty of times where I was a writing machine, pumping out words like I was personally getting my ass slapped by Stephen King, but other times I just kind of stared at the screen and drooled.

3. Results

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining …researching …talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.” – E. L. Doctorow

On my Twitter profile I describe myself as a “pretend writer.” This is because I had never really written anything, but loved to come up with stories in my head. Sure, I have one shitty story I put on Fience Sciction, but it’s nothing I’m proud of, just something I wrote so that I could have something. NaNoWriMo, of course, exists exactly to help people get over this hump, to allow them to say “sure, it sucks, but I wrote a 50,000 word novel. Suck on that, dad!” Did I expect to win? I’m going to be honest here, yes I did. I’ve changed a lot since last year, and I took the challenge seriously this time. I can definitely say that actually writing has started to allow me to find my voice, my own way of writing and describing things. I haven’t yet reread what I wrote (more on that later), but I do feel that the last 10,000 words are a lot more elegant and well-written than the first 10,000. They certainly came out easier. The whole experience really slapped into my brain what I knew before but never acted upon. It’s exactly what that quote up there says. I can come up with worlds, ideas, characters, storylines, etc. all I want, but unless I’m actually going to write them down they won’t exist anywhere but in my head. There is no worse place for something to exist than in my head. I would know, I live there. So I’ve learned to just write, and in fact I already got some ideas for the next edition of NaNoWrimo, though if things work out I can pump that novel out even sooner. Or short stories, or whatever. I’m excited about my newly unleashed abilities, is basically what I’m trying to get across here.

All in all, this accomplishment symbolizes a turning point for me. I have conquered NaNoWriMo, I will soon finish my first game, I worked for money this past month (just a temp translation job, but enough to afford a nice holiday season), and most importantly, I am finally approaching the end to my academic career, making my mom proud and leaving me with a potential backup if this whole “make money on the internet somehow someway idk lol” plan doesn’t work out. This is important to me, because I’ve always been that guy who doesn’t really work hard enough or finishes his projects, but somehow still always lucked his way into reasonable success. Sure, being lucky is fun, but it’s not a reliable path to success, you know? And it made me spoiled as hell. Why try, when things always work out for you anyway? Well I want certainty, that’s why. And I have great, great plans for the future me, but I need to change this “shit just kinda falls into place” attitude to reach them. Changing this attitude has been hard, and believing that it can be done was even harder. But here I am, I have completed the First Challenge. To the rest, I say: Bring it on.

4. FutureJer

“If you don’t think about the future, you cannot have one.” – John Galsworthy

So I wrote myself a novel. Now what? Well it has always been my intention to become a self-published author. It’s becoming pretty clear to me that the old TwenCen concept of writing a manuscript, and then leaving the rest up to an agent and publisher who will compensate you as they see fit, will not work for me. We’re living in a time when being self-published is most certainly a viable option. This takes work, of course. I’m going to have to rewrite the whole thing so that it doesn’t look like it was hastily written in a month, edit it or get it edited, and do all the marketing, etc. That will all take time, and effort, but I’m willing to put those in to maintain control of my work. However, I think it’s a good idea not to touch the work for a while, to let it sit for at least a month, maybe longer, so that I can look at it with fresh eyes again. This is why I haven’t even read it yet, and why I’ve been trying my best to ignore all the possible improvements to it that have been popping up in my head for the past week.

So until I’m prepared to take a look at the work again, I’m going to have to keep myself busy with other things. School, of course. Finishing Outer Space Hot Rod. Finally getting some kind of WordPress theme production going. And most important, coming up with an interesting idea for a webcomic which I will write and my most talented sister will illustrate. I’ll probably be doing lots of other writing in between. Oh, and there’s also the matter of a BA Thesis that has to be done before the summer starts.

However, if you are still interested in reading the very first draft in what will (un)doubtedly become the first of many bestselling adventures of Thomas Thing and his friend, then please, by all means, check out Good Excuses.

Also I’m totally the first person to use the word “nonchievement.” Write it down.

So here I was, slowly waking up, still very much in the zombified state I’m usually in for the 3 hours or so post-sleep, running through my usual bloggy news sources, when I came across this nice article on io9 regarding a ridiculously sexist story called Womanspace, published in Nature, of all places. So I read the story, and then I read it to my girlfriend, and we both laughed at the fact that, if it wasn’t for references to current technology, we would have guessed that it was a story from 1952 or so. But it isn’t. Nope, it’s a story about a couple of men who figure out that women do half their shopping in a parallel universe, and it was published (and presumably written) in 2011. Like io9, I’m not going to bother getting ripping into the awful gender stereotyping, because a ton of other sources have already done that better than I could, but io9 did bring up  another valid criticism of the work, namely it’s pathetic excuse for a scientific process.

I would like to add another log of criticism to the fire, but first let’s run trough the ways this story is stupid (as an English literature student, none of my instructors would appreciate describing a work as “stupid” but this is my blog and I break academic boundaries, yo.)

1. Men are brave scientists uncovering the world, women tell them to buy underpants. Understood. Not only that, but there is a biological divide between men and women so huge that women are able to access a parallel universe. This counts for all women, and all men Unless you’re still one of those aging men pathetically living in the past, or a heavily indoctrinated woman, or somehow transgender but still fixated on heteronormativity because you’re oblivious to the real world, it sounds pretty stupid.
2. Science is when a couple of biologists (?) come up with a very non-biology related theory of parallel universes while shopping for panties, blog about it a bit, and then let the real scientists work it out. But we’re still the ones who found it. Okay, I guess. The real scientists are just the computers who work it all out for you? It’s the idea that matters, not the enormous amount of work required to find real data (not @replies), test it a billion times over, and reconcile it with our current understanding of the universe? Alrighty then.
3. It’s poorly written. Look, okay, I’m not gonna go into it because I still am in that zombified state, and I understand that very short fiction has its limitations, and I still suck at writing myself (I’m about 10,000 words behind on my NaNoWriMo adventure to boot), but how the hell did this story get published. Seriously.