Coming up in October in New Orleans is the 11th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference. Each year the conference begins with a couple of days of tutorial sessions–half day classes on different Tcl/Tk programming topics. Since June I’ve been scheduled to teach one of these tutorials, on the subject of programming with Snit, my Tcl-based object-framework.

And so for the last week I’ve been industriously preparing for my tutorial. I’ve been making a list of specific technical points I need to discuss, writing example programs that illustrate these technical points, and outlining a lecture that works through the examples in a logical progression. It’s been interesting work, but since it’s a free-time activity I’ve been a little concerned about getting it all done in time.

So today I hear from someone on the conference committee that to date exactly one (1) person has signed up for my tutorial; the fee from one person won’t even pay for the room the tutorial would be held in. So the committee wants to cancel my tutorial and replace it with a couple-three panel discussions on a variety of topics, and would I like to sit on a panel about OO methods in Tcl?

I said yes, of course, and I admit to a sense of relief–this means I don’t need to finish the tutorial, and can get on with other things. Nor is my ego bruised; the committee expected Snit to draw more interest than that, just as I did. After all, it’s becoming reasonably popular in the Tcl community.

Really, I think, it just goes to show. If you want to make money teaching people to use your software, don’t write software that’s simple and easy to use, and most especially don’t document it well. On the other hand, if you write software that’s simple and easy to use, and document it well, don’t expect to make money teaching people to use it.

As I mentioned the other day, it’s at interesting time to an orthodox
Christian in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

Some weeks ago, three
L.A. area parishes chose to leave the Episcopal Church and place
themselves under the authority of the Archbishop from the Anglican Church of
Uganda, with whom all three parishes already had warm ties. The
Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles has responded by claiming that all of the
property of the three parishes (including every candle and prayerbook) is
the property of the diocese and must be handed over. The three parishes
have responded that in fact the parish land, buildings, and accoutrements
(I love that word “accoutrements” a whole lot) were purchased solely with
money contributed by parishioners, with no money coming from the diocese
or national church, and that moreover they hold legal title. Lawsuits
have been filed, and eventually the courts will decide who is correct.

There’s been a lot of talk around the relevant portions of the
blogosphere about this–about whether we should, as Christians, have
recourse to the courts at a time like this; most of the comments I’ve
seen have thought that this reflects badly on Bishop Bruno. Now, I
support the three parishes in this particular debate, especially as
the property was purchased entirely with local funds. But I feel moved
to note an incident I discovered in Eusebius’ History of the
Church.

In the middle of the third century, the Bishop of Antioch was a fellow
named Paul of Samosata. After he’d been made bishop, it was discovered
that he held unorthodox views; in particular, he denied the divinity of
Christ, a constant of Christian doctrine since the apostles. On top of
that, he appears to have viewed his position primarily as a way to make
money for himself, and as a way to gain social status. Eventually he
seems to have required his followers to pay him divine honors, and to
have taken “spiritual brides”, whatever that means (though one can
certainly guess).

The Church as a whole responded by calling a synod at which gathered
bishops from as far away as Alexandria; they were unanimous in declaring
that Paul of Samosata’s teaching was heresy, and excommunicated him,
choosing another man, one Domnus, to be Bishop of Antioch.

Paul, for his part, refused to relinquish control of the church’s
property in Antioch; and so his successor and the synod called upon
Emperor Aurelian to intervene. In effect, they filed suit. Aurelian
(not a Christian himself) solved the problem simply and magisterially–he
asked the bishops of Italy who rightfully represented the Christian Church
in Antioch. They told him that Domnus did, and Paul was ignominously
thrown out by the secular authorities.

There are two aspects of this tale that interest me. The first is that
the leaders of the Church did not hesitate to appeal to the Emperor–and
note that this was well before Constantine’s day, at a time when
Christianity was tolerated at best by the Roman authorities. Being
excommunicate, the teachings against taking fellow Christians to court
would no longer apply to Paul of Samosata. But on top of that, Aurelian
based his decision not on what the local leaders said, but on what the
larger church said (as represented by the Italian bishops).

Given that the majority of the world’s Anglicans have declared themselves
in a state of impaired or broken communion with the Episcopal Church,
perhaps Bishop Bruno should be worrying about the Los Angeles Cathedral
Center….

Forager 23 has a new post up; this time he’s talking about movie remakes, which he breaks down into three categories: the Remake of Tribute, the Remake of Correction, and the Remake of Convenience. Then he starts pigeonholing specific films, and the fun begins. Go thou, verily, et cetera, et cetera.

Ugh. I really don’t need to wake up to comments spam advertising “r-pe stories with screams”. (That “-” used to be an “a”, if that wasn’t clear; I just don’t want to discover that the Foothills are the number one Google hit for that particular topic.)

Comments are disabled, again, at least until tomorrow. (Sigh!) If you have comments, you can send them to me, and I’ll post ’em for you. (Within reason.)

Update: I’ve re-enabled them; hope springs eternal.

Jaquandor comments (with reference to his manuscript in progress) on this post about how to (or how not to) write formula fantasy fiction. Jaq compared his work-in-progress with the guidelines and discovered he’d hit 7 out of 10 of them–but with extenuating circumstances in each case.

As it happens, I’ve written two fantasy novels; Through
Darkest Zymurgia, which you can read on-line for free because not
only isn’t it a best-seller it isn’t any kind of seller, and The King
of Elfland’s Nephew, of which I have a pretty good draft but which
I’m not really through with yet. As it’s a slow weekend (Jane and are
both afflicted with colds, and our youngest is teething) and Jaq’s
example seems like goodly post fodder, I’ll do the same. You’ll need to
read the original guidelines, linked above, to make complete sense of the
answers.

1. Create a main character

And according to the guidelines he should be a loser, so that young,
under-confident males will identify with him. Alas, I blew this one;
Leon Thintwhistle is a successful academic and a leading name in his
field, and Jonas Morgan’s a successful investment banker.

2. Create a Quest

Because the fate of the whole world has to rest on the main character’s
shoulders. Hmmm. I blew this one, too. Zymurgia has an
expedition, certainly, but it’s of no importance to anyone but the
principles. And while considerable weight rests on Jonas Morgan’s
shoulders, there’s no quest as such, nor is the whole world (or anything
like it).

3. Create a Motley Bunch of Companions

Each with particular skills that will be necessary at some point in the
story. The author of the guidelines might have added, “And then play
them against each other for laughs.” Here, I confess, Zymurgia
hews to the party line. But then, the members of a scientific expedition
are supposed to have particular skills that will be necessary at
some point. Elfland seems to be free of this sort of thing,
though. Jonas Morgan doesn’t (for the most part) have companions; he’s a
banker. He has a staff. Of employees, not of oak, hickory, or (spare me) lorken.

4. Create a wise but useless guide

He must be wise and powerful and never say anything or do anything
terribly helpful. If the book were a computer game, I suppose he’d be
the on-line hints. Zymurgia simply has no such character;
Elfland has something of the sort, but Mr. Godwin is about as
different from Gandalf as one can reasonably imagine.

5. Create the Land

It must have all of the landforms you can imagine, in bewildering and
unlikely juxtaposition, through which the motley crew can be dragged, and
it must fit on two pages of a paperback book. Hmmm, I seem to have blown
this one, too. Zymurgia is all about geography in one sense, but
I seem to have restrained myself with the variability; and anyway it
takes place in a modified Europe/Mediterranean world. Sort of. And in
Elfland I never go into the geography, it not being particularly
relevant. Though I can find most of the parts that take place in Los
Angeles on the map.

6. Create the Enemy

After all, you have to have a Dark Lord. Except that you don’t;
Zymurgia has no such thing. In Elfland, on the contrary,
there’s definitely a bad guy, the King of the Unseelie Host, but frankly
he’s not much of a Dark Lord. Evil, yes, but human-scale. Or
Elven-scale, perhaps. Not that my elves are particularly like anybody
else’s.

7. Make it Long

Blew it here, too. IIRC, both novels are around 90K-100K words.

8. Skip the Hard Parts

Such as the battle scenes, for they are messy and hard to write. As the
original guidelines put it,

The sound of the battle was suddenly a long way away but just as he
closed his eyes and the black cloud engulfed him he thought he heard
someone crying from the grassy knoll, “The Toasters are coming. The
Toasters are coming.”

I don’t think I did this. There’s precisely one (short) battle-scene
between the two books, and I describe it in detail. Oh, and there’s a bar
fight that takes place off-stage, but that’s only because it was funnier
that way. In fact, come to think of it, both books have a bar
fight that takes place off-stage because it was funnier that way. Hmmm.

9. Lead up to a Cataclysmic Battle

OK, a good bit of the plot in Elfland leads up to a battle. It’s
a fair cop–except that the battle doesn’t really settle anything. There
are no battles to speak of in Zymurgia

10. Kill Almost Everybody

To quote the guidelines,

Most of the Motley Bunch must die in terrible pain and
degradation before the Loser/Hero gets his act together. This is to keep
us mad at the Enemy, thought it is basically the Loser/Hero’s fault for
being so slow and incompetent.

Precisely one person dies in Zymurgia, mostly because he’s nasty
and stupid, and it’s his own fault. A few more people die in
Elfland (there’s a battle, after all) but only two of them are
really important to the plot. The book begins with the funeral of the
first of them, and the second dies well before the halfway point.

After giving these ten guidelines, the author goes on to list a few other
keypoints. Jaq skipped these, but I think I’ll give ’em a go.

Bad Expendables: E.g., orcs, goblins, trolls, cannon fodder. I
don’t have any of these in either book. That is to say, Elfland
certainly has ogres and trolls and goblins, but none of them are
expendable.

Tough Old Warriors: Nope, none of these either. Unless an
experienced CPA/comptroller counts.

Pure Maiden Warriors: Nor these.

Body Types: All of the people in my books (the corporeal ones,
anyone) do indeed have body types. But I don’t think that’s what he
meant.

Character Names: Some of my names are a bit silly, it’s true, but
all of them are pronounceable.

Technology: E.g., gaps therein. The technology in Zymurgia
is at a level roughly equivalent to the Victorian era I’m evoking. The
technology level in Elfland is consistent with the Elves’ interest
in such things. (Snicker, snicker, guffaw.)

Magic: I quote, “the Good Wizard’s fire is always blue, and Bad
Wizard’s is always green or red.” There are no wizards in either book.
Unless an experienced CPA/comptroller counts.

Dwellings: “There are three sorts of dwellings in fantasy novels
— caves, huts, and castles.” I’ve got caves and castles, certainly,
though none of the caves are of the “passageway under the impassable
mountains” variety. But I’ve got a number of other kinds of dwelling as
well, including a picture of a really nice Craftsman-style living room.

The Enemy’s Stronghold: There’s no enemy as such in
Zymurgia, and hence no stronghold. The enemy has a stronghold
in Elfland, but the good guys never get near it.

The Enemy’s fatal flaw will always be that he is over-confident.

But in Elfland, the Enemy certainly is over-confident. But that’s
not what proves his undoing.

So. I believe I’ve established that my stuff doesn’t follow the formula
particularly well. The question is, does that make it bold,
original, innovative, and fresh, or simply uncommercial?

If you’re familiar with the VeggieTales series of videos, you’ll probably find this amusing.

Back when I was in my mid-teens, my older brother started buying and then
loaning to me a series of books about a big bruiser named Conan the
Barbarian. The original tales were by Robert E. Howard, of course, but
L. Sprague de Camp, the editor of the paperback series, had
gone to great lengths to put them all in some kind of consistent order
based on their internal chronology, and if I recall correctly he added
some Conan tales of his own to fill in the gaps and round out the series.
I read every one of them, and then I gave them back to my brother, and I
haven’t seen them since. Most of Howard’s other output was also available
in those days, and just as with Conan my brother bought them and I got to
read them. Just hearing the names brings back those days: Kull of
Atlantis, Bran Mak Morn the Pict, Cormac Mac Art…it was great stuff.

I read it all once, and never again, because I don’t have the books on my
shelves, and they haven’t been in print in years.

Then Forager
23 reprinted a post of his in which he contrasted Howard with Tolkien
to the latter’s detriment (a dispute upon which I will not venture an
opinion at this time except to say that Howard is pretty darned good and
Forager is still bananas), and that got me thinking about ol’ Conan and
his ilk. And so the next time I was at the bookstore I looked for Howard
and discovered that Chaosium (the outfit that publishes the Call of
Cthulhu roleplaying game) is republishing Howard’s fantastic fiction.
They had exactly one volume; and somewhat ironically, perhaps, it’s the
one major character of Howard’s that my brother never got to (not that I
recall, anyway): Solomon Kane, a stern Puritan of the 16th century.

Kane is a tall stern man; he wears black, naturally, with a broad
slouch hat, and his face has a dark pallor. I’m not sure how you have
a dark pallor, but the words were used in a number of the stories, and who
am I to argue? Kane’s the sort who will verbally rebuke those who offend
his morals with loose talk or blasphemies but he reserves his anger for
those whose crimes are considerably more active–at which point he begins
to regard himself more-or-less as God’s executioner. And once on the
trail he will pursue his quarry quite literally to the ends of the earth.

The tales were precisely the sort of thing I remember–swordplay, bold
speeches, inhuman fiends, and the like–with the striking difference that
the hero never gets the girl (well, he’s a Puritan after all). I enjoyed
them, certainly, though they didn’t seem quite as good as I remember
Howard’s other stuff being. But it’s so hard to tell, from this remove;
I was less discerning in those days, and that’s a sword that cuts both
ways. I really need to re-read some stuff I remember from before.

There were a couple of things I noticed that I know I would have either
missed or ignored had I read these tales way back then. The first is a
logical error: Howard describes Kane as always acting on impulse; a true
fanatic, he never considers the true reasons for his actions but just goes
straight ahead. And yet, isn’t it the hallmark of the true fanatic that
he always knows exactly why he does why he does, and can explain it to
you in great and appalling detail? In any event, Solomon Kane was first
envisioned by Howard while the author was still in his teens, and I think
it’s fair to say that the darkly pallid fellow owes more to Howard’s
imagination and youthful misconceptions than he does to any Puritan who
actually walked the earth.

The other issue is a shocking degree of racism. About half the stories
in the book take place in central Africa, and Kane several times runs into
lost cities once inhabited by proud races of a higher type than the
savage black negroes of Africa who have since replaced them.
It’s only fair to say that the proud races in question are not
presented as being less cruel than their successors; just more civilized
and racially more advanced.

The racial foolishness didn’t spoil my enjoyment, not the way it
would have if the stories were of a more recent vintage; I don’t regard
these stories as being about the real world anyway, and anyway they were
written in the 1930’s, a time when such sentiments were frequently held
about present-day Africans, let alone those in the forgotten jungles of
the 1500’s. Howard was, after all, a man of his day. But if you’re the
sort who is excessively bothered by this kind of thing you’ll want to
give the book a miss.

Every winter when I was in college, majoring in English and minoring in
History, I spent vast amounts of time reading books. A typical week would be
3-4 novels with a couple hundred pages of history besides. There was one
notable semester that I rashly took Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare all at
the same time plus an intensive course in Roman history and I emerged from
that period of time barely able to speak modern English. What I did to
regain my sanity over the summer was to read Harlequin romances.

For those of you who have never read a Harlequin, don’t despair. There is
only one plot. Single young woman meets glorious, available youngish man. He
generally has a cool name like Brent. They fall in love and marry without
ever touching each other beforehand. Not a kiss, a handshake, nothing. No
throbbing thighs or heaving bosoms. No wide eyed exclamations of intense
delight mingled with surprise. Not a ripped bodice in sight. Just plain old
romance stories with a hint of tingle to them.

Since then, whenever I am overwhelmed mentally, I reach for something like a
Harlequin. No thoughts necessary. No huge plots to follow. No meaning to be
delved into and shredded to bits. Just a story to occupy my mind while I try
to relax. That’s what these books have been for me this last month. Since
deciding to homeschool my daughter, I’ve been in a flurry of putting
together a coherent course outline for her that will address what I want her
to learn and not bore the poor child to death in the process. So I’ve been
reading, googling, looking at forums and generally brushing up. It’s
exhausting.

Plus, when my unemployment ran out in June, I dashed out and got a little
full-time job at a convenience store. And my boss can’t seem to get it thru
her brain that I want to go to part-time because she keeps scheduling me for
full-time hours. This all means I have no brain bandwidth left at the end
of the day to analyze what I’m reading.

So I’m sorry, you guys! I read these books over the last month or so but if
you asked me to delineate the plot of any particular one of them or present
a coherent thought on them, no can do. I do know they hold my attention
enough that I finished them when I can’t even follow the plot of a movie on
the TV. Maybe someday I’ll reread them and actually pay attention.

The September issue of Ex Libris Reviews is now on-line. Don’t miss Craig Clarke’s reviews!

I deal with spam comments almost every day; it’s just a fact of life. Most of them are just annoying: endless advertisements for wonder drugs and on-line gambling. But just in the last few minutes the blog has gotten dozens of truly vile spam comments, and so I’m disabling comments. These things tend to come in waves, so I’ll probably be able to re-enable them tomorrow.