Metafictional Musings

Around the same time Loyal Sedition officially launched, I began a new fiction project that I intended to publish episodically at my static website. I imagined that I would occasionally post my thoughts about the writing process on this blog, both for my own edification and for the possible amusement of any readers. Instead, Loyal Sedition has focused mainly on politics and philosophy, touching on entertainment but rarely. It became almost my only personal writing outlet.

Meanwhile my fiction project languished … for all the usual reasons and more. The science-fictional concept behind it was beyond my ability to execute, which I quickly realized as I started to write the first couple chapters. Though I wrote the leads for several chapters, I let myself be stifled by the need for a more traditional narrative structure. The dynamic, engaging opening that I had imagined—one that would be simultaneously intensely intimate and spectacularly grand in scale—turned into disconnected scenes bracketing the characters sitting around a table talking about orbital mechanics and international treaties.

Beyond that, all I have are excuses. I don’t have enough time between working full time, establishing a part-time business, failing to maintain a satisfactory household, and all that. In truth, I lack the discipline to pursue my writing amid these and other distractions. Maybe that would remain true even if I had the wide latitude I presume to need.

Nevertheless, I’ve tried to break the impasse again and again over the years … but mostly I’ve just tinkered when the mood struck. I’ll write a sentence or a paragraph here … a page or two there. (I wrote pages and pages for my shelved Third Millennium opus.) I’ll dabble in science fiction, magical fantasy, or alternative reality. (I wrote the heartbreaking background for a bloody-handed anti-heroine from a place called Hearth.) I’ll write notes or treatments for various story ideas. (I wrote dozens of now lost pages summarizing an SF story that I eventually decided was too derivative to pursue.) In other words, I’ve toyed with many projects … but still haven’t produced any significant results.

This year, I was inspired to take a different tack. I started to write a screenplay adapted from one of my favorite novels. Building on another author’s work has freed me from the usual doubts that restrain me and lead me to surrender to other distractions. Intellectually, I know that I have to start by placing the plot elements into the story, even if I later have to rearrange, polish, or even remove some of them. Emotionally, though, I too often fail to lay that first course of storytelling bricks … and instead succumb to frustration.

In this case, the building blocks have already been placed. Working within the constraints of a different narrative medium, I can rearrange, rebuild, or even replace the plot pieces that don’t properly fit. Otherwise, the job is akin to editing a completed manuscript. I still need to provide a good measure of creativity due to the aforementioned narrative limitations, but the adaptation process will get me over that first emotional hurdle.

Already, I have made much more progress than usual, drafting about 200 pages of a probable 600-page project. I’m now confident that I can carry the exercise through to completion. Being an adaptation of other copyrighted work, this project is very unlikely to see publication. As much as I would love to see it produced as perhaps a 12-episode television series, I’m hoping that the exercise itself will prove valuable to both my desire and ability to write … even if the work must remain out of general view by design.

This post may not rise to my usual “high” standard of entertaining or thought-provoking fare, but it seemed a worthwhile milestone to place for future reference. Will it mark a meaningful change to my unrequited aspirations as a writer? Or will it mark yet another dead end in that pursuit? We shall see.

Back to Work

Now that I’ve had some of the fun I promised, it’s time for Loyal Sedition to return to more serious, philosophical topics. In the coming weeks and months, I will be writing about the nature of rights and privileges, the relationship between the right to privacy and the right to arms and their importance to the civil-rights movement, and the history of cultural economics and its effects upon wealth and poverty. No doubt, I will also continue to report and muse on new developments in the civil-rights landscape and on the continuing revolution in the information economy.

Nefarious Organizations

My father recently confessed that he had looked me up on Google and remarked that I belong to several “nefarious organizations.” Indeed, I have made no secret of my various memberships and affiliations, but I also rarely go out of my way to talk about them. Today, though, I think I will discuss some of my more nefarious connections and activities.

I am a card-carrying* member of the oft reviled American Civil Liberties Union. Yes, this organization frequently stands up for some real unsavory characters, but while the ACLU is defending the dregs of society from persecution, the rest of us are much less likely to find ourselves among those dregs. In other words, the ACLU helps keep normal people from becoming direct combatants and possible casualties in the war on civil rights.

I am also a member of the equally reviled National Rifle Association. This may seem at odds with my ACLU membership, since that organization’s national leadership fundamentally misunderstands the firearms issue for reasons that are as irrational as they are forgivable, but the NRA and the ACLU do complement each other, even though their actual collaboration may be rare. Of course, the NRA promotes and defends gun ownership and the right to arms.

Based on many of my posts here at Loyal Sedition, you can tell that this last point is very important to me. I have been increasingly active in the right-to-arms movement for several years now, in my own small way at least. This is not because I think that the right to arms is our most important civil right—it isn’t—but because it is the one with the best opportunity for real progress at the moment. The most dramatic progress is currently happening in the courts, so I am a financial contributor to the Calguns Foundation.

I am also a member of the Libertarian Party mostly as a statement of my political support for social and economic freedoms, which are really the same thing—but it’s considered greedy and insensitive to be concerned about money unless you don’t have any. I might call myself a communist, if communism didn’t violate the second law of thermodynamics and the first law of human laziness. However, I don’t limit my political defeat to one party. I was registered as a Republican during the last two elections, and I sometimes even vote for losers from the Democratic Party.

Finally, some interesting stereotypes can be derived from my on-line activity. I am a frequent poster at Calguns (dangerous gun owner), an occasional poster at Libertarian Undergound (heartless libertarian communist) and Cool Mini or Not (freakish gamer geek), and a formerly active poster at Sword Forum International (scary blade lover). I also write this blog and make comments on other people’s blogs from time to time (lonely Internet nerd). Oh, and I recently joined Facebook (unskilled Internet plebeian).

Next year, I may even register to vote as a Democrat.

*I don’t like to have a lot of cards in my pocket, so I don’t actually carry my ACLU or NRA cards, but I do have them.

Welcome to Loyal Sedition

As I mentioned in my previous post, I created this web log to replace my sidebar commentary at the Dancing Giant Inn. That site will continue to host my more in-depth articles, while this space will provide immediacy and the opportunity for participation from my “readership.” Never mind that in the last 10 years I have received exactly one piece of fan mail, one piece of “hate mail,” and one citation.

I wanted an engaging name that would also summarize my intent with a fair amount of accuracy. This is how I arrived at Loyal Sedition.

To a libertarian, sedition is one of the most chilling words in any language. Though defined as conduct or speech meant to incite rebellion, sedition has often been charged against any criticism of the state, its leaders, or its agents. I am here to raise my voice in dissent to the powers that be whenever necessary.

That said, I love my country and my nation. Despite our many flaws, the United States was founded on the principle of human freedom and remains the most successful embodiment of that ideal in known history. This is something I have sworn to support and defend.

To be honest, I don’t really want any attention. I would rather go about my business and pursue my interests in anonymity and privacy, but the stakes are too high. I cannot condone with silence the many forces that would trample human freedom and extinguish the American Revolution through ignorance, greed, or ambition.

Loyal Sedition is my voice (or at least part of it) in the ongoing struggle for human freedom.

But that doesn’t mean we can never have any fun here.

Web 2.0 and Loyal Sedition

And so, with no small amount of reluctance, I have finally launched a web log (or “blog” in today’s vernacular). This is mostly in response to a Web 2.0 initiative by my employer. To be fair, though, my former Commentary section at the Dancing Giant Inn served a similar purpose and now provides a ready-made archive for this space. What’s next? A MySpace page or my own World of Warcraft account?

Web 2.0 is more than another empty bit of marketing, though the term has certainly been used in this manner. In a nutshell, the Web 2.0 concept represents the combination of web-based software and user-generated content. This contrasts with the traditional model of controlled content authoring and desktop software distribution.

I foresaw this trend at least a decade ago, when I created my first website. Back then, I described a time when software developers would simply provide the tools that would allow non-programmers to create useful electronic content. I saw programs like Netscape Composer and Microsoft FrontPage as early examples of this technology, but a web-based distribution model seemed more like science fiction at the time.

While I was clicking away at HTML on my dial-up connection, the Internet was quickly blooming with user-created content. What I was trying to accomplish with my monolithic website was being accomplished much more easily on web logs, photo-sharing sites, on-line auctions, discussion forums, and social-networking sites. To some extent, I was ignoring the very technology I had predicted and desired.

My late arrival to high-speed connectivity explains some of my reluctance to embrace these trends, but there is more to it than that. I wanted total control over the architecture of my content—or at least as much control as I could get. In pursuit of this goal, I built my own websites from the ground up, teaching myself HTML as I moved slowly forward. I’m sure that I even sneered at all those Internet plebeians who were quickly popping out so many MySpace pages.

I will have to let go of some more of my stubbornness in this respect. It won’t be easy, but I’ve been making progress. There is a wild and wonderful world out there on the Internet. It’s time for me to embrace all of it … maybe.

I will talk about Loyal Sedition and what that’s all about in a later post.