Names and story titles are a sensitive area in every writer's anatomy. You can critique a story's grammar, characters, plot, and pacing to your heart's desire, and most authors will listen patiently. Some will even take your suggestions to heart. But the moment you tell a writer that his/her story title doesn't work for you, or that the protagonist's name was unpronounceable, or that s/he should've named the planet something other than Fizbal, they lose interest in your critique.

It's not that changing the name would be difficult--computerized search and replace has made that argument obsolete. It's not that they spent enormous amounts of time and effort devising their names--if they did, you wouldn't have spotted the flaws so easily. True, renaming someone might upset their mental image of the character, but even this could be finessed by holding off the search/replace until the last minute. I think the real problem is that everyone thinks s/he's an expert at naming.

How many parents seek expert help naming their babies? No, consulting a book doesn't count. I mean, how many would be willing to hand off the final decision to an expert? Now think how many kids hate the names their parents stuck them with.

Think about the thousands of people who contribute to naming contests, confident that they have the perfect name for the newest microprocessor chip or consumer product.

When it comes to naming, most people assume they are extraordinarily clever-- infallible, even. So when you criticize someone's choice of names, you cut their ego to the core.

I'm reminded of the primeval couple in Mark Twain's "Eve's Diary" and "Extracts from Adam's Diary." Eve says that Adam "can't think of a rational name to save him" while he fumes that her way of naming things is "mere waywardness and imbecility."

After more than a week of silence, my phone rang shortly before dinner. It was the AT&T technician, reporting that he'd switched my phone service to a different cable in order to bypass the short in the local loop.

I'd been stressed by the outage, which prevented me from placing and receiving calls at home. Since I don't have a cell phone, pager, or separate secondary/work/fax/modem line, this made me difficult to reach. Luckily my DSL kept operating despite the short. The nadir came today, when I was stuck for six hours waiting for the technician in case he needed access to my home. (No four-hour windows were available, and my housemate had to go to work.) As it turned out, the tech didn't need access, and staying home kept me from lots of tasks I needed to do: going to the bank, exercising, shopping for groceries, mailing letters, returning a library book, doing laundry, testing the irrigation system, and placing calls on the public phone.

Frankly, I'm frustrated. This is the third phone outage I've endured this year. The fix is trivial, and waiting around for a tech is a waste of time. Why couldn't AT&T have sent someone out on Tuesday morning?

Despite (or perhaps because of) my lack of service, I had a productive day today. After my housemate got home I was able to run some errands--largely just catching up. Yesterday we got back from a three-day vacation at the beach and found 89 new e-mails and various crises. Lots more catching up to do tomorrow, so I'd better call it a night and get to bed.

My phone service died sometime on Monday, so it's been out for at least 40 hours now. The last time this happened (in January) I got slightly depressed. I don't have a cell phone, a work phone, or a second line, so I'm isolated. The heavy rains yesterday made it inconvenient to go out and talk to people or use the common phone. My main link to the rest of the world is now the Internet. Intellectually I know the lack of phone service is only a minor problem, but it saddens and frustrates me nonetheless.

My least favorite aspect of freelance writing is the waiting. I've been waiting for RW to send me a contract for the nonfiction piece since Feb. 27th. My best story has been sitting on an editor's desk since Feb. 18th. My request to be on the program at WisCon has been out since Feb. 1st. Despite the writing and critique I did in March, I feel frustrated, as if I weren't making any progress. My new year's resolution was to submit one piece a month, and I'm behind. I feel as though this is because the rest of the world is lagging, even though I have other pieces I could submit.

I'm even getting bogged down in Bettelheim. As a Freudian, he seems obsessed with breastfeeding, bedwetting, and the Oedipus complex, as if these were the key elements of every childhood. But my own childhood memories center around imaginative play, the cruelty of my peers, and fear of failure. A lot of technical language has crept into the text--words like "introject" and "latency."

From poking around on the web, I've come to suspect that the controversy around Bettelheim arose because of his theories about autism. Apparently, he believed autism resulted from "maternal coldness." This is the last thing the mother of an autistic child wants to hear, and I'm sure saying this made him lots of enemies.

Bettelheim is proving to be a fascinating read, though I can see why his work might be controversial. Though it's hard to be sure from a popular treatment, his work seems unscientific. He tries to generalize from a very small set of observations, mostly made at a single kibbutz. He makes lots of assumptions which, as far as I can tell, he never verifies. He appears to have drawn a lot of conclusions based on intuition, thought experiments, and Freudian dogma. It's easy to see how another person observing kibbutz childcare could have come to different conclusions. I think he was trying to make some point about institutional care for children born in American slums.

Despite all these problems, I value and enjoy his observations about kibbutz attitudes. The book is very readable. Because he's a psychologist, he has remarkable insights into how children see the world. Psychology is a field that I think I, as a writer and parent, could benefit from studying. I'll definitely encourage my girlfriend and neighbors to read this book.

We had one of our regular neighborhood meetings yesterday, and it was an emotional time for me. The community seems a bit off-balance, perhaps partly due to B's recent cancer diagnosis. She came in at the end and talked to us about it. I admire her courage in addressing this scary topic head-on. I was glad she set such a good example for us. She has no close kin, so we are, in some sense, her family. I spoke during the meeting, but apparently I wasn't clear, because when I told B how we would all miss her, people interrupted me. I felt shamed and hurt by the implied disrespect.

The meeting dealt with a lot of contentious and emotion-filled issues. The triggering events were minor--breakage of a wagon wheel, confusion over how common house cleaning is organized, a committee uncomfortable admitting new members--but they reveal deeper conflicts within the community. I think a lot of people feel guilty over not contributing more time. Others appear critical of parents who don't closely supervise their children. There seems to be less trust than when we started--plus the usual unspoken assumptions, miscommunications, and time pressures. To some, this might sound like Hell--so much conflict and emotional turmoil!

In human beings, strong emotions are unavoidable. Emotions, properly directed, are fleeting, beautiful and powerful. Feelings of fear, shame, and anger can energize us to make positive changes in ourselves and the world around us.

On the other hand, emotions ignored or suppressed fester and grow ugly. When these forces within us find no outlet in constructive action they can overwhelm us. Unexpressed emotions harm our bodies and cause suffering.

In a close-knit community, conflict is unavoidable. Conflict, properly resolved, is a powerful opportunity for intimacy and growth. If we take time to listen to, understand, respect, and acknowledge the feelings and needs of others, we grow in understanding, closeness, and trust. Often the underlying need can then be easily and joyfully satisfied.

On the other hand, conflicts ignored or suppressed fester and grow ugly, and when people try to resolve conflicts through backstabbing, oppression, or violence, they weaken their relationships and hence the whole community.

Our imperfections are one of the places where our human-ness lies.

The energies that wake me early in the morning and spur me to overexert myself on the bicycle come from emotions. I need to stay alert to my thoughts and actions as clues to what those emotions might be.

I'm starting to understand why it's difficult to keep a blog secret. If I spend an hour writing it, I have to account for that to my girlfriend. And once she knows it's there, it's hard to explain not sharing it with her. I want to comment on cousin A's blog, but if I sign my comment "unquestioned" then that means he might read my blog and tell other family members where to find it. Many of my friends have blogs, so my secrecy is a missed opportunity to share and grow closer to them. And frankly, I'm constantly tempted to brag to people about finally entering the 21st century.

Yesterday I read and critiqued a somewhat confusing sf story from my friend M, about a race of intelligent bird-like creatures. She was concerned about what she called the "religious slant" of the story, but it wasn't what I would call religious story. It didn't take a moral stand or offer wisdom, enlightenment, or comfort. The religion in the story was presented as a means for the males (who were apparently all priests) to control and exploit the females.

I'm not a religious person myself, but I'm discouraged by the perception (apparently common among secular folks in America) that religion is nothing more than an opiate and a tool for controlling masses of people. Every successful religion encourages its practitioners to improve themselves in some way--submitting to Allah's will, seeking enlightenment, resisting or confessing sin--and offers some kind of reassurance or comfort. But when sf writers portray religious adherants, they often remove all vestiges of intelligence, humility, and common sense, and the invented religions of sf seem to lack any positive qualities that would make them inspiring or appealing.

Organized religion has a bad name in America. Fundamentalism is seen as a political threat to secular society, religion is blamed for oppression, violence, and wars throughout history, and anything outside the mainstream is suspect as a cult intent (for no clear reason) on stealing our children and convincing us to surrender our possessions. Sure there are some bad eggs out there, people whose faith motivates them to bomb mosques or clinics. Meanwhile, millions of deeply religious people live decent lives and do enormous good. Of course, decent people seldom make the news, let alone history.

I bet it hurts to be marginalized like that, especially after centuries in which religious attitudes were considered normal. Move aside Native Americans, people of color, immigrants, homeless people, motorcyclists, and smokers--and make room for the Christians and Muslims.

I've begun reading Bruno Bettleheim's _The Children of the Dream_, his account of communal child-rearing practices on Israeli kibbutzim in the 1960's. This book was another gift from my father, and I'm excited about it for a number of reasons: (1) it may be applicable to the "gender inverted" world of my stories, in which children are reared collectively and mothers detach from them at about two years of age (2) it may shed light on my son's development, since I live in an experimental community -- though one that is far less communal than a kibbutz, and (3) it discusses Jewish attitudes toward family and motherhood, which are important to me because I am living with my girlfriend, a Jewish mother.

I haven't read very far in _Children_, but already it's got me rethinking some of my assumptions about motherhood.

I'd been disturbed by the reaction one of my writing teachers had to a story of mine (set in a pre-technological Islander culture distinct from the "gender inverted" one) in which a young mother appears to rejoice at escaping from home and leaving her 18-month old son to be raised by his grandmothers. My teacher, a woman of color, was shocked by the characters's apparent lack of maternal feeling. She asked me if I thought that "those people don't really have feelings?"

The comment stung. She had suggested that I bore a racist attitude toward my own character -- as if I would've written a different ending if the mother were a white American. I've since rewritten the story to clarify that the separation is involuntary and the mother's feelings about it are decidedly mixed, but the experience left me concerned, and lately I've noticed that mothers abandoning their children is a theme that crops up often in my stories.

(In case you're wondering: no, I wasn't abandoned by my mother. Perhaps the theme emerges from a guilty feelings I have toward my own son, though I wouldn't say I've abandoned him, either.)

I became concerned that I was some sort of unfeeling brute, out of touch with a universal invariant of human culture -- as if every culture expects mothers to rear their children and no mother with normal feelings could calmly accept separation from her child. Perhaps, as a man, I "just didn't get" the importance of motherhood to women.

The little I've read of Bettelheim's book has me convinced me otherwise. He describes a culture in which parents routinely hand off their children to unrelated women, to be raised in a communal setting. The kibbutz mothers' feelings seem normal in other respects, so I'm less worried that the mothers in my stories are inhuman. Like the kibbutz mothers, they merely are products of their culture, one which makes different assumptions about childrearing and maternal roles than my own.

I wish I could explain this to the teacher in question, but unfortunately we are out of touch.

Yesterday's LeGuin quote got me thinking about my own blind spots. How can I, a highly-educated, capable Anglo adult white male, hope to understand the experience of a weak, disadvantaged, or disrespected minority?

Hope came to me from another quote in my writing file, this time from Maria Montessori:

"No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child . . . No slave was ever so much the property of his master as the child is of his parent . . . Never were the rights of man ever so disregarded as in the case of the child . . ."

On the surface, her observation sounds discouraging and depressing, but I find hope in it. What this tells me is that every one of us has experienced disability and disrespect. Everyone has had their "rights" disregarded. If we can reconnect to our childhood dependancy, we can understand (to some extent) what it's like to struggle for dignity.

This approach has limits of course. Minority adults face issues and responsibilities from which most children are exempt, such as supporting and caring for dependants, finding housing and employment, and managing their own sexuality, health, and finances. But childhood experiences we all share (like hurtful assumptions and powerlessness in the face of injustice) provide a touchstone for compassion when dealing with less privileged people.

At 1:45 this morning I finished the first draft of my new novella. The story came to over 22,000 words--a third longer than I'd planned. In order to reach closure, I had to fight the tempatation to add more plot twists, carry the story further. I wish I were a short story or flash fiction writer ... the satisfaction of completion is more immediate, or at least more frequent. But either I'm long-winded or else my plots are too complex for the short-story format.

I still have plenty of critique and revision ahead before this baby hits the marketplace, but there's less guilt there -- nothing to keep me from blogging. Though I just remembered I've been promised a contract for a nonfiction piece that I may need to work on soon.

One of the joys of finishing a story is that I can now look at it from the 20,000-foot level and try to pick out some meaning. What drove me to pick the situation I did? Why did the characters do and say what they did? And why did I choose to end it as I did? I haven't read the novella from start to finish yet, but one theme that I know appears often in it is sexism. The story is set in what I refer to as a "gender reversed world" where men are a minority, both numerically and politically. I've written quite a lot of fiction in this world, but this is the first time I've written in it from a man's point-of-view, and doing so revealed how hostile and oppressive my creation can be. The protagonist experiences some form of disrespect in almost every scene.

I'll be interested to get readings from my critiquers (most of whom happen to be women) to find out how closely the sexism in the story mirrors women's experience of sexism in our own culture. I fear I may have projected my own fears and hostility onto the female characters in the story and that, as a result, readers (especially women) will find the characters unsympathetic. I tried to show that the disrespect arises not out of any malice on the part of the individual, but rather from cultural assumptions that the characters don't even perceive. Unquestioned assumptions, in other words.

For instance, men in this culture are treated somewhat like children. They aren't allowed to do productive work or leave their homes or fight or give orders. When the protagonist tries to cross these boundaries, the women around him think he's crazy or stupid. They ridicule him, shame him, or slap him around. The miracle in this story is that the protagonist finds the will to take any initiative at all.

In inventing and portraying such a culture, I've tried to make the mechanisms of sexism more visible--to men at least. As for women reading the story, I hope they'll pause to ponder how *they* would treat men if they lived in a gender-reversed culture.

Is such a culture even possible? I think so, though I can't point to any existence proofs. There are (and have been) matriarchal societies, but I don't know of any that demeaned men to this degree. (Of course, there's never been a society in which women outnumbered men by a hundred to one.) One might argue that in a land of women, the one-testicled man would be a king, not a slave. Or one might argue that maternal instincts mitigate the risk of oppression and violence in a women's world. Or one might argue that my protagonist would've been caged from birth and never had the opportunity to escape and rebel.

Back in 1976, Ursula LeGuin wrote, "[I]f men and women were completely and genuinely equal in their social roles . . . then society would be a very different thing . . . . [I]t seems likely that our central problem would not be the one it is now: the problem of exploitation -- exploitation of the woman, of the weak, of the earth."

A bold hypothesis. But levelling men and women, if it ever happens, might still leave huge social inequities in our society. Don't other forms of inequality (based on age, class, education, nationality, sexual preference, religious conformity, etc.) also lead to exploitation?

More on that later.