White-Wash Explained

How to spot a white-wash on television: They propose a theory about a certain topic. This is followed by numerous problems or falsehoods in the "official" story. It is concluded with one issue that supposedly "debunks" the theory. However, most audience members will thus forget all of the problems that were brought up. None of those problems with the story are ever explained.

Writing a Scene

I came across this minor problem that started as a major problem, and the epiphany I had allowed me to get past my writer's block. To be brief, I could not get past a scene which was pretty basic. I was at Point A, and I had all of these ideas for where Point B, C, and D would be. The problem was connecting the dots. The epiphany I had was "just focus on the scene." I had a lot of ideas of what the character would go through, how the other people in his life would play a role, shape and change his life. This is all well and good, but it detracts from the scene. A lot of it goes back to film making in which scene after scene makes up a movie, and events may happen outside of the current scene. The key is to focus on this one scene.

Female Characters

By and large, I write female characters as being strong and independent. I write the males as the same typically, but just as two alpha males clash, the male and female characters can clash in the same way. Much like the structure of a sentence, two independent sentences can have a lot in common, but it takes something like a conjunction. It allows two strong characters to have a middle ground where there can be cooperation and mutual respect.

Whether the character is male or female, to have a character that is helpless or weak conveys a sense of "dead weight." That is not to say that a character can change from being weak and helpless to being a strong and independent character. The archetypal "damsel in distress" serves no purpose in a story other than a reward for a hero. Simply stepping outside of that and looking for another reward for the hero negates the need for the weak character, who presumably is stagnant in its shallowness.

I have had women characters who are expert snipers, genius level intelligence, trained in martial arts, programmed to be more human than human, or overcome tragedy with the strength and will to fight. Everyone is good at something; I choose to exemplify, in my characters, what any human can do.

Vote of No Confidence

Growing up, I was told that if you did not vote, you had no say in an elected official did. At a time, even I believed it, but as I became informed to how the election system works, voting for even the lesser of two evils seems morally wrong. People like to think that in a situation, you have to do something. But doing nothing is something.

Not Really News

I grew up a tad bit strange (still am strange) in that I began watching news channels at a young age instead of cartoons. I began with Headline News, but after realizing that every half hour or so was repeated, I was not able to get the information I wanted. Eventually we got Fox News, and at the time I was still in the left-right paradigm of CNN was liberal, and Fox News was the only station telling the truth.

I watched Bill O'reilly, and later Glenn Beck, but it was during the time that Glenn Beck was on I began listening to Alex Jones. Like a man dying of thirst, I began to relearn economics, government, politics, entertainment, and especially history. One of the first things I heard Alex Jones said is "Don't believe me; look it up." And I did. Everything he was saying I would look up and it was all true. That was no so much surprising as it was surprising that I had not done what I had been taught in college. Since pretty much my first semester, I was taught that if I was to claim anything in a paper, I had to back it up with facts, source it, or cite it.

Author's Research

A couple years ago for Christmas, I got "The Twelfth Imam" by Joel Rosenberg. It is a fictional book set in historical events. You could argue that since it is a book, that alternate version of history or an alternate universe, as it were, would not be the same history as our own. Given how much research the author must have done for the period setting, it would be acceptable to assume that it is relatively the same universe as ours.

Moral Revolution

Right now I am reading "The 5,000 Year Leap" which goes over the principles that the Founders believed in that set up a system to make a country great. There are 28 principles, but the chief among them are liberty, private property, and the pursuit of life and happiness. The book also talks about the doubts these men had before the revolution began. They agreed that a nation must be filled with well educated, moral and just men to be able to govern themselves. They admitted that a nation filled with uneducated and immoral people will flee asking others to govern them.