Anthony Lee Collins

So, I’m still working on my next mystery story (“The Trinity Mystery”), and I’ve written quite a bit, but right now I’m kind of stuck, so I’ve been thinking about my third novel, which I never finished.

I got to the end of a first draft (so, it did have an ending, and a pretty good one), but it had some significant problems (internal and external), and I got distracted by writing mystery stories.

So, I decided to go back and give the third novel another look. And I couldn’t remember where it was. I knew it had been online, but I couldn’t find it, and clearly I removed links to it on this blog (or at least most of them).

Well, that was embarrassing. One advantage of having your writing online is that you always know where it is, and if you back up the website(s) then you also have backups of the writing.

I searched, and I couldn’t find anything on this blog. Or the other blog.

I finally found it, or fragments of it, and I’m starting to collect all the pieces and sort them back into their proper order. It needs some streamlining (it emerged from chaos even more than some of my other work), plus some punctuation improvements, and it has way too many characters (fifty? sixty? — but I’m probably stuck with that). So, I’m going to assemble the pieces and then bring it to the point of being a second draft.

It will be fun to put all the pieces back together, and when I’m done I’ll link to it from here, probably with some caveats. (You know when you have a DVD of a movie, and there’s a menu item called “Deleted Scenes” and one of those deleted scenes is actually an entirely separate movie? Okay, I’ve never seen that either, but this is like that.)

And (to mix metaphors) when I’m done, this time I’ll remember where I parked the car.

Oh, and I just remembered that the third novel had a title also. It was “Throwing Stones.”

1) I saw a sign in the subway a few days ago.

It said that “a fare increase will be going into affect.”

Sigh.

It was a fancy electronic sign, probably one of many through the system, the sort which I’m sure are all run from a central location. So, as soon as somebody figures out the problem, all of the signs in the system can be fixed simultaneously.

So, it’s better than the new medical facility near me, where “All insurance is accetped.” That’s on a huge printed sign — more difficult and costly to change, I’m sure.

 
2) I did not expect The New Yorker to write about Harley Quinn. Not the quasi-trilogy of movies starring Margot Robbie as the former Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel — this article is talking about the very violent, very obscene HBO Max cartoon series which stars Kaley Cuoco as Harley and Lake Bell as Poison Ivy, Harley’s friend/lover/partner-in-crime: “The Violent Delights of ‘Harley Quinn’“

The one thing I want to emphasize a bit more than the article does is that Harley and Ivy seem like a real couple — they work through problems as they come up, in healthy and realistic ways, despite the fact that they are both incredibly, and very differently, misanthropic. Ivy prizes plant life and loathes human beings — other than Harley — and Harley is both a violent, unpredictable sociopath and a trained psychiatrist (and those do not overlap, which would be a cliche at this point). When Dr. Quinzel takes over, she is completely focused and empathetic. And Harley’s scenes counseling Bruce Wayne (both as a grown man and as a traumatized boy who has just watched his parents get murdered) are wonderful. (She even attempts to collect a copay at one point, but little Bruce informs her that “rich people insurance doesn’t have copays.”)

One thing I disagree with, of course, is this: “The intricate plotting extends to the playfully dirty but heartfelt romance between Harley and Ivy. Like all love stories, it inevitably dipped in excitement once the characters finally committed to each other.”

Since it was pretty obvious from the first episode that they were getting together eventually (and that it couldn’t be rushed, since Harley was getting out of a very toxic relationship and that wouldn’t be healthy), it was pleasant and fun to watch but not compelling. Staying together is the really interesting part (see the article, and my comments above).

Here’s the Season 4 trailer. Definitely not safe for work.

 
3) This was interesting: “Is ‘Yo’ the Gender-Neutral Pronoun You’ve Been Looking For?“

I remember a friend, years ago (decades, actually) who proposed that “Black English” had advantages over regular English, in that it was more adaptable to changing demands and circumstances. Regular English has various rules and rule books and so on (French and Spanish have this also, and I’m sure other languages do as well).

Here are some quotes from the article linked to above:

This “yo” is a straightforward, gender-neutral third-person pronoun — basically “heesh,” but not as ridiculous sounding. “Yo was tuckin’ in his shirt!” is an example Stotko and Troyer documented. This “yo” did not mean “you,” because the reference was certainly not to someone tucking in someone else’s shirt. A female teacher was handing out papers, and someone remarked — not to the teacher herself — “Yo handin’ out papers.” Someone else used “Yo is a clown” to describe a third party.

Wrap your head around it, and you can see this pronoun is pretty awesome. The interjection “Yo!” has been retooled, so that what started as a way of calling someone has become a way of calling out — i.e., pointing out — someone. The new “yo” means, in its way, “the one whom one ‘yo’s.” And it applies to no gender in particular. Baltimore Black English achieved what mainstream English never has: a gender-neutral pronoun that doesn’t force some other pronoun to moonlight in a new role.

Standard language unites us. But with nonstandard language, nothing — no dictionaries, no tut-tutting by experts — pulls it back from doing what it wants to do. It tends to be built out compared to standard language, “buff” as it were. It should be common knowledge that such variations are of interest not merely because of the cultures they represent but also because of their sheer grammatical intricacy.

The appeal (an appeal) of “yo” is that it feels, and apparently is, organic. Rules and rule books can sometimes work in languages when they are, or are claiming to be, maintaining “proper” or “correct” usage. However, it’s very difficult to change language by setting up new rules, because (as a friend of mine observed once) habit is the most powerful force in the universe, and because it makes people question why they should listen to your rules anyway (and because there’s usually no general agreement, among all the people who feel that a change is needed, about specifically what that change should be).

Philip B. Corbett of the New York Times used to have a wonderful blog called “After Deadline” where he reported on the language used in the Times (rules followed, rules broken, the reasons for the rules, the reasons for changing the rules, etc.) and he used to say that he never set up absolute yes/no rules about things, since that would have made it embarrassingly obvious that people weren’t following his rules anyway.

 
4) I’m terrible with anniversaries and birthdays and occasions & milestones like that (well, I’m not terrible with them — I’m just oblivious to them), so I completely missed the fact that this blog now has over a thousand posts. This one here, when published, will be 1,003. So, let’s have a belated… whatever might be appropriate. Yay.

(I thought I published this a couple of days ago, but apparently not. Whenever I write something, I like to save it and let it sit for a day or two. Sometimes I then forget about it until the next time I do something on the blog. Oh, well. Better that than publishing anything before I’m sure it’s ready.)

1) Happy Near Year!

2) Blogs are cool. They are not currently hip, but they are still cool. I liked this article: “Bring back personal blogging.”

I’ve had this blog since 2005 (August 21, to be precise — I never remember to celebrate the anniversary, but I don’t pay much attention to my birthday either). At that point, it was just a blog update of a regular website (hand-coded HTML) that I’d had since some time in the 1990s.

There were a few years, before social media took over, when I had a lot of comments and interactions with other bloggers. Those blogs are almost all gone now. (Well, except for Maggie over at Maggie Madly Writing. Hi, Maggie!).

Then that all ended, but that wasn’t why I’d started in the first place. I wanted to put my stories and my movie reviews and other stuff out there — I didn’t need (or even, at first, realize the possibility of) likes and responses and whatever.

I think I learned that from my parents. Creating things can be — in and of itself — rewarding.

This will be post #995. There are also 41 posts which are in Draft mode, I assume permanently. As I said, not all of the posts I write make it to being published. That’s fine.

Again, happy new year.

Actually, I wrote an entire blog post, but something was wrong. I had accumulated a list of URLs of articles (well, three) which I was going to use to illustrate my points (about why the articles were, in terms of their main points, wrong), but something wasn’t right, so I didn’t press the big, blue “Publish” button.

I always go by my gut when writing. As I’ve recounted before, I had a friend, a very long time ago, who was reading a book about the workings of the human brain, and he called me up and asked, “Do you write with the front of your brain?”

“No,” I replied, “I write by the seat of my pants.”

I finally figured out why the blog post should stay, permanently, in Draft mode. I really don’t want this to be the kind of blog that’s devoted to pointing out things that are wrong. Every time I go to YouTube, for example, I see all kinds of videos about what’s wrong with the final season(s) of Game of Thrones, why The Witcher sucks because it’s not like the video games (or the novels), why this or that Fast & Furious movie sucks, why The Walking Dead isn’t as good as it used to be, all the things Licorice Pizza stole from other movies, and why the ending of Killing Eve pissed everybody off and/or broke their hearts.

I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with any of those positions (okay, the ending of GoT did suck, and The Witcher totally rocks) — the point is that I realize (I’m pretty sure I’ve realized this before, maybe more than once) that I’d much rather write about things I like. I really don’t want to be one of those people who can’t shut down the computer at night because, to quote the classic cartoon, somebody is wrong about something on the internet(!).

So, some things I like:

1) There was nice weather yesterday and today. Both days I took some paper and a pen (okay, several pens) to the park and wrote a bunch. Very pleasant. Paper and pen: still the best way to write. (Also, everybody should watch David Lynch’s daily weather reports.)

 
2) Legends of Tomorrow has not yet been renewed for an eighth season. If this is the end, it would be too bad, but back when it started who could ever have predicted it would last this long and end up being so good? Sara and Ava are married, Sara is pregnant (with Ava’s baby — don’t ask) and all is well with the world. (Other than the fact that all the Legends are now in time jail, but they’ll think of something. They always do.)

 
3) Season 2 of The Witcher is over, so I was kind of looking for something else. I tried Peacemaker, since it was based on The Suicide Squad, which I really liked, but the first episode didn’t grab me (although the opening featured an amazing dance number behind the credits).

So, I settled on Moon Knight. I haven’t watched any of the other Marvel shows, and I’ve stopped watching the movies, but it’s supposed to be fairly free-standing — not completely tied into the overall mythology (well, the Marvel mythology — it’s very much tied into Egyptian mythology).

So far, it’s really good. The “heroes” and “villains” are all pretty complex, compromised, and damaged. It’s not as wild as Doom Patrol — although that statement applies to pretty much everything except possibly the new David Cronenberg movie (his first feature based on his own script since eXistenZ).

Also, it deals with DID (dissociative identity disorder), which I’ve been known to write about as well, so that’s interesting (of course, the term, the current replacement for Multiple Personality Disorder, is contentious, since not everybody agrees that it is a disorder in the first place).

 
4)I appreciated this article: “How to recognize gaslighting and respond to it.” When I used the term “gaslighting” twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, I almost always had to footnote it. Now, similar to “triggering,” it is used constantly, to refer to a wide variety of unrelated things.

I always remember watching a TV drama with my father back in — I think — the late 1960s. The episode was about an actress (or maybe she was a singer — I forget her exact profession), who was starting to think she was losing her marbles. Halfway through, my father announced, “It’s Gaslight!” As indeed it was. I’m sure that was the first time I learned what it meant to “gaslight” someone, and where the term came from.

 
5) Good music from Tangerine Dream recently, both composed and improvised.

 
6) Also, Billie Eilish may be winning me over.

I was taking a subway today, and, as we pulled into a station, I heard this announcement over the loudspeaker: “The alligator is at the center of the platform”

My first thought was, “Well, I’m glad I’m not getting off at this station.”

Then, thinking about it, I decided that the announcement had probably said “elevator,” rather than “alligator.”

This happens to me pretty regularly, especially when I have news radio on in the background while I’m focused on something else — I consistently hear things as weirder than they really are.

I decided to write a quick blog post about this, because for the last couple of weeks I’ve been assembling a list of possible short blog posts, and my idea was to write a long blog post, with a lot of little sections.

This idea (calling it a “plan” is probably giving it too much credit) has obviously resulted in a lack of actual blog posts. I thought about this when I read this article: “Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t“

I usually have a lot of different To Do lists in various places, electronic and on paper (my little list of possible blog posts is just a small segment of the overall confusion), and it was kind of a relief to read the article and to realize that this is a general problem.

Anyway, there should be a few (shorter) blog posts coming soon. If I can just remember where I put my list…

One thing about having had this blog for so long is that I sometimes find old blog posts and I only barely remember writing them. It seems I was on a pretty good roll back in late spring of 2015.

First I searched for what I had written about Coherence, an excellent low budget (almost no-budget) science fiction movie. It struck me that it was rather appropriate to the pandemic and quarantining. I wrote about it here (along with “performative statements,” which are cool).

I started to poke around right before and after that blog post, and I found these:

1) “Blew up the Internet”? In your dreams (in which I talk about artists and related subjects).

2) Ten-Sentence Flash Fiction (in which I write a really short story, much to my surprise)

3) Ornette Coleman (1930-2015), which then led back to this one from 2014:

4) Neil and Ornette and me.

I think my mother’s thoughts about artists from #1 and mine from #4 (taken from Ornette Coleman and Neil Gaiman) go together pretty nicely.