For those of you who enjoy — or think you might enjoy — or think you know someone who thinks he or she might enjoy — my young adult adventure novels:  most of them are on sale at the Kindle store for the next few days for $2.99. All the books in the Homelanders series — The Last Thing I Remember, The Long Way Home, The Truth of the Matter and The Final Hour — plus If We Survive, one of this years International Thriller Writer nominees for best YA thriller — can be scored at that price through June 23rd.

They are very cool action-packed books and will make a man of you, unless you’re a girl, in which case you will remain a girl. The Homelanders books follow patriotic tough guy Charlie West, who goes to sleep in his own bed one night only to wake up strapped to a chair being tortured by terrorists. If We Survive is about four young people who go down to Central America on a charitable mission — and then get trapped behind enemy lines during a Communist revolution.

Each for $2.99 apiece! Pretty good. Even I may buy a couple.

*****

Cross-posted from Klavan on the Culture

Submit your questions about friendship, relationships, careers, family, or life decisions to PJMBadAdvice@gmail.com or leave a question in the comments section, and I’ll answer it in Bad Advice, PJ Lifestyle’s new advice column every Wednesday!

George R. R. Martin is often accused of nihilism for his brutal treatment of his characters, without any discernible purpose or “moral” to the story. I say: not every author puts a moral in his story, but that doesn’t have to stop a thoughtful reader from finding one anyway. Now that season three of Game of Thrones is over and we have our Sunday nights back, it’ll probably take all summer just to recover from the trauma of this season and prepare for the next. Here’s my half-silly, half-serious attempt to put the “sense” in “senseless graphic violence.”

Sansa Stark: This is going to sound like bad advice, but it’s time to do something stupid.

Sansa is paralyzed by doing what’s right: sitting still and obedient in King’s Landing and playing the good little hostage. But her good behavior isn’t rewarded — in fact, it’s punished. Sometimes, despite all the morality tales we read as kids about how good behavior always leads to peace and happiness, life puts you in a situation where you’ve done all the right things and still find yourself trapped in an unbearable situation. In cases like those, it’s time to think the unthinkable — it’s time to make the seemingly “incorrect” decision. For Sansa, that would be running away. From the outside, show fans are cheering for her to do it — but from her vantage point, it’s the unconventional and wrong thing to do. My impression has always been that she shies away from it not only because it’s dangerous, but because it’s frowned upon. So when you feel like a hostage to your own circumstances, take a step back and ask yourself: what is my complete docket of options? Are there any obvious ones I’m ignoring because they come with some risk or they might provoke someone’s disapproval? Don’t be a Sansa. There are no castle guards holding you back. Take control of your own life.

Gendry: This is actually going to sound like great advice, but don’t accept oral sex from strangers.

Seriously. Leeches.

THE LESSON IS OBVIOUS HERE, PEOPLE.

Often people feel that way after meaningless sex.

Tyrion Lannister: This is going to sound like bad advice, but it’s time to put your parent(s) in their place.

Before September 11, 2001, bestselling author Robert Ferrigno was known as a cooler West Coast version of Elmore Leonard. His mysteries put a modern, whacked-out L.A. spin on noir fiction, and if there was a political point of view expressed, it might have been a rough libertarianism.

But when he decided to get political, he went all out. His audacious novel Prayers for the Assassin was a dazzling dystopian mix of social/political satire and spy thriller that proposed a future America ruled by Sharia law. Suddenly Ferrigno’s patriotic and conservative convictions were on view for all to see.

The Assassin trilogy became a huge favorite with conservatives — and was decried just as soundly by the advocates of political correctness. Mark Styen’s positive reviews of the books were even used to haul him before the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

Like fellow mystery writer Andrew Klavan, Ferrigno began doing overt poltical commentary as well as working within the popular culture. He wrote a series of columns for Andrew Brietbart examining the Obama White House from the point of view of Bo, the president’s dog; and his blog on his website would feature brilliant bits like this about gun control and pop culture in the wake of mass shootings: We Are Not the People We Used to Be. 

Ferrigno’s new thriller, The Girl Who Cried Wolf, is available as an e-book (and at $.99 for the Kindle download on Amazon, the best value I can think of). It hearkens back to the old Ferrigno darkly comic/noir, but with his new political sharp elbows fully employed. In it, a small group of eco-terrorists kidnap Remy Martin, a beautiful heiress, hoping to benefit both the Cause and their personal cause as well. You see, it takes money to live free of modern conveniences.

They are a little surprised at how calmly her billionaire father takes the news, not realizing that this just may be the most ill-conceived kidnapping since The Ransom of Red Chief. Remy’s job as an entertainment lawyer and her posh upbringing may make her seem like a soft mark, but calling her a handful would be a considerable understatement. Then there’s the fact that Remy had just begun dating an ex-cop security expert who takes his failure to have protected her very seriously indeed.

The kidnappers are surprised at how well Remy takes to being held in a wilderness paradise—but that’s just the beginning of their surprises.

I caught up with Robert Ferrigno to talk to him about the changes in his writing, including huge changes in the business of writing, and how a conservative operates in the pop culture.

After last week’s Game of Thrones episode with its infamous Red Wedding scene, watchers of the show wait on the edge of their seats to find out what could possibly happen next and readers are wondering where in the heart-pounding series of events in A Storm of Swords, the show creators will decide to end this season.

In an Entertainment Weekly interview, author George R. R. Martin replied to questions about how he coped with writing such a bloody, tragic scene, and how he dealt with the initial reader reaction:

People read books for different reasons. I respect that. Some read for comfort. And some of my former readers have said their life is hard, their mother is sick, their dog died, and they read fiction to escape. They don’t want to get hit in the mouth with something horrible. And you read that certain kind of fiction where the guy will always get the girl and the good guys win and it reaffirms to you that life is fair. We all want that at times. There’s a certain vicarious release to that. So I’m not dismissive of people who want that. But that’s not the kind of fiction I write, in most cases. It’s certainly not what Ice and Fire is. It tries to be more realistic about what life is. It has joy, but it also had pain and fear. I think the best fiction captures life in all its light and darkness.

First of all, one of the things I admire about Martin in this interview is how nonjudgmental he is of escapist fiction. He’s not saying that readers who want a soothing story are wrong or stupid or lazy readers; he’s just saying they’re not the readers for his books.

In that quote, Martin is implying that his series isn’t really escapism, at least not the way he defines it. But Game of Thrones is escapism, it’s just escapism for people who enjoy escaping into a world of heart-pounding drama and pornographic levels of gore. Not all forms of escapism are about comfortable sedation in a pain-free world. But just adding more gore and senseless tragedy doesn’t necessarily make a story more realistic.

Write a sentence. Then write another sentence…

Introduction: The Thirteen Weeks Novel Writing Program

Week 1: 3 Questions To Ask Before You Write Your Novel In 13 Weeks

Week 2: First You Catch Your Idea

Week 3: The Plot Wars

Week 4: How to Find the Time for Writing

Week 5: How to Escape the Blackhole of Endless Research

Week 6: How to Develop a Dynamite Writing Voice

Week 7: Stop Rotating the Cat: My Tricks For Beating Procrastination

Week 8: Slow Dancing In The Dark: How To Avoid Giving Up On Writing Your Book

Week 9: How To Read Fiction And Watch Movies To Add Depth and Feeling To Your Writing

Week 10: I Believe I Can Fly! When Writing Clicks Together

*****

It is becoming increasingly obvious to me that I’m not going to finish this by week thirteen. This is fine. First, it is fine because I did not start to write in week one, having tried to lay the foundation for the writing program, first.

This should replicate your experience, particularly if this is your first novel, or if you are writing a novel that necessitates research – historical, scientific or other. And there are very few novels that don’t.

For ease of calculation, let’s say you took the first three weeks either to brush up on writing craft – such as via Dwight Swain’s excellent Techniques of the Selling Writer – or to study up on the time of your novel, or even the theme of your novel. For instance, if you’re writing a novel involving space pirates it would behoove you to read novels about pirates past and present, so as to give your construction the necessary feel of heft and verisimilitude.

So, let’s say you took the first three weeks to research, study and plot. Depending on where you are on your writing development and how sure of yourself and this novel you are, it can of course take a much shorter time or a much longer one. Don’t be bound by my rules but by yours. Novels are an intensely individual endeavor, like any other art. While there are rules of writing and rules of craft, they don’t and can’t affect things such as how much preparation is enough for this particular writer or for this particular novel.

As I’ve said before, I’ve written novels in three days, and I’ve written novels in three years. All right, the one written in three years is near unreadable and never sold, but that might be a quality of my own, particular mind and lack of attention span – I have trouble carrying a theme coherently over a very long time. Or it could be the result of where I was at the time – that particular novel spanned the birth of both my sons, experiences that changed me profoundly so that the writer who finished the novel was not the one who started it.

Of course the conceit of the novel in thirteen weeks is that you’ll at least try to finish the novel in that time period. However, as has been noted in the past, this doesn’t mean you’ll manage it in a thirteen week period. It might very well take you two.

The critics are chattering about Baz Luhrmann’s highly anticipated The Great Gatsby. They fall into two camps: those who watched the movie for itself, and those who closely compared it to the book. Even though I appreciate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal work, I’ll be going to the theater as a member of the first camp. Adaptations are rarely successful when the goal is a strict translation of the book to the screen. Even if a movie’s based on a book, I try to judge it as a movie in its own right, as if the book had never existed. Just to prove how unimportant The Great Gatsby’s faithfulness to the book is, here are four examples of absolutely amazing, beautiful, gripping, classic movies (and a TV show) that took an existing story and threw expectations out the window to make something completely original.

5. The Adaptation Most People Don’t Know Is an Adaptation: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Did you know that O Brother Where Art Thou?, the Coen brothers’ rollicking adventure comedy through the Depression-era South, is a loose retelling of Homer’s Odyssey? If you didn’t, pick up the DVD and rewatch it (well, you should rewatch it anyway even if you did already know because it’s that good) and see if you can recognize the sirens, the cyclops, and the hydra.

If you keep rotating, that cat will bite you.

Don’t tell the SPCA, but writers have the oddest relationships with their pet cats (even pet cats they don’t have).

When a writer is struggling with a piece of work, she’ll tell you she was vacuuming the cat, or he’ll say he was bathing the cat, or… I prefer to say I’m rotating the cat, because it’s an activity no sane person would find necessary. It doesn’t accomplish anything and it annoys the cat. A perfect image for writerly procrastination

I once read an article by Terry Pratchett lamenting the demise of the typewriter as a tool of the trade, because it took away one of his favorite ways of wasting time before getting down to writing proper. He apparently used to take a Q-tip and alcohol and clean the little metal raised letters to make sure the impression was really sharp.

Being of a different generation I could tell him that we young whippersnappers can find just as many ways to waste our time.

For instance, I’ve been known to remove all the keys from my keyboard and wipe both keys and base with bleach wipes, an activity good for consuming an hour or two and giving you an impression you accomplished something.

What drives this is a fear of the blank screen. Facing that screen is hard, even for —  particularly for — a novel you have outlined, researched, but not started yet.

There is an undefinable sense that once you save that first paragraph, the fate of the novel will be sealed for good or ill. Before that you don’t know if the voice will be tender, poetic, funny, or brisk, but once that first paragraph or page is saved, some of those options will have vanished. You can no longer think of this novel as the best ever to grace the world. Choices will have been made, and you are stuck with them.

This is not exactly true. I usually revise my beginnings after finishing the book. But it does limit some possibilities anyway. If you write your beginning as a comedy, then in the next scene have your character stumble on a serial killer’s lair and describe it seriously and graphically, you’re going to have people run screaming. (And not just because it’s a serial killer.)

So writers will try to find “legitimate activities” to put off the moment of typing in words.

The thing is, most pro writers don’t have to look around for silly activities. When pros – particularly these days – say they’ve been rotating the cat, what they actually mean is that they’ve spent their day with a dozen “little” activities and failed to write.

This is because the writing life is much like herding cats.

I usually struggle with the “voice” of the novel at the beginning of it. I write and discard several beginnings before I finally find the way it wants to be told.

It’s not always true. The beginning of A Few Good Men came to me loud and clear while I was doing something totally different. The sentences were there, words and all:

The world celebrates great prison breaks. The French territories still commemorate the day in which the dreaded Bastille burst open before the righteous fury of the peasantry and disgorged into the light of day the innocent, the aggrieved, the tortured and the oppressed.

They forget that every time a prison is opened, it also disgorges, amid the righteous and innocent, the con artists, the rapists, the murderers and the monsters.

Monsters like me.

I knew who the character was at that moment, and what he meant, and the whole novel was right there in my mind.

I wish it were always that easy. My beginnings are usually so difficult that once I’ve got three chapters down I have done half the work needed for the novel.

And not only do I have a particular voice, composed of word choice, setting, and character, but each novel has a particular voice, a tone that brings it the most to life. Again, it is word choice, setting, character, and mood plus – in the beginning – setting the right hook to draw the reader in.

Imagine Tom Sawyer told in the tone of Wuthering Heights and you’ll see what the wrong voice can do to a novel.

Most books aren’t told in the wrong voice – not exactly.

My son is a singer. Not professional, but he sings around the house all the time.

If he knows we’re going to get upset at his singing – say I’ve already told him I have a splitting headache – he sings in a muted half-tone.

Most writing on the market is written in that muted half-tone.

The difference is hard to explain. Oh, the half-tone is obvious when my son is singing, but let’s step it up. Let’s say he’s singing while doing something else, not giving it his full attention. It still sounds pretty good. You might think that’s his best, until you hear him singing and putting his whole soul into it. And then you stand there in awe and go “oh, the other was a pale shadow.”

Writing is like that too, and until you see the real thing you might not realize the other is a ghost.

You get better at finding a book’s proper “voice” as you practice more. This is often observable in the writing of popular authors. (For this, it’s best to choose someone first published more than twenty years ago, when you were still allowed to serve your apprenticeship in print.) They were good enough – perhaps better than most people – when they first were published. But when you read early works, it’s like they’re singing through cloth. The voice you know and love is there, but somehow muted. It’s not till you get to their middle work, when they’re at their peak, that you get their full, glorious voice with no muting.

• Version 1.0 of my 2013 Self-Improvement Program: 7 New Year’s Resolutions I Invite Others to Steal
• Version 1.5, published a month later after my 29th birthday: The Plan So I Don’t Waste the Last Year of My 20s

Today I am joining Charlie Martin and Sarah Hoyt in attempting a 13 Weeks Blogging Self-Improvement Program. I invite others to join me and assist in the continued development of what we should call The Charlie Martin 13 Weeks Method. (Has a nice alliterative ring to it, methinks.) Back in February Charlie laid out his approach:

By accident, however, I’d noticed a process, or pattern.

1. Decide there’s something you want to change.
2. Find ways to measure your progress.
3. Decide on some small unthreatening things you can do that should affect those measures.
4. Track the results for 13 weeks and see what happens. It helps to pick appropriate tools and techniques for that tracking, but something as simple as a Seinfeld calendar, where you just draw an X on a calendar for every day you do something can be very powerful.

So here’s my 1-2-3-4 for The 13 Weeks Radical Reading Regimen:

1. The problem that I’d like to change is the one that Sarah identified in her PJ Lifestyle article yesterday: being buried in books for research. Over the past year I’ve tried to figure out how to organize the various subjects that I want to study in order to best make sense of them and find the connections across the disciplines. I want to read more books and do a better job of staying organized with the ideas and research that I find in them for my future writing and editing projects. I want to continue to explore connections across disciplines, reading both novels and a wide variety of nonfiction, both very serious philosophy and absurd satire.

2. I will continue to share the most interesting nuggets of my research in one daily PJ Lifestyle Bookshelf post that features an excerpt. Additional snapshots from my research will appear at my Instagram and Twitter accounts which can be followed here and here.

3. I will only create seven piles of books, one for each day, and then base each day’s reading on the titles from that pile. I won’t have to think about which books I’ll read each day. I’ll just draw from each pile. Each day will be based on 1-3 authors and 1-4 related subjects that I want to juxtapose together. This will not be a hard rule that I can only read from that day’s pile. If a book on another subject has caught my enthusiasm then I can still read it after dong the day’s necessary reading.

But I need to find at least two excerpts worth Instagramming and at least one of them should appear as a PJ Lifestyle Bookshelf selection to inspire debate and discussion. (That’s the purpose of those posts — for the regular readers who have complained, asking why I don’t take a few paragraphs to spell out my opinion of each excerpt offered. They appear because I am more interested in hearing reader feedback on them than pontificating my own ideas.) These seven piles will then flow into the six categories that I created in my original Counterculture Conservative book list from back in October. The seventh (and last) category I plan to add will be based on my list of the The 15 Best Books for Understanding Barack Obama’s Mysterious Political Theology. (This will be the basis for Friday’s  systematic exploration of evil ideas.)

4. I will create a calendar on a page of my journal broken up into 13 weeks and at the beginning of each day I will notate which page I am on in the books that I am reading associated with that day. I will photograph this calendar and blog about it each week, noting and analyzing my results on Tuesdays (the PJ Lifestyle day focused on writing, media, and technology). At the end of the 13 weeks I will see the progress I made on each author and subject. Then I will decide how to adjust each day’s reading focus, maybe taking a break from an author for a bit or adding another writer whose ideas are worth juxtaposing with the other thinkers of the day.

So what will the reading subjects be for the seven days of this “first season,” as Charlie calls it, of the The 13 Weeks Radical Reading Regimen? I’m doubling down on the authors and subjects of previous self-improvement plans, but focusing some plans and expanding others. As always, your recommendations for additional books and authors that I need to read are sincerely appreciated. Please leave suggestions in the comments or email me.

And publishers, authors and publicists: any and all paperback/hardback books received by mail will be photographed and blogged about. (And e-books that are especially interesting may also be featured. But actual books are of course more photogenic.)

I sold my first novel, Ill Met by Moonlight, fifteen  years ago at a workshop on the Oregon Coast run by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith.

The proposal was created at the workshop as an exercise. This being the dark ages, and the workshop house lacking internet connection, I wrote about something I knew really well: Ill Met by Moonlight (and the three books that followed, now available as an Omnibus) attempts a magical reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s biography.

The problem: my confidence in my knowledge lasted until I sold the proposal. Then I panicked and bought thirty more books on Shakespeare, to keep company with the forty I already owned.

This is because a writer’s need for research isn’t exactly sane or logical.

Part of it is, of course, a search for information. My books always need research, and often more research than is immediately obvious.

Of course when writing science fiction, I buy the latest books on whatever will be in the novel — terraforming, or space flight, or genetic engineering. However, plotting details also often require research. Say there is a battle in the novel – I will read accounts of historical battles for the strategy and the feel. Or say that my character survived some horrible personal event – it helps to ground the novel if I read the biographies of people with similar experiences, or even clinical articles about similar cases.

For the book currently in the works (“Through Fire,” book two of the Earth Revolution), I find myself reading a lot of books about or set in the French Revolution.

The problem when you start doing that kind of research is that there is a nearly infinite number of resources, and you can get lost in them. By definition you research things you’re interested in, so of course you want to keep reading about it. Also, as long as you’re researching, you can claim to be working really hard, and you can delay having to face the blank page (or screen).

Twenty years ago, I knew people who had spent fifteen years researching a foreign country, had traveled to that country, and owned enough books on it to stock a large municipal library. All without writing so much as a word of their proposed opus.

Periodically I run into these same people at writers’ events or local libraries. They will accost me with the enthusiasm of new converts wishing to share religious revelation: they just discovered a fascinating fact about the country where their novel will eventually be set; the history of this or that region works wonderfully with their plot; did I know that such and such a ruler had a horse exactly like the main character’s horse?

Time And Writing Wait For No Man (Or Woman)

Believe it or not, when you’re a freelance writer, even if you’re working for someone else, you’re still expected to manage your time.

So let’s start by admitting we’re not going to have a novel ready in 13 weeks, since most of you – I presume – haven’t started.

The reason for this is that I was going along and doing preliminaries to the “13 weeks” posts when my editor – wisely – thought perhaps you guys needed to know when to expect the posts. Ahem. Being a writer, this had never occurred to me. One sometimes forgets that not everyone lives in one’s head.

So… we are still in the preliminary posts. I think I have two more, unless questions arise. And then we’ll start the countdown of 13 actual weeks, from beginning page of novel to end.

By then you should have a notion of whether you want to plot or fly by the seat of your pants, what your projected novel length is, and how to plan how much you need to write each week.

See, when we talk about planning your timing, in writing, it means two things: the timing of events in the novel, and the timing of your writing so you can deliver on deadline.

And yes, I’m aware that just like a lot of you will have different preferences when it comes to how a novel is timed – slow and languorous, or a mad cavalcade from beginning to finish – a lot of you will have this idea that you don’t time when you write, it just sort of happens when the muse descends from heaven and sits on your shoulder to whisper sweet nothings in your ear.

For the record, I’ve never met a professional, working writer who works on the muse-installment plan. There are some who will tell you they do in public. This is part of what we call keeping up the mystique, also known as “baffling the mundanes.”

To Plot or Not To Plot

• Introduction
• Part 1: 3 Questions To Ask Before You Start
• Part 2:  First You Catch Your Idea

The closest you come to holy wars among writers is on the matter of plotting versus pantsing. Pantsing is a highly technical term, roughly translating as “flying by the seat of the pants.” Plotting in this case means working out the details of your story in advance.

Should someone ask you if you’re a plotter or a pantser, you might think it is just a matter of curiosity; but be careful how you answer.  Whatever your answer, there is an even chance that if your listener is a writer — and even if he isn’t — he’ll have strong opinions on how you’re doing it wrong.

The only people without strong opinions on this are people like me who started as strict plotters, became somewhat looser plotters, and now find themselves as pantsers.  It is not an unusual journey even if the opposite trajectory is almost unheard of .  I have the theory that plotters who become pantsers after a number of books have in fact internalized the structure of a novel so well that the subconscious is pulling its own weight.

Plotters defend their method of work as resulting in tighter, cleaner books, and pantsers defend theirs as letting unexpected genius shine through more often.  And yet, I know many plotters whose work has sudden, unexpected surprises, and many pantsers whose plots work as precisely as a Swiss watch.

So, instead of telling you the way you should work, I’m going to assume you’re an adult and know yourself best. Besides, if you start out one way and it doesn’t work, you can always change.

What I’m going to tell you — quickly — is how some people write plot outlines, and then how other people write without mapping plots in advance.

The Run Up

Or, In Which Things Have Already Gone Wrong

What happens very often when one decides to write a novel is: everything goes wrong.

It is a well-known fact to those who participate in National Novel Writing Month in November* every year that it seems to attract bad luck. One year, I had a pet die, a relative die, the roof over my office leak, and the printer develop a fatal short. I haven’t participated since because I’m afraid my livestock will die — I don’t have livestock.

The last two weeks haven’t been quite so bad, but I’ve got a lot of unexpected work, ranging from short stories to blogs to promoting my new book A Few Good Men, at the same time as one of my sons brought home something “interesting” from school that made 15 hours of sleep per day irresistible.

So — and this is part of successfully writing a novel or completing any project — we’re adapting to changed circumstances and carrying on.

Let’s start with frequently asked questions which, hopefully, will lay out what you need to know before tomorrow, when I will explain my method and schedule. And then we’ll have a post on ideas and how to work an idea.

Can you write a good novel in thirteen weeks?  I don’t know. I can. The shortest time I’ve taken to write a novel was three days, which so far happens to be my best-selling novel. (Alas, work for hire.)  And I’ve written a novel in five years.  That novel remains to this date – deservedly and mercifully – unpublished.  While the idea isn’t bad, it will take some serious rewriting to make it readable, the sort of rewriting that turns it into a trilogy and gives it new characters.

If you go on the evidence of the market, you’d do best to write a novel in a shorter time than thirteen weeks.

My average novel takes a little over a month, but I don’t count research and outlining and run up at the thing (which means finding the right voice and all that).

So thirteen weeks is probably about right, particularly since I’ll be doing my usual thing and writing other things in the evening, as well as editing a couple of other novels.

While it is tempting for the amateur to think that the quality of a novel is directly proportional to how long you take to write it, as far as I can tell there is no correlation.  At least in terms of readability and salability — which is my definition of quality for this project — there were authors like Rex Stout, who had a long-lasting career and who wrote his novels in an average of a week per.  There are also authors like J. K. Rowling, who is reported to have taken three years to write Harry Potter.  There is of course Tolkien, who took more than a decade to produce his works.  There simply is no correlation between quality and time.

You write a novel in as long as it takes to get the novel written.  And that’s all there is to it.  Even now, even in my case, some novels will appear to me fully-formed and with some I have to struggle for every word.

America’s muddle in Afghanistan is not merely an unwise policy. Two prominent American authors — one a serious analyst (and former badass warrior), the other a bestselling novelist (who created one of our biggest badass heroes) — worry that it is an affront to American manhood as well.

For years Bing West has argued that our carrot with no stick approach to counterinsurgency and nation building in Afghanistan is sapping the “martial spirit” of our armed forces. Recently, he even wrote a column titled “We’re Too Nice to Win in Afghanistan,” detailing how a wimpy approach to a truly savage enemy is making victory impossible.

West proposes we change from a counterinsurgency protocol (winning hearts and minds in order to recruit allies against the terrorists while building a civil society) to a counter-terror strategy (kill them whenever and wherever we can find them and let the Afghan government build its own society).

Vince Flynn, in his new book The Last Man, has his fictional alter ego, Mitch Rapp, take a very direct approach. Upon being introduced to a former Taliban official the CIA has recruited to be part of the Afghan security infrastructure as America prepares to leave the country, and who is certainly playing both sides, he sees only one incentive structure that can work:

Pistol-whip the sneaky bastard and threaten to kill him if he doesn’t cooperate.

So, based on West’s superb book on the war in Afghanistan, The Wrong War, and Flynn’s best thriller to date, here are 5 ways that Obama’s approach to Afghanistan is an affront to American manhood.

Another titled added to the research list…

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Click to submit book suggestions for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle. Wednesday selections currently focus on the counterculture satire of Robert Anton Wilson and related authors.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

Robert Anton Wilson: Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

Americans have a naïve view of religion. The religious freedom that is so ingrained in our tradition — and our Constitution — has morphed beyond tolerance to a sort of anthropomorphic acceptance of pretty much anything.

In other words, in order to prove how tolerant we are, we take our basically Judeo-Christian view of what religion and God should be, and assume all other religions share the same goals, have the same values, and are just differing manifestation of the same loving and just God.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the God of the Bible is unique in the history of the world’s religions. From Baal to Zeus, from Jupiter to Allah and Odin, the gods of paganism are capricious masters, not loving fathers. Control is their goal — when they think of humans at all — not justice or peace.

But saying so is sooooo judgmental!

Marvel Comics master storyteller Stan Lee took the most interesting of the Norse gods, Thor, the God of Thunder, and made him a crusader for truth, justice, and maybe even the American Way… or at least Western values.

But think of it from the view of the Vikings — what could be more capricious and destructive than the god of the weather?

But of course, a self-centered destructive superhero who loves war and longs to be worshiped would make for a crappy comic book.

On the serious side, though, a misunderstanding of a leading world religion has serious implications for most of the current world conflicts.

Even George W. Bush mouthed the diplomatically convenient canard “Islam means peace.” Yes, and Pravda means “truth.”

A non-rebellious slave is at “peace” with his master, too.

#ByeByeRefinedSugarAddiction

On Tuesday I turned 29. Apparently this is one of those “milestone” birthdays meant to suggest that now I’m really growing old and should start worrying or feeling worse about myself in some abstract way. Apparently when you’re 30 it means that the party decade is over and you should scrape the cheeto dust out of your navel, put some pants on, and finally grow up.

So be it. Growing old has never really bothered me. (Though I wish the hair wasn’t going so fast…) I’ve felt like a cranky old man trapped in a young person’s body since at least junior high. So how about this for an old-fashioned way to really put the last 362 days of the third decade of my life to use: actually writing out a plan for the year. Here’s what I’m going to try to do so that when the 30th birthday hits in 2014 I can look back and not feel too much embarrassment at another wasted year.

In December I declared my “7 New Year’s Resolutions I Invite Others to Steal” and then began the process of integrating these general self-improvement goals into both my daily routine and the weekly schedule of my PJ Lifestyle blogging. I left them somewhat vague so over the course of the month more concrete goals could materialize. And here they are, revised from my original list but generalized so perhaps others might still find them useful to consider as potential additions to their own Lifestyle self-programming.

1. Family Life on Monday: Rediscover and Celebrate Your Family’s Origins.

On Monday this week I blogged an open letter to my wife informing her that the time had come to change directions with our Netflix diet. The number of Dexter/Battlestar Galactica-level cable shows on DVD had dried up and new releases offered little hope of consistent entertainment satisfaction. We had to start mining older regions of film and TV history — but could we agree on a path forward?

Turns out we still can. April selected the first option:

1. Watch the entire Criterion Collection. Maybe in order?

You’re always complaining (rightfully) that the past few years I’ve spent too much time on politics and don’t show you weird, artsy movies anymore. Well here’s the mother lode and now we should start exploring it.

April suggested we call it “The Criterion Challenge.” We’re going to attempt to watch as many as we can this year — and yes, as close to in the order of their release as we can. We started last night with my copy of The Seven Samurai (spine #2) and watched the first hour. I’d forgotten how entertaining a film it was — and was delighted when April got into it too.

In charting this new entertainment course for us, we’re really going back to the origins of our relationship. I never realized what a role my oddball movie tastes had for April. When we began dating seriously for a second time in the fall of 2006 (a few months after I’d graduated and she was starting her sophomore undergraduate year), I would drive up to Muncie from Indianapolis on weekends with different art movie DVDs to share with her.

But in the years since our marriage I’ve neglected this original film guide role. My movie obsession fell by the wayside to make way for political warfare and new media trouble-making. Now’s a good time to correct course as I seek to re-balance my life between the legs of culture, religion, and politics. (Instead of the ideological focus that it’s largely been for the last three years…)

And we’re both on the same page in why we’re watching this series of classic films — to further develop our own understanding of the visual arts. What makes a beautiful, powerful image? How does film tell stories and evoke feelings? April and I are going to explore these questions together and I’ll try and blog a few thoughts on each film. Also, keeping with the return to film, for our year off from Disney Land I’m going to make a point to explore the ideas that brought it into existence.

Monday Bookshelf and Blogging Focus: Research the life, work, and ideas of Walt Disney to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Today’s PJ Lifestyle Bookshelf selection comes From Ed Driscoll’s “Far from Complete: Great Books Missing in the Kindle Format” article:

Fatherland, by Robert Harris: The birth of the modern world in the early to mid-19^thcentury gave man many blessings, but it also created the technology — and more importantly, the totalitarian worldview and the concept of “Start From Zero” — that unleashed newfound horrors a century later, as seen in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But how similar where these two ideologies?

In Robert Harris’s best-selling alternative history book, first published in 1992, it’s 1964, Nazi Germany won World War II by getting to the atom bomb first, and a stalemate — a Cold War, if you will — exists between America and Germany. President Joseph P. Kennedy, who won the White House due to the appeasement with the Nazis he preached during World War II, is scheduled to fly into Germany to begin discussions leading to détente between America and an Evil Empire. Sound eerily familiar? As Orrin Judd wrote in a perceptive review of Harris’s book, Fatherland is a brilliant metaphor for the Cold War:

A nuclear balance of terror surely would have kept America from invading Europe and, after a suitable period of huffy pretense, there surely would have been a significant segment of public opinion, particularly in academic intellectual circles, advocating detente–just as has actually happened with both the USSR and Red China.  And just as the Holocaust failed to draw the U. S. into WWII in the first place, and just as the millions of victims of Russian and Chinese communist oppression failed to deter rapproachments with those countries, it’s easy to believe that the “disappearance” of Europe’s Jews would have little impact on an American/German détente.

The story is engrossing enough on its own, but these speculations, and the subtle way in which they implicate the past sixty years of Western history, turn the book into a disturbing and subversive novel of ideas.  Conservative historians–like Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes and Allan Bullock–have beaten their heads against a wall for years, demonstrating to an uncaring elite establishment how little the Soviet Union, Stalin and Communism differed from Nazi Germany, Hitler and Nazism.  But this popular thriller makes the same points, and reveals the moral emptiness of our policy of détente, in a wonderfully imaginative way.  What more can we ask of an author than that he entertain us and at the same time raise questions that trouble our souls?

Apparently, Fatherland was included in the early books rushed into Kindle format, and is still available on the Amazon UK site for British Kindle owners, but isn’t currently available in the States. Is it a case of Amazon or the publisher losing the electronic format licensing rights? Otherwise, what on earth is stopping Amazon from rectifying this?

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Click to submit book suggestions for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

The Society of St. Pius X and Antisemitism

I was a slow convert to the idea of ebooks. My wife bought one of the first Kindles, and I couldn’t get past the off-putting appearance of the text on the screen in the Kindle’s first iteration. But then I tried the Kindle app for Windows. And the Kindle app for my Android Tablet. And slowly began to fall in love. I could read anywhere. I could free up space on my overflowing and limited physical bookshelves. I could easily quote what I had just read in a blog post. The idea of being able to carry my entire library with me and having it accessible in locations as diverse as the treadmill at the gym or a seat on an airplane became increasingly irresistible.

But not my entire library, alas. There are numerous examples of books that I’d repurchase in a second to read on my Kindle that simply aren’t there yet. Nor are they available on Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader; I’ve searched.

Off the top of my head, in an ideal world here’s what I’d like to see in the Kindle format. Amazon links are included, if you’d like to get started reading any of these titles now in good ol’ dead tree format — which might be a good idea, as I suspect the wait for some of these might be glacial.

■ Alvin Toffler’s Back Catalog: Toffler’s Future Shock was a huge bestseller when it was first published in 1970. A decade later, The Third Wave, the sequel to Future Shock, would be  name-checked by Newt Gingrich during the heady days of the “Republican Revolution” in 1995, shortly after he became speaker of the House, which gives a sense of how the book’s predictions held up in the interim 15 years. Toffler’s War and Anti-War applied the principles of the Third Wave to warfare; Powershift applied them to business. Given that The Third Wave was a pretty accurate prediction of how the Internet reshaped society in the 1990s, if any book deserves to be available in electronic format, it’s this one. Where is it? (For my interviews with Toffler, click here and here.)

■ Profiles of the Future, by Arthur C. Clarke: A quarter century before Star Trek: The Next Generation displayed its first replicator onscreen, Clarke was writing about them in Profiles, along with plenty of other futuristic technology; some we now take for granted (such as the Internet and the Kindle) and others that are still on the drawing board. Again, why isn’t such a forward-thinking book not an ebook as well?

■ Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Carolyn Geduld. Speaking of when Stanley Kubrick’s enigmatic 2001: A Space Odyssey left so many audiences baffled in the late 1960s, co-screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke was fond of saying, “Read the book, see the movie, repeat the dosage.” Right idea, and while Clarke’s novelization of 2001 is available on Kindle, it’s not necessarily the best book for cracking the film’s mysteries. If I had to hand one baffled 2001 viewer the Cliff’s Notes to the movie, it would be Geduld’s book from 1973, which thoroughly charts out the film’s plot and leitmotifs.

The flat-panel news and information devices the astronauts read while eating dinner in 2001 directly inspired the iPad and Kindle. Now that technology has finally caught up Kubrick’s 1968 vision, shouldn’t the book that places them into context be accessible on those devices as well?

■ The Death of the Grown-Up, by Diana West. The subhead of West’s book is “How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.” As Michelle Malkin noted in 2007 when she interviewed West on her book, others have written about the increasing child-like naiveté of society, but West was perhaps the first to explain how it has hamstrung our fight in what was once called the Global War on Terror. That we had (have?) a war named after tactics rather than the enemy we’re fighting is due to the GWOT receiving its name largely through a process of elimination, as West noted in her book and the articles that preceded it, as political correctness allows few other choices.

New Year’s Resolution #4 — Develop more Hobbies

New Year’s Resolution #5 — Read the “Five Big Books of Anti-Marxism”

When I began my first semester of college in August of 2002 the path forward looked clear: English major, creative writing emphasis, learn how to write novels. This had been my plan since about third grade.

But it didn’t happen. Instead George W. Bush invaded Iraq and I added on a political science major. At a moral level, with questions of life and death hanging in the balance, to change the world by writing great literature seemed almost irresponsible. How could I waste my time dreaming up fantasies when I could be using my skills to try and affect the decisions our country made?

And so it’s remained for almost seven years, since I graduated in 2006. My political ideology might have shifted as I emerged out of the academic bubble and discovered the joy of learning how to create value in the free market, but my reading habits stayed the same, mirroring what P. David Hornik described in his thoughtful “Goodbye, Literature” essay.

I realize now that I’ve consumed an unbalanced reading diet — not unlike my unbalanced eating diet (now recently corrected). Perhaps novels have made up only 10% of my book intake. I’ve focused so much on getting caught up on political books and reviewing the new non-fiction ones that I’ve neglected the literary world.

No more. Yesterday I decided to declare my intent to blog on the humorous philosophical writings of the radical agnostic novelist Robert Anton Wilson, to analyze his ideas and separate the wheat from the chaff. And so it seems fitting that on the day following it I’ll do the same with his opposite, the very serious and very certain Ayn Rand. The Thursday Book Shelf recommendations and excerpts will come from her works. I welcome any suggestions on passages of note — email me at DaveSwindlePJM@Gmail.com. I’m hoping that this can ignite my passion for the novel. Someday I do hope to get back to it again…

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More on Ayn Rand and Objectivism at PJ Lifestyle:

Time to Read Ayn Rand?

10 Badass Moments from Bosch Fawstin’s The Infidel #2

The Distinction Between Sin and Crime

Official description:

Publication Date: August 1, 2004

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Click to submit book suggestions for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle.

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More on political ideology at PJ Lifestyle:

The 15 Best Books for Understanding Barack Obama’s Mysterious Political Theology

Whittaker Chambers: Taking Freedom’s Part, Irritating Everybody in the Process

Even while women devour the Twilight books and flock to the recent release of Breaking Dawn 2 most revile the series’ heroine Bella Swan. The savvy modern woman prefers the vampire-slaying Buffy Summers. As a fan of both the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight franchises, I think that we have this partially backward and that the Buffy v. Bella arguments common on the web underscore dangerous assumptions about women. Feminists have co-opted Buffy and the female superheroes for the gender wars in order to perpetuate their illusion of no differences between men and women.

Conventional wisdom tells us that women can do anything men can. With rare exception owing to strength or stature, this is true. But we don’t always want to do what men do, and even if and when we do we have to account for our biology. Sometimes it is the strength and stature deficit, sometimes it is our heavier role in reproduction. The feminist intelligentsia thinks this unfair, so, couching their advice in terms of equality, they tell us to ignore biology. Accordingly, the female heroes who we admire today are the ones who work around reality.

It is great that we have heroes who happen to be women, but we mistake them as role models for womanhood. Five pop culture heroines to illustrate my point:

5. Hermione Granger, The Maligned Hero

Hermione helps Harry Potter figure out how to defeat the evil wizard Voldemort and, at great personal sacrifice, she accompanies Harry on his final quest.

As a role model for womanhood she is the best of this list. She shouldn’t even appear but for what we like about her. The oft-cited favorite Hermione part in the movies: when she punches Draco Malfoy.

Over eight films loaded with powerful women defying evil—Luna Lovegood, Molly Weasley, Lily Potter, Narcissa Malfoy—that inconsequential punch makes number six of the 50 greatest moments. What was a slap in the book was rewritten as the crowd-pleasing punch because we like it when a woman acts like a man, which is ironic considering the next most overrated heroine, Wonder Woman.