Sensible Style: Writing in the 21st Century

Last week I reread Steven Pinker's THE SENSE OF STYLE (2014), subtitled "The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century." All writers could enjoy and benefit from it. Although addressed mainly toward nonfiction writers, it contains plenty of material also useful to authors of fiction. Pinker, a psychologist who specializes in linguistics and cognitive science, has written several other books about language. This one isn't a conventional style manual with exhaustively comprehensive rules for punctuation, grammar in the narrow high-school-English sense, and diction (word usage), although he does delve into those areas toward the end. THE SENSE OF STYLE goes much deeper. It has only six chapters, some rather long, though they include marked divisions where the reader can pause as desired. Chapter One, "Good Writing," sets the stage with several examples of professional work that illustrate the title of the chapter. Pinker's analysis of what makes these passages "good" foreshadows the tone of the entire book -- thoughtful, humane, highlighting the positive rather than hammering on the negative. Chapter Two defines and analyzes what he calls "classic" style, straightforward, clear, deceptively simple-looking, offered as an "an antidote for acadamese, bureaucratese. . .and other kinds of stuffy prose." In other chapters, as well as sentence structure -- "grammar" in the linguist's sense -- he dissects and elucidates larger units such as paragraphs and clusters of paragraphs, revealing what features give a piece of writing the all-important quality of "coherence."

To me, the most vital chapter may be the third, "The Curse of Knowledge." The "curse" consists of assuming (often unconsciously) that prospective readers know the fundamentals of our topic as well as we do. They don't share the background of the speciality we've studied for years. They aren't familiar with the technical language of our field. Or, to put it the way I often feel when trying to understand instruction manuals, the writer doesn't start far back enough. Pinker summarizes this problem as "a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know." As he says, "it's often the brightest and best informed who suffer the most" from this form of ignorance. That's why, incidentally, a person with a breathtakingly high level of expertise in a subject won't necessarily be good at teaching it. The chapter goes on to explore different forms this phenomenon takes and strategies for combatting it. For authors wanting to communicate more effectively with audiences, this chapter may be worth the price of the whole book.

Chapter Six, "Telling Right from Wrong," deals with the topics covered by standard style manuals, such as punctuation, subject-verb agreement, correct word choice, etc. Pinker, however, explains his rationale for accepting, rejecting, or modifying each "rule," often in considerable detail. He explains which pronouncements in traditional grammar texts make a certain amount of sense and which have irrelevant origins such as wrong-headed attempts to make English conform to Latin sentence structure. Along many other knotty issues, he analyzes the proper uses of who/whom. In discussing the problem of our language's lack of a neuter third-person singular pronoun for human beings, he defends the current popularity of "they." In his educated opinion, some rules insisted on by purists remain useful, while others are outmoded or never-valid shibboleths fit to be ignored. He also distinguishes among usages acceptable in conversation or informal writing, those preferred for formal writing, and those that are simply wrong. I don't agree with all his decisions. In my opinion, he's too lax on the less-fewer, among-between, and comprise-compose distinctions, among others, not to mention the sloppiness of "more unique." Still, he always offers a strong defense of his position.

As usual, Pinker's own style is lucid, readable, and often entertaining. It's a pleasure to read him on almost any subject. On practically every page we encounter witty remarks that invite rereading, chuckling over, and savoring. He enlivens his books with numerous cartoons, "Calvin and Hobbes" being one of his favorite go-to examples. On the other hand, for me (YMMV) the visual aids intended to make explanations more understandable more often than not seem confusing. I find traditional sentence diagrams like those in my high-school textbooks easier to follow than his sentence trees. But maybe that's just a set-in-my-ways Boomer attitude. At the conclusion, he refreshingly reminds us that civilization won't collapse from changes in language, regardless of how some of them may grate on us. I need to remember that the world as we know it won't end even if everybody adopts the abominable use of "literally" as a meaningless all-purpose intensifier.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Giving A Shit. Or Not. (Of Word Choices, Word Order, And Grammar.)

Grammar, word choice, and punctuation are a matter of courtesy. Poets and Yoda may turn sentences around, but the meaning is clear. Rules are still followed.  If fictional, green, space aliens can make sense, shouldn't the rest of us?

Perhaps the courtesy bit is being taken too far. Clarity of meaning might be more important... unless the intention is deliberately to mislead.

How about this: "...beleaguered Name-Your-State governor XYZ".  Does that headline tell you if it was the State or the Governor that is beleaguered? No. Does it matter? Yes. It would be easy to change the word order, and much more courteous of the journalist and his/her/their editor.

I have a German friend who says "I give a shit for U," when he means that his emotional investment in "U" is the lowest possible.  There is nothing lower than a bowel movement, right?

Or is being given  "nothing at all, not even a bowel movement" even less respect?

An English friend would say "I don't give a shit for 'U'" meaning that even the most disrespectful action is more attention and time than he is willing to accord to  'U',  whomsoever or whatever 'U' stands for.

Kenneth Beare's article for thoughtco.com on the differences between American and British English as regards grammar, spelling, and word choice is succinct and interesting, especially regarding the simple past and present perfect.

https://www.thoughtco.com/differences-between-american-and-british-english-1212216

Leo McKinstry for the British Daily Mail penned a jolly good piece about Political Correctness and word choice. Apparently, the populace of Great Britain is assumed --by the elites-- to have the vocabulary and understanding of a five-year old, and therefore, because one five-year-old assumed that the reflective devices embedded in roads to mark the lanes at night are feline body parts, "cats' eyes" must now be called "road studs".

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5094791/A-Z-politically-correct-madness.html

How long will it be before itinerant gigolos decide that "road studs" is an offensive term?

How much will language be impoverished, not to mention the resources for humorists, wits, and stand up comedians, if vocabulary is whittled away? Beyond "man holes" and "man power", there is some discussion on the authors' forms about whether or not "master" should be banned as a word. Alas for master sergeants, master plumbers, master suites, mastery of a subject, masters degrees and even homophones (words sounding like "master-", such as that immensely popular puerile joke about Master Bates). 

Is etymology not taught in English classes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly

https://www.etymonline.com/

How can grammar be racist?  Or sexist? Every country or state that has a national language, has rules of grammar. Without grammar, one cannot be understood. Therefore, grammar and the importance of choosing "le mot juste" should be taught more, not less. Some would claim that this was the actual point being made by the Rutgers academic... although it was widely reported as "Teaching Grammar is Racist!"

There is an advertisement by a pharma business that lays down the law: I may not urinate without consulting my physician. Really?

Try really listening to advertisements. Why is it, in America, that the FCC allows them to bombard all of us, daily and even hourly, with execrable grammar and muddled messages? It is our fault if we don't understand what they mean.

According to the Lanham Act, as long as a claim is not "literally false", but rather, remains ambiguous, the advertiser is reasonably safe. 

The legal bloggers of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP give insights into the sorts of marketing trickery that goes on, and what is allowed versus what crosses the line.

https://www.dwt.com/insights/2020/07/stay-advised-whats-new-this-week-july-27

Moreover, if you ever listened to advertisements promoting health supplements, medicines, beauty or medical devices and equipment, you might have wondered whether they damn themselves with faint praise by claiming to be FDA "cleared", when other offerings announce that they are FDA "registered" or FDA "approved".  High risk devices are required to be "approved".  Problems for the consumer may arise when medical devices are purchased from foreigners. Foreign devices do not have to be FDA registered, even if they are high risk.

Aspen Laser explains:
https://www.aspenlaser.com/the-difference-between-fda-registered-fda-approved-and-fda-cleared/

Finally, if you care about copyright, and if a State, or state entity --such as a school or library or prison or tourism board or university etc-- has ripped off your copyrighted work, the Copyright Office wants to hear from you.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/copyrightinfringement


All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

Stylistic Superstitions

There are a couple of too-prevalent over-corrections often seen in published writing that especially bug me. "Lay" as the past tense of the transitive verb "lay" particularly makes my teeth grind. As in, "He picked up the book and lay it on the table," instead of the correct past tense "laid." It's as if the author thinks "laid" sounds too crude. Likewise, many people overuse "whom" because they seem to think "who" is incorrect everywhere except when clearly the subject of a main clause. The tricky kind of sentence that trips them up goes something like this:

That's the man who I believe robbed the store.

Often someone will write "whom" instead, under the impression that it's the object of "believe." In fact, the object of "believe" is the entire relative clause (of which "who" is the subject). A lucid illustration of this point that I read not long ago rearranges the sentence this way:

That's the man who robbed the store, I believe.

By "superstitions," however, I'm referring to a different phenomenon, usages people think are grammatically or stylistically wrong even though they're perfectly innocuous. By now everybody probably knows that there's nothing evil about splitting infinitives or ending a sentence with a preposition. Those "rules" were invented in the eighteenth century by grammarians determined to make English conform to the structure of Latin.

We still hear stern admonitions, though, not to start a sentence with "and" or "but." As a pupil of the strictest old-fashioned English teachers imaginable, in the 1960s, I never heard of such a "rule." It seems to be a relatively recent invention with no rational basis. "And" and "but" are coordinating conjunctions, used to introduce independent clauses, so there's no reason to forbid them to introduce sentences. And if you want to find numerous examples of such usage, take a peek at the King James version of the Bible.

I once had an editor who insisted the possessive case couldn't apply to inanimate objects. Quite aside from the grammatical fact that the possessive ("genitive" in Latin) has other uses besides indicating literal possession, substituting an unnecessarily clunky "of the" phrase for apostrophe-S with all non-living nouns contradicts both normal conversational English and venerable precedents in formal writing. For example: The dawn's early light. The twilight's last gleaming. The church's one foundation. New Year's Eve. Numerous familiar phrases such as "the year's best books" and "the world's oldest person."

Another editor of my acquaintance had what I consider an irrational objection to "stand up" and "sit down." On the grounds that the "up" and "down" were redundant, she made me delete them everywhere. In many contexts, plain "stand" or "sit" sounds abrupt and/or stilted. When inviting someone to take a seat, we say, "Sit down," rather than barking "Sit" as if addressing a dog. Also, we often need the preposition to distinguish between verbs of position and verbs of action. "Stand up" and "stand there" mean different things. If you write, "She sat on the couch," do you mean she was already sitting there (using the simple past "sat" to avoid the past progressive "was sitting," another construction many people irrationally condemn, with the mistaken idea that it's "passive") or that she was in the process of taking a seat?

Too much contemporary published writing, alas, is riddled with more than enough genuine errors, without muddying the waters of correct style by imposing groundless prohibitions on top of the established standards.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Sense of Style

I've been rereading THE SENSE OF STYLE, by Steven Pinker, published in 2014. The lucid and witty cognitive scientist Pinker, one of my favorite nonfiction authors, explores the question of what constitutes good writing by connecting grammar and style with the way the brain handles language. He begins by reminding us, “Complaints about the decline of language go at least as far back as the invention of the printing press.” Contemporary writing isn’t uniquely dreadful, regardless of complaints about what the Internet and texting have done to the thought processes of today’s youth. He analyzes several passages of nonfiction to unpack why they’re effective (and, in one case, to uncover weaknesses in the style and strategy of the writer). Although he concentrates on nonfiction, his detailed explanations of why and how these prose samples work would be illuminating for fiction authors, too.

With the help of sentence “tree” diagrams, he demonstrates why the brain finds some sentences easier to comprehend and others difficult. I must confess I had trouble following the trees (the old-fashioned sentence-diagramming method I grew up with makes more intuitive sense to me, probably just because I'm used to it), but visually oriented readers may find them helpful. Pinker shows us what kinds of structures create coherence in sentences and paragraphs. He explains the problems that make for incoherent writing, especially the “curse of knowledge,” his term for what happens when a writer assumes the audience shares his or her background and degree of expertise in the subject matter. Speaking of “his or her,” Pinker tackles the issue of gender-neutral pronouns and defends the use of “they” for that purpose. He illuminates the proper uses of punctuation, especially commas. In the final chapter, “Telling Right from Wrong,” he works through a long list of “errors” condemned by purists and offers his rationale for why each “rule” is or isn’t justified. Though I don’t agree with all his conclusions (e.g., “lay” and “lie” are not and will never be the same verb, and the former should not be substituted for the latter except in passages of dialogue; "between you and I" is an abomination against nature; he tolerates dangling participles to a degree that I can't accept), I found the entire book entertaining and informative. His distinctions between grammatical vs. ungrammatical and formal vs. informal strike me as refreshingly sensible, even if I don't agree with him on where to draw the line in every case.

He makes short work of the grammatical superstitions that forbid splitting infinitives, starting sentences with coordinating conjunctions (e.g., "and" or "but"), and ending sentences with prepositions. I enjoyed and learned from his analyses of many other groundless prohibitions whose invalidity is less obvious. I wish he had also addressed a baffling fetish one of my former editors held—she insisted inanimate nouns couldn't have possessive forms. Say what? "A midsummer night's dream"; "the Church's one foundation"; "the dawn's early light"; "the twilight's last gleaming"; "New Year's Eve"? If there was ever a pointless "rule" that could generate awkward, wordy sentences through attempts to "correct" the "errors," that's one.

He brings up one problem, related to the "curse of knowledge," that frequently trips me up: Writers often string together phrases and clauses in the order they spontaneously come to mind instead of the order that facilitates smooth reader comprehension. In self-editing, one of the first things I usually have to fix is the bad effect of this stream-of-consciousness writing on my sentences. While I was dimly aware of this weakness, his explanation highlighted and clarified it for me.

I won't claim this will be the last style manual you'll ever need; he doesn't aim to cover every possible stylistic and grammatical pitfall. However, I think any writer would benefit from this book and find it a pleasure to read. Besides its useful content, A SENSE OF STYLE functions as an example of elegant writing in its own right.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Theme-Dialogue Integration - Part 2 - What's Eating Her by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Theme-Dialogue Integration
Part 2 
What's Eating Her
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg

Here is Part 1 of this Theme-Dialogue series, What's Eating Him?

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/09/theme-dialogue-integration-part-1-whats.html

Last week, Loreful, the videogame company developing a Sime~Gen RPG style videogame taking Sime~Gen into the space age, pitting humanity against aliens in a galaxy spanning war, launched a Kickstarter to fund the first of the Sime~Gen episodes.

The fate of that project is now in the hands of "crowd-sourcing" -- a concept that just tickles my heart no end!  I have always been an advocate of associated groups of individuals banding together to do original work, to change the world.

I'm still, after all these years, totally dedicated to CHANGE -- we have just soooo mucked up!  We have to FIX THIS, I keep ranting.  And that means we have to change our entire idea of what the problem is, so we can solve it.

When I was about 5 years old, no actually more like 3, -- which I remember because we moved coast to coast when I was about 4 1/2, and this particular memory is from before that move -- I parsed the problems in my little world (this was during WW II when they kept preempting or interrupting THE LONE RANGER on the radio to insert war news), and I decided that all the problems in the world were caused by adults having missed one, tiny but salient point about the structure of reality.

Yes, such was my thinking before the age of 5.  Consider at that age I thought the reason the wind blew was that the trees waved their leaves.  I hadn't yet figured out the world, even when my Dad explained wind blew because of pressure differences.  I KNEW it was tree leave that did it. 

My ideas about how weather happens have changed -- markedly! 

My ideas about THE LONE RANGER have not changed, -- much.

Here's the thought that has persisted, and which is behind all my novels.

Fiction consumption is a life-function of the same level and magnitude of the 5 life signs, organization, metabolism, growth, irritability, and reproduction.  Respiration, mobility, etc. are often cited as well.   I've seen definitions that include adaptation, but I could dispute that as if it were TRUE, we would never have species die-outs. 

So as a 3 or 4 year old, I added FICTION to that list, which I hadn't yet learned.  It never occurred to me that animals and trees didn't imagine.  Boy do humans learn a lot in the first 10 years of life!

But my main fiction sources, The Lone Ranger, Superman, persisted into the TV era, and onwards, and my ideas about the vital necessity of imagination developed through my exploration of science fiction - then adult Fantasy, and I launched a career into the teeth of the prevailing winds, adding Romance to Science Fiction but hiding that so deep inside the fictional worlds I built that editors couldn't see it.  My first sale was the Sime~Gen story Operation High Time to Fred Pohl -- read some of his novels and see how anti-Fred Pohl SFR really is, and I sold him a Sime~Gen story!  It is so deeply disguised, he didn't notice.

Today, I still firmly believe fiction -- specifically The Lone Ranger, Superman, -- and yes, Sime~Gen -- is more important than war, more vital to staying alive than winning a war, because fiction of this type reaches and nourishes the parts of your spirit that make you want to live and enjoy life.

Remember the gusto and zest with which Captain Kirk on Star Trek tackled impossible odds? 

Given an incompatible First Officer who refused to acknowledge the importance of emotions, particularly hunches and "gut feelings" -- Kirk enjoyed associating with Spock so much that Spock changed his mind.

Spock watched Kirk surmount impossible odds --

The formula for a novel of any genre has 2 main plots -- which bespeak the very essence of STORY.

a) A likeable hero overcomes apparently insurmountable odds toward a worthwhile goal.

b) Johnny gets his fanny caught in a beartrap and has his adventures getting it out.

Memorize those two, (they are true for ROMANCE too!) and evaluate every story you see or read to see which one it is.  Some really great literature has both.  Look at your life, and you'll see yourself doing both, often simultaneously.

Jim Butcher's Dresden Files novels, ...



...which I've reviewed on this blog many times, is mostly a beartrap plotted series -- but the wider envelope which keeps these novels a strong series and got it onto TV as a short-run SciFi channel (before the channel name change to SyFy), is crafted from A) the Likeable Hero with a Worthwhile Goal. 

You will find that same combination in C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner novels that I rave and rave about here ...



Study this structure, it's the key to why FICTION is a life-necessity like air, water, food, shelter. 

Heroic fiction -- Westerns, Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy -- fiction with a real HERO whose mind and heart are revealed to you in a way that you can become that character -- is a necessity of LIFE, because it gives your spirit the strength to overcome obstacles, just as food gives your body the strength to overcome disease and heal and reproduce. 

In Occult practices, this principle is applied by "donning magical robes" or a "ring" or other symbolic garb, and becoming your best self, even if you are only pretending for the moment.  Do this pretense assiduously enough, persistently and repeatedly, and you do become what you pretend to be. 

That is part of the nature of humans: you become what you emulate.

There is another principle promulgated at the heart of Kaballah, that the entirety of existence is made from pure energy.  That's a principle of the occult studies, too, and was derided and scoffed almost to death by the early Scientists.  Now we have split the atom, and are examining quarks, bosons, and other phenomena that compose space and the stars.

We are made of pure energy, and that energy (says Kaballah) is God's Love breathed into the world and shaped by Words.  God recreates the entirety of creation millisecond by millisecond.

That's a principle -- our very existence depends on being recreated by Words in increments too small to perceive.

Science now scoffs at that -- and is desperately trying to explain all of human experience in terms of biochemistry and the electrochemistry of the brain. 

That is the science that science fiction is based on.

The recent dust-up over the SFWA Bulletin Cover and a blog by another person that erupted into a discussion of how the SF community is viciously rejecting women and SFR might be parsed into an example of how society is trying to reject the existence of the HAPPILY EVER AFTER "ending" - or "worthwhile goal" that we strive toward.

The Occult Studies -- particularly Tarot -- see the feminine principle as the masculine principle's aperture to "heaven."  See THE LOVERS card -- the male looks at the female on the material plane, and the female standing on the material plane looks upward at an angel.  The female connects the male "real world" to the ineffable.

Without that connection, goes the theory (which I didn't know at age 4), men behave in very brutal ways.

I suppose by now you've all forgotten the video images (that surfaced in June 2013) of a Syrian "opposition" fighter killing an Assad regime soldier and cutting out the man's heart and liver and eating them on camera.  That pretty much sums up in symbolism the "brutality" referred to in the theory.  The philosophy advocated by most of the factions trying to re-create the Middle East as a Caliphate are intransigently anti-woman. 

You might look at the way that society insists women be wholly covered in public and NOT LOOKED AT.  Thus, in public, no man sees a woman, and therefore is free of all contact with God (even though they publicly bow down to God repeatedly during the day, they do it without contact with the feminine principle.)  Sans femininity there is no way a male can connect with God.

That's what SOUL MATE is all about -- connecting our men to God on a soul level.

In Occult Studies, sex magic involves the public displays of feminine nudity, and even public sexual acts.  This practices releases a certain type of (very dangerous) power into the world, and especially  into the hands of the men involved in this practice.

Masculinity seeks power within the material world.  That is the nature of male-ness. 

Femininity seeks power within the spiritual world.  That is the nature of female-ness.

But "within every man is a woman; within every woman is a man" -- we are all composed of both.

The balance though is not (usually) equal within a human.

Occult studies maintain that Souls reincarnate sometimes as male sometimes as female.

Kaballah maintains that Souls reincarnate (if they do at all) always as the same gender because gender is a property of the Soul, not the body alone.

Sime~Gen uses the Occult theory - and in Sime~Gen Souls sometimes incarnate as male, sometimes as female, and sometimes as Sime and sometimes as Gen -- and even more confusing, Souls reincarnate as aliens.  That is humans can reincarnate as aliens of another species, and Souls that are now human may have been non-human prior to that.

This concept is reflected in Kaballah theory as the idea that some Souls occasionally incarnate as inanimate objects or insects or other animals, for the sake of completing some task.

The Kaballah based Chassidic school of thought maintains that Joy Breaks All Boundaries.

In other words, the "apparently insurmountable obstacles" between the Hero and the Worthwhile Goal are surmounted by tackling the problem with JOY.

Zest, verve, happiness, bright-eyed optimism, -- i.e. Captain Kirk asking Spock the odds -- is the spiritual fuel that causes success.

It works on beartraps too -- the beartrap is a "boundary."  The beartrap is the consequence of not having assessed the consequences of other people's actions (the trapper sets the trap and you step in it before the bear does).  Once it's snapped shut on you, you have been placed inside BOUNDARIES.

It is zest, joy, verve, happiness, that breaks out of the beartrap.  You must pry the jaws apart, taking whatever physical damage that costs you, but you will fail without HAPPINESS (or so the Kaballah based thought goes.)

We, as SFR writers, are looking to convince a gloomy public (that sees War as a solution rather than the problem) that there exists a HAPPILY EVER AFTER, an HEA.  It's real, and it's within your reach, except for the problem of the beartrap or the "apparently" insurmountable odds.

Where does a man get that zest, verve, joy, happiness that fuels a Captain Kirk approach to problems?

Note Captain Kirk is a "womanizer" -- i.e. is driven by sexual appetite.  And woman accept his advances readily.  That acceptance is one of his character traits, too.

There is a higher truth behind that formula.  Contact with the FEMALE PRINCIPLE fuels that sense of impervious JOY that romps happily over every obstacle.

In other words, that JOY that the Kaballah theory talks about comes from God via the female principle. 

The female principle is the nurturer, the astrological sign of Cancer, the 4th House of the Zodiac, and the other water signs, Scorpio, Pisces. 

So what do women get out of men? 

What is eating her?

Could it be war? 

Last week in:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/09/theme-dialogue-integration-part-1-whats.html

We touched on the idea that Mars represents a fistfight, maybe road rage or a bar fight, but Pluto represents a War - probably a World War.

Right now, Pluto is transiting opposite the USA natal chart's Sun (energy source, sense of individuality).

The Sun rules the natural 5th House (Hollywood, and children, siblings).  Pluto stirs the unresolved conflicts of childhood (the much used defense of "I was an abused child, so I commit crimes now.").

The Nation's childhood was in the birth of the Constitution -- and I maintain that the USA has two valid natal charts because we are two countries interwoven -- based on two distinct philosophies which have traditionally been represented by the Democrat and Republican parties (what we now call "Left" and "Right" which I see as misnomers.)

The Sun rules Leo, the sign of Sovereignty. 

Note how Astrology indicates that Entertainment (fiction), children (sex for reproduction, a life function), and siblings (bonding) are the selfsame identical energy.  Opposite the 5th house is FAME, the 11th House, Aquarius ruled by Uranus, freedom.  Think about the implications of the binding and intermingling of these concepts usually treated as separate and incompatible things.

You have the same kind of situation between the 1st House (Aries, ruled by Mars) and the 7th House (Libra, ruled by Venus).  (these are the "Natural" Houses; the personal Natal chart indicate the same forces, but place them in different signs depending on the time and place of birth)

1st House is your personal, individual Identity (your sense of self that develops at puberty with a sudden, inexplicable, need for privacy, especially privacy from parents, and today privacy from the Nanny State.)

7th House is the OTHER, family, spouse, foreigners, strangers, groups, and allies, partners, even enemies!  When there is a 7th House malfunction, you get xenophobia. 

With Pluto transiting the National natal 7th, we have publicly espoused inclusive group principles, the public refusal to "discriminate" and reject people from our groups on various grounds.  We rejected the principle that we should deny people loans on the basis of their financial condition.  When Pluto finished the 7th House transit and hit the 8th House cusp of the USA Natal chart (exactly to the day) we had the financial meltdown known as the Housing Crisis, where the mortgage and thus banking industry collapsed.

Now Pluto is transiting the National 8th Capricorn, (natural 8th is Scorpio ruled by Pluto; USA natal 8th is Capricorn ruled by Saturn).  The Nation has a stellium (complicated conjunction) in the Natal Second House which is ruled by Cancer. 

Which brings us back to the feminine principle (nurturing, home building, Cancer ruled by the Moon) vs. the masculine principle, imposing human will on material reality, (career building, success, Capricorn, ruled by Saturn.)

Whatever it is that is "eating her" nationally, is very likely to erupt full blown into national consciousness over the next couple years as Pluto transits opposite the national Sun.

The National Sun is in Cancer (in both national natal charts), Mother, Home and Apple Pie. 

This eruption of complaints about how women are treated in Science Fiction communities is all connected to the national conversation about "the place of women" in the world, and in life.

There are those arguing that women should be kept inside the home and never seen in public. 

There are those arguing that women are absolutely no different from men.

What's eating her is that society is using force and coercion to KEEP HER WITHIN BOUNDARIES.

What's eating him is that society is "including" her in public life, eroding the boundaries men have created.

The solution - magically and kaballistically speaking - is JOY. 

The Kaballah maintains that there is an intrinsic difference between masculine and feminine functions in the matrix of reality.  A very deep, abstract study of this philosophy reveals that the difference that Kaballah fingers as the distinction between men and women is very,  VERY different from the difference that society (historical and modern) has tried to impose.

In other words, we have parsed the problem incorrectly, which is why we can't solve it.

It's very possible we don't understand Kaballah at all, really -- as it has traditionally been interpreted by men only.  Today many female scholars are tackling the climb up the Tree of Life into the rarified reaches of Kaballah.  So things might change drastically in the very near future.

What seems clear to me, and has always seemed clear since I can remember even thinking a thought, is that FICTION is the tool for solving this problem.

Fiction does two things:

a) it BREAKS BOUNDARIES constraining the imagination, allowing you to concieve and try out various descriptions of the problem and of the solution.

b) it INJECTS JOY into your life as you experience triumph together with your avatar in the story, and that lets you break the very real boundaries that constrain you in your everyday life

Which brings us back to Sime~Gen, and the space war that Loreful wants to present to the world.

Sime~Gen solves the problem of the way humanity has artificially imposed "boundaries" on each gender and thus created The War Between The Sexes -- which I maintained is a scam here:

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2013/08/theme-conflict-integration-part-1.html

Sime~Gen postulates that humanity mutates into Sime and Gen.  There are male Simes and female Simes and male Gens and female Gens.  Simes Kill Gens to live, to survive. 

Thus the difference between Sime and Gen preempts, overshadows and wipes out the significance of the differences between male and female.  But it replaces it with an even bigger difference, a lethal difference.  Men and Women still find their Soul Mates, reproduce, and live Happily Ever After, and in fact it's those men and women who eventually solve the problem of half of humanity needing to Kill the other half.

Then with that problem solved, they dissolve the Territory Boundaries they created between Sime and Gen so each could survive, and they create an interstellar space drive that requires cooperation between Sime and Gen to work.

They venture into the galaxy, and run smack into an existing interstellar civilization. 

The result is War.  (that was planned into the Sime~Gen series premise, and the stories I want to write lie on the other side of that war, so I was happy to license Loreful to create me a space war, and so was Jean Lorrah, my co-author on Sime~Gen.)

Even at the age of 4, I knew that war was WRONG because it interfered with fiction imbibing.  And I still stand by that assessment.

Fiction imbibing is a necessity of life -- war is all about death. 

Remember Conflict is the Essence of Story.

Life vs. Death makes a good conflict to generate a fabulous plot. 

I actually adore World War II movies -- the Hollywood version of war, not the real thing.  Real thing is to be avoided - which is the message of all good fiction.  NO WAR!!! 

War is the result of the failure of diplomacy, which is a form of warfare. 

War conflicts with the necessities of Life, and Sime~Gen is all about LIFE - about living, not dying, about the glories and joys of life (but, yes, there are some barriers to overcome to get there).

So the Simes and Gens who have hammered their way to Unity will now hit another barrier, one that will try very hard (Pluto hard) to shatter that Unity. 

This game is going to be FUN - and it will spread much JOY into this world that is so sorely in need of JOY. 

What's eating both him and her is BARRIERS -- walls around us that keep us from communicating.

Play this game, take home some joy, target your communications with others, see if that breaks or surmounts any of the barriers in your life -- especially the barrier to getting your own fiction published!

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com