Charted waters: map reveal!

By L.D. Inman 0 Comment on Charted waters: map reveal!

Happy Friday to all you cats and kittens! I am about to go out and have some beer with my church, because that is how we roll, one Friday a month anyway. But before I do that, I will announce: we have achieved mappage!

Tori McDonald was both kind enough and intrepid enough to expand her portfolio and draw me a map of Ilona based on my sketch, and I have to say, the results are awesome. I’m working on the incorporation of the image into my manuscripts as we speak, a week ahead of my planned schedule, which is also awesome. Check her out and give her the love she so richly deserves.

Does this mean I am close to releasing the paperback for preorder? Why yes, yes it does. Watch this space.

Full, perfect, and sufficient

By L.D. Inman 0 Comment on Full, perfect, and sufficient

It’s funny how you read something referencing a particular text or situation, and then lo and behold, you run into another reference to that thing soon after. There’s a word for this, a Greek one, I think, which basically says that the only thing funny about it is that you noticed it. But never mind that.

So last month I picked up Fleming Rutledge’s massive book on the Crucifixion — which includes a whole section devoted to rehabilitating Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? — and yesterday I ran across a link to this article by Elizabeth A. Johnson, a theologian I greatly admire, dismissing both Anselm and the whole theory of substitutionary atonement, root and branch.

Now, I’m not sure I really want to get in the middle of this. I like both Rutledge and Johnson, and I agree with much of what each has to say, and enjoy engaging with the rest, and if they were guest speakers on a panel together I would happily sit in my seat and not trouble myself to go to the audience mic with a question.

But this is my blog, and it’s Holy Week, and not only have I been thinking about the exigencies of forgiveness for a long, long time, it’s baked into the original story I told myself that then eventually became Ryswyck. So I guess we’re doing this. If theology is not your thing, feel free to jump back onto the platform before this train pulls out.

One of the arguments that Fleming Rutledge made so powerfully was that when we talk about sin in this context, we’re not talking about an aggregate of discrete and somewhat arbitrary infractions, to which God’s wrathful response is equally arbitrary. No, what we’re talking about is the Power that moves us to gloat over others’ misfortunes, to torture, dehumanize, and deface — in defiance, seemingly, of social and mental health — both collectively and in the secret of our own hearts. I could pull ten headlines at random from today’s news in illustration of this, so I won’t belabor the point. Today and every day, things are being made horribly, infuriatingly wrong: and on more than one level we are helpless to put them right.

I doubt Johnson has a serious disagreement with this. But Johnson isn’t the only one to find the narrative theme of substitution-as-atonement dissatisfying, arbitrary, and facile. It’s made worse by contemporary evangelistic churches who insist that this narrative theme is the only theme of the cross that has any theological meaning. If you don’t acknowledge that Jesus died for your sins…well, you know what awaits you.

So far so obvious. But one of the problems I wound up having with Rutledge’s book is her dismissal of “forgiveness” as an ineffective response to the gravity of the evil we are wreaking on this world and on one another. And “forgiveness” as generally understood really isn’t adequate: but even before reading Rutledge’s book I have long thought that the general understanding of “forgiveness” leaves people not knowing what forgiveness really is.

So for this here blog I am going to outline the narrative theme of forgiveness as I’ve worked over in my mind for twenty years.

It started with a reread of Hannah Hurnard’s allegory Hinds’ Feet on High Places. In this story, Much-Afraid is brought by the Shepherd’s path to the Precipice Injury. At first she refuses in panic to try to climb it, but eventually she obeys and toils her way upward. Halfway up the cliff she rests in a cleft, where she meets a small flower growing from a tiny crack in the rock. When she asks the flower its name, it says, “My name is ‘Bearing the Cost,’ but some call me Forgiveness.”

That name stuck with me, more than anything else in that story did. I hadn’t really thought of forgiveness as bearing the cost before, but I could see that it was true, that when someone wrongs another, it’s the hurt one who has to pay the damages. Even on the grossest monetary level, if you empty my bank account, you may be sorry and give the money back later, but in the meantime I still have to figure out how to pay my rent and buy my groceries. And if you do harm to my soul with physical or psychological abuse, it might make things easier if you were sorry, but it would still have to be me who cleans up the inner mess.

Forgiveness isn’t anything to do with repairing a relationship with the wronger, or finding a sense of compassion for them, or even acknowledging the wronger in any way; it isn’t about devising a comfortable way to think about the situation, or superficially dismissing the charges, or contorting oneself into believing it’s one’s own fault after all. No, it’s definitely the wronger’s fault. To forgive is to say, “I am not going to wait for an apology; I’m going to own this mess and get on with cleaning it up.” It is entirely possible to forgive a wrong and still be angry at the person who did it. And sometimes the hurts we do to one another are so great that we just don’t have the wherewithal to repair the damages. We seek for help wherever we can find it, with varying success.

We can’t hurt God in the same way we can hurt one another. But sin is damage that God cares about and has to fix. So then, narratively speaking, it makes complete sense to understand the cross, “an instrument of shameful death” that takes to an extreme all the public degradation, dehumanizing, humiliating, torturous abuse we humans can devise, as God’s way of “bearing the cost” of not just our “sins,” our discrete and piddling infractions and dishonesties, but the power of evil that has roots in every one of us.

So why doesn’t Anselm discuss the resurrection in his treatise? I don’t know, maybe because it’s implied? How many thousands of people were tortured to death on crosses? To take all that cost upon oneself and then rise victorious — that is what the Christian draws upon for hope. Not just hope for the wrongs they have done, but for the wrongs done against them, that they are too poor to pay the damages of. Our insurance policies are a mockery of this divine subsidy; there are no premiums, no deductibles, no schedules of benefits. Give us today our daily bread, and forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. It’s all one thing.

So I don’t subscribe to crude notions of arbitrary sacrifice, no. But anyone who’s ever had something to forgive knows that it is a labor and a struggle, even without the question of reconciliation. This is how the story goes.

It’s a story that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, and it’s the kernel of the story that Ryswyck is now. When I first conceived this story, I sketched the character of General Barklay as a simple monster, and the story as being about the struggle of various characters to forgive his wrongs. But as I wrote, Barklay himself refused to be that simple. He insisted on being a mix of decency and selfishness, honesty and mendacity. He wanted both to repent and to hold out for justification. His wrongs are both personal and systemic, not his fault and entirely his fault. No mere substitutionary sacrifice could address his situation. Yet the costs are really there, and have to be borne.

There are endless stories to be written on this theme. Because it’s written on the walls of the world itself.

Good life choices: a fencing manual rec

By L.D. Inman 0 Comment on Good life choices: a fencing manual rec

A week or so ago I joined Instagram — largely because I feared I might be boring my Facebook readers with new views of my cat asleep, and other such random photos as Instagram appears to be specially made for. Instagram is great, I discovered: vastly more simple to curate, with a feed presented in order by date posted (that thing which every user of a social media service wants and every service developer hates to give them), and easier to discover friends on.

It’s thanks to Instagram that I discovered that a longtime fandom friend has just finished a project illustrating a fencing instruction manual. So naturally I bought it; it arrived today, and it is clearly the Best Purchase Ever.

For one thing, fencing — whether HEMA or sport — is a small world. The author dedicated an acknowledgment to a fencing instructor whom I’ve actually met — and I don’t get around much in fencing circles. For another, the manual is both serious in approach and light in tone, which is no mean feat when writing instructions for practice and pedagogy. My friend’s illustrations are simple but clear and excellent.

I’ve read a few fencing manuals for knowledge and entertainment, and this one really raises the bar for both; it does not over-assume what the reader knows, yet the explanations are not heavy. Seriously, snag this puppy right away, even if you’re not a fencer yourself. (I mean, that can always change. Right?)

Congratulations, Kat and Russ!

And now for something completely different

By L.D. Inman 0 Comment on And now for something completely different

Well, not completely: music and art make their way into my blogging on the regular, and there are plenty of interesting things to post about.

A couple months ago I bought a 24-pan set of watercolors, because I wanted to reproduce my cover-art concept for Beth Leggett. This is the best view of the result:

But the upshot is, I have new watercolors. Yay! So every now and then I pull them out and practice.

Ultimately I’d like to produce an image strong enough to cover “Household Lights,” but that stage is a ways off.

Meanwhile, I have discovered some new music! First, a piece by an Icelandic artist that crossed my path in a Lenten devotion, which informed me that “brot” means “bread” in German and something like “torn” in Icelandic, making a cross-lingual Eucharistic pun of sorts.

And last weekend I was at the symphony (no, I didn’t light my cell phone and call for the Widor Toccata — Carmina Burana was the featured piece and that was quite enough to be going on with), and the opening piece was a new one by Sarah Kirkland Snider called Something for the Dark.

None of my companions liked this piece, but I found it moving and interesting. The reflective motif introduced by the flute in the middle has a strong delicacy that is attractive in itself; and since my head’s been full of Ryswyck since ordering the proof, it made me think of Speir and her perspective, how it gets fraught by events; how it perseveres. If I were making a Ryswyck playlist, I would be tempted to put this piece on it.

Up next on my art-and-music docket: fun with photography. We’ll see if I can get a good walk in between thunderstorms.

And it helped, too

By L.D. Inman 0 Comment on And it helped, too

So yesterday was the kind of day where, although things didn’t exactly go badly, there was just a general atmosphere of stress, exacerbated by all the little things crowding the margins of my mind that I haven’t gotten done. I have taxes to do, and a sermon to write, and certain work deadlines have been glaring at me from beneath their heaps in Outlook for weeks.

(Speaking of exacerbate, a friend of mine has a running joke where when someone uses a 25-cent word, she says, “And [simpler word], too.” Once in our hearing, V remarked that something-or-other would exacerbate a certain situation, and C said: “It might even make it worse.”)

So at close of business yesterday evening, I shut down the lid of my laptop. “Fuck it,” I said, “I’m going to Bo Lings.” I put on my hat, grabbed my file of “Household Lights,” and went.

Bo Lings is one half of my mental spa ritual. The other half is Barnes & Noble. The order in which I visit them depends on how hungry I am, and whether I plan to purchase reading material to go with my dumplings and egg drop soup. In this case, preliminary editing was the order of the day, so after dinner I walked the two blocks to B&N and mouched about, browsing.

To my delight, I found that B&N had stocked Erin Bow’s new book. Which is, deplorably, not always the case at my local B&N.

Lo these many years ago, I was a failed beta reader for one of Erin’s early projects. Can we talk briefly about beta reading failure? Writers (at least all the writers I know including myself) continually trawl the mental rolodex of their friends for possible readers for their manuscripts: people with certain areas of expertise, or with discriminating taste, or with an editor’s eye for detail, or all of the above. But sometimes it happens that someone agrees to read a manuscript and then…just doesn’t. Or just can’t. And then there’s a shame spiral and they can’t even look at the file, and turn aside from the topic as soon as may be and may take to avoiding the writer on the street.

I’ve been on both ends of such a weltering disaster, and producing Ryswyck has taught me a lot about this aspect of project management. Well, actually, one of my betas taught me a lot about it: she suggested I give a timeline along with available dates for discussion so that she would be able to work it concretely into her schedule. “Ooh, concept,” said ADHD me. By providing a proposed deadline and other parameters, I as the writer can practice expectations management, and the beta reader can find it easier to cancel if necessary without having to say I don’t want to read your book ever ever ever.

Anyway, Erin has obviously found better betas, because she has now produced a string of brilliant books. I read through Chapter Six last night, and look forward to getting back to it. (You know, somewhere among all the abovementioned work.) Some writers worthy of the Evil Author badge are ingenious at making you cry by the end of the book, but Erin is special: she made me shed tears AT THE BEGINNING WTF.

Talk about a mental spa service upgrade. Couldn’t have found a better way to ameliorate my anxiety.

Gusto

By L.D. Inman 1 Comment on Gusto

Spring has sprung! I’m spending mornings with the balcony door open and feeling the itch to plot this year’s garden — along with a number of other allergy-related itches due to the neighborhood trees, but everybody’s got to live. And I’ve got to the point in preparing the ebook document where the light at the end of the tunnel looks less like an oncoming train.

So while I’m slogging through the last tedious bits of work, I give you two pieces of music pour s’amuser. One is a fascinating piece by a traditional Japanese drum ensemble, which I could watch over and over. One of the first things I noticed was that these young people played the entire piece while sustaining a lunge. Could I sustain a lunge for ten minutes straight? I doubt it.

The other is a piece I have long delighted in, ever since I heard it when it was being used as the postlude for ordinations at the cathedral. This is pretty great, but you really haven’t heard this piece till you’ve heard it in person in a resonant space. If I wanted to heckle Michael Stern at the Kansas City Symphony, I wouldn’t call for “Free Bird,” I’d call for somebody to get up in the organ loft and play the Widor Toccata. Every time I’m at the Kauffman I keep hoping the program will put that organ to use, but it rarely happens, alas.

Gusto is the thing. Sometimes I think it’s the whole point of music: if you have gusto and don’t know what to do with it, I say fire up one of these babies.

Now to await the first thunderstorm of the spring, when I will blast the “Dona nobis pacem” from the Bach Mass.

Tell the whole world, why doncha

By L.D. Inman 0 Comment on Tell the whole world, why doncha

Had a beta chat re: “Household Lights” today, which reminded me of this amusing incident tangentially involving one of my other beta readers….

One evening last month, I was at a friend’s house for dinner with the spouse of one of my betas, and as we were going to our cars and waving goodbye to one another, I stopped.

Me: I’ll have to come over next week and tell you and S all about the sex scene I just wrote.
Him [ears congested from the weather]: Oh, yes, S would like to see you too, real soon!
Me: No, I said I want to tell you about how I wrote a sex scene.
Him: What? You wrote about seeing something?
Me: NO. I WROTE A SEX SCENE.
Him: What??

At this point K’s whole neighborhood knows I wrote a sex scene, and D still doesn’t. I go closer to him.

Me: Scene!! I wrote a scene!
Him: Oh, a scene!
Me: With sex in it.
Him: OH! Well, that’ll sell.

When I told S about this little tableau later, she laughed fit to kill.

Fortunately for my reputation in K’s neighborhood, none of my betas have seen fit to ask me to revise said scene. Even if they had, though, I think I’ve learned my lesson about throwing out references to sex scenes in the driveways of friends’ houses.

A Gnosticism Taco

By L.D. Inman 1 Comment on A Gnosticism Taco

For numerous reasons, this Sunday blogging is brought to you by my dear friend and fellow community member V. I have, in the past, shared living space with her for longer than I have anyone else except family, and she didn’t kill me at any point during our sojourn together, so I reckon that as the mark of a good friend.

It was V who recently recommended Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, and since I already knew Rutledge to be a fine writer and preacher, I bought it on Kindle — and am finding it just as amazing as advertised. It has the kind of academic rigor and respect for ecumenical reality that you would hope for from a 21st-century treatment of the topic, and just my kind of humor as well. (To people who argue about whether to focus more on Good Friday or Easter, she retorts: “If you’re making a ham and cheese sandwich, you don’t ask which is more important, the ham or the cheese. If you don’t have both of them, it isn’t a ham and cheese sandwich.” This occasional flippancy is just the right leavening for a serious and complex topic.)

What really got me thinking, however — at least as far as this blog post is concerned — is the way she begins her approach: with a serious and thorough critique of gnosticism as it has leached into our beliefs and practices even in churches, displacing the importance of the cross. I know, I know: we’re supposed to think of gnostics as the good guys — after all, “gnosis” is knowledge, and knowledge is better than ignorance, right? “I thought I was all set to read a blog by a smart person. I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition!”

No one ever does.

I mean, I get it. I’ve spent many enjoyable hours in New Age shops, read Jung and learned Tarot, fought my way free of the creeping despair of fundamentalism; my friends constellate the widest varieties of belief and nonbelief, and I have no reason or desire not to honor that, even enjoy and affirm it. But Rutledge is right about one thing: gnosticism is not actually democratic in nature. It seems like it might be: though the cross is a picture of abject helplessness and degradation, we know instinctively that we are more done-to than doing when we face God in a Christian arena. To take the initiative into our own hands, to go out and seek knowledge or to hold still and grasp it from within: that’s more like it. It certainly is more appealing to me.

But democratic it is not. Some people are better equipped for meditation, get more out of walking labyrinths, find more opportunities of learning from teachers. Transcending the difficulties of the body — being spiritual — is a matter of becoming adept. And if you don’t make the grade, you roll down the bank as the train barrels past.

I think we’re supposed to care about that. Not least because I’ve rolled down any number of spiritual banks myself; but also because in some limited areas I have impressed people far more than I deserved to, better people who were not aware as I was that it ought to be the other way around.

So naturally my thoughts turned to the worldbuilding I had done for Ryswyck. As a secondary-world speculative story, it doesn’t carry the same factual history of our world but is an analogue to it. In the story we only meet people from two countries in a backwater region of a global community more or less united against nuclearization anywhere in the world. The two peoples of the story share, with some differences, a religious tradition — a worship of wisdom without resort to images. As I feigned it, destruction and loss on such a massive worldwide scale led to an iconoclasm similar to the Simplification of A Canticle for Leibowitz: it is better to know nothing than to know how to harm people. For my world, the axiom is that it is better to worship no image than to identify the image only with ourselves.

My characters stoop to enter the low lintels of meditation halls; they burn lights in witness to their prayers; they pray alone and they chant together; they consider themselves more or less adept in comparison with others. I questioned myself: did I feign a gnostic religion for my world?

I mean, I don’t think I’m going to hell if I did. But on consideration…I don’t think so. I think what I did was a photo negative to what I experience in this world. After all, I wrote Ryswyck because I wanted to read a story that I couldn’t find out there six years ago. I wanted to read a story driven by friendship, ensconced in community, making use of Charles Williams’s concept of substitutionary love but anchoring a truly feminine point of view: plus all my favorite SFF tropes and the kitchen sink. It makes sense that if my daily fare is a Christian pita with a gnostic filling, I would serve up substitutionary love in a gnostic taco.

So pour me a Dos Equis and pass the hot sauce.