Rebellions are built on hope

Once again, we in the US are getting an up-close and personal object lesson in hatred. The attack in Las Vegas is leaving a lot of us speechless, and those of us who can speak can only talk about anger and fear. There's nothing wrong with that - there's fear and anger aplenty to go around, and expressing it, sharing your concerns with the people you're close to, prevents it from festering.

However, we need more. Fear and anger alone aren't enough to make the changes we need to see happen - if they were, every oppressive regime and reign of terror would end almost as soon as it began. No, we need conviction, and hope, and optimism. Those are what will drive us to make things happen.

Optimism and hope are words that tend to be very brightly colored in our society. They're the sparkly unicorn birthday cakes of words - hearing them makes one think of Care Bears and pretty, slightly dopey sidekicks who are always looking on the bright side. We tend to underestimate the power of those words. But optimism isn't Pollyanna-style thinking; optimism is the simple belief that tomorrow can be better than today. Big or small, for everyone or just for one person, forever or for just a moment, tomorrow can be better than today.

Hope and conviction are how you move from "tomorrow can be better" to "watch me make tomorrow better than today." And again, you don't have to solve all of the problems for everyone forever. Most of you are only human, after all.* But helping one person feel better for just a minute, even if (especially if) it doesn't take any extra effort on your part - that's progress. That's not to be denied. It adds up.

It's a marathon, and we all need to take breaks. I'm returning from a leave of absence at work, because I didn't take the breaks I needed until they were forced upon me. For the record, I don't recommend going that route. Be careful, be safe, ask for help when you need it, and remember that anything that improves another person's day, even just for a second, is moving us forward. So send the silly text to your folks, share the adorable animal pictures, tell that random stranger that they are really rocking their look today. It's all a Katamari of change, and it'll all roll together until it destroys the specters of hate.

Bilingual-ish

There has been a lot of discussion around writing circles with regards to how a bilingual person would use both of their languages. There are definitely not great ways of doing this, so I wanted to give an example from my own use of language(s) to see if that helps.

English is my primary language, with Spanish as my secondary language. I generally think and dream in English, though occasionally a Spanish-language dream will come my way. I read and write in Spanish better than I speak it, though with practice I can get more comfortable.

Having said all of that, there are certain things that are just easier in Spanish than they are in English. It could be because I heard my mother saying them all the time when I was a kid, and so it became more like a form of family slang than anything else, but some phrases are so much faster and snappier in Spanish than in English. It helps that, frequently, you don't actually pronounce all of the letters in Spanish - there are sort of blank spots where the sound would be.

Examples would help. If I'm behind the wheel of a car, I'm more likely to break out the Spanish than in just about any other circumstance. "A que gente!" just rolls off the tongue more easily than "For crying out loud!" or something similar. There are a lot of phrases in the family vocabulary that I'm not certain are common in general Spanish speaking, but certainly popped up a lot in our house. Most of them began with "A que," which...doesn't really translate. It usually denotes some sort of frustration or irritation. If I get an "A que Stephie!" from my mom, I know she's getting exasperated. Needless to say, I got this a lot as a teenager.

I'm not sure why, but when I talk to animals, I'm more likely to slip into Spanish. A lot of times it's some form of endearment ("niño/a," "perrito," that sort of thing), though sometimes it falls into that exasperation frame again. Ramses, may he disembowel fuzzy mice in heaven, was frequently "gatito hombre," usually when he was on the kitchen counter or somewhere else he shouldn't have been. It just wouldn't have been the same to call him "little cat man," you know?

Anyway. For me, Spanish is useful when it's faster or easier to think of instead of English, but it's not necessarily the first thing I'll come to. I don't know how people who have Spanish as their primary language would treat English - anyone want to weigh in?

Aphantasia - no "mental images"

Recently, I read an article about how it's possible to live without the ability to imagine...well, anything, really. There are people who are incapable of visualizing things, or imagining sounds, or anything along those lines. For those people, the "mind's eye" is purely metaphorical.

Naturally, this made me wonder about the way my brain works and thinks. I frequently day-dream, occasionally in full-color video or pictures, but often just in sound and sound effects. I can distinguish various voices when they run through their paces in the soundstage of my mind. Hell, certain music shows up as different colors when I hear it.

The idea of not having any of that - of not being able to picture, say, my father's face or my mother's laugh, of not having a way to revisit memories without some form of memory aid - makes me incredibly sad. I realize that, in the article I linked to above, the writer was unaware of what he was missing, as he didn't know this was something the human brain was capable of doing. And maybe it wouldn't be so bad, if you didn't know.

What do you think? Would you prefer to not be distracted by the images and sounds in your mind?

Gaming, contract drafting, and writing

Remember how I said I would come back to the idea of writing and gaming? Well, I've had a chance to think about it, and I realize it's not just gaming that ties into my writing, but also my day job within a legal department.

Both gaming and legal writing require a level of consistency in language.  When drafting legal documents, contracts generally have some sort of glossary near the beginning or end of the document, outlining the defined terms.  The main thing to remember with those terms is that a defined term has to mean the same thing every time it's referenced.  It's a convenient way to both make it clear to anyone reading the document what the parties mean when they use a potentially ambiguous term, and also a standardized shorthand to refer to a specific idea.  Even though you wouldn't think it, legal writing can teach a writer a lot about being concise and clear.  Well, the important thing is to avoid the standard "legalese" of heretofore and "the party of the first part", and the like.

Similarly, when writing rules for a game, being consistent with terms is key for making sure the players understand what the designer meant.  In my copious free time (/sarcasm), I work with my husband to edit translations of board game rules.  There's a specific jargon involved with board games, which can occasionally get lost in translation.  We review the rules with an eye towards making the language flow naturally, as well as being consistent throughout.  If something happens once a turn, for instance, we make sure that it isn't referred to as happening once a round later on.

Now, I'm not saying all of this to mean that everything you write needs to have a glossary.  However, consistency is key, and it's one of the easiest ways to pull a reader out of the world if it isn't there.  How often have you read something in which a character's clothing changes in the middle of the scene?  It gets under your skin, and generally, irritating your readers is a bad idea.

Now for something a little different.  Recently I read a list on Cracked that asked a very simple question - what have you done today to get yourself closer to your goal?  I want to be able to answer that question everyday, even if it's just "I wrote ten words".  So, I'm going to hold myself accountable here.  Since the beginning of September, I've written six out of seven days.  Things are going slowly, but I think my new idea is coming together.  It's still a fledgling, so I'm not quite sure enough of what I'm doing to discuss it much, but it's there.

Languages and personal lexicons

Growing up, I didn't speak Spanish all the time, though my mother is a first-generation Mexican-American who speaks Spanish fluently.  Although she didn't actively teach my brother and me Spanish, she did use certain phrases and worked their way into our family's lexicon, just because in her mind, it was faster or easier to get the point across in Spanish than in English.

By this point, I feel comfortable saying that I can read and write Spanish fluently, but I don't speak it all that often.  Even so, there are some of the same phrases of my mother's that I hear coming out of my mouth when I'm not thinking.  It's easier and faster for me to say "fíjate" than it is to say "look at that!", even if I didn't actually know that's what it meant in English.  Even though my husband doesn't speak Spanish at all, he's learned what some of the phrases mean just through the way I use them.  Similarly, I've picked up on a couple of phrases in Japanese, because my husband uses them as shorthand.

In general, we all have our own personal shorthand that we use with people we are close to.  Inside jokes are the most obvious example of this, as anyone who has been the third wheel with a couple who has been together for a long time can tell you.  Jargon's another way of describing language used for a specific purpose, as certain terms will me different things for different companies or businesses.  But even when it's not some sort of joke, everyone finds a way to reference a complex experience without describe the entire event, and everyone has a way of speaking that they use only when speaking to certain friends or family.

When creating a character, it makes sense to find out how your character thinks, and figuring out what their linguistic shorthand is can be a great way of getting an insight into that thought process.  Say your character has to tell someone that they are seriously ill.  How would your character tell his or her best friend?  What about their parents, or their employer?  Imagining how the same conversation will happen with different groups of people will tell you a lot about how your character interacts with different environments, and more options can always lead to more interesting interactions and plot lines.