What the fuck?

A white supremacist goes on a shooting rampage at the Holocaust Museum and fatally wounds a security guard, and the right-wing media decides he's a LEFTIST. (via.)

Yesterday, a guest from the "Ayn Rand Institute" argued to Fox News's Glenn Beck that because Von Brunn is a racist, he must of course be "a phenomenon of the left." In response, Beck accepted that logic, and wondered: "How did it happen that you look at people that are Nazis and you say that those are right wing? It doesn't make any sense whatsoever!"

I'm with the People for the American Way: Release the report on right-wing extremism NOW.

Europeans call right-extremists what they are: terrorists. It's time the US stepped up as well.

Music recommendation: Portals of Grace

In 2005, I saw the movie Head-On (Gegen die Wand), and I really liked it. It was beautiful and depressing, a story about two messed-up people who became involved in each other's lives. It's by the German-Turkish director Fatih Akin, and it's about two German Turks and how they live and fit in (or not). This is a theme I like, in general, in stories, so I'm predisposed to enjoying it, even if I felt suckerpunched at the ending.

The soundtrack was awesome, so when I was looking for the DVD on Amazon, I clicked the link to the soundtrack as well. Then I was recommended CDs by Vas, Niyat, and Azam Ali. I bought one by Vas, and I played Feast of Silence over and over.

I eventually bought Ali's Portals of Grace, because I liked the idea of medieval European music played on traditional Arabic instruments. Also, a portion of the proceeds, according to the CD liner, go to RAWA, which is something I can endorse.

Ali herself was born in Tehran and raised in India, and she had the idea to combine the two musical traditions and record it. The CD is amazing. I'm not educated in music theory or criticism, so I lack the words to explain it.

You can listen to samples on Amazon, or if you're local, I'll play it for you sometime.

I've got it on repeat today, while I write. It's helping.

Progress report

Apparently, being home alone is good for my writing. Between about 2 pm and now, I wrote 3320 words, bringing me to a total of 9934.

I stopped for dinner and again for an evening walk. Living alone would be a singularly bad idea.

I've got something written in each subsection of section 2, which grew as I wrote it from three subsections to six, three of which are parts 1-3 of the same event (I POV switched, so it has to break between them.) I worked out part of the next section on my walk, so I wrote that out of order, then went back to fill in the missing scene.

Tomorrow I'll get to go back and fix these 3000 words, because there are probably a lot in there are aren't very good. Highly likely, actually. And some scenes are probably not even useful, but I'll leave them in until I get to the end and see whether the word count needs them or not. (And even then, I might think of ways to get rid of them. But Protag A wants to stare at Protag B's assabdomen while he's working out.)

It looks like the action-y part is going to start just short of halfway into the tale. I've laid some groundwork for it (I hope), but the first couple sections are intro, setup, and getting the heroes together. (I plan to make some angst and possibly tear them apart, so they can make up. We'll see where they take me when I get there.) I hope I can make it romancey enough. My inability to describe things is likely to be my downfall.