Why Oh Why Can't We Have A Better Press Corp? (Washington Post edition)

"A Secret Pentagon Study of Iraq has come up with three options -- injecting more troops into Iraq, shrinking the force but staying longer or pulling out, The Washington Post reported Monday." (Associated Press report)

For it's next trick, the Associated Press will tell us that you have two choices every morning: get up or stay in bed. If you do get up, you can take a shower, a bath, or skip it. Brad Delong calls this kind of reporting "Journamalism," which is to journalism as truthiness^[?] is to truth, and often bemoans this kind of crap with "Why oh why can't we have a better press corp?" Of course, he's also betting that with hard-hitting investigative reporting like this, the Washington Post will probably not survive the decade as a financially viable institution.

The article then goes on to interview a few talking heads about discussing this amazing new discovery, and concludes with a big and somewhat repetitive collection of paragraphs about how McCain's all for option one because the other two are "unnacceptable." To John McCain, at any rate.

Analogy of the moment

Concept du jour: If Apple wants you to feel connected to passionate record store employees who love their music, Microsoft wants to remind you that the record store has a cranky landlord who can shut you down any time he likes.

The wire?

As I write this, with ten days left to go in the month, I am down to the wire. I'm at 45,656 words and I've started to realize two things: one, there's a Hell of a lot more story left to write, and two, I have no idea how Zia & Polly's story is going to end. I do know how it's going to "end"; I understand Zia's sudden and harsh conflict, the realization that she knows what Polly is trying to figure out: not how to get out of the relationship, but what will happen when (not if) the relationship ends, and for the first time in her life Zia is scared: she's never had a relationship, this one seemed to be working well, but it's built on very shallow ground. But how Zia and Polly work through these realizations? Not so much.

But the real point is that at 45,656 words, I'm less than 5,000 words away from the "ending." Hell, I can write that much in two days. That is, if the goal was just to write 50,000 words.

But it's not. It never has been. The goal has been to tell stories. In this case, to get back to my roots as a pornographer and tell a story with lots and lots and lots (oy, vey, lots!) of fucking. I'm realizing that, since there is more story to tell, more threads to follow, more love and passion in the undercurrents of the story... I don't know what to do. Part of me will know that the story is incomplete, that there's a lot more to tell, and a lot more to rewrite to make it all make sense.

But part of me will be convinced that at 50,000 words I've hit a goal, and goals are where people stop. And I've enjoyed having that goal, because it was something to work towards. I didn't pad this story, didn't try to fake it. There are 50,000 words of characters struggling to understand what's happening them as they leap from their TL12 culture to one verging on TL17. That's not something to be wasted. But I frequently just write with no goal, just to see what happens next. Having the word count and time goal pushed me. I think I did a good job. Now I just have to learn something useful from the experience.