A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
In fiction, interiority is relating the internal world of a character to the reader. Their thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, anxieties, memories, motivations, and so on. This is a simple yet consequential thing. Every one of us lives simultaneously in the external shared world and our own private worlds. These two realities are constantly colliding, separating, and distorting each other, whether that’s something as small as snapping at a friend because you are “hangry” or having a life-altering epiphany at the image of, I dunno, a dove flying over a lake that symbolically completes your character arc because you are a protagonist in a literary fiction short story published in a university literary magazine.
I kid, a bit. Still, it is true that our interior worlds are as vast as anything outside of them. If your fiction is missing interiority, it is leaving quite a lot out. This is true in a grander, philosophical sense yet also in a very practical craft sense. Readers tend to connect to stories through the emotions and desires of the POV character(s), and interiority provides that connection. The simplest story structure might be a character wants something but obstacles get in the way. This is a classic and powerful story, but only when the reader understands the character’s wants.
Interiority provides far more than just desires and goals. An interesting character will typically have a gap between how they act or speak and how they think or feel. Here’s an old CW class chestnut: In every scene, you should know what a character says they want, what they think they want, and what they really want. This can be applied to anything from prize-winning literary novels to pulpy superhero films. In this scene, the villain, Dr. Evilguy, says to the security guard that he wants to just use the bathroom but what he thinks he wants is to steal the blasto-ray 4000 omegagun prototype and conquer the city yet what he really wants, deep down, is to please the daddy that never loved them.
In most states, if you deposit 20 kWh
of power during the afternoon (as is usual on a typical sunny day), you
get a full 1-to-1 credit to withdraw those same 20 kWh later that night.
While states like Florida, Ohio, and Iowa protect 1-to-1 net metering
as a matter of property rights and energy freedom, Indiana’s Senate
Enrolled Act 309 created an artificial government price control that
penalizes Hoosier families for investing in their own homes.
Passed in 2017, the law allows
electric companies to harvest those same 20 kWh of afternoon power from
you and immediately sell them to your neighbors for $3.00 (the full
$0.15/kWh retail price), while crediting you just $0.70 (the discounted
$0.035/kWh wholesale rate). When you pull that same power back out of
the grid that night, they charge you $3.00 once again. That leaves the
homeowner getting back less than 25% of the energy value they deposited
just hours earlier.
[I am back working through my pretrial detention journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 8/14/2026]
Gunshy as I was from breaking up with TJ, I did not hurry into another romantic relationship with any woman. I blamed myself for all that had gone wrong.
I got attached to LAH during my second semester of law school. She was Bones back then. Like me she came from Central Indiana. Unlike any of our other classmates. Blonde hair, firm breasts, thin, who was always being hailed home on weekends by her mother. Scared and lonely as I was at law school. We had one date while in law school. She transferred to the IU Indianapolis Law School for her second year. I took her out a few times during the summer of 1985. It was difficult to ignore her. I dropped by one time, she wore jeans with the seat ripped out and a white cotton T-shirt that only accentuated her breats. I came close to those breasts during that summer. I lay on the floor of her parents' basement looking at the first naked breasts I had seen since the previous year. Only I made the mistake of smiling. (What else could one do when confronted by such a beautiful, wondrous sight?) She stood up, got dressed, and had me leave soon after. She thought I was laughing at her.
That began a relationship that lasted on and off with me dealing with her mental health issue and getting repaid with scorn until 2005. It ended when I told her I was to marry. She said I would end up in the gutter. Why did it go on for so long? It was not sex. We made it to bed only twice, then it was platonic. It was me who suggested she take up women. No, LAH had no other friends, and I thought I could help her. I must admit that her prophecy came true. She played with my head like it was a revolver. My friends made it clear that if I ever let her back in my life they would drop me. I hope her mental health is now better than mine.
The one who saved me was E. She came after me. I can say it is a very pleasant surprise to find a naked woman in one's walk-in closet. We remained friends but drifted apart as I went south and she remained in northern Indiana. I wish I ha felt financially comfortable enough to have taken up an offer she made me in 2009. She wanted me to take time off and stay on her farm. Sorry, I did not do so E. The failure belongs solely to me.
T1 came into my life almost accidentally. Friends thinking I needed a feminine distraction invited me to a party in Muncie to meet a sure thing. (Which brings to mind Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing, and why is it seldom seen nowadays?) That was T1's roommate. Only she was too blonde, too thin, and too vacuous to interest me. Nor did I pay much attention to T1, she was attached to someone else and my mind was on TJ. This party was the longest time I spent in Muncie since breaking up with TJ. I stood on the back porch of T1's second floor apartment, looking over the neighborhood. I was only a few blocks from where I had disasterously impregnated TJ. I left soon after. I drove around the places in Muncie TJ and I had frequented in the old days (something I would do even after I finally married.)
I did catch T1's eye. Seems she and her boyfriend were below me engaging in sex when she looked up and saw me standing there. I became a coitus interruptus without becoming aware of it. My mind, my eyes were on 1984. I did not know what I had done until months later, after a call from KH telling what had transpired below me. It gave me a good laugh and a little guilt at spoiling T1's fun. The next time we met things went differently.
sch
[Continued in 6-6-2010: The Women In My Life; Part 2. sch 8/14/2026]
I got out and about yesterday. I fixed the problems with Xfinity, had brunch at Jersey Mike's and shopped at Aldi's.
I had to schlep my groceries from University to Riverside, a walk about 4 short blocks, and that did me in for most of the day.
It was a gloomy day and humid. It was one of those Indiana's days when it's like living in a warm, damp sponge.
I slept most of the afternoon and into the evening. Then I could not sleep. I watched a bit more of Penny Dreadful. I had seen most of it years ago and am finishing it up. I like its variations on the idea of Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It also made an interesting comment on Frankenstein, that he could create but had no interest in nurture. There is something to think about in that; especially in light of Mary Shelley being Frankenstein's creator.
I went down to the convenience store when I finally felt the energy to move about. A blue, clear sky above, a coolness in the wind, and a pleasant deficit of humidity.
The time since has been spent on reading online articles and answering emails. I do not feel like I have the energy to work on a short story that I have in the works. Perhaps the article.
Thank you for sending "After Making Landfall" to CRAFT for consideration. We appreciate the opportunity to review your work. At this time, however, we must say no to this piece. Best of luck placing this one elsewhere soon.
There was some debate during the group session last week about what was meant by a hundred year flood, and I learned with were all wrong. U.S. Geological Survey's The 100-Year Flood explains:
"100-year floods can happen 2 years in a row"
Statistical
techniques, through a process called frequency analysis, are used to
estimate the probability of the occurrence of a given precipitation
event. The recurrence interval is based on the probability that the
given event will be equaled or exceeded in any given year. For example,
assume there is a 1 in 50 chance that 6.60 inches of rain will fall in a
certain area in a 24-hour period during any given year. Thus, a
rainfall total of 6.60 inches in a consecutive 24-hour period is said to
have a 50-year recurrence interval. Likewise, using a frequency
analysis (Interagency Advisory Committee on Water Data, 1982) there is a
1 in 100 chance that a streamflow of 15,000 cubic feet per second (ft3/s) will occur during any year at a certain streamflow-measurement site. Thus, a peak flow of 15,000 ft3/s
at the site is said to have a 100-year recurrence interval. Rainfall
recurrence intervals are based on both the magnitude and the duration of
a rainfall event, whereas streamflow recurrence intervals are based solely on the magnitude of the annual peak flow.
Ten
or more years of data are required to perform a frequency analysis for
the determination of recurrence intervals. Of course, the more years of
historical data the better—a hydrologist will have more confidence on an
analysis of a river with 30 years of record than one based on 10 years
of record.
Integrity has been so diminished of late but I was shocked byCapitalism, as Told by Its Enemies - Phillip W. Magness, Caleb Petitt (The Dispatch). No one is perfect, no human being sees all; therefore, intellectual integrity requires us to admit as much. Mr. Magness and Mr. Pettit provide what such integrity should look like:
A more balanced entry on capitalism for the SEP could have offered a constructive assessment of this subject, its history, and the contemporary state of scholarship around it. Such an entry could still have room for critics in the Marxist and many other socialist traditions, but they would not have the disproportionate dominance found in Cordelli’s piece. Instead, a better entry might include serious engagement with the Scottish Enlightenment precursors to the emergence of market capitalism in the late 18th century, with references to David Hume’s work on trade and currency, as well as something more than superficial references to Adam Smith.
It might also discuss how the ideas we call “capitalism” came to supplant an older mercantilist economic order that used government policies to steer an economy for nationalistic objectives. It might also discuss the period of both political and philosophical contestation between the “capitalist” and “Marxian communist” worlds following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and culminating in the collapse of the latter in 1991. It could discuss in greater depth the theoretical contributions of institutionalist economists like Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Douglass North in the mid-20th century around the theory of a market economy. It might mention Deirdre McCloskey’s work on the Great Enrichment as a positive argument for what we colloquially refer to as capitalism. And it might explore the tensions between these and other theorists of market capitalism. As it stands, this rich and complex academic literature receives nary a mention beyond a few passing citations.
Since capitalism is fundamentally an economic concept, one could reasonably expect to see mainstream economic voices discussed, and competently so, by someone versed in economic theory. There would be a clear description of how profits work both as signals of demand and incentives for entrepreneurship, how competition between firms disciplines market actors, how market prices make economic calculation possible by signaling the relative scarcity of goods in a common denominator, and how government policies contribute to the creation of monopolies. Marxist and socialist critiques of capitalism from the far left would also be balanced with mainstream economic critiques of socialism. Early in the 20th century, there was famously a debate among economists over whether socialist central planners were capable of engaging in economic calculation. The economists who argued against the possibility of socialist calculation ultimately won the debate—though one would not know this from reading Cordelli’s entry.
Welfarist arguments for capitalism would not be confined to a single paragraph, and would describe in detail how free-market capitalism has been responsible for lifting the world out of poverty. The way that capitalism incentivizes entrepreneurship, and the role entrepreneurs play in arbitrage and the creation of new goods and services, would play a more important role than the entry’s single paragraph on Joseph Schumpeter, the first economist to make entrepreneurship central to the understanding of economic development and change.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s unwillingness to select an author for the entry on capitalism who could provide a charitable or even neutral assessment of the concept is ultimately unscholarly. In the 20th century, socialism resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, and capitalism and free markets were the critical factors for lifting billions out of poverty, and yet it is socialism that received the positive encyclopedia entry and capitalism that garnered the hate. Such imbalances could only emerge from an academic environment in which an ideological echo chamber supplants rigorous peer review, and the fashionable socialist perspectives of the professoriate lead it to mistake bad caricatures of a market economy for descriptive fact.
One thing lacking during prison was information. I did not read Llosa, “A Confederacy of Dunces”, or Irvine Welsh until then and without much context. I keep my eye out for articles that will fill in the context for me.
The Odyssey piece is here because it is so big this summer.
Gabriel García Márquez is the book’s foil: the
magician to Vargas Llosa’s realist, the man who stayed with the leftist
tribe while his lesser rival abandoned it. Martin, now the biographer of both,
is uniquely placed to reconstruct the most famous right hook in
literary history. In 1976, Vargas Llosa floored García Márquez with a
punch after allegedly accusing him of overstepping the mark by
comforting Patricia during the collapse of their marriage.
The
punch marked more than a personal rupture. It sealed an ideological
one. García Márquez later remarked that there were only “two soups on
the menu”: capitalism and socialism. Vargas Llosa turned up his nose at
one and spent the rest of his life gorging himself on the other.
The party is afraid not of Plato but of Uighurs, whom it has smeared
as terrorists and agitators. What the party actually wants from the
ancient Greeks is a pedigree. In November 2024, Chinese President Xi
Jinping sent a letter to the first World Conference of Classics in
Beijing, urging scholars to “embrace the responsibility of advancing
classical studies.” A Chinese School of Classical Studies now operates
in Athens. A Chinese translation series of western classics, which
includes Plato, Aristotle and Rousseau, has sold tens of millions of
copies across a thousand titles over four decades.
The West is putting the same inheritance on trial. In December 2024
the British government moved to end the £4 million Latin Excellence
Programme. The program had carried Latin into 40 non-selective state
schools, where more than a third of pupils were eligible for free school
meals. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson had launched it to stop
Latin being reserved for “the privileged few.”
The pressure comes from more than one direction. In January 2026,
Texas A&M University ordered a philosophy professor to remove
readings from Plato’s Symposium from an introductory ethics course or be reassigned, under a new university policy against teaching “race and gender ideology.” On
the academic left, the pressure is harder to describe. The Princeton
classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta has written that classics was “a cheat
code for mastering whiteness.” In that reading, the ancient work must
answer our quarrels before it is allowed to tell us anything of its own.
On August 14, The Odyssey opens across most of China’s
nearly 800 IMAX screens. More than 250,000 people had registered to see
it before tickets went on sale. They probably won’t ask whether Homer
needs forgiving. That was always our question, not his.
You might want to think about this one. I am. All the cultural malarkey imposed on us by neurotic, insecure boys like Elon Musk and his online cohorts does not address the poem. All that interests them is their obsessions and terrors for which they want to make use of Homer and his descendants.
If you finish that novel thinking “Ignatius gets it”, well brother,
you don’t get it. And that’s the most Ignatius thing about you.
The dunces were never in a confederacy against Ignatius. He was a
confederacy of one, at war with reality. And you will never win that
war, no matter how many times you quote Boethius.
Trust me on this one.
I am. Perhaps my understanding was affected by being in prison, reading the novel in isolation, without any knowledge of lit bros.
Can Nothing Save Us? is published this month, but
it has a long back story. Welsh originally thought he was collecting
material for an HBO pilot on the superstar DJ – this was in 2014 – with his friend Calvin Harris. (Welsh also DJs and co-owns a record label.)
From the DJ boxes of Vegas, he’d look out at “this ugly scene where
middle-aged sleazy guys grind up against young women who’ve been comped
for the clubs” – but the project stalled and Welsh realised he had the
makings of something different: “A novel about modern America.”
He gave the draft to his editor and some writer friends. “And they all said the same thing. ‘This is shit!’”
Welsh re-read it. “Fuck, they’re right,” he thought.
Rejection
must be unfamiliar to a multimillion-selling novelist. But Welsh did
manage to sell the screen rights, and while he watched the writers’ room
work through his pages, he became “a voyeur of my own material” and
understood how to fix his novel.
Join us at the Indiana State Library
when Indiana’s best established and emerging writers will meet for a
full day of classes on the writing craft for the 2026 Gathering of
Writers Annual Writing Conference, presented by the Indiana Writers
Center and the Indiana Center for the Book.
Featuring a keynote address and a breakout session from playwright, Andrew Black. Other breakout sessions include poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and more presented by
Andrew Black, Rachel Cochran, Kelcey Ervick, Chris Forhan, Shasta
Grant, Ashley Mack-Jackson, Karen Kovacik, Natalie Lima, Barbara Shoup,
Liz Whiteacre, and more. You’ll leave full of inspiration,
armed with writing drafts ripe for experimentation—along with a hundred
other writers who feel the same way.
[I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. Consider this post as more of an aborted memoir. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 8/14/2026]
Those looking for prurient information should skip this section. I dated only two women while in law school.
I started Valparaiso University School of Law in August of 1984.
My first semester was rocky. I had been out of school for two years. I was neither certain if I retained any academic abilities nor that I belonged there socially.
Second semester became a disaster. I came back knowing my mother's lung cancer had returned to kill her and that TJ no longer wanted me. I teetered on the brink of flunking out. That I might not survive scholastically was a first for me.
Dad offered to mortgage his house. I turned him down. I spent the summer working for him so I could be close to Mom. I got myself onto law review by way of the law review's case comment writing competition. (By the way, I consider my contest entry better written than my law review note which is stilted, pedantic, and boring.) I reverted to a pre-TJ mentality for survival: the professors, the school, became the enemy, my opponents.
I survived the summer of 1985 and watching the effects of chemo on Mom. With my attitude towards school, I survived. Even with Mom dying in March 1986 and learning in April that my Great-Aunt Elsie had liver cancer, I made it through.
I stayed with and worked for my father the summer of 1986 so I could spend time with Aunt Elsie. She died a month after I started my Fall semester class. I made it to graduation.
Survive may be a bit of an understatement, as I increased my grade point average and class ranking every semester. This occurred even though in my last year I was on law review, had a part-time job at the undergraduate library, delivered pizzas for about a month, and was a professor research assistant. I always knew how to work.
I thought law school was a serious place for serious people. They were not the educated morons I met at college. To the disappointment of at least one professor, we were not interested in the abstract, scholarly aspects of the law but in careers that could put food on the table. Thankfully, I was at Valparaiso instead of Indiana University-Indianapolis. Valparaiso offered none of the distractions of people and places in Indianapolis.
I think I would have done better for myself had offered the clinical class that it now offers. Anyone actually wanting to practice law needs to take clinicals. They will do themselves great harm by avoiding practical experience.
I will also say that a law school education is one of the best educations anyone can have and more should be exposed to its rigors. However, not everyone should practice law and no one should feel any shame about graduating law school and then foregoing the practice of law. I could not imagine not practicing law. I think now that I was utterly unprepared for the business side of law.
(How to know if you should go into private practice? If you cannot schmooze, if you cannot network with those your business depends upon, then a solo practice is not for you. Also read Jay Foonberg's How To Start and Build A Law Practice.)
Since becoming a felon, I seriously doubt ever being asked back to my law school (or to any other), but for the last twenty years I have wanted to tell law students two words they need for success. Those two words are: cash flow.
I admit creating a serious problem for myself by financing my law school career with student loans. I lost all control over my student loan payments in 1999. I took this path on the advice of my Aunt Mary Ellen's youngest son. Tax policy then allowed deducting student loans. Tax law changed, but being committed to finishing what I started, I took out more loans. Never base any long-term plans on the federal tax law. Doing so truly is building one's foundation on sand.
(Another interruption: with the Great Recession, the firms shed lawyers and student loan debt requires a steady income for younger lawyers. I predict we will be seeing younger lawyers leaving the profession and fewer wanting to go into the profession; law schools will soon find the environment as competitive as we did in private practice. I worry about the smaller cities in Indiana. I have already seen fewer younger lawyers coming into Anderson as solo practitioners. Operating costs have increased. I expect the Anderson paradigm of solo attorneys sharing office space as being extinct by the time I finish my sentence. Which then raises the question of how many people will go without what variety of legal services.)
I left law school for private practice. I had had no plans for myself past graduation. All the reasons I had for law school and going into the legal profession had departed from my life by May of 1987. I was never good at doing things for myself, such selfishness never felt right to me. I had no idea what to do now that I was on my own. No real goals other than to make money. Inertia saved me a lot of thinking, and I was heading back to Anderson.
[It looks like I was not far off the mark in 2010 about new law school students: Law School Enrollment Trends, 1963-2025 (LawHub ). And I was not wrong about law schools, but did not expect it to get worse:
