My Darlin' Coraline

I'm going to commit a cardinal sin and plug a movie I haven't seen. Please, please, please go see Coraline this weekend if you can. I am a huge fan of animation in general, and stop motion animation in particular. If this movie doesn't have a good opening, the small animation studio that made it will probably shut down. That would mean they would never tackle their next film—"a sweet comedy about a boy who communes with his dead grandmother and who must take on a small army of misguided zombies." Do you really want to live in a universe that didn't produce that magnum opus? (Thanks to Neil Gaiman for the article link.)

I spent awhile tonight talking to Nerkymarg, and she gently castigated me for not updating the blog daily. I guess I'll try to be more regular about that, although writing the blog is not as important to me as writing the novel. Still, it's great that people are checking in on me and my progress, and as that is the ostensible purpose of this blog, I'd better stick to it.

If you don't routinely check out the links on the left side of my blog, Brad Green wrote a superb essay entitled "Plucking a Wild Growth." Please check it out. BG has a flair for indelible imagery and metaphor, and I sometimes turn a mottled emerald when I read his stuff.

What the Cookie Said, ii

As I have said before, I love fortune cookies.

Yesterday's fortune was:

How much deeper would the
ocean be without sponges?

Purity of Body

Did you answer one of those "purity tests" when you were in college (or whatever you were doing in your early twenties)? Despite being pretty inexperienced at that age, I tended to score as rather "impure" simply because homosexuality was seen as intrinsically more corrupt than heterosexuality. Apparently things have come a long way. For one thing, "The Unisex, Omnisexual Purity Test" specifically levels the playing field so that the hets don't have an advantage. (Or was that a disadvantage?) For another, though, I'm just completely stunned by the fairly new notion among young Christian adults that non-vaginal sex doesn't count as sex. Church Discipline has a really nice entry on this, and he argues (from Augustine, no less), that the kids have got it right—oral and anal sex are A-OK from a virginity standpoint... with the caveat that you're still tainting your immortal soul with lust.

Now, if that's the case, and modern Christians are fully embracing non-procreative sex as a fun way to wile away the evenings, then why-oh-why do these same folks get in such a snit about homosexuality?

More importantly, though: If they are right, and non-vaginal sex is not sex, then what happens to my nearly two decades as a practicing homosexual? I was getting really good at it! Now I'm a virgin again? Who wants to have sex with a thirty-seven year old virgin? I feel like such a loser.

The Return of the Word Count Graph

In my previous NaNoWriMo blogs I would post progress charts of my daily word totals. They were pretty popular (well, OK it was only cs10 who commented on them, but we make every effort to content the kill-bot), so here they are again.

The graphs are built by a spreadsheet that I use to track my writing totals. It also calculates how much I have to write per day to stay on pace to meet my monthly goal. Maybe I'll write more about that another time.

The January total was 14,519, which was 94% of my goal. We'll grade that as an "A", right?