originally posted 2018-07-22

​I'm working on my second Letty Valdez mystery.  ​The title of the new book is Dragon's Revenge. It will be published November 20, 2018.

I've been thinking about language and how fraught it is with controversy these days.

Some people seem to think that telling a falsehood is perfectly okay. If called on the lie, they double down and tell a bigger lie. As a former news reporter, I am convinced that facts matter and that telling lies can undermine everything, from personal relationships to a democracy. 

On the other hand, there are those who think one should never use certain terms because those terms are not socially accepted anymore or they are not politically correct or maybe they just plain rude. These folks are willing to censor others to see their view of correct language prevail.

So what about writers who want to express a thought or words said by a character that doesn't speak in a politically-correct way. 

Here's an example. In the 1960s, women were often called "girls" or if you were a hipster, you called them "chicks."  So if I write a book about women in the 60s and 70s, it seems right to me to use the language of those times - girls and chicks - even though if someone called me a chick, they'd get an earful from me (I'm a Second Wave feminist!). 

Back to Dragon's Revenge: A substantial portion of this book is a memoir written in the 1970s by an old man who was a boy in the 1890s in Tucson. His stepfather was a Chinese immigrant. At that time, they called this man a "Chinaman" although that term is no longer used and is considered derogatory and offensive. In my book, he will be called a Chinaman in the memoir because that's what he was called in 1890. 

Accuracy and facts are more important to me than changing definitions of what is currently "correct" or "polite."

Originally posted 2018-02-15
Recently one of America’s greatest writers died, Ursula K. Le Guin. Note that I said “greatest writers,” not “greatest science fiction writers” or “greatest fantasy writers.”  Le Guin won numerous awards during her career, and sold millions of copies. Many of us believe that her books have become part of the canon of American literature. She was both wildly inventive and deeply thoughtful in how she approached her work. You leave her books both entertained and provoked to do some serious thinking of your own.
 
I’ve always thought the fact Le Guin’s parents were both cultural anthropologists was a significant factor in the imaginative worlds she created in her books. Rather than the showy heroic stories of conflict and triumph we so often see, Le Guin created characters and societies with complexity and ambiguity. (photo left: NerdPatrol, Flickr)
 
Take for example, her classic The Left Hand of Darkness. This compelling story follows a Terran (earthling) to the planet of Gethen where all the inhabitants are ambisexual most of the time. But once a month they come into “kemming” for a few days and become either male or female for purposes of reproduction. Which sex the Gethenians transform into depends on conditions they find when the state of kemmering begins. Although Le Guin refers to them as “he,” sometimes they are “she.”  The Terran, Genly Ai, finds this more than disconcerting because he comes from a place where everyone is either a he or a she, and he treats them according to this permanent state. Ai is himself always a male. Needless to say, this book, first published in 1969, had a deep influence on the Second Wave feminists of the day, and that includes me.
 
Another highly influential book was The Dispossessed. Here she creates two twin worlds. One world is rather like ours is these days. Cut throat capitalism rules, and anyone unlucky enough to not be part of the elite are doomed to suffer – homelessness and hunger abound in the shadow of extreme wealth. The other world is socialistic and authoritarian, but no one goes hungry. Le Guin called this world “an ambiguous utopia.”
 
Le Guin considered herself a feminist. She was also an advocate of non-violence and expressed a deep interest in ecology and a concern for our environment. She was influenced by Daoist philosophy, and that shows up in her writing, too.
 
Not only was she a terrific writer, Le Guin also had a wicked sense of humor. Regarding her advice for women writers, she said:  If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.” For the record, Le Guin married, had three children, and did not commit suicide.
 
Perhaps her most famous quote is from The Left Hand of Darkness, a quote that is unfortunately often attributed to Hemingway, “It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
 
In December 2017, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published her book, No Time to Spare:  Thinking About What Matters in which she ruminates on old age.  Le Guin died in January, 2018.