Remembrance

Apparently it was Memorial Day in the States. Hopeully I can be forgiven for missing it, since it's not a holiday in New Zealand, so nobody mentions these things.

Also, I have a lousy time with the usual seasonal holidays (Christmas, Easter, Halloween) on account of the seasons being upside down. There's frost on the ground this morning, and the maples and beeches out my back window are colored like bright torches.

We don't have Memorial Day in New Zealand, but we do have ANZAC Day. Very similar, both started in the days after The War to End All War. For ANZAC Day, people wear a red poppy to show their support.

Personally, I find the poppy a lovely, resonant, poetic image. Those young men cut down on the fields of Flanders, their lives barely begun. That single blood-colored blossom is a powerful symbol of the tragic human losses of war. Kiwis don't do anything with the yellow ribbons. They look at me funny when I tell them it's from a Tony Orlando song.

ANZAC Day is different from Meorial Day in one major way: the Kiwi experience of war. NZ has a long record of sending more volunteers (per capita) than its once-parent, Great Britain. They also have a long history of being as poorly used as Britain's other colonies. Think, "We need someone to draw the enemy's fire while we dither about elsewhere."

Gallipoli taught Kiwis a hard lesson in war. As so often in that war (and in wars to come), they were given a tough job without proper preperation or supply, left in an untenable situation and died in terrible numbers. That they accomplished as much as they did is a testament to their toughness and ingenuity. Read about it here.

Gallipoli left scars on the Kiwi psyche. They're still thinking about it today. 'Birth of national identity' is a very kind way of saying 'loss of innocence.' It was obvious to all concerned that the benevolent parent was only looking out for itself, and nobody cared about New Zealand but New Zealand.

Kiwis became wary of rhetoric, and they still are. But it never stopped them from commiting when they believe the cause is just. They still sent an amazing percentage of their men into WWII, though fewer into Vietnam. Since I've lived here, I've seen big pushes to stop civil wars in East Timor and Fiji. They sent troops to Afghanistan, but not to Iraq. They'll fight, but only with their hearts in it.

I was born in the US, and I love it as only someone estranged is able. I hope seventy or eighty years from now, Americans will remember a time when rich old men used flags and fear to waste too many young lives.

Of course, I'll probably go on some sort of watch list for this...

Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil

73,000 words

Stephen King says building memorable and believable characters is nothing more or less than our own observation of human beings and our ability to tell the truth.

He also says, tell the truth and you won't be popular in polite society for long.

I remember being fourteen or fifteen years old. Being afraid all the time, and turning hard to hide that fear. Looking at the violence and addiction around me, the teenaged parents, the kids who came out of prison dead eyed and flat faced and the ones who never got more than a memorial page in the yearbook, I was scared.

I remember sitting with Interview With a Vampire and getting my first clear vision of a life beyond what I knew. The thought that I might one day sit at a sidewalk cafe on a sunny street in Paris was impossible, but too tantalizing to resist.

I got tastes of what I wanted, but I also plumbed a lot of my own personal darkness. One day, I finally did get free. My dreams came true because I paid what they cost.

When my work goes wrong, this is usually where it gets lost: it loses its honesty. It's tempting to write these sort of nifty-clean thrillers where you can imagine Roger Moore in the lead. Or genteel murder mysteries where old ladies have to figure out who killed the vicar. Hell, I love to read that stuff.

But that's not my voice. It's part of the human condition I can relate to vicariously, but not the part that I can speak from with any authority. I *can* be honest about fear, about predators and victims and souls in moral freefall, about violence, hope and love.

I once couch-surfed with a stripper/sometime hooker and her disgraced cop boyfriend/sometime pimp. I can be honest about the love and anger and sadness between them in a way that I can't about, say, a witty and debonair jewel thief, or a group of high school kids throwing a party with their parents out of town.

The Tiny Dynamo sometimes wishes I wrote Regency Romance. She's afraid to let her parents see my work. *My* parents never finished my first book. Ten pages, and they were out.

When the Dynamo read about the Christchurch I know, she was aghast. But she also admitted every word was true. So these last couple weeks, that's a lot of what I've been doing with this (almost finished) retrenchment.

Telling the truth.