The Economics Of Star Trek 1

Y’know how the Federation–or human civilization at any rate–doesn’t have money on Star Trek?

That’s soooo stupid.

And originally, it wasn’t that way. In the original series, there are periodic references to money. Sure, they call their units of money "credits" rather than "dollars" or "yen" or what have you, but it’s money. There are also references to traders, commerce, and even mail-order brides.

And then came what should have been a throwaway line.

In the movie Star Trek IV ("The Search For Whales"), Kirk and the gang are back in the 20th century (remember that one?) and Kirk is going on a sort of date/business meeting with a marine biologist to a pizzeria, and he explains that he’s from the future. She is incredulous and not taking him very seriously, and then when the time comes to pay the check, she says, "I suppose that you don’t have money in the future."

Kirk replies, "As a matter of fact, we don’t."

Funny line! Good delivery by Shatner. And if it had stopped there, everything would have been fine. The line could have been taken as a joke, or it could have been taken as a statement that in the future nobody carries cash (i.e., they all use debit cards or something).

Unfortunately, the Powers That Be at Star Trek chose to take it in a much more literal sense (probably dictated by Gene Roddenberry’s over-optimistic secular humanism), and so it became canon that they don’t have money at all in human civilization. Instead, as articulated in Next Gen and DS9, the human race abandoned money for an economy driven by a mutual desire for improving oneself and the common good.

Riiiight.

All those greedy traders from the original series like Cyrano Jones and Harry Mudd were driven by a desire for mutual self improvement. That’s what led them to unleash ecologically unsafe life forms (tribbles), traffic in contraband substances (magic beauty crystal drug thingies), and risk jail and stuff.

The difficulty of making Star Trek over into a Leninist workers paradise has problems that go way beyond continuity problems, though. The basic problem is that Leninist workers paradises don’t work. That’s why the Soviet Union early on abandoned its efforts to have a cashless society and reintroduced the use of money.

Money plays a vital role: It tells you how much somebody wants something that is in short supply. Person A wants to have something that Person B also wants to have (say, a nice fluffy tribble that has been safely neutered). Who wants it more? Money is the best way to settle that. (Fisticuffs not being a good way.) You want this tribble? How much are you willing to pay for it? Supply and demand.

Even monkeys can get the principles involves.

A society of humans couldn’t be more advanced than us and yet lack money. Whether  cash or electronic, money is the most efficient way of settling how wants what how much and thus who gets it. It’s the best way to organize resources on a wide scale. Any other system is going to be inefficient and result in the misallocation of resources and greater human suffering.

Star Trek is able to ignore this because it is held to such low standards of realism, but no human society built on a touchie-feelie, moneyless self improvement philosophy could possibly work. We know. We’ve tried them. They all fall apart (usually very quickly). Even the kibbutzim are either changing or dying.

Even with the low-realism standards of Star Trek, though, the problem shows through. There are episodes of DS9 (whose writers hated the moneyless business) where the problem is thrown into sharp relief. How could it not be?–when some of the principal characters on the show are Ferengi and thus devoted to the pursuit of money.

One of the things that the show just has to ignore is how moneyless humans interact with moneyed Ferengi (and other cultures). Think Quark isn’t going to charge humans for drinks in his bar? Or to use his holosuites? Think again.

This is not to say that the economics of the future wouldn’t look different than ours. Technological change alone would ensure that. If you have replicator technology (which didn’t come in until Next Gen) and abundant energy then the unit cost of countless consumer goods is going to be vanishingly low (even if replicated food doesn’t taste as good as real food), but it will still exist.

And so what should have been a fun, throwaway line in a movie about searching for whales turned into a HUGE, HULKING, ENORMOUS, WHALE-SIZED WRITING PROBLEM FOR THE FRANCHISE.

Sigh.

GET YOUR COPY OF THE RULES OF ACQUISITION.

One Mil

One_milWell, it finally happened.

Yesterday, about noon Pacific Time, we passed one million hits.

These are page views rather than unique user sessions, but still, a million page views is quite an accomplishment.

THANKS FOLKS!!! MUCH OBLIGED TO Y’ALL!!!

These are the hits since I moved to TypePad back in April 2004, so it took us about a year and four months. The blog has grown since then, though, so it may not take that long to hit two mil.

In the meantime, Party On, Dudes!!!

(Oh, and . . . Be Excellent To Each Other!)

B16: Master Showman!

Recently I was reading an article that compared JP2’s use of crowd-pleasing zingers to B16’s allegedly more reserved, shy style.

Not so fast!

The current pontiff may be more reserved by nature, but he’s able to deliver a killing joke if he wants to.

Consider the following opening from a recent speech he gave to an ecumenical gathering in Germany:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Permit me to remain seated after such a strenuous day. This does not mean I wish to speak "ex cathedra."

ZING! Man! What a great line! A joke only the pope can tell! (At least with the same punch.)

His next line is only a step down from this:

Also, excuse me for being late. Unfortunately, Vespers took longer than
foreseen and the traffic was slower moving than could be imagined.

Again, what great irony. B16 may not have meant this one to be humorous, but I can’t get over the irony of the successor of Peter complaining about traffic jams and using the phrase "slower . . . than could be imagined" regarding them.

But maybe that’s just me. His first line totally ROCKS, though.

As the discourse goes on, he gets into more serious territory, and it is here that he shows his humility. First, he says:

I do not intend here to outline a program for the immediate themes of
dialogue — this task belongs to theologians working alongside the
bishops: the theologians, on the basis of their knowledge of the
problem; the bishops from their knowledge of the concrete situation in
the Church in our country and in the world.

This is remarkable, and may indeed by different than what JP2 would have done. JP2 was a man of remarkable self-confidence, and this does contrast with B16’s free admissions of personal inadequacy. Here B16 publicly confesses that he is not the most informed person on a matter and that others are more expert in it than him. He holds himself back from using the power that is his as pope to set an agenda and leaves this to others who can do it better in his view. THAT is humility–to refrain from doing what you could in order to allow others to better promote the greatr good.

But he does have a contribution to make, and it’s a remarkable one. He goes on to say:

May I make a small comment: now, it is said that following the
clarification regarding the doctrine of justification, the elaboration
of ecclesiological issues and the questions concerning ministry are the
main obstacles still to be overcome. In short, this is true, but I must
also say that I dislike this terminology, which from a certain point of
view delimits the problem since it seems that we must now debate about
institutions instead of the Word of God, as though we had to place our
institutions in the center and fight for them. I think that in this way
the ecclesiological issue as well as that of the "Ministerium" are not
dealt with correctly.

The real question is the presence of the Word in the world. In the
second century the early Church primarily took a threefold decision:
first, to establish the canon, thereby stressing the sovereignty of the
Word and explaining that not only is the Old Testament "hai graphai" [Greek, "the Scriptures"],
but together with the New Testament constitutes a single Scripture
which is thus for us the master text.

However, at the same time the Church has formulated an apostolic
succession, the episcopal ministry, in the awareness that the Word and
the witness go together; that is, the Word is alive and present only
thanks to the witness, so to speak, and receives from the witness its
interpretation. But the witness is only such if he or she witnesses to
the Word.

Third and last, the Church has added the "regula fidei" [Latin, "the rule of faith"] as a key
for interpretation. I believe that this reciprocal compenetration
constitutes an object of dissent between us, even though we are
certainly united on fundamental things.

Therefore, when we speak of ecclesiology and of ministry we must
preferably speak in this combination of Word, witness and rule of
faith, and consider it as an ecclesiological matter, and therefore
together as a question of the Word of God, of his sovereignty and
humility inasmuch as the Lord entrusts his Word, and concedes its
interpretation, to witnesses which, however, must always be compared to
the "regula fidei" and the integrity of the Word.

This probably sent shockwaves through B16’s audience. He may have introduced it by calling it a "small comment," but that’s just him being humble again. What he did in these brief paragraphs was to completely recontextualize the ecumenical discussion–at least in Germany (though his remarks will have repercussions far beyond that nation).

The problem he’s commenting on is that ecumenists have focused on particular doctrines–like the organization of the Church and the nature of ministry–as if they were the things we need to talk about. B16 recognizes, though, that our positions on these issues fall out from our higher-level views on how we derive doctrine–in other words the question of "authority" as many Evangelicals in America put it. To solve these lower level issues, the pope is suggesting, we need to discuss them in the context of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium (though he refrains from using the latter two terms).

In other words, ecumenists need to stop talking about the symptom without talking about the cause of the symptom.

He then says:

Excuse me if I have
expressed a personal opinion; it seemed right to do so.

WOW! Again, what humility. He has just completely recontextualized the ecumenical dialogue in Germany,  but he says that this is just "a personal opinion." He refuses to use the power that is his as pope as an agenda-setter (something that even the Lutheran ecumenists in Germany recognize) to tell people that they must proceed on these terms.

He plops an insight of crucial importance onto the table and then refuses to use the power that is his to make others take it up. He leaves it to their judgment to recognize the importance of his opinon–or not; their choice.

It’s hard to imagine JP2 doing that. He identified himself and his opinions with the office of the papacy to a far greater degree.

JP2 was a great gift to the Church. So it B16.

But they’re not the same gift. And both are marvelous in different ways.

READ THE FULL TEXT OF B16’S ADDRESS.

A.K.A. Benedict XVI

While reading James White‘s responses to Karl Keating’s August 23rd e-letter, I came across a strange assertion in White’s follow-up "Even When I’m Wrong, I’m Never Wrong"-response. Setting aside the question of the merits of White’s critique of the e-letter, since that boxing ring is already occupied, let’s look at White’s defense for his error in calling Benedict XVI by the name of Boniface:

"I notice a few folks out there who are extremely excited and happy that when I quickly put together a response to Karl Keating on his ridiculous attack upon John MacArthur that twice I referred to Pope Boniface instead of Pope Benedict. Ignoring the substance of what I wrote and focusing solely upon mixing two artificial names (shall we just call him Joseph Ratzinger and stop the pretension of the Papacy and its naming policy?), some have jumped on this as if it has some kind of meaning."

Setting aside also the question of whether White should have thrown together an off-the-cuff response or should have more carefully considered the issue before offering a careful and measured response (or offered no response at all if he didn’t have such time to spare for the matter), let’s look at the claim that there is something "pretentious" or "fake" about popes taking new names.

The practice of a pope choosing a new name is an ancient one, stretching back to John II, who reigned in the sixth century and felt that his given name of Mercurius (derived from the pagan god, Mercury) was inappropriate for a Christian leader. We could even cite biblical support for the practice if we note that Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter (cf. John 1:42). While this doesn’t directly support a pope choosing his own new name, it does show that taking on a new name is not antithetical to Christian piety or theology.

In modern times popes have often chosen their new names in order to honor loved ones, to demonstrate solidarity with predecessors, or to indicate the direction and goals of their pontificate. Thus, John XXIII chose his father’s name; John Paul I and John Paul II chose to honor predecessors and indicate continuity with them; and Benedict XVI explicitly stated that his name honored both the patron saint of Europe and a peacemaker pope, which indicated his own goals.

This isn’t simply a Catholic phenomenon. When Edward VIII abdicated the throne of England in 1936, his younger brother Albert succeeded him to the throne. The abdication had caused a great scandal in Britain, causing many to wonder about the future of the monarchy. In order to calm such fears and to demonstrate the continuity of the British monarchy, Albert chose to take his father’s name and be crowned King George VI. His choice was still fresh in the minds of royal protocol experts years later when his daughter Elizabeth succeeded him. Asked by her advisers what name she would be known by as queen, the new monarch is said to have responded "My own, of course."

My guess is that James White is not entirely ignorant of the history of papal names. Unlike sensationalistic anti-Catholics like Jack Chick, Dr. White shows some familiarity with the actual teachings of Catholicism. My guess is that he once again threw together a response without thinking through the claims he was making in the course of that response. He was likely more interested in dismissing criticism of his original sloppiness than in critiquing a Catholic custom. In short, he was more interested in proving himself right than in serving truth.

UPDATE:  Karl Keating has published his own response to James White in his August 30 e-letter.

GET THE E-LETTER.

Bad Mood

They had a visting priest at Mass this weekend, and he preached a really good homily (for the most part). His celebration of the liturgy of the Eucharist was also generally good, but he had a few quirks in how he said thing.

Most notably, he used the wrong mood when in greeting the congregation.

When the priest does this, he is supposed to say "The Lord be with you."

This gentleman, unfortunately, said "The Lord is with you."

He may not know enough grammar to understand the shift in meaning and simply thought that the latter is a more contemporary, vivid way of saying the same thing as the former.

It’s not.

The "be" in "The Lord be with you" is an example of the subjunctive mood, while the "is" in "The Lord is with you" is the indicative mood, and there is a marked difference in meaning between the two moods.

In English (and in many other languages) the indicative mood is used to make statements about the way world is. In other words, to state facts. (It also is used to ask questions about the way the world is, but the above isn’t a question.)

The subjunctive mood, however, is more tentative than the indicative. It doesn’t claim to state the way the world is, but the way it might be. Thus it gets used in hypothetical clauses ("If I were a rich man . . . "). It also is used to expres wishes. That’s what it’s doing in "The Lord be with you." The priest is expressing a wish that God be with the people, not stating for a fact that he is.

English has been losing it’s subjunctive mood and its functions have begun to be taken over by auxiliary verbs like "may," "let," and "should." Sometimes an auxiliary appears in the same sentence as a subjunctive verb, calling attention to it. Thus "May the Lord be with you" conveys the same meaning as "The Lord be with you."

Unfortunately, as the subjunctive has weakened in English, many people don’t recognize it if one of the auxiliaries isn’t present. That may be what happened with this priest. In the absence of "may" or "let" in front of "The Lord be with you," he may have thought that the latter is just a stuffy, old fashioned way of saying that "The Lord is with you."

But it’s not. While the Lord is omnipresent and thus present with all people everywhere in that sense, he is also "present with" certain people in additional senses. He may be "present with" people in blessing, approval, etc.

That’s what’s happening here. To say "The Lord be with you" means something like "May the Lord bless you, approve of your moral conduct, comfort you with his presence" or something along these lines. In any event, it’s the expression of a wish that God do something good for the people.

It’s therefore presumptuous for the priest to shift the mood to the indicative and simply up and declare that God will do this good thing (whatever it is understood to be) with respect to the people.

MORE ON THE SUBJUNCTIVE.

Blogging Katrina

Katrina With the Federal-Disaster-In-The-Making, Hurricane Katrina, ripping through the Gulf Coast, journalists are turning to blogging to keep the public informed.

"Patrick Cooper, Bob Swanson and more members of the USATODAY.com news and weather teams are blogging the latest from Hurricane Katrina on Monday. Check back often for updates. A wrap-up story is also being updated throughout the day."

HURRICANE KATRINA BLOG.

Check out the Hurricane Katrina blog for more news and updates on the progress of the storm.  Blogging is becoming more mainstream by the day.

May God protect all those in Katrina’s path.

College Living Arrangements

A reader writes:

I am moving to college.

I was planning to get a room with my roomate at the dorm.  One of my friends was getting an apartment and asking us to move in with him.  His girlfriend got assigned to a dorm to far away so he decided to move in with my friend and bring her along.  I gotten random roomates the past two years and it has not been a fun experience, so I decided to move into the four bedroom apartment with them.

I signed the lease after much thought, or rather after trying to put it out of my head, but I started thinking about it again.

The apartment is a four bedroom four bathroom apartment, everyone’s is seperate.  There is a communal eating, cooking, and sitting area.  The couple will have seperate rooms, but they will most likely have sex.  I am friends with both of them and I have made it very clear to them that I don’t like them having premarital sex.  They are my good friends though and I love them both and spend a lot of time with them both.

Will living there be approving of those actions in what I do, even though I have said differently?  I have talked to several of my friends and they claim it wouldn’t appear to them like I would be approving of their sex, but they are just college students, what do they know?  The price of rent will not change for them if I move out, so I am not assisting in them living together.

I talked with a representative of the landlord and she said that it would not be a fee to chagne roomates for the next 11 days, but I would be stuck with three random people rather than just one random person.

Would living there be a sin, or will I have to change where I will live?
I talked with a representative of the landlord and she said that it would not be a fee to chagne roomates for the next 11 days, but I would be stuck with three random people rather than just one random person.

Would living there be a sin, or will I have to change where I will live?

I don’t think that under these circumstances you would be signalling your approval of behavior they may or may not be engaging in. You’re not financially subsidizing their behavior, and you’ve made it clear that you don’t approve of their behavior. Consequently, I don’t think that you would be sinning by living there or that you would have to change where you live.

The individuals have separate bed rooms and even separate bathrooms. Physically, they are part of the same apartment only in the sense that they join a common living, dining, and cooking area.

Suppose that the landlord changed his rental policy and said, "Okay, now we’re going to consider each bedroom-bath unit a separate apartment, which will be rented separately to whoever wants to rent them. They’ll be advertised in the paper as separate apartments, and each apartment has access to the common living/dining/cooking area."

In that case could you rent one of the four apartments? Even if you knew that the inhabitants of two of the others were engaging in non-marital sex or some other immoral activity?

It seems to me that you could. If you live in an apartment complex, you have little control over what others in the complex do along these lines, and your presence is not taken as an endorsement of their behavior.

But that’s precisely the situation we’re talking about in your case, only with the semantic lines redrawn.

There is also the consideration that you’d be taking a significant chance with three random roommates. The random roommates (being typical college students) is also significantly likely to engage in sex or other immoral behavior.

I know all about how the random roomate chance can go. When I was living in the dorms in college, I had
three roommates, one of whom was a dud (and wanted to use the dorm room
for immoral behavior), one of whom was crazy (and who threatened violence, promting me to insist on being assigned to a new dorm room), and the last of whom (a friend) was fine. In other words: The two random roommates I had in the dorms were bad experiences and it wasn’t until I moved in with a friend that the situation evened out.

You’re not talking about the dorms at this point, but you are talking about random roommates, and that’s a significant risk that may not improve anything and that, in fact, might land you in a worse situation.

At least with your friends you have reason to believe that you can live peaceably with them, even if two of them are engaging in behavior that they shouldn’t. If you switch to three random college students, at least two of them are likely to be engaging in comparable immoral behavior.

All things considered, I therefore don’t think that you are morally obligated to insist on switching and getting new roommates.

20

Not All Vile Protesters On Left

This is just to show that the Cindy Sheehan left does not have a monopoly on vile war-related protests. Some folks on the other end of the political spectrum are doing something even more vile:

Members of a church say God is punishing American soldiers for defending a country that harbors gays, and they brought their anti-gay message to the funerals Saturday of two Tennessee soldiers killed in Iraq.

The Rev. Fred Phelps, founder of Westboro Baptist in Kansas, contends that American soldiers are being killed in Iraq as vengeance from God for protecting a country that harbors gays. The church, which is not affiliated with a larger denomination, is made up mostly of Phelps’ children, grandchildren and in-laws.

The church members carried signs and shouted things such as "God hates fags" and "God hates you."

GET THE (DISGUSTING) STORY.

Travis Tea Speaks!

Guestblogger Travis Tea (alias Mary Catelli) writes:

Once upon a time there were — and there still are — some writers who helped new writers against scam tricks in the publishing industry.

You can read about them: at Writer Beware http://www.sfwa.org/beware/ or at Preditors & Editors http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/

The writers involved were SF and fantasy writers, and one publisher that was warned against was PublishAmerica, which described itself as a traditional publisher but had such untraditional practices as a one-dollar advance, and requiring you register your own copyright (leaving you $29 in the hole, because it costs $30.)

Apparently it hurt.  Or so we deduce from the comments here:

"As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction."  So they warn to run away away from SF or fantasy writers, who are obviously without a clue.


http://www.authorsmarket.net/experts.htm

And indeed, this particular screed seemed to point quite clearly:
http://www.authorsmarket.net/youreyes.htm

Some SF and fantasy writers were discussing this posting online.  During the course of which, someone proposed that we should try to get published by PublishAmerica.

James Macdonald took this and ran with it.  He drew up an outline, asked for volunteers, and send out the chapter descriptions.  Indeed, one he sent out twice, to two different writers. 

I asked for, and got, one of them.  And so I sat down to channel my inner clueless newbie.  I went on for two paragraphs on describing the setting, neglecting any research, and ignoring what I already knew, down to forgetting that polo is played on polo ponies.  And I expanded those paragraphs for a page each — carefully ensuring the opening sentences of the first paragraph contradicted its last sentence.  And then I told, in a flat-footed style, the story he laid out for me.  I made up for the opening by chopping parts up into itsy-bitsy paragraphs, one sentence, or one word.  I introduced one character by cutting and pasting the description from the two paragraphs I had been sent.  I larded their conversations with said-bookisms — far-fetched substitutes for the word "said."  When it was coming in under the length he asked for, I reached for those handy chocolate, fattening parts of speech:  adverbs and adjectives.  Whenever my fingers slipped, I trusted the Microsoft spell checker, which hates all writers and tries to make you look like an idiot; if it could correctly work out the word, I twisted the misspelling until it suggested something else.  Most work of all, in one paragraph I switched tenses every sentence.  That I had gotten used to doing on autopilot.

And then I sent it off.

Meanwhile, other writers were also channeling their inner newbies.  James MacDonald collected them all, put them in the order received, left one chapter out when the writer was unable to make it, fed several into a text generator to produce another chapter. . . . my little efforts at inconsistency are but the smallest part.  People change race.  They die in one chapter and return in the next without a comment.  They wake up and it was all a dream — AND THE STORY GOES ON.

Online, the chatter went on, but when MacDonald said he would tell us the title it would go in under, I posted "NO!"  It was a private location, but never post anything to a private discussion that you don’t want to see on the front page of a New York Times — and once I posted it, the chorus arose.

The rest of the operation was carried out as Top Secret. 

Therefore the next I heard was of our happy acceptance.  They had, of course, had the contract vetted by a lawyer and though it would have been fun to carry the hoax all the way — have it published — the lawyer didn’t think it wise.  So the news was announced:


http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/1/prweb202277.htm

From here you can see the acceptance letter and the contract:
http://critters.critique.org/sting/

Alas, a month after PublishAmerica accepted it, the day after the news was publicized, they read it.  "Upon further review it appears that your work is not ready to be published."

Fortunately, we were able to find a new publisher:  lulu.com, where we were not fed the same line as at PublishAmerica.

Also, you can download the electronic version for free from the "sting" link.

The story as told by James MacDonald:
http://www.sfwa.org/members/TravisTea/backstory.htm

The website in question has a great deal more information.  Read the blurbs:
http://sfwa.org/members/TravisTea/blurbs.htm

And then compare to the list of known authors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights

Introducing Travis Tea

Travistea_1Before Travis Tea gives us the inside story on Atlanta Nights, I thought I’d introduce him.

To the left is his picture from his author’s page over at lulu.com.

And here’s his bio from his own web site:

It was a dark and stormy night the night Travis Tea was born in the small town of Sweethome, Alabama. Though ever proud of her only son, his mother Senilla continually mourned the loss of the little princess who never would be, Travis’ stillborn twin sister, Madge S. Senilla moved the family from their ranch-style house to a ramshackle shack on the outskirts of the cemetary where the baby was buried. After five years of such living, his father, Ben-Ali, took Travis, and they began a nomadic existence, travelling the highways and byways of America’s southlands, often staying with various of his father’s relatives, many of whom provided inspiration and impetus for his future ambitions.


Travis grew swiftly into a young man, but to a father grown hardened, burly and surly from hard labor, he was. . . not to put too fine a point on it. . . a disappointment. Always of a non-descript and introspective type, Travis made few friends, and buried himself away from his father’s scorn in the pages of magazines and cheap paperbacks purchased at any convenient drugstore. In those pages, he was transported away from his life of toil, and soon began to write for his own amusement. His dear maiden Aunt Vanna was the one who told him in the first place that he was as good as any writer out there. Only one piece from this period is still extant, though Travis holds that shred of napkin close, and will not deign to share it with the general public at this time.


For his 18th birthday, Travis gave himself the gift of a future, and signed up for a hitch in the National Guard. Not quite fitting in with the others, he kept company with his imaginary little brother, Insanna, who would whisper to him at night, and kept him going. While Travis served his country, his father capitulated to his loneliness, and returned to Senilla, who, though Travis had always sent letters home to her, barely realized the men had been gone. Upon his return from the service, Travis wrote a very special story for Senilla’s birthday, which he entitled "That’s All Right, Mama." After the story had been read to her, his mother miraculously recovered her sense of the importance of her living family members, and resumed her place as matriarch of the home.


Travis threw himself into his writing. He wrote at night; he wrote on weekends; at mealtimes; and between work shifts. He enrolled in several correspondence courses in writing, and though lessons were not always delivered in their entirety, and some may never have arrived at all, he perserveered. Though several applications to writers conferences were inexplicably rejected, he perserveered.


In June of 2004, following a particularly vivid dream that stretched over three long nights, Travis began work on his first full-length novel, Atlanta Nights, and by dint of his his dedication to his craft, and phone conversations with his cousin Atrossa helping to drive the plot, and cousin Vapidda helping fashion the words on the page, the novel was completed by July.


Currently, Travis’ family has quit the locality of the cemetary, and moved into a posh suite at the nearby Motel 6. Travis continues working on his next novel, travelling as need be to make personal appearances and perform dramatic and not-so-dramatic readings of Atlanta Nights. He designed, updates and maintains this website with the kind assistance of the Sweethome, Alabama Public Library and HTML for Dummies.