Zen Master: Blog

I seem to be...caught up on my proofreading? That can't be right! I'm ALWAYS behind on my proofreading! I've missed something here. So, whose work am I behind on? I think I'm organized, but I can't find it.

-ZM

(expanded a little from an email)

This year is the 2500th anniversary of the twin battles of Thermopylae and Salamis. The first Persian invasion of Europe ended at Marathon. After several years of preparation, Darius' son Xerxes tried again with an army that some historians have claimed had more than a million soldiers. That number is absurd, but it is telling that the Persians never needed 10 years to prepare for any of their other conquests.

Thermopylae was a classic pass defense and the defenders held until the attackers got around them to attack from both ends of the pass. Eventually, the Persians crushed the defenders and moved through the pass into Greece.

If that was the end of the story, no one today would know about Thermopylae. The men who died showing the biggest empire in the world how much it would cost to add Greece to that empire would be forgotten, because imperial rulers don't care about peon casualties, and there would have been no Greek cities to write about theirs.

Xerxes went about systematically destroying Greek cities that had defied him. One month later, however, the complete loss of his fleet at Salamis ended any chance of resupply or reinforcements.

Xerxes took a look at the map, compared his casualties against the Greek casualties, thought about losing more than 20,000 of his personal guard, the "Immortals", who were his best soldiers just to take a single stupid mountain pass and only getting less than a thousand of the defenders in return, thought about how many more mountain passes there were all over Greece, thought about all the rebellions all over his empire that would only get worse the longer he stayed stuck in the quicksand, and grabbed half of his remaining army and went home.

The half that stayed in Greece was wiped out during the winter. The Greeks ensured that they kept naval superiority to prevent another Persian invasion, and went back to squabbling among themselves. No Asian army ever crossed the Dardanelles again until the Turks finally took Constantinople in the 1400s and started thinking about Europe. They took Greece and held it for four hundred years, but they couldn't get much further into Europe. Greece's children felt the same way about empires.

As I'm sure all of you read about in my masterpiece "...In The Shade", the Greek survival of Persia's massive second invasion meant that, for the rest of the world's history, the Eurasian land mass has been divided between Western Civilization, with small nations which counted people as more important than the government, and Eastern Civilization, with huge empires which counted the government as more important than the people.

If you value your freedom, if you value even just the CONCEPT of individual freedom embedded at the heart of Western Civilization, thank the Spartans at Thermopylae and the Athenians at Salamis.

-ZM

You know that short story "Ending This Mess"? Well, it's just a scene from a novel. Granted, the scene came first, but I was also supposed to write up a more detailed version of an outline that Frostfire wrote (as notes from a conference, more on that later), so the two sorta merged into a novel. A novel I had absolutely no intention of writing, but I had that scene and I had that commission, and the damn things kept growing...
Anyway, the novel has been sitting for a couple of years now. I'm not happy with it but it was supposed to establish a bunch of "Swarm Cycle" canon, so I have to publish it. Problem is, all of my usual proofreaders have already seen it. If I have added new mistakes messing with it, they won't catch them. They already know what's supposed to be there and they won't see the typos.
So, I need some new eyes to look over "Ending This Mess" before I post it. Please note that I would need an internet email address to send a file to.

-ZM

I've been out of town for a couple of months and "Jason's Tale" has been posted right on schedule, three times a week, the whole time. LJ's automated posting system worked pretty darn good! However, one chapter got left out. I'm sure it was my fault. It is now fixed, and the rest of the story will be posted on schedule next week. Thanks to all of you for all the kind words and votes!

-ZM

Jack, Jack, Jack. I think you've missed the point. That is, if you are looking for wisdom and knowledge. If, on the other hand, you are simply looking for an argument, then I believe I'm supposed to start out by saying something that LZ would delete when someone pointed it out to him.

Um, intentions, reality, and perceptions are very often three different things. And, if there is more than one person involved, you can even add additional perceptions to the mess. I have no idea what LZ had originally intended for the blogs and the forums. It's quite possible that he never had any intended use; he simply set them up because the people who came to his website asked for them.

In my experience -which I recognize may be different from yours- the _blogs_ tend to be bombastic wastes of space, mostly "Hey, everyone, look! I posted another chapter." And, as a matter of results, the blog entry announcing chapter 12 shows up on the home-page stream AFTER the actual chapter 12 entry shows up, making it of absolutely no value to anyone. Of course, as you pointed out many of the blog entries do say something useful.

On the other hand, what I've seen of the forums is more of a question and answer session. There are a lot of rants, but mostly it's been people asking questions. And people giving answers. Not always even on the same subject much less actually helpful, mind you, but answers.

With that in mind, I'd suggest that you have it exactly backwards: The forums are for the thoughtful while the blogs are more for those who just want to talk and they have no interest in any answers.

The truth (as I see it) turns out to be orthogonal to intention. It has been my experience that my blogs are generally answered by readers with a few writers tossed in, while my forum comments are generally answered by other authors, with an occasional reader who got lost. So, these days I use the blog to talk to my readers while I use the forums to ask questions of the other authors. Read whatever you want into the sorts of answers I get.

-ZM