Authors Electric

  Hey, it's Christmas Day! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buddhism_dham_jak.svg     So there were these two Buddhist monks travelling together, one much older than the other. They were on foot, slogging along. They came to a fast-flowing river, with no bridge. On the river bank, looking scared, was a beautiful young woman.  A  Buddhist monk, like most other monks, is bound by strict vows of celibacy and is forbidden to even touch a woman. As the monks near the woman, she turns to them and tells them that her mother is very sick and she needs to go to her. But her mother's village is on the other side of this river. She's tried to cross it once, but was nearly swept away. Can they help her get across? "Of course," says the older monk, a hefty sort. He picks the young woman up his arms and wades into the river. The water sways him and the woman cries out and locks her arms round his neck. But the monk is strong and soon gets his balance. Slowly, he w...

Lately, I've been reading – or I should say, tripping on –  The Beginning of Infinity  [New York, Penguin Group, 2011] by  Oxford theoretical physicist  David Deutsch , also best-selling author of  The Fabric of Reality . Professor Deutsch  speculates that much of what happens in fiction is close to a reality somewhere in the  multiverse . As a writer, I find that comforting, especially when I postulate that Deutsch's projection could just as well apply to the abandoned narratives that litter my garden of forking drafts.       Maybe the happenings in my uncompleted drafts actually occurred in dimensions where momentary universes collapse due to off-kilter physical laws. Not being a mathematician, I can't work out the equations, but this projection might serve me well in offsetting blame for failed drafts. It wasn't me. It was those darn skewed dimensions. Indeed, a draft can seem copacetic one day, and melt off the page w...

There are so many faces of the Buddha that it's more than a bit silly when somebody gets in your face about one: the beaming, Christ-like pacifist. And when critics condemn works of art that are false to the face they prefer...things grow worse. For the Buddha has so many faces. Second only to the PPS (Perfectly Passive Saint) is the PPA (Playful Party Animal). There are also images of the Angry Buddha, reminding us that Christ himself flew into a rage at one temple: Even the Buddha acknowledged the humanity of anger: And it should be obvious that not all Buddhists are Perfectly Passive, as this image attests: And these: Recently, though, I was taken to task for a short but graphic passage in my first piece of flash fiction. My antihero had learned just enough martial arts to deal with a thug on the street--ultimately learning that he knew a lot more than he thought. The short-short was character-driven, with an inevitable path to the end. Yet a dear ...