Yes, this is political, and has nothing to do with writing or entertainment, unless you've been watching the improv comedy extravaganza we call "The Republican Debates".  So, without further adieu, and accompanied by some works by one of my favorite painters (Francisco Goya), I bring you my list. Remember, I'm not ranting, I'm being educational!

1. Corporations are NOT people, and no logic game you play will convince a sane person that ANY non-sentient entity is a person.

2. Call it pro-life if you want, but it's anti-women's rights. It'd be one thing if you guys wanted to just chase after abortion, but going after stem cell research, contraceptives, and rape victims shows that what you really want is to micromanage the lives of everyone else around you.

3. Marriage is a function of the state, not the church. I'm glad that your church has a ritual to go along with the state's recognition of two adults who have chosen to share their lives, but it does NOT mean that you are the only one's entitled to enjoy the privileges of marriage. It's a legal status, regardless of religious covenant, proven by hundreds of years of atheists, agnostics, and other non-christians doing it.

4. Back off the hate against homosexuals. This goes back to number three, in part, in that no one gives a shit about what you do in your bedroom or if you prefer blondes to brunettes. Stop trying to regulate morality between consenting adults.

5. Speaking of morality, quit trying to convince us all that we can all be better off if we just would get rid of all the pornography. Ever heard of the Venus of Willendorf? It's a statue, thousands of years old, of a naked woman with gigantic breasts and good breeding hips, and you can't make out her face. Some cave man probably jerked on off to it. Guess what? We still invented the light bulb, French New Wave Cinema, and the iPad.

6. Gridlock isn't the answer. I get it: politics is like football to you. You think there needs to be a clear winner and loser, and you hate when ANYTHING ends in a tie. Political compromise, thus, is your bitter enemy, but guess what? America was BUILT on political compromise. I won't get everything I want and you won't get everything you want, but in the middle there will be sanity. If you refuse to compromise, you aren't just part of what's wrong with our country, you ARE what's wrong with our country.

7. Science is NOT your enemy. Maybe you don't understand it, but science doesn't care. Stop trotting out the same bullshit after it's been proven wrong. Leave the conspiracy theories to the Elvis hunters and JFK spotters, okay? Climate change is real. Evolution is real. Magnets, believe it or not, are real. If science is so scary that you really can't deal with it. We have plenty of forest and farm land you can go live on and stop fucking it up for the rest of us. Of course, that means you'll have to give up your internet porn. Sorry.

8. Back off teachers, unions, welfare recipients, and any other scapegoats you've come up with. This includes immigrants, homosexuals, atheists, and muslims as well. Until you can start taking responsibility for your own fuck ups, don't try pointing fingers at everyone else. By trying to blame one of the above-mentioned groups for failing marriages, economies, or morals, you do us all a disservice because we first need to debunk your crazy bullshit before we can address the real problems like drug abuse and tax evasion.

9. Speaking of taxes, quit brainwashing people into thinking that taxes are the enemy. NOT paying taxes means giving up things like paved roads, fire departments, and basic health standards. Do you really want that? If not, then shut up and pay your taxes. When you wind up on Social Security and need to be rushed to the hospital for your heart attack, you'll be glad for all that "socialist spending".

10. Take the blinders off. No one who is that extreme can truly maintain those stances without being either crazy or a hypocrite. Ted Haggard is a hypocrite, so was Gaddafi. I'm pretty sure no one wants to be in their company, so, again, take the damn blinders off and I'll gladly meet you in the middle.

Ask yourself this: Who is your favorite author and how did you first come to read their work?

Did you receive the book as a gift?
Did you check it out of the library?
Have you EVER checked a book out of the library?

Part of the problem with anti-piracy groups and laws is that they ignore the above example. I loved the original The Crow comic. I was loaned a copy in high school. We passed that book around until it was ragged. But then, when the film came out, we all went in droves. I saw the film four times in theaters, bought the soundtrack twice, and have owned several copies of the book. But that first taste? I didn't pay a dime. Someone SHARED it with me. Here's a few more things I tasted for free before spending a boatload of cash on them.

Neil Gaiman

I first read Mr. Gaiman while in high school. My friend Paul had just finished his JD and he and I worked at the same record store. He and I talked a bit about comics, and then he introduced me to Sandman: Seasons of Mist. Holy hell, I was hooked. I loved that comics could be more than capes and spandex. I stopped reading X-Men, boycotted Gen-13, and started reading Grant Morrison's Invisibles, Garth Ennis' Preacher, and eventually found great writers like Mike Carey, Brian Wood, and Brian K. Vaughn. I have paid tons of money to read most of Gaiman's body of work since then, and the work of many, many other similar writers, but that wouldn't have happened in a world where it was a crime to share what we've already paid for. How many readers would new authors lose in a SOPA/PIPA world?

Nine Inch Nails

I first heard of Nine Inch Nails thanks to MTV. They actually played videos back when I was a kid, and I immediately loved the thundering beat and crunchy guitars of Trent Reznor. That said, I had no clue who this band was or where to find their music. They didn't seem to sell it at K-Mart, and I was still too young to drive. Then a friend found out I liked the band, and he made me a copy of Broken. From there, I went to concerts, found record shops where I could buy the music myself, and most importantly, I copied that music on to tapes for anyone who asked or showed interest. Hell, I did the same with Dead Can Dance, Portishead, and a number of other bands. If I loved it, I wanted my friends to love it. Going to concerts is more fun with friends, right? These days, audio cassettes are dead, but the act of sharing isn't! Trent Reznor, for all the copying I did back before the internet, is filthy rich these days. He even won an Oscar last year, and you know what? He gives away a lot of his music. He's played with the record labels, anonymously issuing greatest hits albums and the DVD version of Closure on The Pirate Bay, and when he was free from the record labels entirely, he released The Slip absolutely for free. And you know what I did? I went out and still bought a physical copy. Piracy isn't killing the recording industry, but SOPA/PIPA certainly aims to kill the internet in the name of killing piracy. If the bill actually managed to work, it would likely do more harm than good when it came to the spread of new artists.

Akira

If you want to introduce people to animation as legitimate art for adults, look no further than Akira. Before I got old, we had these strange black rectangles called video tapes. My neighbor, a kid my age named Chris, copied Akira onto a tape and bugged the crap out of me to watch it. When I finally did, it opened a flood gate. I found Vampire Hunter D at a record store, and another friend became a huge Macross Plus fan. The thing is, these films weren't widely available here in the states. Much of Asian cinema still isn't. Hell, it's 2012 and Battle Royale is only now getting an official DVD release. I bought a copy from a bootlegger at a comic con somewhere. The fact is, marketing execs and movie studios control what we get to buy far too stringently. When the BBC finally started airing Doctor Who episodes the same day in the USA as they did in the UK, it was a sign that someone who worked there understood that fans who wanted to see the new episodes wouldn't patiently wait. The other day, Neil Gaiman himself tweeted about getting a bootleg copy of the latest episode of Sherlock. The BBC should know better by now, but until they do, even the people who stand to benefit from anti-piracy measures like SOPA/PIPA are circumventing the artificial system in place in order to acquire what they want.

Is this all starting to make sense? SOPA/PIPA, or really any other hard-line anti-piracy legislation is likely to do more harm than good. We all fall in love with various arts for various reasons, but more often than not, we do so without paying anyone a dime up front. Want my own work for free? Hit up http://straylightmag.com and look for it there. I hope you dig it and share it with friends. That isn't going to stop me from trying to make money on what I do though. If anything, I'm encouraged by it. The fact is, no stupid law will be able to shut down piracy, any more than politicians could hope to kill libraries, art galleries, or outdoor concerts. They're in panic mode, these companies that support SOPA/PIPA, but for them, the sky has been falling since the days of the player piano. As it turns out, we all still buy music at least once in a while, so maybe that wasn't a threat either.

Look, for a lot of us, writing is like a drug. We got a little taste, probably as kids, and we just couldn't stop. Fiction, poetry, and even academic writing consumes us. It doesn't matter, really, as long as we get to sling some ink and manipulate words. You know I'm right, because you feel it in your bones. You sit down from time to time and you either write furiously, like W.S. Burroughs chasing a fix, or you sit and stare for a long, long time into the void because you're overwhelmed with ideas, and you want to make the time count. I get it. I'm a word junkie too. Thing is, we’re junkies that need direction. We can masturbate until our hands are covering in gooey, sticky ink all day long, but we might not ever produce something substantive from our passion. No, being a junkie isn’t enough to be successful: we need to learn to focus. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that people can be auto-didactic about damn near anything. I have a wealth of knowledge just waiting to be unleashed at Alex Trebek, because he’s probably the only motherfucker who cares that I can name the first film Clint Eastwood was in, or the reason Kenner convinced parents to give their kids an empty box for Christmas in 1977. We need to learn structure though, and it isn’t easy, not by a long shot.

Make sure the Academy doesn't show this "Black Lagoon" shit when I die, okay?

Wait, where was I? Damned insufferable distractions! I needed a break, I told myself, so I took one. I smoked a Camel, got something to drink, brushed my hair, and then my teeth, and then I read some blogs that I like. All the while, somewhere in the back of my brain, I wanted to finish my fix, but I procrastinated. See, the problem of writing is that the addiction is psychological. We get so deep into our heads that sometimes we drown in it. That’s why we need structure. Here’s some examples.

The closest I could get to Hogwarts.

1. School

One of my favorites. I’m currently closing in on my Master’s Degree. I’ve gotten to study at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee with Ann Angel, 2011 winner of the YASLA “Excellence in Nonfiction” award. It’s more than just learning to get better at the craft though, it’s the grueling deadlines. Normally, as writers we can write and write and write. The program demands we write pages upon pages in a short amount of time, and then edit those pages, and then write some more, and then edit some more. By the end of one semester, I’m sitting on the first 20,000 words of a novel, and they aren’t crap. Without those school-imposed deadlines, I might have 2000 good words, or 50,000 shitty ones, but probably neither. School takes the ink-needle out of your hands and teaches you how to make it last.

Yeah, like that...

Sure, there's the old cliche that we, as writers, should "kill our darlings", but what happens when we get there? After all, in order to write this stuff, we need to live in the skin of these people, and really embrace the good and the bad, so what does that make us? Are we all just schizos looking for a victim, putting it off by putting on the page? Should we avoid going to that dark place so our readers feel better? Is our very humanity in some kind of danger because we spend so much time in these dark places? I say no. We're just expressing the crap the average Jane or Joe thinks on a daily basis. When we do it well, we get fans and haters alike, but that should be the goal. Look for ways in your writing to ruin someone's life, fuck up their paradigm, and make them deal with the worst, most vile shit you can think of, and you'll find something called a story.

Think of it this way: What happens if Old Yeller lives at the end? What if the black guy in Night of the Living Dead doesn't get shot? If The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo doesn't get raped in the ass, what then? Well, we lose credibility, for one. Horrible things happen to people all the time. They happen to everyone, and what we like to write about isn't the horrible thing so much as how these people deal with what happens to them. Sometimes, we aim to make the audience deal with it, because that's real too. Reading or watching well-written stories is a visceral act. We are supposed to connect to the characters and empathise with them. When John Harker gets cuckolded by Dracula, we're meant to feel his outrage. I mean, shit, wouldn't you be pissed if your significant other turned into a necropheliac? That shit's gross, even if you're into the whole "sharing" thing. The secret is, as writers we don't get the same reaction writing it as when we read it. A strong writer will go there. A strong writer will make the hero shoot his son in the head just moments before the military was going to save the day and probably feel none of the catharsis the reader feels. So, then, what's in it for us?

Well, as writers, we're still living vicariously, but we do it through our readers. We push their buttons and gufaw with glee whenever we see someone doing the "holy-shit-that-hurt-please-stop-electroshocking-me!" dance. We just want a reaction, and we're willing to push your buttons to make a point. Let's take a look at some examples from the world of cinema. It doesn't matter what the medium is; the motivations of the storyteller are universal.

Red Ryder my ass!

Old Yeller: I'd kill the dog to make you cry, because the loss of innocense isn't enough on its own. Look, the story isn't about a fucking dog, it's about growing up. I'd want you to lament the loss of childhood so bad that I'd kill the boy's mom instead, but let's face facts: You don't care if the mom dies. Not really. Killing an animal though, no matter how understandable his rabies makes that decision, is gut wrenching. Everyone hates it when that dog dies. Everyone except my own kid, I guess. I showed him Old Yeller once, and I had to ask him why he wasn't upset. Turns out, I'd shown him too many zombie movies. He said, "The dog is like a zombie, Dad, and you HAVE to shoot zombies!". He then promised he'd shoot me in the head if I became a zombie. Damn, kid...

His name was Ben? Not Robert Paulson?

Night of the Living Dead: This one might be obvious, but you kill the black guy (his name is Ben, by the way) in order to create outrage in what you presume to be a racist audience. You see, the important part is that Romero and Russo spend that whole movie brainwashing you, the viewer, into seeing society differently. Instead of Christian vs Non-Christian, White vs Black, Men vs Women, or any other self-imposed seperation we may come up with, we start to see the world as Living vs Dead. That's important, because then, when he kills Ben, you are pissed. You're ready to upend your theater chair and march through the sticky aisles of that theater to scream that the black guy didn't deserve to be shot like that. Remember, that movie came out in 1968, and for white audiences to come out of a story pissed that the black man got shot unjustly, well, that's a kind of social accomplishment.