I attended my first ever Nebula Awards Conference this weekend, virtually, of course. What should have been a joyous occasion, sharing a weekend of camaraderie with science-fiction- and fantasy-writing colleagues, celebrating the nominees and winners of the best speculative fiction of the past year, was overshadowed by the ongoing horrors and injustices taking place all across U.S. soil. It cast a pall over every panel discussion, every conversation. We all felt it. We all talked about it.
So, I feel like I would be remiss with you if I didn’t at least address the fact that we are living through an incredibly difficult and dangerous time. As I write this, American cities are burning, and a deadly new disease has killed enough of us to fill two major stadiums, with untold more people still suffering and/or permanently damaged from the experience.
A lot of people are traumatized, hurting, angry, sick, beaten, outraged, and terrified. The U.S. is hurting. Much of the civilized world is watching our pain and hurting with us. The last three months have felt like one trauma after another, with no respite, no moment of peace.
So we turn to art for solace, for escape.
I want to give you a powerful sentiment from Lord of the Rings.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
[Or in the movies, Frodo says, “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”]
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
In the midst of all this, I often find it difficult to keep going.
And then I remind myself that art is one of the things people live for.
So I keep up my work in the ink mines.
They Call Me…Wyatt Lee, the next volume in T. James Logan’s Adventure Kids series, is almost done. I’m getting busy on not one, but two ghostwriting projects, one a fantasy novel and one a TV pilot script. And I’m also putting on the finishing touches of Tokyo Blood Magic, an urban fantasy features monsters, ninja-sorcerers, and a mouthy cat.
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This morning as I was cruising through social media, growing more horrified, saddened, and outraged by the minute, I had a moment where I remembered one of the greatest sentences ever written in English.
This week’s One Cool Thing is an excerpt from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If you’ve been a long-time subscriber to this newsletter, you may recall that I’ve discussed this before.
Before the excerpt, I want to point out that about 80% of this excerpt is one single sentence. When I say it is one of the greatest sentences ever written in English, I invite you to examine its structure, its emotional impact, and the way it perfectly melds theme with content.
As a former instructor of composition and rhetoric, I can say it is one of the most powerful and effective sentences that exists in English. Note the succession of dependent “when” clauses. The heart of the sentence, the subject and verb appear, do not appear until the very end. I have highlighted the sentence in yellow so you can see what I’m talking about.
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“We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dart of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’ then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”
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Yes, that yellow part was ONE SENTENCE. Throughout its length, he was making the reader wait for his ultimate point.
That is powerful stuff.
If you would like to read the entirety of “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, you can click here.
This posting includes a color-coded rhetorical analysis of the whole letter, so you can examine how Dr. King deftly, artfully, powerfully used appeals to logic, emotion, and authority to make his point.