There’s a 3-part process to the Whitney Awards. First, a book has to be nominated by a minimum of 5 readers, the only qualification for which is that each must affirm that he/she has no financial interest in the success of the book (e.g., family member of the author or publisher). Then a panel of judges, selected from the LDS writing community, reads all the books in a specific category that received at least 5 nominations, and selects 5 finalists. Finally, a large group of potential voters — the “Whitney Academy” — votes on the finalists, category by category, after first affirming that they have read all the finalists in that category.

I’m a member of the Whitney Academy. Every LDS author who’s had a novel published in the last 5 years is eligible, upon request. I also believe that the Whitney Academy includes owners of the various LDS bookstores, plus well-known critics and/or representatives of specific organizations with an important presence in the Mormon arts community. So even back when No Going Back was a finalist in the general fiction category, I could have voted, if I had managed to read all the other finalists.

I didn’t manage to read the other finalists, and so I didn’t vote that year. This year, though, I decided that I should give my best shot to reading and reviewing the finalists for as many categories as I could. And I’ve done that. And I published collective reviews for each set of finalists in the four categories I managed to complete, the last being posted earlier today at A Motley Vision Mormon arts and culture blog.

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I first tackled the general fiction category. I felt like I owed it to this category, since it was the one for which No Going Back had been a finalist. Besides, I’d heard some controversy about a couple of more literary-oriented books that some people thought should have been finalists but weren’t. I wanted to see what the competition was like.

Overall, I found it disappointing. I also found myself wondering just what the “general fiction” category is. It largely seemed like a grab-bag of things that almost but didn’t quite fit in other categories, or that didn’t really fit anywhere. I got a lot of responses to that review, though mostly it took off into a general discussion of the Whitneys themselves and the state of Mormon literature, with few specific comments about the books themselves.

My next priority was general youth fiction. I found the finalists in that category generally stronger than in the general fiction category, though I was disappointed at the lack of Mormon experiences in the mix — something that had also disappointed me in the general fiction category.

Finally, I tackled the youth speculative and adult speculative categories. Both of them, I thought, were pretty strong overall. Maybe that’s because those are the categories that are closest to my own personal tastes. If you like those categories too, I recommend that you take a look at my reviews. You might find something for your reading list.

It was an interesting experience. This is probably the most focused spell of fiction reading I’ve done in years, partly because reading itself has become more laborious for me as I’ve grown older, for reasons I won’t get into here but hope to write about sometime. So this was partly an exercise to see if I could do this kind of focused reading. (Answer: yes, but it was an exhausting experience I probably won’t repeat anytime soon.) Second, it was a form of market research, since these are the genres I’ve written in and/or want to write in. And third, it was (as I commented above) a way of paying back a little to the community of Mormon letters.

So that’s part of what I’ve been doing over the last couple of months, together with paid work and plugging away at my teenage empath novel, which I’m feeling pretty good about. More progress reports to come!

Recently in a discussion about writing and revising over at the AML blog, William Morris (someone I greatly respect and often agree with) talked about being frustrated by his first drafts because “the language seems so mundane.” Which resulted in one of those sinking feelings on my part — you know, like the one you get when the speaker in sacrament meeting talks about how bad things were when they missed their daily family scripture study, just when you were feeling good about reading scriptures together once last week. Or maybe like how you feel — at least, the way I feel — when I turn on the radio to one of those money management programs that keeps talking about how money I should already have saved for my retirement. But that’s another (though not entirely unrelated) topic.

The point is that I don’t really feel like much of a stylist. Sure, I revise — but it’s not to achieve any kind of lyrical prose effects. Really, I have only 2 main goals: to make my writing quick, clear, and easy to read, and achieve some kind of consistency in my characters’ voices. Those are hard enough.

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The last several weeks, I’ve been stuck at a plot point in my writing: one I need to research, and also a point where I need to sit down and do some detailed thinking about what happens next. Unfortunately, I’ve also been very busy with work commitments. So in order not to completely abandon my creative work — and steep myself in what I’ve already written, so as to (hopefully) inspire myself for my plotting — I’ve been reading and editing my existing draft.

For me, reading and editing is a lot like using a plane in working with wood. (Bear with me here.) I read through the text at something like normal speaking speed, which is hard for me not to do since I’m one of those people who hears words spoken inside my head as I read them. (The same thing happens while I’m writing, which leads to some interesting effects when I pause to try to figure out what the next word should be.) As I read, I’ll hit rough spots: places where my mental voice stumbles, where I wonder what was going on, where I think “Gee, that’s awkward” or say to myself, “My character wouldn’t say that.” The effect for me is a lot like running my fingers up and down a board to find the spots that seem rough or give me a splinter. And then I try to smooth them out, applying a least-needed-change philosophy: a word or two here, cutting something there, substituting a new paragraph for an old one. And then I reread to see if the problem seems to be fixed.

I’ve never been very good at woodworking, which probably has something to do with the reasons why using a plane doesn’t work too well for me. I always worry that I’ll gouge the wood — cause new places where it’s rough —or keep on shaving away until there’s a dip in the wood and it starts to lose its intended shape.

The same things can happen in editing. Trying to fix one problem can lead to another. Focusing too long and too hard on one part of the text can result in prose that looks fine up close but doesn’t read that well as part of a longer passage. And sometimes I worry that the iterative process of reading, editing, reading, editing, results not necessarily in an improved text but rather one that is constantly in flux.

I try to guard against these dangers by imposing limits: not spending too long at one time looking at one particular place in my writing, rereading after each substantial edit from a point before where the revision started, rereading multiple times later on. One thing I find is that sections I draft later generally appear rougher to me than those I’ve already read and revised multiple times, which provides some evidence that my writing does in fact improve (for me as a reader, at least) as a result of my edits. And then when I reach the point where I can’t tell if I’m improving things anymore, I stop revising: for that session, for that point in my process, sometimes for the story as a whole. There are doubtless still improvements that could be made, but I’m no longer capable of knowing with any certainty what they are.

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I remember reading once that Isaac Asimov wrote only two drafts: the initial draft that he banged out on a typewriter, and then the revised draft that included whatever changes he wound up making in the process of typing it all out again.

I won’t go so far as Orson Scott Card and call Asimov “the finest writer of American prose in our time, bar none” (Maps in a Mirror, p. 270). But at the top of his form — say, with “The Bicentennial Man” (the novella; I’ve not read the novel) — Asimov’s style is remarkably effective: clean, clear, distinctive, and capable not only of telling a story but also of communicating and prompting feeling. It’s not lyric, but it does the job.

My point isn’t that Asimov’s style is “right” (not something I believe he ever argued), but rather that it is what was right for him. I have my own process. Whether it works or not — that’s something I’m still trying to figure out.

Rules of sanity (in no particular order):

1. Treat all schedules as works in progress. (This is for your sanity, not other people’s.)
2. Don’t plan how you’re going to use time you don’t have yet.
3. Do stuff when you have a chance.
4. Everywhere you go, take with you a book (or two), a notebook (or two), and a writing utensil (or two). After all, you never know when you might get stuck for a half-hour waiting for a train to pass. Even if there haven’t been any trains there for 20 years.
5. Do first that which is most urgent. (But see next item.)
6. Do first whatever it is you have energy to do.
7. When the brain cells fail, it’s never a mistake to do dishes. (Not quite as valuable now that we have a dishwashing machine. Maybe substitute “do a load of laundry/pick up the living room”?)
8. When you’re too tired to work, sleep.
9. Go for walks. It’s better than strangling people.
10. Don’t put off taking a shower.
11. When your body informs you that you aren’t getting (back) to sleep anytime soon, get up and do something useful.
12. Always have some nebulous writing project to work on in your spare time. It’s the best way to avoid having any. (Spare time, that is.)
13. Don’t break your diet for something you don’t really like.
14. Warm Pero and a bathrobe are the best cure for a headache. Along with Excedrin.
15. Dark chocolate. Need I say more?

So what are your own personal rules of sanity? Feel free to share!

I should start by explaining that even though I have two children who have attended high school (one now a college student, the other currently a high school junior), neither has shown the slightest interest in attending school dances. Keep in mind as well that I’m pretty much a popular culture illiterate. I did attend some dances back when I was a teenager (kind of hard to avoid when you’re the student body president), but that was (gulp) 35 years ago in an extremely small, extremely rural school district in eastern Oregon. In short, about as different as could be from the way things are in a suburban midwestern high school of today — more different, it turns out, than even I had expected.

I had previously found a cultural informant: the daughter of some friends of ours, now in her mid-twenties, who went to dances when she attended the local high school. Her description was helpful, but I thought it be good to see things firsthand. So I wound up talking to the school volunteer coordinator about helping out with the winter carnival dance. She had me fill out some forms — including one for running a background check that I found comforting in a protect-our-children sort of way — and told me when and where to show up.

#######

I went early, on the theory that I might be able to help with setup. It turned out not to be necessary, as the teachers on duty clearly had everything well under control. On the other hand, I got to observe the last half-hour or so of what even I thought was a very exciting basketball game, which our local team won in double overtime. Go Wildcats!

Things started as people were streaming out the gym through the Commons area where the dance was going to be held. One end had been cleared of tables, and equipment (lights and speakers) had been set up there. As best I could tell, the music was all done by students on a volunteer basis. I think the set list had been pretty much decided in advance.

Lines were set up to process students. The fee was $3 each, which I was informed went to the student council and helped pay for scholarships. It was basically run by students, overseen by faculty members (with a friendly police liaison officer very much in evidence). I hovered at first in the area where students were being admitted, basically to be another adult presence, though I doubt I would have known if someone was doing something he or she shouldn’t — a statement that pretty much summarizes my role throughout the evening. As the dance was getting ready to start, students were also still selling soft drinks in a vending area. Later, they sold pizza-by-the-slice further toward the back: again, basically run by students under teacher supervision.

And then the dancing started. I’m not any good with numbers, but I figure there were maybe 50-100 kids there, which I think is pretty good for our school. (I just went online to try to get enrollment figures, but failed.)

From the beginning, things were different from what I was expecting. Students crowded up toward the front in large groups: boys with girls, boys with boys, girls with girls, in ways that seemed to have very little to do with romantic pairings. There was a lot of hopping, jumping, and waving of arms. It kind of looked like what I’ve heard about mosh pits, except not nearly as squished together as real mosh pits must be. The music was loud and heavily techno/rap-influenced, as best I could tell (what do I know about popular music?). The whole thing was a lot more athletic than erotic.

And that’s the way it continued. With the exception of the slow dances — of which there were maybe three, in the two hours I was there — kids weren’t dancing as couples. The slow dances were much the way I remember, with boys and girls wrapping their arms around each other and swaying side to side, kind-of in time to the music. That part of the evening seemed strangely like an afterthought, though. Most of the time, there was more couple action at the tables than in the dance area: kids cuddling or talking, but nothing more than what you’d see during lunchtime at a typical school, I expect.

Eventually it occurred to me that unlike high school dances of my time, what I was seeing wasn’t about pairing up romantically. Guys weren’t asking girls out onto the dance floor (or vice versa). Teen hormones were clearly in evidence, but they had to do more with working out energy with other teens in creative ways than with checking each other out. Frankly, I’ve been to science fiction club meetings with more romantic tension than I saw out on the dance floor last night. In short, the evening really wasn’t about courting (or pre-courting) behavior — at least not any more than all teen interactions are about that. That’s a major change from the dances of my youth: both those I remember and everything I’ve heard reported by contemporaries.

#######

The other thing I noticed is harder to characterize. I want to give it a try, though, because in some ways it represents just as fundamental a shift as the first, or perhaps the same fundamental shift as the first.

The teen years, from what I’ve observed, are often characterized by a kind of awkward earnestness, doing its best to camouflage itself behind a mask of attempted irony and misdirection. Social acceptance is often literally a matter of survival. Teens do their best to hide that vulnerability by pretending that what they’re doing and the reactions they get from both peers and adults don’t really matter to them.

What I saw at last night’s dance was a bit like that, except less serious. The kids at the dance mostly really didn’t care about what they were doing, except as a way to have fun. It was all a kind a tongue-in-cheek performance to them, whether what they were imitating was dirty dancing, disco, or swing (all of which you might see at any given time). They were essentially all goofing off, in a way that was social while at the same time highly individualistic.

(I should also comment here about the variety in dress, which ranged from jeans and t-shirts to cocktail dresses and mini-skirts, to button-up shirts and even a few ties. All evidently part of whatever performance the person wanted to enact. One kid I saw was wearing a pair of truly horrendous early-60s-geek-style glasses with huge plastic frames. I wondered at first if fashion had taken another truly unfortunate swing of the pendulum, but later decided that it was probably a bit of deliberate parody. Or maybe not. Who am I to know?)

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So what do I make of all this?

It’s easy to overgeneralize. Teen behavior, for all that we talk about the universal impact of the Internet, tends to manifest within often highly idiosyncratic microcultures — a fancy way of saying that my local high school may simply be weird. And I’m sure there’s a lot I missed, or misinterpreted, or misapplied based on an inadequate sampling (or too much attachment to an elegant hypothesis). And yet… Results of direct observation certainly shouldn’t be dismissed. There’s something immensely powerful about firsthand perceptions, especially when it comes to informing fiction, which is always inevitably about the particular as opposed to the general.

From a broad cultural perspective, I can’t help but think about how this calls into question the common wisdom about dances as a venue for dating and pre-dating experience. I’m sure dances can still serve that purpose, especially in settings like the Mormon church where expectations are colored by what the Old Folks say. But if what I saw is representative, we’re swimming against the tide on this one. Asserting that this isn’t the way dances ought to be risks making our advice irrelevant and/or confusing. Do we really have any right to insist that our children adhere not just to our values, but also to the culture of our youth? That’s a losing battle. Teens, by definition, own teen culture. I suspect attempts to change that are ultimately doomed to failure.

Which is more than enough pontificating based on a scant two hours of time done at a high school dance. I’m off now to attend a rocket launching sponsored by the Minnesota Amateur Spacemodeler Association…

(Note: It’s now more than 2 weeks later. Obviously, I didn’t, in fact, get any further at that time. But I will take up the task now, and hope to actually produce something…)

For much of this past year, I’ve been attempting (between being a dad, doing my paid writing, political involvement and other projects, and sheer laziness) to work on my empath novel. Somewhere I’ve got more than a half-dozen drafts of my first chapter alone — some radically different from others, in matters ranging from point of view (first versus third person) to location (Nebraska to Kansas to the Twin Cities) to the sudden unexpected appearance of a mysterious villain in one draft (since excised). About the only constants have been (a) that my character is a teenage boy who is also an empath, (b) that the story begins the day he starts high school, and (c) that his best friend is Iranian-American.

Part of what’s had me stalled has been figuring out Cameron’s character and how I want to tell the story. A big part, though, has been simply being unsure about where to go next. And so back in November, I think, I decided to try writing an outline, or more precisely a synopsis. (Exactly what makes a synopsis different from an outline is fuzzy in my brain, except that I think of an outline as being more structured and a synopsis as being more loosey-goosey, as well as being written in paragraph form.) And so I did that thing. Then I decided that in order to make sense of what was going on in this novel, I had to add some notes about my intentions for the two novels that will follow it as well. A couple of week later, I had 8 pages of single-spaced text giving a basic overview of 3 novels.

The process was illuminating. I’ve been leery about outlining my stories, ever since the time a few years ago when I discovered I was following my outline too slavishly and that the story I was writing had ceased to have much life to it. I managed to write No Going Back without ever creating an outline, although I did have a detailed timeline where I kept track of what happened when. It also occurred to me, however — in thinking about my challenges with this empath story — that I had a much clearer mental picture of the main story arc and contributing storylines of No Going Back prior to writing it — and that I spent a fair amount of time mentally working out those storylines as needed during the process of writing. I certainly wasn’t simply discovering the plot as I went along.

And so I decided to give outlining — er, synopsizing — a second chance. And to my pleased surprise, I found that the process wasn’t simply a mechanical one of recording decisions already made, but stimulated me to think about my story in new ways that made it better and, I think, a lot more solid. At least in potential. Things jumped out at me that I hadn’t considered before. New possibilities came to the fore, and previously unmade plot decisions became more clear. Well, some of them. Others remained muddy, or even stirred up new sand and much and flotsam. But then, that’s the creative process, isn’t it? I don’t think I’d trust the results if everything seemed too neat and tidy at this point in the process.

*****

I haven’t had a chance to do much writing from my synopsis yet, so I don’t know how it will actually work. And I’m sure that many of the things in that synopsis will change during the process of writing, and yet again in the process(es) of revision. But it gives me a place to start. I can’t help feeling encouraged — and that I’m now further down the road toward getting this novel actually written.

A couple of months ago — shortly after my oldest son got back from his mission — I hijacked him for a day to go driving with me in the northeastern suburbs of St. Paul, about 45 minutes from where I live. He, unwary soul, neglected to ask the purpose of our expedition prior to departure. When eventually he did discover the purpose — to check out a neighborhood and high school that I’ve adopted as the model for the set of novels I’m working on at present — much eye-rolling was evidenced. (Note my clever use of the passive voice to clue the reader in to just how clever I am. For, um, using the passive voice. Yeah.)

I’m sure the only thing that made the experience bearable for my son was the fact that he didn’t have to interact with anyone himself and could therefore more or less ignore the embarrassing way his father was acting. Later, when I told him about emailing a vice-principal chosen at random from the school website with questions about the school — and then showing up in person one day just as school was getting out — he made a comment the precise content of which I cannot remember, but the sense of which was that (a) I’m really quite weird, and (b) the publishing industry does not have enough money in it to persuade him to go out and be nosy and intrusive and chat up complete strangers. Which, I pointed out, was kind of an odd comment for him to make, given that he’d just spent two years talking to strangers about religion. That, however, was Different. Or so he informed me.

I concede nonetheless that he has a point. Being a writer, I’ve found, frequently puts me in situations where I act in ways that push the boundaries of my comfort zone — and leave my family’s far behind. I’m reminded, for example, of the time I showed up at a community PFLAG meeting for No Going Back (Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays, except that now they’ve expanded it beyond the acronym to include other categories such as transgendered). I felt intensely uncomfortable going into the meeting — but I did it anyway, because I thought my writing would be better if I had actually experienced some of what I was writing about. And I think it was.

Part of the reason for my embarrassment, I suspect, is that I lack confidence in myself as a writer. Perhaps this will be different once I get a few more publications under my belt. When I say, “I’m doing research for a book I’m writing,” I feel very much a fraud, even though it’s nothing more than the truth. It’s a truism that if you act as if what you’re doing is perfectly normal, others are likely to treat it that way too.

I admit in this respect to a certain jealousy of Shayne Bell, a member of my old writing group Xenobia who (together with Dave Wolverton) was among the first to break into professional writing. Shayne had a remarkable ability to approach total strangers with what appeared to be absolutely no embarrassment when it came to requests related to his writing. So sincere was his demeanor, so clean-cut his appearance, so reasonable and modest his approach, that he could charm pretty much anyone into doing pretty much anything — or at least, so it seemed to me at the time. Shayne was a dangerous man, or at any rate could have been had he chosen to use his gifts as a con artist or politician instead of storyteller. Perhaps I’ll develop more of that kind of confidence when/if I have more published titles under my name.

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The day I showed up without prior notice at the school, I first drove around the neighborhood. My original intent had been to drive back and forth in front of the school several times (I wanted to observe while kids were getting out of school), but after a couple of passes, I decided that was a little too stalker-like. So I parked in the nearby district office lot,  walked over to the school, and then talked to someone at the school office, who in turn called out the vice-principal I’d been communicating with. We talked briefly. She said I wouldn’t be able to stay there and observe without talking to the principal first, and encouraged me to email her to set up something.

So that’s what I did. I thought about it for a couple of weeks, then decided that what I really needed was a tour of the school — ideally while students were there, but I assumed it would be less disruptive and easier to arrange after school. I composed an email to the  vice-principal, specifying the types of areas I wanted to see (halls, commons areas, auditoriums, etc.) and explaining that it wasn’t so much a matter of wanting specific information about the school but rather of wanting to get a feel for the school — which is both older and larger than the one my own children attend, and with a somewhat different student demographic. I also was careful to trot out my credentials as an actual published author, one who had even received a short review in one of the local Twin Cities newspapers, and listed my website. I then had to do the same for the principal — and was rewarded with a message asking me to schedule a time for a school tour with the principal. Success!

So that’s what I’m set to do tomorrow morning (the Tuesday before Thanksgiving — this part was originally written a week ago). I’m looking forward to it. Part of me wishes that I had been more self-assured from the start — it was kind of awkward talking to the office staff when I showed up without any kind of appointment, saying, “I just want to stand somewhere and watch the students going out the doors.” But comfortable or not, the fact remains that I actually did it: another small-but-real challenge surmounted in my quest to write my stories.

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So. I went into the office, spent about 10 minutes waiting — which was actually kind of nice, since I got to watch students going back and forth during one of the breaks between classes — then spoke with the principal. He had concerns about confidentiality, but when I explained that what I wanted was all in the nature of background and that I wasn’t planning to share any specifics about their school and its students, it seemed to allay those concerns. I also gave him a copy of No Going Back —don’t know if he’ll read it, but it seemed like the thing to do. (Note to self: remember to record the cost of the copy as a research expense…)

After we had talked, he fetched a counselor to show me around for about 20 minutes. We got to see open areas, the library (er, media center), the lunch area (with students eating lunch), the gym, and the halls. I took some notes — more as an immediate aid to memory then as anything else. I took in the ambience. And then I went home.

Generally speaking, I tend to read only a chapter at a time. This time, though, we read three chapters with only a couple of relatively short breaks. Partly, that was because I feared that if I stopped, they’d never let me start again. It’s pretty intense.

Reading aloud is one of those things I like to do with my children, even though I don’t do it often enough. Our current project of reading The Lord of the Rings is one that we’ve been working on for over a year now.

My 16-year-old is finding it a revelation. After tonight’s reading, she commented that Eragon (a favorite of hers from a few years back) is really a pale imitation compared to Tolkien. Even our 11-year-old seems absorbed by it. I think he wanted to start reading ahead a few months ago, but reluctantly deferred to my desire to have this be a family activity.

There’s a lot I’m finding in it that I don’t remember noticing either, despite the many times I read the books during my growing up — and the master’s thesis I wrote about it, once upon a time. Reading aloud brings some things to one’s attention that are easy to skip in silent reading. Part of it, too, may be that I’ve spent more time trying to write narratives myself since I last read Tolkien’s work. There are things I notice now because I’m seeing it from the writer’s perspective.

It’s a good experience for our family. And it’s a good experience for me as a writer. One thing I know: I’m still just as blown away by Tolkien’s writing as I was when I first encountered it almost 40 years ago. More, maybe. Nobody does it better…

Not much to report on the N0 Going Back front. I’ve had one new blog review since I posted last, from One Literature Nut. She wrote in part: “There were many layers of conflict built into this story, which I think does a nice job of touching on some of the realities that must surround a teen who wants to admit that they are gay…. There aren’t any easy or pat answers given in the book, which is probably for the best, but this story tries to tackle them head on.  For starting a dialogue and giving voice to teens also coming out, this book does a really nice job.” As I wrote to Chris Bigelow (my publisher), at this point I think the only thing that might impact sales of No Going Back are either (a) a random meteor-strike event, such as being endorsed (or condemned) by Glenn Beck, and (b) getting something else published that’s a lot more popular and leads people to wonder what else I wrote. Which isn’t going to happen unless I actually write something else…

Which brings me to the realm of my other creative endeavors. After taking several months off my creative writing — due in part to the press of other work projects — I’m now hoping to get back into writing more regularly again. The first step is probably to get more solid plotting done on the story I’m working on most seriously right now. Then some rewriting… As always, the biggest challenges are (a) keeping myself on a good schedule, and (b) getting my nervousness so that I actually do something instead of whining about it. We’ll see how that goes…

Hales starts by acknowledging that calling a work of fiction “didactic” is usually considered an insult. Yet that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. He notes:

[L]iterary history shows us that such works have left no small footprint in the wet cement of history…. Didacticism, sentimentality, and good old American preachiness can be powerful tools in the right writer’s utility belt…. [W]e would do well to remember, dear reader, that there are… writers of talent who are willing to break a few fiction faux-pas to make important points about the issues of the day.

This, according to Hales, is a good way to view No Going Back, which he characterizes as

a novel of ideas — a roundtable in book form. In his narrative, Langford has included the perspectives of a variety of people, each of whom has a different opinion about Mormonism, homosexuality, and the choices Paul has to make…. In a sense, what Langford does with No Going Back is show that the issue of Mormonism and homosexuality is complicated — and every voice at the roundtable discussion needs to be heard.

Overall, despite some “stutters,” Hales sees No Going Back as artistically successful. He writes:

As a novel of ideas, No Going Back is surprisingly void of sentimentalism — probably due to its avoidance of utopian spaces…. At times… certain scenes, characters, and situations in the novel seem designed to make a point or raise a question in the debate over Mormonism and homosexuality. At the same time, though, the novel never seems too heavy-handed to me. For the most part, Langford tries to approach every idea in the novel evenly and sympathetically, although some points-of-view and organizations come out less scathed than others. This seems to fit with his larger agenda for the book. Langford’s after conversation, not conversion.

Hales also praises the novel’s major characters as “interesting [and] realistic” and notes the pervasiveness of the theme of silence in the book, extending beyond the main character’s situation into areas such as the relationship between Richard and Sandy Mortensen (the main character’s bishop and his wife). I’m not sure that as an author, I’d been fully aware of all those connections. It’s a cool experience to learn something new about your own work from reading someone else’s thoughts about it.

There are two fundamental problems with health care in the United States: cost and equity. Most proposals for reforming the system address (at most) one of these. Given the vast influence that my online presence gives me (cough, cough), I’d like to propose something that might actually manage to address both — or at least address one without doing much in the way of net damage to the other.

I should start by emphasizing that I have absolutely no expert knowledge in the field of health care, thus making it almost certain that there’s a good reason why I haven’t heard these proposals talked about anywhere. But if so, I’d like to hear them.

The base idea is simple: allow insurance companies to charge higher health insurance premiums for those who don’t take care of their own health.

I mean, come on. I’m overweight, and I almost never exercise. This almost guarantees that I’m going to have more health problems than someone who exercises and watches his/her weight. It’s only fair that I should have to pay a higher price for that.

In order to keep this proposal from harming those who genuinely can’t help their health issues, I would limit it to a few specific criteria. For example:

- Being overweight — and not subject to a medically verifiable condition that prevents you from addressing this

- Being in poor cardiovascular shape (e.g., doing poorly on treadmill tests) — again, with exclusions for those whose health conditions prevent them from exercising regularly

- Smoking

- Not seeing the doctor for regular checkups and meeting specified recommended milestones (e.g., PAP smears, prostate exams)

I would definitely not allow higher premiums based on preexisting conditions, age, gender, or anything else that the person can’t control going forward. And I wouldn’t allow anyone to be excluded based on these criteria. Perhaps there should be some maximum percentage amount built in: e.g., no one can pay more than double the base amount. All that is stuff that can be worked out by people who know a lot more than I do, if the basic idea works.

The beauty of all this is that it rewards people for doing the things that can help them stay healthier. Prevention, not curing — which I have to believe would reduce bottom-line health care costs. Yeah, I know, people already have plenty of incentives to do that. But at bottom line, we’re largely a paycheck-driven society. If I see that not exercising and controlling my weight costs me an extra $150 a month (taking a wild stab), I’ll have a very tangible incentive for changing things. And if I don’t improve my own health — well, other people who are taking care of their health won’t be forced to pay for my sloth.

I have no idea if the specific items I listed above are the ones that actually would make sense, financially and healthwise. That’s the sort of thing that health experts could argue about. But I’d like to at least see the conversation take place.