One of my college friends had a shirt that said “Stop Plate Tectonics”. All these years later, I still giggle when I think about it. I never asked him why he liked it, but for me there was something about “taking a stand” against something that absolutely could not be impacted by human endeavor that I found strangely appealing.

I grew up at the dawn of “faux activism”. People have long worn t-shirts that express their political and social leanings, but when I was coming of age, we seemed to enter an era where the t-shirt wasn’t just one more visible extension of the wearer’s activism; it was the wearer’s only activism–as though wearing a Live Aid or ACT UP shirt would end world hunger or AIDS without any further effort on the wearer’s part.

I think of these acts of pointless sartorial expression as the forerunners to today’s Internet petitions, where people add their names to long lists of names that are rarely seen and less often acted on by people with the power to do anything about the issues in question and then go back to playing Angry Birds, convinced they’ve done “their bit” for the environment or racial equality or the day’s other cause celebre.

Maybe my friend’s “Stop Plate Tectonics” shirt was only meant to be funny. But I always read it as a dig against the kind of complacency that choose to let a piece of cotton be its sole defense against the world’s maladies. I can think of few issues less likely to be impacted by “t-shirt activism” than continental drift. If that was the message, it took a very cynical view of human efforts to effect any of the other conditions heralded on other shirts. I choose to think we can make a difference in the world, if we really put our backs–t-shirt clad or otherwise–into the work.

Or maybe the t-shirt was just a reminder that, like the old saying goes, you can’t fight mantle convection–a lesson Pangaea learns in my newest “Restorying the Sacred” column, “The Last Days of Pangaea“.

I recently followed a link to an article by JA Konrath about rejections (the writing kind, not the personal kind). Konrath wrote a thriller called The List, which was rejected by several major publishers. Frustrated, he went on to self-publish the book and is, he claims, earning about $9,000 a day from it at amazon.com. The post is a familiar sort of gloating “haha those stoopidheads at the major publishers don’t know what they missed out on/DOWN WITH TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING GATEKEEPERS!” deal.

Konrath published several of those rejection letters in the post, and I found them fascinating. While a few seemed overly concerned with the marketability of the book (plenty of published authors have told me, and I believe it, that a truly excellent book or story will always find its audience, and that a good editor/publisher will know how to sell it), for the most part, the personal ones pointed up very real issues with the book. Several referred to implausibilities in the plot, others to sitcom-like humor out of keeping that jarred the thriller atmosphere; a couple used variations on the phrase “too familiar”.

Most of the commenters followed Konrath’s “down with the gatekeepers!” line, but a couple said, in all honesty, that they’re fans of Konrath’s but find The Line to be a flawed book and, while they were happy to pay $2.99 for it as a Kindle download, they wouldn’t have paid full price for it as a paper book. A couple asked him about any changes he might have made between the last publisher rejection and the decision to self-publish. So far as I can see, he has yet to address these comments.

At a recent MinnSpec gathering, Hilary Moon Murphy told us about a study she conducted of stories from her year at Clarion. She said that the stories that fared the best in the world–sold to the most respected publications, brought their authors the most renown–were the ones the group had fought over, that some people hated. Someone asked her about changes the authors may have made in the interim, and she said no, most were fierce about “defending their vision”.

But Konrath’s experience makes me ponder: where’s the line between defending your vision and blinding yourself to your writing’s flaws? I’m not the Mozart of modern writing (and, trust me: neither are you, and I doubt Konrath is, either); nothing I write comes out perfect the first time. I have plot implausibilities. I write jokes that fall flat. I forget that my audience can’t read my mind. I take feedback from beta readers and editors very seriously. That’s not to say that I implement every change they suggest, or that I make changes that compromise my vision (and I’ve received a surprising number of suggestions that fall along those lines). But if multiple people say that the ending feels flat, or that this action is out of keeping with the character taking it, I listen. And I rewrite in a way that, if I’m doing it correctly, will make the story not only more readable, but also more reflective of my vision for it. That, after all, is my job as a writer: to manifest my vision on the page.

I admit: I haven’t read The List and probably won’t; thrillers aren’t my bag. And I respect that Konrath didn’t take the multiple rejections as an excuse to give up. He wasn’t happy with the way things were progressing for his novel, and he took steps to change that. But is predicting the demise of traditional publishing just because they didn’t like your book sailing bravely into new waters–or is it mocking the people climing into the Titanic’s lifeboats because you refuse to see the iceberg?

On a naturalistic Paganism list I belong to, the conversation turned to aspecting, a fairly common practice in the Reclaiming tradition (of which I am a practitioner), among others. Aspecting is a way of allowing a deity, spirit, or other entity or even a characteristic, such as Love or Joy, to speak through a person, and it can be a very powerful magical and ritual tool.

The question arose of how those of us of a naturalistic mindset, who do not necessarily believe in the external existence of deities, handle an experience like that. I dashed off a response detailing my own history with aspecting and why it still works for me, even though I don’t believe in gods and goddesses as literal beings out there somewhere. A few weeks later, B. T. Newberg, blogmaster of the remarkable Humanist Paganism blog, asked if I would let him publish it as a guest post. I consented with great joy, and the post appears today.

Deities as Role Models at Humanistic Paganism.