Outrage

Saudi Arabia beheads woman for witchcraft – chicagotribune.com.

I am outraged by this. Capital punishment is appalling enough for capital crimes, but this, a state killing of a woman accused of sorcery. What did they think she could do, lay a spell on the ruling family?

The Chicago Tribune story goes on to explain the huge increase in executions in Saudi Arabia this year, several for “sorcery”, some even men.

The newspaper doesn’t comment, although it may have in the past, on the continued execution of people in the United States. Many of these are mentally challenged. Those convicted of killing white individuals are far more likely to be executed than those killing people of any other colour. Those killers who are women are highly unlikely to be executed. Even-handed justice? I think not.

Every country, including this one, has a number of the falsely accused, or wrongly convicted. Guy Paul Morin, Donald Marshall, Stephen Truscott. Those are the names we need to remember when politicians talk about bringing back the death penalty(for our falling murder rate) here. I don’t want innocent blood, shed by the government in my name and yours, on my hands. You can’t say sorry to a corpse.

http://freesakineh.org Please sign the petition.

Writing

I’ve started on a project suggest by James Scott Bell in his book Plot and Structure in the Write Great Fiction series from Writers Digest Books. Essentially it’s a method for internalizing plot structure. it involves reading and then analyzing the structure of six novels of a type you would like to write. It will take time away from the actual writing of the sequel to The Facepainter Murders. It’s close to completion, but will need a rewrite for the second (or 10th) draft. I tend to revise as I go along, but I think, after reading Bell’s book, that I should consider just writing, and revising with a second draft of the whole thing. That is for the next book, however.

If you’re a writer or want to be one and haven’t looked at this series of books on writing, I’d recommend it.

Our lovely fall resurgence of summer seems to be over. The temperature is falling and so is the rain. A good time to begin my reading.

Another plan is to catalogue the books in this house and they are everywhere. Fortunately, I have a program on my Mac, called Delicious Library 2, that uses the InSight camera to read the bar codes on the books and record them in a library format.

I was glad to see that the Saudi King had the good sense to rein in the driving police or whoever they are that wanted to flog that woman in Saudi who dared to ?!drive a car. How subversive. And how sad that so many countries can’t or won’t understand that they and their people will never advance while keeping more than half their population unengaged.

Sakineh is still in prison. Please sign the petition. http://freesakineh.org/