About The Mongoliad: Book Three:

The shadow of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II hangs over the shattered Holy Roman Church as the cardinals remain deadlocked, unable to choose a new pope. Only the Binders and a mad priest have a hope of uniting the Church against the invading Mongols. An untested band of young warriors stands against the dissolute Khan, Onghwe, fighting for glory and freedom in the Khan's sadistic circus of swords, and the brave band of Shield-Brethren who set out to stop the Mongol threat single-handedly race against their nemesis before he can raise the entire empire against them. Veteran knight Feronantus, haunted by his life in exile, leads the dwindling company of Shield-Brethren to their final battle, molding them into a team that will outlast him. No good hero lives forever...or fights alone.

In this third and final book of the Mongoliad trilogy from Neal Stephenson and company, the gripping personal stories of medieval freedom fighters form an epic, imaginative recounting of a moment in history when a world in peril relied solely on the courage of its people.

THE 12 STEPPE PROGRAM

Erik Bear and Cooper Moo

We love gallows humor -- the darker the better. Bonus points if you have the presence of mind to wisecrack in the face of certain death. You may recall this most excellent exchange on the eve of the Battle of Thermopylae:

Native of Trachis: "The Persian arrows are so numerous they block out the sun!"

Spartan Dienekes: "Good. Then we will fight in the shade."

It's not that we make light of situations we "can't handle". Rather we are accepting the challenge while giving fate the finger. Gallows humor is a perfectly legit tool for dealing with death, divorce, and all manner of dereliction - even addiction.

Anyone who has struggled with addiction, or witnessed a friend for family member do so, knows there is little humor in the experience. And yet, when you talk to someone who has been through rehab they will often tell you a dark humor pervaded their treatment group. Call it a coping mechanism; it can play an integral piece in beating the beast. And it certainly comes in handy when writing about addiction.

The Mongoliad, published in three volumes by Amazon's 47North, is the epic tale of an intrepid band of warriors from the west who set out to save Europe from the Mongol hordes. One of the primary characters is an alcoholic. Ogedei Khan, third son and heir to the throne of Genghis Khan, drank so much fermented mare's milk it probably cost the Mongols their ever-expanding empire. In penning the tale, there was no avoiding writing about Ogedei's drinking problems - and at times it got down right depressing.

Now, one of the crazier quirks about writers is that we'll do damn near anything to avoid writing - even write. For example, instead of writing what we should have been writing; in this case whatever chapter was due that week, the authors of this article took the time out to scribe a tongue-in-cheek bit about the attempted intervention of a ruthless Mongolian khan who wielded near-absolute power over one of the largest empires the world has ever seen.

* * *

Ogedei, Khan of Khans, third son of Genghis the Great Conqueror, sat upon his throne. His mighty frame was draped in fine robes--delicate embroidery depicted clouds and dragons in pure-gold thread on a sky-blue background. The lilting music of zithers filled the room and lithe girls danced about the tall throne. Ogedei absently traced the delicate silver etching of the cup in his right hand. The cup was empty. He did not wish it to remain empty.

A harsh, staccato clapping brought Ogedei out of his stupor. The music stopped and the dancing girls faltered as Toregene, Ogedei's first wife, took command of the ger. She shooed the musicians and girls away. The space quickly emptied as everyone rushed to do First Wife's bidding.

Oegedi arched an eyebrow at Toregene and made to protest but the diminutive woman stopped him with a gesture. Whatever this was, it apparently wasn't up for negotiation.

Then, to Ogedei's great surprise and shock, his elder brother Chagatai entered the ger followed by Ogedei's head administrator Chucai, a woman with a clipboard and some whelp who looked like he just got off the plains. The boy held a large pink box.

"Chagatai, brother..." Ogedei began but Toregene again waved him off. That was getting annoying.

"Please don't speak, Ogi, we're here to help you." The group before him shuffled their feet uncomfortably. "Brother Chagatai is here, Master Chucai, this is Gansukh from Chagatai's personal guard." Toregene then motioned to the woman with the clip board. "And this is Jessica."

"Jessica?"

Jessica's tone reflected the gravity of the situation. "This is an intervention, Ogedei Khan - we're here to help you stop drinking."

There was a long silence. Ogedei looked at each of the people standing before him in turn and then started to laugh. The action started deep in his ample belly until his entire frame shook with the effort. Chagatai and Toregene exchanged concerned glances and Toregene stepped forward.

"This is no joke, Ogi, we want you to get better."

Ogedei's laughter died in his throat.

"We've enrolled you in a Twelve Steppe Program..."

Ogedei groaned but Toregene continued.

"Which, if you complete it, will save your marriage and your empire. If you continue to drink as you are you will lose both."

Ogedei glared at Toregene. First wife held his gaze unflinching.

"Aren't you guys forgetting something?" he bellowed, his eyes sweeping across the group.

No response.

"I'm the mother-freakin' Khan! I do whatever the hell I want!"

Toregene sighed heavily and Jessica wrote something down on her clipboard.

"Lose my marriage? I've got plenty of wives and more if I want'em!" Ogedei waved his hand toward the entrance of the ger to communicate there was no shortage of wives out there.

"And who's going to fire me? You?!" Ogedei fairly shrieked, coming halfway out of his throne and pointed a meaty finger at his older brother. "You traitor!"

Jessica interposed herself between Ogedei and his brother, "Please, no name calling."

"What?!" the khan was clearly working himself into a rage. "Who the hell do you think you are? I've got a name for you - all of you - headless!" Ogedei made a sharp chopping motion with his right hand.

The young whelp made for the door, nearly dropping the pink box. Master Chucai snagged his sleeve and dragged him back to the group. He kept a death grip on the boy's arm to hold him in place.

Master Chucai spoke in a low, measured tone. "Great Khan...last night you were so drunk you ordered the invasion of Russia with just the people in the room."

"I did?" Ogedei faltered. "Huh. Uh...how many people were in the room?"

"Enough to kill the visiting Russian emissary and his entire entourage."

Ogedei grimaced, "Oooooo, that's not good."

"No, Kakhan, it isn't. What do I do with all of these very white Russians?"

Ogedei's gaze clouded. "Mmmm...white Russians."

Toregene rolled her eyes, not amused.

Ogedei cleared his throat. Obviously taken aback by the news of a dozen unexpectedly dead Russians, he seemed consider his situation.

Jessica motioned for the whelp to proffer the pink box to the Khan. The boy inched forward. "P-p-pastry our eminence?"

The khan was agape. "Seriously?"

"Let's all have a pastry and talk this through," Jessica said. The boy opened the box to reveal delicately frosted confections. Ogedei's expression changed.

"I'll take half of that cherry-chip scone. Just half."

Chucai produced a knife from beneath his robes and cut the scone neatly in two.

There was a pause as the group distributed the pastries and found chairs. A small semi-circle formed around the khan.

"Very tasty!" Ogedei said, his mouth full of scone. Master Chucai inclined his head.

"Now," Jessica began again, "here's how this is going to work-"

Suddenly Ogedei's expression soured and he silenced her with a snap of his fingers. "Look, Jessica, I'll tell you how this is going to work." The khan swallowed and motioned for Gansukh to hand over the pink box. He located the second half of the cherry-chip scone and pointed at Jessica with it.

"You are going to go back to wherever the hell you came from or I will introduce you to Captain Munokhoi and the rest of my private guard." Jessica's jaw clenched and she pulled her clipboard to her chest.

"You," Ogedei nodded his head at Toregene "Fetch Second Wife, she'll enjoy my company tonight."

"You'll have no company tonight," Toregene retorted, standing up. She strode out of the ger with Jessica in tow.

Ogedei, looking decidedly less confident, blundered on.

"Chucai, sorry about the dead Ruskies but I know you can handle it." The Khan made a flicking motion this fingers. Chucai stood. "And find my brother a ger for the night." Both Chucai and Chagatai left the room.

"And you," Ogedei held his empty cup out to the boy from the plains, "Fetch me a white Russian!"

* * *

Needless to say this copy ended up on the cutting room floor. "Ogedei's Intervention" was a diversion - a dark-humored way of dealing with Ogedei's alcoholism. In The Mongoliad the khan's inability to deal with his addiction plays a pivotal part in the fall of the Mongol empire and the subsequent halt of the invasion of Europe. In reality there was no intervention - and no invasion.

Perhaps, if such an intervention had worked, we'd all be speaking Mongolian.

David Hughes, longtime Empire contributor and author of the new book Tales from Development Hell, reveals the secrets of the darkest place in Hollywood

These days, Hollywood studios don’t waste much time exploiting their intellectual properties: it seemed that no sooner had Sony finished counting the box office receipts from the last of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, a "re-boot" was announced, taking its most valuable film franchise in a new direction, bringing it too a new generation, or – who knows? – perhaps simply making the suit, and perhaps the story, a shade darker. What Sony hasn’t done is wasted years in "development hell," figuring that a bird in the hand (a Spider-Man movie in cinemas) is better than two in the bush (another round of draft screenplays).

This wasn't always the case, however. Six years passed between Aliens and Alien³, eight between Batman & Robin and Batman Begins -- and an unthinkable eighteen fallow years between Superman IV: The Quest for Peace and Superman Returns. So what was going on for all that time? My first book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, set out what was taking Hollywood so long to bring popular properties such as The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Thunderbirds, Silver Surfer etc. to the big screen -- as well as exploring the various approaches to famous franchises (William Gibson’s Alien III, Tim Burton’s Superman, Philip Kaufman’s Star Trek, etc.) which were abandoned en route to the films we know. With my next book, Tales from Development Hell, I chose a variety of projects -- a few stillborn, others aborted, one or two with a particularly painful gestation -- which aimed to illustrate the kinds of problems which can beset a film, even when some of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters are involved.

Why were Oliver Stone’s and James Cameron’s thrilling takes on the Planet of the Apes property rejected in favor of Tim Burton’s unimaginative “re-imagining”? How come even the combined muscle of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Paul Verhoeven, at the height of their powers, couldn’t get Crusade off the ground? How did Outbreak get a green light when Ridley Scott’s The Hot Zone, set to star Robert Redford and Jodie Foster, did not? How many different directors, from Ridley Scott (again -- the man does seem to suffer more than his share of development hell) and Roland Emmerich, have jumped aboard the alien-on-a-train movie ISOBAR? Why have we still not seen a Sandman movie? Where’s the film of Smoke and Mirrors, a script so hot it sparked a feeding frenzy in the early 1990s, and was never heard from again? The answers to all these questions, and more, lie in one or the other circles of development hell. I should know. I wrote the book on it.

Tales from Development Hell is published by Titan Books.

Excerpt from Tales from Development Hell, by David Hughes

Sometime around 1987, emergent independent production company Carolco Pictures purchased a script for a futuristic science fiction/horror hybrid described as “Alien on a train.” The script, entitled Dead Reckoning, was written "on spec" by future Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls. “It was a sci-fi action thriller,” he says, “set in the future, in which an altered form of life gets loose on a high-speed runaway underground train. The creature was a humanoid with a genetically-altered brain that was intended to be used as the 'hard drive' in an artificial intelligence project.” The setting was near-future Los Angeles, which Uhls describes as “a traffic-infested dystopia, with wide shots of freeways and streets -- even residential streets -- completely jammed with non-moving, honking cars. And billboards that admonished, 'Did you allow yourself three hours to get there?' There was reference to a new law, just passed, outlawing horns on vehicles in LA County. The super-subway was the only viable means of transportation.” The script was bought by Carolco, with Joel Silver, producer of the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard films, climbing aboard as producer.

At the time of its purchase, Carolco had yet to score big with the science fiction milestones RoboCop, Total Recall and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Nevertheless, Carolco bosses Mario Kassar and Andrew G. Vajna saw Dead Reckoning as the perfect vehicle for Ridley Scott. Although the Alien director had sworn off science fiction following the dismal critical reception and commercial performance of Blade Runner in 1982, his most recent films -- the fantasy flop Legend and the neo-noir thriller Someone to Watch Over Me — had nudged him from Hollywood’s A-list, and he perhaps saw Dead Reckoning as a way to recapture his former glory. According to Uhls, Scott came aboard as director in 1988, accompanied by production designer Norris Spencer, with whom he would later work on Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Hannibal.

No sooner had Scott coupled himself to the project than he contacted H. R. Giger, the Swiss artist with whom he had collaborated on an aborted adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune and, more successfully, Alien, for which Giger had won a special Academy Award. “Sometime in 1988, Ridley Scott telephoned me and asked me if I would like to make a science fiction movie with him,” the artist wrote in his book Giger’s Film Designs. “For me, there is nothing greater than this. I was enthusiastic about it and immediately accepted, because a remarkable movie always originates from a director like Ridley Scott.” Scott seemed equally enthusiastic at the prospect of working with Giger again. “I have come close to working with Giger on a number of projects since we did Alien,” he commented later, “and it is my strong hope that we can work together again in bringing something special to the screen.”

At this early stage, Giger noted, there was no agreement between Scott and Carolco: “he told me to just think about the project and to capture my ideas in sketches. He would negotiate a contract with Carolco in the meantime.” Giger set to work with his customary enthusiasm, without discussing the project further with Scott or signing a contract with Carolco, producing many color and black-and-white sketches for the project, under the new working title The Train. “If somebody is telling me something I am always so enthusiastic that I don’t wait until the contracts are done, otherwise I will lose interest,” he explains. “I have to do it when I have the spark.” Giger worked for almost nine months, between the summer of 1988 and the spring of 1989, working up numerous bizarre designs for trains, stations, passenger compartments -- even a radical new kind of emergency exit in which passengers are ejected into a spontaneous ejaculation of soft foam.

During this time, Giger was frustrated by his inability to reach Scott by telephone, and unaware that the director had already moved on to direct Thelma & Louise for MGM. “Shortly thereafter he telephoned me late in the evening,” Giger recalled, “and disclosed to me that he had already gotten out of the project, three weeks before, because he would have been given too little artistic freedom.” Says Uhls, “Ridley Scott left the project, seemingly out of some disagreement with Joel Silver.” Giger continued, “He promised me that he would still negotiate with 20th Century Fox,” referring to the film’s proposed distributors, “and that if he would be able to deal with them, he would of course take me on.” As a result, he says, when the project derailed, “I never got engaged and I never got paid.” Nevertheless, Giger was able to exploit some of his unused designs for The Train when he was engaged to work on designs for "Sil," the beautiful but deadly alien at the center of the science fiction horror movie Species. “I had an idea about Sil dreaming about a ghost train,” he explains, “a train which comes and picks up people who are waiting in the station, [and who] she eats to get power. I worked on this train, and I put a lot of my own money into it,” he adds. Giger went as far as building a three-dimensional model of the train, which he filmed in action in the back garden of his home just outside Zurich.

Following Scott’s departure, producer Joel Silver set about re-working the script in earnest, starting with the title: instead of Dead Reckoning, Silver preferred Isobar, defined in The Oxford Modern English Dictionary as “a line on a map connecting positions having the same atmospheric pressure at a given time, or on average over a given period.” One problem was that Isobar happened to be the title of a script which another screenwriter, Jere Cunningham, had written for Silver and fellow producers Lawrence Gordon and John Davis around 1986-1987, described by Cunningham as the story of “a mutant professional fighter in a future world, on a quest to discover the truth of his origins.” According to the writer, Arnold Schwarzenegger was interested in playing the role, but the actor’s $5 million asking price proved too rich for 20th Century Fox, and he signed to star in Total Recall instead. “A year or two later,” Cunningham reveals, “Joel Silver called and said he wanted to use my title for another project because he loved the word ‘isobar’. I said, ‘Whatever, Joel, it’s cool.’” Explains Uhls, “He wanted the name, so it had to be made to work.” Uhls dutifully came up with an explanation for the title with an acronym -- Intercontinental Subterranean Oscillo-magnetic Ballistic Aerodynamic Railway. “It was basically a magnetic levitation train underground that was a subway connecting the entire world,” he explains, “traveling as fast as a commercial jet plane, in a vacuum.

The new version of the script was set in a more distant future, with the surface of the Earth rendered uninhabitable. “The creature was changed to be an evolutionary leap,” Uhls recalls. “A super-adaptive humanoid that was caught thriving outside, in the environment that’s hostile to humans. It is put onto the train to be transported to a special lab. It breaks free, then it must adapt faster and more dramatically to stay alive inside the train. It requires massive doses of adrenaline to do this, so it kills people to get it.”

Uhls continued to work with Silver as German-born director Roland Emmerich and his producing partner Dean Devlin came on board. “I had worked with Roland on Moon 44,” the producer says, referring to Emmerich’s first science fiction film, “and based on that movie, Mario Kassar brought Roland in to direct the picture. Roland came in, read the script, and wanted to do a major rewrite, and asked me if I’d rewrite it. So I said, ‘Sure.’” While Devlin worked on his draft, he and Emmerich were surprised to learn that Joel Silver had hired another screenwriter. “Roland and I read in the paper that Joel Silver had hired Steven de Souza to do a rewrite, and Roland said, ‘Well, you’re about to get a new draft in two weeks, why are you hiring someone else?’ And Joel said, ‘Oh, Steven did Die Hard with me, he’s the best writer in Hollywood -- trust me.’ So they never read my draft, they waited for Steven’s draft, and when that came out, Roland said to Joel, ‘I don’t want to do that, but I’ll do Dean’s draft,’ and Joel said no, so Roland bailed out of the project.”

At the time, Emmerich and Devlin were some years away from delivering their science fiction blockbusters, Stargate and Independence Day, and Silver evidently had no qualms picking de Souza, the writer of Die Hard, 48HRS , and The Running Man, over two relative unknowns. Says Devlin, “I think the biggest change which Steven made in his draft, which we didn’t do, is that he gave it a kind of uplifting feeling at the end, a kind of E.T. thing. And also Steven came up with some amazing characters that weren’t in the original drafts. That’s really the direction he went -- it just wasn’t what we were going for. We were going for something much more like Alien.”

Certainly, Silver’s decision would have been endorsed by action star Sylvester Stallone, who had previously met with de Souza to discuss a potential rewrite of his 1993 science fiction film Demolition Man, and had been impressed with the writer’s ideas. “They wanted a total reinvention of the script,” de Souza says of ISOBAR. “The original script was one of these usual dystopian, post-apocalyptic futures, and the movie was a complete rip-off of Aliens. It was sort of like Aliens combined with Alien, with a squad of guys assigned to catch this monster and bring it in for study by "The Company" -- a shameless rip-off. But then they had to get the train to its final destination, which made no sense at all.” After all, de Souza reasoned, if The Company wants to keep the existence of the monster secret, and has reason to believe that it may be dangerous, it would be more prudent to land the creature closer to its final destination. “Plus, if they’re going to take it to some military facility where they’re going to study it, wouldn’t they have an airstrip there? So from page one it made no sense.”

De Souza was equally nonplussed by the script’s description of the monster itself, which he describes as “a guy-in-a-suit kind of creature. It lived off adrenaline,” he adds, “sucking adrenaline out of your body with these big nails, like a vampire. It reminded me way too much of a picture called It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which was itself a rip-off of ‘Black Destroyer’ and ‘Discord in Scarlet’, from A.E. van Vogt’s short story collection The Voyage of the Space Beagle. So with ISOBAR, you had a rip-off of a rip-off.” Overall, he says, “It was too much like Alien, the monster wasn’t fresh enough and there was no explanation of why the world was this way -- it was one of these science fiction movies where it’s supposed to be the near-future, but it’s a completely implausible near-future without any kind of explanation. The script was just embarrassing.

As I write this, it is 1:17 am on Wednesday, June 20th, 2012.

I am lying awake in bed, trying to decide whether or not to have an abortion.

Of course, we don’t call it an abortion. We call it “a procedure” or a D&C. See, my potential abortion is one of the good abortions. I’m 31 years old. I’m married. These days, I’m pretty well off. I would very much like to stay pregnant right now. In fact, I have just spent the last year—following an earlier miscarriage—trying rather desperately to get pregnant.

Unfortunately, the doctors tell me that what I am now pregnant with is not going to survive. Last week, I had an ultrasound, I was almost 6 weeks along and looked okay. The only thing was that the heartbeat was slow. It wasn’t a huge deal. Heartbeats start slow, usually around the 6th week, and then they speed up. But my doctor asked me to come back in this week for a follow up, just to be sure. That was Tuesday, yesterday. Still my today. The heart hasn’t sped up. The fetus hasn’t grown. The egg yolk is now bigger than the fetus, which usually indicates a chromosomal abnormality. Basically, this fetus is going to die. I am going to have a miscarriage. It’s just a matter of when.

Because of these facts—all these facts—I get special privileges, compared to other women seeking abortion in the state of Minnesota.

Nobody has to tell my parents. I am not subject to a 24-hour waiting period. I do not have to sit passively while someone describes the gestational stage that my fetus is at, presents me with a laundry list of possible side-effects (some medically legit, some not), lectures me on all the other options that must have just slipped my mind, or forces me to look at enlarged, color photographs of healthy fetuses.

Because I have health insurance, I can afford a very nice OB/GYN whom I chose and who does not exercise her right to deny me this option. Thankfully, I don't live in a state where she can legally lie to me about the status of my fetus, to dissuade me from having an abortion.

Most importantly, from my perspective, I have the privilege of a private abortion in a nondescript medical office. I will not have to go to an abortion clinic. I will not have to walk by any protesters—not even Charlie, the one guy who is paid to protest every day outside Minneapolis’ abortion clinic, where I have volunteered as an escort in the past.

Most of these privileges boil down to the fact that, as far as my doctor and my medical billing are concerned, this is not an elective procedure.

But here’s the thing. It is elective.

I don’t have to do this. I am making a decision. Plain and simple. An incredibly awful, heart-wrenching decision with positives and negatives no matter which option I choose.

Having an abortion would get this miscarriage over with quickly. That’s important, as I’m leaving for a speaking engagement this weekend and am rather apprehensive about the risk of miscarrying, all by myself, in Aspen, Colorado, in an environment where I am supposed to be on professional behavior. (Uncontrollable sobbing doesn’t really fit with the image of competent journalist.) Most likely, there would be less pain and less bleeding. That’s also a big deal. My last miscarriage happened at 4 weeks along. I woke up in the middle of the night wanting to scream and almost vomiting from the pain. I bled for nearly two weeks after that. My guess is that these effects are not weaker for a 7-week miscarriage. Finally, even if I wait this out, there’s still a pretty decent chance that I end up having to get an abortion after all. It’s not uncommon for miscarriages like this to take too long to start, or not finish completely on their own. With just enough bad luck, I might get to experience both options.

On the other hand, I’m scared. This is surgery. Surgery is scary. There are small but very real-feeling risks involved: Reaction to anesthesia, infections, and in rare cases some women develop scar tissue in their uterus that can make it hard to get pregnant again. That might be the biggest fear for me, honestly. It took 5 months to get pregnant the first time. It was a year after that miscarriage before this pregnancy happened. I know that, for the most part, this is random chance. I have bad luck. But part of me is terrified of anything that might make this process harder than it already is. Also: Psychologically, I’m still clinging to this pregnancy. I want the doctors to be wrong. I want to have one of those miracles where everything turns out to be okay and I am relieved to find that I haven’t actually lost everything.

Right now, at 2:06 am, I’m leaning towards a compromise. I think I probably want the abortion. I don’t think I want to have to jump from thinking I had a viable pregnancy to having an abortion in a span of two days. My husband has offered to cancel his own business trip and come to Aspen with me. Maybe I’ll take him up on that, and wait until I get home on Monday to do a final ultrasound and get the abortion. I have a list of questions to ask my doctor in the morning. This decision is entirely dependent upon her answers, but I think it’s the right one for me.

That was a lot of TMI, I know. But I am telling you this to press a point.

I am making a decision.

The only thing that makes my abortion decision different from anyone else’s abortion decision is that some people who are against abortion will think that my abortion is acceptable.

Some. Not all. Maybe not even most. I honestly have no idea. My life is not in danger, after all. I have not been raped. I merely think that I might not want to sit around, feeling the symptoms of pregnancy, for god knows how long, until a heartbeat stops and the ripping pain kicks in and the blood starts flowing on its own.

Let me be clear. I have options. It’s just that they all suck. That’s kind of how bad news related to pregnancy works.

If you are pregnant, and do not want to be, all of your options suck.*

If you cannot seem to get pregnant, and want to be, all of your options suck.**

If you are pregnant, and won’t be soon, all of your options suck.

There is no universal good option. There is no universal bad option. But for each individual there is an option that is the least bad. Here is why I am pro-choice. If someone has to make a decision and the best they can hope for is the least-bad option, I don’t believe I have any business making that choice for them.

My abortion is not a good abortion. It's just an abortion. And there's no reason to treat the decision I have to make any differently than the decisions made by any other woman.

*I’ve known women who had abortions, women who gave a baby up for adoption, and women who raised an unintended baby on their own. None of those options are easy. None of those options are any less painful, traumatizing, or side-effect filled than any of the others. They only seem that way to people who haven’t experienced them.

**Whether you try low-level infertility treatments, IVF and donors, start looking for an adoption, or accept a life of unchosen childlessness, you are going to experience a lot of stress and you are going to have to give things up and grieve. You will probably need to chat with a therapist. None of these options is easier than the others. It just looks that way to people who haven’t experienced them.

• This post isn't really about miscarriage, specifically. But part of why I wrote it was to break some of the silence surrounding what I like to call The World's Shittiest Secret Society. As many as 50% of conceptions end in miscarriage. Most likely, that's not because of any outside forces. It's just because of the way nature works. If this has happened to you, you are not alone. If you have had a miscarriage, and are struggling with processing this thing, then I really think you should read Jon Cohen's Coming to Term: Uncovering the Truth About Miscarriage. Cohen's wife had four miscarriages in a row before the birth of their second child. His book provides an evidence-based, sane-making perspective on what we do and don't know about miscarriage and it provides many, many reasons for hope. In particular, the fact that Cohen's wife's experience isn't extraordinary. Even if you have four miscarriages in a row, you've still got a greater than 70% chance of having a perfectly normal, healthy pregnancy the next time out. Miscarriage is weird, and it's horribly painful. If you're anything like me, learning as much as you can about it helps.

The MP3CD is advertised as "iPod-ready" and indeed, the single disc (shipped in a DVD-style bookshelf case) has an orderly, well-named set of MP3 files on it. This was awfully nice, though a little more care could have been taken with the filenames and metadata. Some files had curly-quotes in them that rendered in my OS as ’ and such; the reader's name had been put in the "artist" field of the ID3 tags, which meant that the files were misfiled; there was no cover-art in the ID3 tags. None of these are grave mistakes, and indeed, it's a treat to get an audiobook whose MP3s have any metadata or sensible filenames, but if you're going to go "iPod-ready" then it wouldn't hurt to iron out these small bugs.

Meanwhile, listening to these essays and experiencing them for a second time was quite exciting, as there were connections I'd missed, some of which will form the basis for some upcoming columns (I have two due this week!). A thoroughly recommended experience.

Distrust That Particular Flavor [MP3 Audio, Unabridged] ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/17/distrust-that-particular-f-2.html/feed 4