Michigan got beat last week and is on a bye this week. But I’m getting my dose of college football by going to the NSU-Lincoln game this evening. Middle Daughter is on the NSU pom team and they’ll be performing at halftime, so that’ll be cool. NSU is winless so far this season but they’ve got a new coach and a lot of young talent. They’re scoring more than they did last year, which is a plus in my book. At this point in the season last year, they’d been shut out four out of five games. So far this year, they’ve scored 86 points, which is more than they’ve scored in the last several seasons put together. That’s progress.
And as it turns out, NSU won 55-7, and Ohio State lost, so it was a good Saturday for football.
Reading
I read this piece at Reason a couple of weeks ago and kept meaning to bring it up here and kept forgetting. Shame on me. States Are Banning This DIY Rape Kit. Why would they do that? I can understand the basic reasoning behind being concerned about it. The idea behind a Vitullo kit is for a trained person to gather evidence that can be used to prosecute the offender in a sexual assault. Once everything is gathered, a chain of custody is established which is critical to a successful prosecution.
The basic problem then with at-home evidence collection is that the person collecting the evidence is probably not trained in evidence collection. The chain of custody is broken as well, because sexual assault survivors don’t have safe, secure storage for the gathered evidence. (More than a few police departments have had the same issue, with some rape kits being damaged in storage by water, birds, or vermin.)
States though need to realize why Leda Health is making these kits available. The company saw a need for a product and tried to meet that need. There aren’t enough SANE nurses available to handle all of the kits that need to be done. There aren’t enough labs to test the kits that are gathered. And most importantly, there aren’t enough properly-trained cops to investigate the complaints. There are still cops out there who will ask a woman if she resisted, if she tried to fight, if she gave off mixed signals. They still ask what the victim was wearing as though that had any effect on what happened.
So while I understand why states are trying to stop Leda Health from offering these kits, I think their energy would be better spent on solving the underlying problems that cause sexual assault survivors to want to do the evidence collection somewhere they feel safe.
More Reading
- ‘Call Me a Scammer to My Face’ Madison Campbell is determined to get DIY rape kits into survivors’ hands, no matter who tells her it’s a bad idea.
- Leda Health: Founder Story
- AG Henry Sends Cease-And-Desist Letter, Files Suit Against Leda Health Regarding Misleading Marketing of ‘Early Evidence Kits’ for Sexual Assault Victims
Writing
Ghost sits at 83,000 words and 29 chapters. I think it’s going to come in around 95,000 words in the first draft, give or take.
I’d gotten out of the habit of doing multiple drafts because I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of doing massive rewrites to a book. I’m more than willing to make necessary edits to a story, and Ghost will need some. I’ve got placeholder names, like FBIINTERN and so forth that will need to be replaced with a proper name. And even though I had a name for my antagonist, I’m kind of not as happy with it as I was. That’ll need to be changed. I’ve got several research emails to send out that might change things. I also know at this point there are a couple of scenes that made sense when I first wrote them, but don’t really advance the story now, so they may come out.
But those are all relatively minor edits. They’re not massive rewrites or wholesale new writing. The violates Heinlein’s Rule #3 (not to be confused with Parenting Rule #3). I did that whole multiple drafts thing with Don’t Stop Believing (three-plus drafts!) and I’m not sure it helped me. I didn’t do it with The Sad Girl series, though I’ve said before that transcribing handwritten manuscripts amounted to a second draft.
Most of my writing these days is straight to the computer though. I’ve tried going back to hand-writing a couple of times, but it hasn’t quite clicked for me for some reason. It may be that much of what I’m currently working on is already mostly written on the computer, so I couldn’t easily shift to handwriting. Maybe it felt like changing horses in the middle of a stream.
I’ve also got a smaller machine now that I use almost exclusively for writing. When I was hand-writing in the past, it was partly because my eight-pound desktop replacement laptop didn’t have good battery life. This HP lasts a solid four-plus hours under normal conditions. If I get aggressive with power conservation, I can get close to six hours. I’ve realized though how much I like writing things by hand, which may be part of the itch that writing letters scratched. I’ve let that fall by the wayside, though, and I really feel like I should pick it back up. There’s a sense of connection that comes from writing letters that you just don’t get from email and instant messaging. In my opinion, anyway.
At any rate, I made goal this week by 3,400 words. I’ll take it.
Huh. I thought when I started this it was going to be a pretty short post. It seems I was mistaken.
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