The Eleventh

I was sitting in my living rom running a fever and watching the 9/11 memorial on CNN when it occurred to me that the Eleventh is my day to blog at the League, even in September. So here goes.

It’s hard for me to remember exactly what it was like on September 11, 2001. I was ten yearsyounger, new to being a Dad, and my writing was still just pie in the sky stuff. I’d finished a first novel, but it was bad and I didn’t know enough to recognize that yet. (It involves a mage and his familiar; maybe one day I will rewrite it).

Things I do remember:

Standing in the break room and seeing that second plane hit the World Trade Center.

Rolling the television out so that other folks at work could see what was happening, too.

Recording a video message with my wife for our tiny son, who was just one week old, so that he could understand the event later. (I’m not sure where we put that tape.)

And that’s pretty much it.

I feel I should mention that this is my umpteenth attempt to write this blog. There were a few full of intensely disrespectful (but funny) thoughts about what might have happened if various characters from my series were on one of the planes, if there had been another plane that was headed for Void City… I like to think the Mages Guild would have been really useful…

But it’s hard to write about.

Where’s the line between humor and disrespect? It’s a line for which I’m often searching. How much is too much? Not enough? Too high brow? Too low?

We live in a world where the X-men have fought vampiresuicide bombers, where Mark Waid’s Irredeemable explores what would happen if a being as powerful as Superman went nuts, (read it, it’s awesome), and where another comic, Ex Machina, is predicated on the idea that one world’s superhero’s greatest failure is that he only managed to stop one of the WTC Towers from being hit.

Maybe one day I’ll be comfortable writing a scene with ubervamped Eric emerging from a burning plane, but it isn’t today. Today I’m still in awe of the event. I’m too cowed by the air of respect and the so-called “failure of imagination” that prevented us from seeing those possibilities.