"It's Not Really Science Fiction": Sackhoff on Playing Starbuck

Is Battlestar Galactica "not really" being science fiction something like saying, "I believe in equal rights for women, but I'm not a feminist"?

heh.

In any case, an interview with Sackhoff about the "flak" she's gotten for playing Starbuck.

And what's with actresses playing "strong" female characters wanting to get in the whole "I wanted her to strong, yet vulnerable" line. I've never heard a male actor say he wanted his character's "vulnerable" side to come out in a performance.

And why does an interviewer who interviews an actress playing a strong female character feel it's important to mention that the actress actually has a "delicate physique" and "favors fashion more in the style of Audrey Hepburn than her alter-ego's flight suits."

For fuck's sake. It's one step forward, two steps back.

I do like that people are fighting over whether or not she's "hot." The fact that there's a debate says a lot about what kind of sex symbols we're "allowed" to pine after in this culture.

Her response to the original actor's bashing of her character is probably the best bit, though:

"That's what I said in rebuttal to that (the bashing by Dirk Benedict of a woman playing "his" character). But I never really tried to match it. But once that started happening, I was like, look, at the end of the day, I've now played this character longer. And at the end of the day, it's a TV show. We're not curing cancer, people. I wish we were, but we're not. It's entertainment. So ... tit for tat. Shut up."

And Now My Printer's Broken

It's just been that kind of a month.

Firefighter Gives Birth, Aces Promotion Exam

Despite just giving birth and getting only two hours sleep, Kent got 104 out of 110 on the test and expects to return from maternity leave in March as a captain.

Because that's just what you do, people.

(thanks, B)

WisCon Panels:

Discuss.

The Fat Trap

A SURVEY today suggested that most women would rather be thick and thin than brainy and fat.

There's already a bias in your surveyor's assumptions if they're only asking women this question. That says a lot about what they're looking for.

(via BFB)

Dear Ladies at the Gym:

You can lift more than 15-30 lbs without looking like the Incredible Hulk.

I promise.

I've been sicker than a dog for the last few weeks, so yesterday was my first day back at the gym since the holidays. I have, however, been doing my daily free weights routine and taking the stairs everywhere, as usual, so there wasn't much guilt on my part about missing the gym. What I missed had nothing to do with guilt. I just missed getting to the gym. I liked the routine.

I cleaned out my closet the other night and got rid of all of my baggy pants, the sort that would literally fall down if I didn't wear a belt. I got rid of some shirts that I looked like I was swimming in, too. At the back of my closet I found a part of shorts I'd worn at Clarion five years ago, and found that they slipped right on.

So after three years of beating my head against a wall, the last year has seen me fall back to my set point with very little head-beating at all. Hooray for 30 lb free weights and tossing out dieting. I'm very happy at a size 14/16. I don't like being too small these days, though when I was a kid I obsessed a lot about being small and fragile and bullshit like that. Now I enjoy having some intimidating bulk. It makes it easier for me to yell at assholes on the train who try and harrass me. But I don't like being a size 20 because you can't find clothes anywhere and everything seems to look terrible on me unless it comes from Old Navy.

To be honest, the best part about being back to my old weight is that I *can* go to more stores and buy actual clothes there. One more size, and I can actually go shopping with size 4 Jenn at the shops she goes to and expect to find something there in my size, too.

That pisses me off, really. Why the fuck couldn't they have sold stuff in a size 20? I would have bought it. Think of the money they'd make! But then I'd be shopping with size 4s, and some of those women might find that really intimindating. Or something. I don't know what's up with that. Heaven forbid a size 2 woman get caught dead wearing the same style clothes as a size 20.

Pisses me off.

For now, it's nice to recognize myself in the mirror again. It took me three years to put on the weight, and three years to take it off. I guess that's fair.

My concern now is keeping 2 sizes of clothes in my closet instead of 4.

Sometimes I wonder if it's weird to gain and lose as much weight as I have in my life. And then I wonder if that's normal. And then I wonder if the problem's always just been the fact that I always thought I was too "big" for a girl and kept trying to diet and got lost in a binge and purge cycle that's kept me yo-yoing for years.

I want to get off the yo-yo.

I'm spending a fortune in clothes.

What I Plan To Do This Year

Because resolutions involve stuff like, "I'll join a gym and go until the end of January when I get burned out," and "I won't eat anymore chocolate until I go crazy and binge on it."

Plans are much more practical.

1) Move to NYC at the end of July

2) Pay off my credit card so I can put said moving-to-NYC costs on it

3) Find an apartment in NYC that costs less than the monthly income of an average two-person household (this is going to be tricky)

4) Buy a new computer under $1500 with a 3-year warranty (after paying off credit card? Because I'm currently word-processing on an ancient back-up laptop that wieghs 20 lbs, has a broken space bar, and can't connect to our wireless network)

5) Get a new job (in NYC) that pays me about as well as I get paid here

6) Apply to Viable Paradise, which I technically can't afford to pay for right now, but if I get accepted, I don't have to find the money until July. I need some new eyes to look over some of my work, and I need to hang out with other writers again. I'm starving for it.

7) Apply to Brooklyn College MFA Program (must be done this week. I put it off way too long and apps are due Feb 1)

8) Sell 3 short stories

9) Finish draft of God's War by March. Have revised and ready-to-hawk version by December.

10) Finish revised (for the bazillionth time) version of The Dragon's Wall and send to Agent by October

11) Get back to work on book two of the fantasy saga (Over Burning Cities) so I have a draft by June of 2007

12) Begin preliminary research and outline for my next stand-alone fantasy book about a feisty girl-turned-resistance-fighter and abused peace-pursuing man clawing out their own versions of an ideal country from the wreckage of a nation butchered by a Rwandan-like genocide. Currently untitled.

13) Finish reading the 20-odd books I'm currently in the middle of

14) Rescue the music stuck on all of my dead computers

15) Consolidate my student loans

Yea, I'm Alive

And I have a lot to do.

So it goes.

Desire & the Pill

It is no secret that some women who take birth control pills lose interest in sex. They have been reporting this side effect to their doctors since oral contraceptives came into wide use 40 years ago.

I'm so happy I have an IUD..

Oops - We're Excluding Our Best Candidates!

Weight limits designed to screen out unfit Army applicants are excluding some of the strongest candidates and will be relaxed, the MoD says.

Under previous regulations, men with a body mass index (BMI) of over 28 were barred from joining the military.

The threshold has been extended to 32 - two points above the World Health Organisation's definition of obesity.

The kicker?

This "relaxation" of the "rules" only applies to men:

Meanwhile, the limits for women will remain the same at 28.

This was *after* they realized that "bigger" people were often stronger, and could perform a wider number of roles. Hence, recruiting "bigger" people was in the UK Army's best interests.

I guess "big" women are just a lot scarier than "big" guys....

(via bfb)

Healthcare in America

I finally went to the doctor to see what the hell's wrong with me. Basically, she said, she had no idea. She gave me some antibiotics, some super cough syrup, and some kind of inhaler to help the inflammation in my chest.

So, $150 later, all I know is I was pretty sick, I'm getting better, and nobody's sure why.

At least I got some drugs, eh?

Oh, Dear

There's nothing so disheartening as receiving an email from a new project manager that reads like it's been written by somebody who's barely literate.

Doesn't exactly inspire much faith.

Fat: Still a Feminist Issue

In classrooms around the world, girls swap tips on how to eat less, how to ratchet up their exercise and how to mimic those perfect bodies they see staring out at them from music videos, TV, the catwalk, magazines and billboards.

Somewhere, they know that these bodies aren't quite real - that they have been enhanced by surgery, lighting, camera angles and digital manipulation. But no matter. The deluge of visual images that wallpapers our world has seeped into every consciousness. It has changed the way we view our bodies and what we can and should do to our bodies, including those of our children.

Read the Rest

On Writing the Female Protagonist

In the course of my writing "career" (such as it is), I've run across quite a few male writers who've told me that they have a lot of trouble writing female protagonists, and it was something they had to actively work on. I always found this fascinating because though my short stories are often female POV (though not always), my novels always have mixed POVs, men and women, and I never gave it a second thought.

One of my most exciting character POVs in book 2 of the fantasy saga is the POV of a rational misogynist, a guy who really does believe women are infantile and inferior; and the trick has been to make him interesting if not sympathetic and have him carry a POV instead of just being a spear-carrier. I'm having lots of fun with it. And I don't find it terribly tricky. I know really great guys who are closet misogynists and can rationalize those feelings from here until Sunday. So it's not like I don't have examples to draw from.

So what's up with the male writer fear of writing up female protagonists? Or is it only strong female protagonists that are scary?

I dunno. I set down my free copy of Hickman's "Mystic Warriors" when the protagonist's wife "purred" at him on page four (this was the fourth time she'd done something stupid like that in as many pages). I don't know how many male writers' SO's "purr" at them, but my guess is: not many. So I don't know where this guy's ideas about all that came from. Maybe he thought it made for a more exciting opening scene.

Maybe this has to do with the old, "We're all used to reading books about men," thing. You know, the old saying that boys and girls will read books about boys, but only girls will read books about girls, because reading books about girls is "Girly." Being a woman, I have no trouble writing about women, and reading a lot of books with male protagonists, having male friends, and generally moving in male-dominated circles fills in the other half, so I have no trouble writing about men. I listen to and talk to men all the time.

But I just don't buy that men don't hang out with women. I mean, don't men have female friends besides their SOs? Don't they read books with female protagonists?

Then what's so difficult about getting into the female POV without it all coming out like Heinlein's robotic-sounding Friday or any of his other cardboard female characters? I mean, women are just people. What's so tough about writing about people?

I don't think you have to have an intimate knowledge of cramps, tampons, and hair products in order to write good female characters.

Elyce Deconstructs "Fight Club"

What is even more interesting re the gaze than how the film plays it out is how it turns it around. Instead of having a narrator constantly gazing at his femme fatale or sex object (a la Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for one), Fight Club has him gaze at his hypermasculine alter ego, Tyler Durden. Both the protagonist and the camera linger over Brad Pitt and his buff bod—as well as over the many other men who must strip to the waist when they fight and the pumped up army dudes. This goes even further as the film fetishizes blood, scrapes, and bruises (and I’ll get to kinkiness presently), but first…

It Ain't Easy Being a "Pale Male"

Yea, right.

On the contrary, men at Fortune 100 companies commonly complain that due to diversity goals, women actually have an unfair advantage. "Every company I've worked at goes out of its way to hire or promote women to senior level positions," says an upper-middle manager at a major food company. He adds with a sigh, "It's not easy being a 'pale male' in today's corporate world."

Where do these guys get these impressions? Not from the stats:

Yet recent research and statistics tell a different story, suggesting that the glass ceiling remains firmly in place. It's been 10 years since the U.S. Government's Glass Ceiling Commission released its findings that while women had 46 percent of America's jobs and more than half the master's degrees being awarded, only 5 percent of all senior manager positions were filled by women. What's more, female managers' earnings were on average a mere 68 percent of their male counterparts'.

And, some reasons for it, which I see everyday here in Grande Latte Enema Land:

- Different standards are used to judge the performance of women and minorities.

- Their corporate culture assigns lesser value to women and minorities.

- The "good old boy network" is the biggest discrimination barrier to career advancement.

- Because women and minorities are less willing to play the political game, many choose to leave the corporate world entirely.

Not really new stuff, but fascinating that men's impressions of women's levels of seniority in the workplace are a lot higher than the actual levels women achieve. It's that old 1/4 rule. Anytime a room is composed of 1/4 or more women, people will say that at least half the room is "full" of women.

Read the rest

It Gets Better & Better

HONOLULU -- A state lawmaker has suggested Hawaii's public schoolteachers be forced to weigh in as part of the fight against obesity in students, KITV in Honolulu reported.

Because teaching kids it's OK to discriminate is cool.

This gets into all those tricky arguments about who decides what "fat" is, and what about medical conditions and... and... oh, forget it! Just oust the fatties.

Note that they're not advocating testing cholesterol levels or resting heart rates. It's never really about health. It's about all that nasty, disgusting fat.

Next up: plastic surgery for teachers who don't appeal to Aryan beauty standards!

The Writing Game

As mentioned earlier, I heard back from the Agent about my fantasy novel, The Dragon's Wall. She's incredibly enthusiastic about the whole project, thinks it'll make a great series, but thinks it needs a total overhaul.

Now, that might sound really great, but I had to hide in my room for two days getting over the initial "rejection" part of it before I could think clearly and re-read the e-mail again with a cooler head. When somebody tells you your book really doesn't hit its stride until page 200 and she's fully expecting it'll be about a year's worth of edits, well, you're going to cringe. You're going to cringe quite a lot.

But for all that, she really likes the book. And I ran into her at a con, and I really liked her. I'd love to run the whole series with her. So there are a lot of positives.

Yet I honestly had to sit down and have a mental conversation with myself about whether or not I was going to do this. I had to ask myself: am I just being delusional? Is it worth spending another five years on this book, potentially taking away time from other books that I might work on? Am I just fooling myself? Should I just move on to something else?

Which is a dumb question to ask about a book you've already invested five years in. Escalation of commitment. You just have to keep going.

Because the thing with the first book in a series is that if you can nail that one, if you can sell that one, and it sells well, you've got a series. It's possible you can lock it in, so long as they don't all suck. You may even be able to support yourself for a couple of those years (if you're lucky) on writing alone. And, of course, you may wow everybody and have 500 people show up to all your signings and have huge fan clubs and be able to buy a big house.

I mean, there's that.

But let's be rational, shall we?

One of my writing buddies agreed to look at the book again, and I think I'll haul it to a writing workshop sometime this year. It's a lot of time and attention, but it's my baby, and I want to get this one out there. Maybe I really am delusional to sink so much into it, but really, what else am I going to do besides write? This is what I do. I'd be bored otherwise.

I wrote up a response to said Agent and said she should expect to see a heavily revisied version of the book sometime later this year - after I'm done drafting God's War, of course. GW has about 100 pages to go (yea, I've discovered my max fiction rate appears to be 100 pages a month). My computer's broken again (it keeps automatically restarting everytime it gets to the "login" page"), so who knows how things'll go, but that's what they make those yellow legal pads for.

So here we go again, playing the writing game, gambling that if I do good rewrites, Agent will like them, then Agent will find Publisher(s) who like the book (or require, of course, MORE REWRITES), and you just keep writing, and keep hoping you're getting better at it, and hope that sometime, somewhere, something will roll over and it'll all just hit.

Of course, it may just be a continuous upward slog, but I really hope there's a hilltop somewhere that I can get to the top of and something, somehow, some aspect of the game, will get easier.

I'm not counting on it, though.

Working Computer

Jenn got my computer hooked up to her old PC monitor, so I now have a working computer. I was starting to go a little nuts with the other half-baked solution I came up with. I haven't even finished paying this little number off, and the LCD screen up and died on me.

This monitor's a lot bigger, though. Makes for better computer playing, though the setup looks a little ghetto...

What I'm Doing This Weekend

Writing like a mad woman. I've got that damn God's War draft to finish, and I'm going to look over some of those rewrite suggestions for the fantasy saga that the Agent gave me, and see if it's salvageable.

If I can get that damn fantasy saga right, well, it's a great investment. It's seven books.

Wouldn't that be sweet?