And After All That...

Good things, for once. Morning weights, writing, gym, sensible food, short walks at work, chatting with my writing buddy Patrick, credit card minimum payments are paid, good stuff in NY this weekend, and I'll be at the Oregon Coast next week. Sweet.

Big, deep, breath.

Anyway, back to writing, then dinner.

And guess what I got for Christmas? The regional VP gave away 30 years worth of National Geographic Magazines in the collector's hardbound covers. I got all of them.

They are fucking sweet.

And fucking heavy.

I've been dragging them home one at a time for nearly a month. Almost done.

They make me very happy.

It's That Time Of Year Again

Time for some Bad Sex.

(thanks, B)

Amusing Forward of the Month

An English professor told his class one day: "Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. As homework tonight, one of you will write the first paragraph of a short story. You will e-mail your partner that paragraph and send another copy to me. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story and send it back, also sending another copy to me.

"The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back-and-forth. Remember to re-read what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. There is to be absolutely NO talking outside of the e-mails and anything you wish to say must be written in the e-mail. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached."

The following was turned in by two of his English students, Rebecca
and Gary.

THE STORY:

(first paragraph by Rebecca)
At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question.

(second paragraph by Gary)
Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

(Rebecca)
He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspaper to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.

(Gary)
Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through the congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the
atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion, which vaporized poor, stupid Laurie.

(Rebecca)
This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic semi-literate adolescent.

(Gary)
Yeah? Well, my writing partner is a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. "Oh, shall I have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other sort of filtered TEA??? Oh no, what am I to do? I'm such an air headed bimbo who reads too many Danielle Steele novels!"

(Rebecca)
filtered

(Gary)
filtered

(Rebecca)
filtered YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!

(Gary)
Go drink some tea - filtered.

(TEACHER)
A+ - I really liked this one.


(thanks, Ian)

Uncomfortable, Isn't It?

A gallery has replaced a painting of a naked man with a female nude after it received dozens of complaints.

Sure is a good thing nobody complains about female nudes!

I mean, naked men are soooo scary.

This Site Makes Me So Happy

So, so happy.

Damn, This is Tough

Down about 15 pages from the page count goal I had for today, but hey, writing 34 pages in 7 days still isn't bad.

Stuck on some plot points, and doing some more reading elsewhere to get myself out of the bind. Should pick up again tomorrow.

Day job still sucks.

Also, it's snowing like crazy here and I have no winter boots.

What's up with that?

The CIA Sabotage Manual

For overthrowing governments at home at abroad!

Here's What's Happening

Despite appearances, I am still alive. Working a day job that suddenly has me, you know, working, which means little to no blogging. It'll be awhile before this lets up.

Finished wrapping all my Christmas presents today. It's the first year I can afford to get everybody presents, and it feels really good.

Sitting here drinking whiskey, listening to Edith Piaf, and working on The Book That Will Get done.

I've still got that Russ appreciation to write, two credit card payments to make, and a lot of books to read. Have finally made it back to the gym. I'm increasingly impressed with my arms. They are just buff. It's great.

Ah, my body project. Someday I will be uber-buff and scary. For now, I'll settle for strong.

Someday, I'll also be making my living entirely from writing.

Just you wait.

It's my New Year's resolution.

Must Have Had His Grande Latte Enema

Wow. The more time I spend at the office, the more I feel like Edward Norton.

It Happened Again on Friday

Somebody else asked me how I was "getting so skinny."

These people baffle me. I start moving into a size 14, and everybody thinks I weigh 150 lbs or something.

Weird. I haven't weighed 150 since I was like 12 years old.

It's all relative.

The Trouble With Writing

This isn't the first time my writing has interfered with my relationships. I'll spend a good deal of time doing research, writing a few pages a month, and then the bucket will tip over and for a couple of months, I'll do nothing but write, and think about writing, and talk about either writing in general or my latest book in particular.

I write on the bus, at work, at lunch, at home before and after making dinner. I think about my book, about the next scene, bits of dialogue, at the gym, just before bed, while doing reporting at work. I keep a notebook next to me so I can get dialogue down, little scenes, before I forget them.

I want to finish this book by Dec 31st, which works out to writing about 7 pages a day. I want to finish this book. I've been working on it, writing, researching, for year. I already have my next project in mind. I'm a writer, and this is what I do.

What the people close to me soon learn is that when I get like this, there isn't room for much else for awhile. I get easily distracted. I'm always somewhere else. I'm only really happy when I'm writing. It's another reason I spent six years avoiding the idea of having a lover. My writing became an issue in my last relationship. He said I never had enough time for him. I was ignoring him. For nearly six months, I stopped writing all together, and nearly killed myself.

No joke.

So this time around I want to find the right balance. I want to be able to give myself over to this passion, to this thing that consumes my life, but I don't want to neglect the relationships in my life with friends and lovers, and that's hard, that's really fucking hard.

Where Are All the Female Magicians?

Susanna Clarke does a Q&A about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

There was an interesting question about where all of the female magicians were in Clarke's book. And I have to admit, that question never crossed my mind. I felt Clarke was writing a certain sort of book, set in England during an alternate 1830s-ish sort of time and narrated in a written-in-the-1850s sort of way (I always read the narrator as male, though Clarke says that in her head the narrator was usually female). So the role of women in the book, as characters, would be pretty traditional. A male narrater wouldn't be much interested in what they did, or ask the question about where all the female magicians were. It wouldn't come up. When you have an opening about the boys' club of pseudo-magicians meeting together with the "boys only" sign on the treehouse door, you don't expect to see any women trying to knock it down when they're stuck wearing corsets and haven't had anything like a Seneca Falls convention and the entire book is about proper upper-crust sorts of people who wouldn't dare think to upset that particular status quo. Though magic may be another matter.

Sure, you'll have some female rebels in every society, but that's not what the book was about, and I think that concentrating on female rebels would have made it another book entirely, and that wasn't the book Clarke was set on writing.

So... no female magicians? Didn't bother me. She's apparently got some in a short story of hers - they just never fit in the book.

Because of the story she wanted to tell, and the way she wanted to tell it, I can forgive Clark for not going into the subject of female magicians.

However, forgiving the lack of relevant female Jedi in every single goddamn Star Wars movie? Especially the first three where there are tons of rebels, the perfect place for a rise in fighting women?

Not so much.

(via Meghan)

Because the Best Way to Win Hearts & Minds is to Make People Feel Manipulated

WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 - The military acknowledged Friday in a briefing for a ranking Senate Republican that news articles written by American troops had been placed as paid advertisements in the Iraqi news media and not always properly identified.

Senator John W. Warner of Virginia, who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters after receiving a 25-minute briefing from officials at the Pentagon that senior commanders in Iraq were trying to get to the bottom of a program that apparently also paid monthly stipends to friendly Iraqi journalists.

Strindberg's Preface to the play Miss Julie

"Miss Julie is a modern character which does not mean that the man-hating half-woman has not existed in every age, just that she has now been discovered, has come out into the open and made herself heard. Victim of a superstition (one that has seized even stronger minds) that woman, this stunted form of human being who stands between man, the lord of creation, the creator of culture, [and the child], is meant to be the equal of man or could ever be, she involves herself in an absurd struggle in which she falls. Absurd because a stunted form, governed by the laws of propagation, will always be born stunted and can never catch up with the one in the lead, according to the formula: A (the man) and B (the woman) start from the same point C; A (the man) with a speed of, let us say, 100 and B (the woman) with a speed of 60. Now, the question is, when will B catch up with A? - Answer: Never! Neither with the help of equal education, equal voting rights, disarmament, or temperance - no more than two parallel lines can ever meet and cross.

"The half-woman is a type who thrusts herself forward and sells herself nowadays for power, decorations, honours, or diplomas as formerly she used to do for money. She is synonymous with degeneration. It is not a sound species for it does not last, but unfortunately it can propagate itself and its misery in the following generation; and degenerate men seem unconsciously to select their mates among them so that they increase in number and produce creatures of uncertain sex for whom life is a torment. Fortunately, however, they succumb, either because they are out of harmony with reality or because their repressed instincts erupt uncontrollably or because their hopes of attaining equality with men are crushed. The type is tragic, offering the spectacle of a desperate struggle against nature, a tragic legacy of Romanticism which is now being dissipated by Naturalism, the only aim of which is happiness. And happiness means strong and sound species."

Boys are great.

Jonathan Carroll, On Too Much Self-Reflection

Ah, there's nothing better than the book about the writer who can't sell a book!

(thanks, Patrick!)

The MZB Heroine, Or The Sword & Sorceress Generation

So, while dinner cooks and the novel prints out for the second round of line edits, I got to thinking again about the MZB heroine. You know, the Marion Zimmer Bradley heroine. The Sword and Sorceress anthologies?

Anybody who's old enough to remember MZB's fantasy magazine before it went defunct probably knows what I'm talking about. MZB was the first mag I submitted to, back when I was 15. She always gave personal rejects, which ended up being more encouraging than I think she actually wanted, and when she didn't personally comment, her back-up did a fair job.

After a couple of rejections, I decided to try to get into the S&S anthologies. I mean, shit I was *writing* strong-women-heroines-with-swords fiction, why couldn't I get into these anthos?

I tried my best to ape the style of the S&S heroine. That means spunkiness as illustrated by her desire to kick someone, tug her braid, chew her lip, and lesbianism, if not an outright no-no, shouldn't come up much. She should have been through a Profound Emotional Experience that she needs to get over. And there should be some sort of earthy psuedo-magic god or goddess that she either worships, scorns people for worshipping (and is later converted), or she's a priestess in some kind of snake cult.

My problem with getting trying to get accepted into that antho (besides the major one - I was fifteen and couldn't plot my way out of a paper bag), is that I never really liked the anthologies. Hated them. Bought two of them, tried very hard to mimic the style, generic setting, generic plot, never really came away with anything. This may be because I've only recently learned how to write anything at all like a plot.

I had a tough time.

As I've gotten older, I've stopped reading a lot of the generic female-heroine fantasy and opted for Russ (who will smash your face in), and Martin (whose characters will all smash your face in, regardless of sex), and deadly courtesans like Jaqueline Carey's Kushiel (or Louise Marley's books). I've tried very hard to read people like Elizabeth Haydon, Kristen Britain, Sarah Zettel, and other women writers with purportedly strong female heroines.

But I just couldn't get into it. Setting falls away in favor of a thin but workable plot, and the interchangeable female heroine can just sort of get dropped into any of these worlds and chew her lip and kick somebody if they irriate her without changing much about the plot (you could also make the argument that this is what many of the Robert Jordan heroines have devolved into, though he gets points because at least the setting's pretty rich). The worldbuilding often feels so thin that I'm uncertain as to why or how these women rose to power in their respective societies except that these are books written in the 21st century, and women running around with swords in feudal societies is considered the Thing to Do. Now, I love myself a good sword-weilding heroine, but you better be really clear about what you're doing.

There have always been women crossdressers in armies, and women are great for making up the ranks of rebel groups (just remember that, historically, once the fighting's done, they're pressed/invited/feel good going back into their more traditional roles). So if you've got a feudal society that's shown as being no different than, say, ancient Greece or Europe circa 1100 ad, I want to know how your woman came by her sword and kept it. And don't give me the cop-out by changing all the names of the countries and saying, "But it's fantasy!" when you've changed absolutely nothing about your pseudo-medieval world except the names and the fact that your woman gets to lead the warrior life baby-free without having access to reliable contraception.

Make me believe you. Please, try. Fantasy or no, worlds have rules.

This is the problem I ran into while reading Naomi Kritzer's Freedom's Gate. Our Heroine, daughter of a freed slave, works for a guy as his errand-runner, basically. She learns to ride and handle basic weapons, self-defense. But I have no idea if she's some kind of anomoly in this society or not, which is called "Greece" and has some djinn and alternative historical bits to it that make it not-Greece. But, basically, it's Greece.

She goes on to join a group of, basically, amazons. An all-female group of rebel fighters, which worked for me. I'm not sure why we needed to get 100 pages of filler in the middle of the book where they spend a bunch of time training without having much to do with the plot, but I guess you have to get a three-book series out of this plot somehow. Extended training scenes help.

The feel of the book felt very familiar to me, and I hopped over to her site and saw that she had, indeed, sold a story or two the S&S anthologies.

And that got me to thinking about how MZB may have nurtured a generation of women writers who all write the same sort of heroine, the same sort of plot, the same sorta-like-X-but-not setting. The same heroine-finding-her-inner-spiritual-strength plot.

No doubt these are quick read books with likable characters and a solid if simple plot. They're marketable. But they're quickly forgettable. I've actually forgotten the main character's name in Freedom's Gate already. I will never forget Martin's Arya even if he ends up killing her. She's that dynamic. And she's a part of a dynamic, complex setting and plot.

Maybe that's the difference between candy trilogy fantasy and true epic fantasy: depth and complexity of setting and character. When I read, I want a whole lot more going on than sorta-like-but-not-really. I get bored with the generics. You can give me a classic trope, you can give me a scullery maid or plucky horsewoman, but she better be *more* than "the plucky horsewoman."

I've already read that book, and it bored me the first time.

I think it's a matter of pushing a book, a plot, characters, concepts, to the next level, and not settling for the easiest way to write the story. It might be comfortable, but it's not memorable.

Finally, the Fucking Weekend

Wow, the day job is shit right now, as my lack of blogging all week aptly illustrates.

Anyway, moving on.

I Wrote 100 Pages of Fiction Last Month

This month, I want to double that.

I Believe in Magic

And I intend to have a very Merry Christmas, thank you, despite my credit card balance.

heh heh

Someday I'll figure that shit out.

One More Reason to Make a Living Writing

So I can stay out late on a Wednesday night and see a political play about Indira Ghandi and eat Thai food with local writers.

You know, I wouldn't have to get up at 5:30 the next morning.

Bah. This fucking job.