Adventures in Seattle

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

June 29, 2011 -- 2:16 p.m.

Updates from the hermit.

Seattle is lovely this time of year, but full of pollen. I keep a spittoon nearby for the purposes of expactoration. Makes me feel like Gaston, or Mulan. What is it with Disney men and spitting, anyway? We had a cherry pit spitting contest back in Montana as part of Polson's cherry festival. And yet, surprisingly, spitting was not considered the height of masculine virility.

My family went to eat Chinese food to celebrate my younger brother's acceptance into UW/my other younger brother's first third of his summer law internship/my acceptance into grad school. As traditional, we ordered the weirdest things we could find on the menu. (At a previous Chinese restaurant, this led to my discovery and addiction to moss soup, which is very good). This meant 'pig ears' and something literally called 'Blood and Guts Stew' for my brother. The cook came out of the kitchen and asked him if he liked it. When he said he did, she went away shaking her head at the crazy Caucasian. We needed her to interpret what the different meats were. I thought the whole thing tasted vile and the intestines felt far too jiggly going my throat. But my brother gobbled down all the wobbly blood cubes (thickened with corn starch, maybe?) and wished there were more. I'll stick with my eggplant, thank you very much. It was quite good.

Pig ears are...well, pretty much like you'd expect. Very chewy. Like nibbling on someone's ear, only you're eating it. (Insert generic Mike Tyson joke here. *Baddabing!*)

Skin Farm is at 70,000 words and counting. It'll probably clock in around 90k. I did a good push but then wrote myself into a corner, but I think I've got a way to write myself out again. I got signed up for writers workshops at Worldcon. I need a new perspective, I can't quite decide whether my first chapter is too exposition heavy or not and I've tainted my writing group. The workshop looks at 8,000 words, so I spent time editing the first three chapters (AGAIN. I swear I've got the things memorized by now!).

I'm still toying with the idea of self-/e-publishing the book. I'm definitely feeling dubious. It seems to me that the best strategy is to wait until you have a sufficient collection to post several books at once and then hold sales trying to entire readers to get the whole series. I've been researching how authors with similar books have been doing, and the answer is pretty hit or miss. The ebook market seems to currently deal with a certain narrow demographic that I suspect will widen over time. One potential problem is categorization. Skin Farm has a young protagonist, but it seems like every other book in Y.A. is a romance first, a science fiction book second. So people looking to read books with male protagonists and limited smooching (Think James Dashner's Maze Runner) might not be shopping in that category. I might have better luck labeling it adult sci-fi. After all, Ender's Game has a young protagonist but adults love it too.

I wish Amazon had more sub-genres. Science fiction/fantasy as a category is much too broad.

Yesterday, I also wrote a 5,000 word short story, a re-write of the classic Cinderella fairy tale that came to me in a dream. Only in this version, she kills everything she touches and uses a glass knife to frame her evil stepmother for murdering Prince Charming's father. Rell's fairy godmother is a glass blower. I wasn't able to work in the step-sisters, but ah well. It's probably a better story idea in theory than in practice, but it felt good to work on something else. When I edit it enough that it makes sense, perhaps I'll post it. Whenever I write short stories, I go into 'fairy tale mode', meaning a lot of jumping around people's heads, heavy narration, and very shallow POV, so it probably isn't very salable, but it was fun to write.

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Good Day

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

June 14, 2011 -- 12:21 a.m.
Good day. I managed to get 3000+ words on Skin Farm done. I also wrote up a 500 word synopsis. I have trouble with synopses, as I think everyone does. I can write ones that are about eight pages long or ones that are about a page long, but no in between. The short one, I cheated by doing the 'and they were tested by various challenges' kind of summary, but I can't think of any other way to do it. For some reason, God's Play seemed easier to shortly summarize even though it was a longer book. I'm not sure why.

There's a part of me that feels guilty for not writing more since I have a bunch of spare time at the moment, but there's only so much I can do before the well goes dry. I have to accept that I can't write at a breakneck pace all the time. I have my limitations.

It helps if I'm writing dialogue or action, then the words just fly by. It's also easier to write beginnings. As I get toward the end, it's harder to punch the keys because of worrying about past chapters and because of the looming sense of import. Your book is almost done. Is it any good? You'd better make it good and choose every word carefully, because the ending will make or break everything that's gone before. Maybe the beginning is important, because it gets people hooked, and maybe the middle is also really important, because it KEEPS people hooked, but the end is the last taste a reader will get of your style, of your philosophy, of your everything.

Which is why endings make me nervous.

***

I'm re-reading Katherine Kurtz's Deryni series. I liked it more when I was younger. It came out of a different age. I've become used to modern conventions, like magic systems with more rules. There's a lot of 'Camber learns a new spell' that can feel deus ex machina. Still enjoy it, though. Like old, familiar friends who've come to visit after so long.

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CONduit 2011 Report -- Are Vampires Hurting Our Girls?

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

June 4, 2011 -- 10:11 p.m.

It's interesting how two people can have two completely different interpretations of a story. For example, my eyes widened at CONduit last weekend when Dragonlance author Tracy Hickman referred to the old folktale Bluebeard as a 'feminist empowerment story'.

In the story, a woman ends up married to a nobleman who tells her she may go into every room in his mansion except the basement. Of course, she goes into that basement while he's away and finds his dead wives hanging on hooks. Before she can escape, the nobleman comes home and tries to kill her, but she delays him long enough that her brothers save her.

I used to love this story, probably because the key the woman uses to open the basement door turns blood red when she uses it and won't scrub clean. Because I was that kind of kid. Bloody keys are cool.

So I've known this story for a long time, and I've always thought of it as a variation on the 'pandora/eve motif' where a woman is punished for her curiosity. The moral of the story is don't disobey your husband, or he might turn into a sociopathic maniac and kill you. A quick browse on the internet reveals that this interpretation is the most prevalent among folklore scholars...or at least among students attempting to sell their papers online. (This is one thing that bugs me on essay-selling web sites--the writing/analysis is usually so poor that if you did buy one and use it, you'd get a bad grade. If you're going to make money selling essays, you ought to at least be selling quality essays.)

However, Hickman's contention is that the Bluebeard story is actually a feminist cautionary tale about abusers. Don't marry someone who's perfect except for the fact he murders people, because the beast will come out in the end.

Now arguing about the legitimacy of an interpretation is somewhat silly--after all, what's the definition of legitimacy? By who's metric do you judge? Hickman's interpretation may have more substantiation than mine, because the female isn't punished at the end for her curiosity--she escapes death and is rewarded by retaining her dead fortune's husband. And Bluebeard killed his first wife even though she couldn't have found the room with the bodies, ergo curiosity may not have been what killed her (although Bluebeard could still have been using the room for something else he didn't want discovered.) So the female character could have been in danger regardless.

But it was more interesting to me how two people could view the same story and take completely different messages away from it. In extension, Hickman served on a panel talking about the modern romantic interpretations of vampires, which basically degenerated into bashing Twilight. (Which bugs me. Not because I like Twilight, because I don't, but because bashing on Twilight is too easy/popular. I never like people who shoot fish in a barrel--that's why I stopped watching South Park. Making fun of Paris Hilton is not a difficult feat of comedy. Same with the Daily Show and it's target on stupid right-wing nutjobs. It's better when it focuses on the nutjobs within the government, instead of the nutjobs commenting on the government.)

Anyway, Hickman views the vampire romance genre as bad because it suggests the monster--the traditional vampire seducer/rapist etc.--can be tamed and loving. He believes it tells women that it's okay to live and love abusers who hunger for blood because love conquers all.

My response, on the other hand, is that the vampire romance is an extension of the traditional romance genre's 'bad boy' with a supernatural twist. That twist gives heaps of wish fulfillment because the (mostly) ordinary girl (stand-in for the reader) is special enough that she's chosen to be privy to a secret world that her peers aren't. Whether it's Sookie Stackhouse or Rachel Morgan, she has a special access to a world of wealth and magic that ordinary mortals can only dream of. Every woman wants to believe they are that special enough to have that kind of access, and every woman loves the hint of danger that comes with the bad boy motif, with werewolves instead of bikers.

Because of my worldview, I tend to look at the vampire romance genre with benign amusement, viewing it as no worse/better than any other romance genre involving a lovable rake. I used to enjoy the books, until I felt the concept got too trite and predictable. Tracy Hickman, on the other hand, views the whole paranormal subgenre as very dangerous indeed.

The point is: Two people can have different ideas about the world, and their interpretations may not touch anywhere.

I was going to segue into stories about bad con etiquette, which seems to be getting worse every year, (including someone having an actual phone conversation during the vampire panel when Tracy Hickman was speaking. A REAL CONVERSATION.), but I've decided to try to be more understanding of other people's worldviews. Even if that worldview includes changing a baby's diaper during a lecture on the carpet two feet in front of my sneakers.

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Mojo

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

May 2, 2011 -- 3:18 p.m.
Bah.

I've lost my mojo.

I said to myself, 'I'm going to spend the whole summer writing and revising. By the end of it, I'm going to have two great novels, and they'll be ready to send out by the time I start my grad school classes, and everything will be so peachy!'

And then...there was...meh.

This hasn't happened to me for awhile. It's been few weeks since I was able to do something remotely productive. I've been able to do little things--write a scene here, revise one there, but mostly I have a big plate of jiggly-squat.

It's possible that I just got burned out trying to do so much last quarter and I need a break. Maybe I need a change of scenery. Maybe I'm just stressed out because my car isn't working, I got moved to a different ward, I just saw my potential workload next year (staring at a school schedule that has advanced statistics/price theory and 9:30 a.m. makes my heart go thud), a single girl in a relationship crazy subculture all heated up over the silly pageantry of the royal nuptials, etc....

But whatever it is, except for small things, there's so much wonder and happiness and joy in my life right now, yet it all feels like it's sitting there at a slight remove. Kind of like when you're at this great party but all you want to do is go home and sleep.

I think it circles back to one idea: Good things stress me out, because I feel like, being so lucky, I'm obligated to do something wonderful to offset the fact I'm not living in a gutter or burning because my husband didn't like my dowry. I'm one of the luckiest, happiest, richest people who has ever existed in the history of the world, and nothing I can do will ever be superb enough to make up for that fact.

We're preprogrammed to root for the underdog. So what happens when we wake up one day and realize that we are the overdog? We're the enemy team in all those dumb sports movies. We don't deserve the success or joy that life handed to us on a platter, and we can never live up to the burden of being awesome enough to deserve our largess.

I think I can't write because I'm too afraid. Too afraid that no matter what comes out, it will never be good enough to justify my existence. At least, in potentia, the pages I write are perfect. Not so when they come out of my fingers.

My friends, my writing groups would make derisive noises at me, reading this, because I do write good things. But are they good enough?

This is the problem with authors' tendency to conflate their work with themselves. If my work = me and my work = not good enough, then, by the associative principle...

Well, you get the picture. The thoughts are stupid. But they're there, lingering in my lizard-y subconscious. I don't want to fail, but I don't know how to succeed either, because the thresh-hold for success to justify my happiness is so outer-space impossible that I would have to be Neal Gaiman on a Gandhi cracker to even brush my fingertips along the bar.

Or maybe it's something else that's making it so hard to look at my books with anything but revulsion. I hope writing all my thoughts down in a nonsensical internet screed will help me overcome this sense of ennui and fear that is clouding my creative processes.

I miss the days when writing was fun. How do I get the fun back?

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Game of Thrones and Gender

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

April 18, 2011 -- 12:29 a.m.

I haven't had a chance to watch the entire first GOT episode yet, but I did take time to start browsing the reviews and see what critics were thinking.

A mix of good and bad, mostly. And a bit of the expected pooh-poohing of the fantasy genre by mainstream critics. I have no problem with the critics who disliked the show...from the first clip of the first episode, I kind of had a "well, this is pretty good but also a little meh" feeling, partly because some of the acting didn't live up to the gorgeous scenery and cinematography, and partly from fannish gripes: ie, it seems like they de-awesomified Catlyn, I could shoot a bow and arrow better than Bran when I was his age, etc. Stupid complaints, really. It looks like they went above and beyond--I saw a documentary talking about how the right-handed actress for Arya had to learn to do everything left-handed and I was like, Really? Even I'm not obsessed enough to care about that. Besides the acting, there were also some odd...SQUEEEEE! TYRION! OMG! SQUEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway. (*Brushes off soiled dignity*)

But when critics go outside the show and start criticizing the audience for fantasy novels, I start getting a little pissy. I thought this kind of talk would lose some of its steam after Return of the King's Best Picture Oscar.

Par example, from the New York Times:

"The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half."

Um...(*raises hand*). Isn't it a little patronizing of said reviewer to decide what females do and do not enjoy? And, of course, it couldn't possibly be that a reviewer from the New York Times who scoffs at the entire fantasy genre might be moving in different circles than those who enjoy such literature. Or perhaps she thinks she can recognize a fantasy fan by sight? Because we save our dragonlance t-shirts for the conventions, we must not exist?

I don't have the surveys on me, but between 40-60 percent of fantasy readers are female. I suspect G.R.R.M.'s demographic tips male because of his cruelty to the characters, but if you look at Tolkien's fans, I bet it's a different story. Just because female nerds are still more socially stigmatized than their male counterparts (this may not be true--but I know I certainly draw funny looks every time I plop down at a M:TG table) and so don't wear our geeky cred so openly, doesn't mean we don't exist. [I've actually been thinking about trying to found a sci-fi/fantasy book group at my local college, coincidentally enough.]

I haven't bothered to send her an angry email. The internet backlash has already begun. (I wrote this before perusing the web to see what fire has been unleashed, and the Huffington Post does a better job of summing up the stupidity of this review than I do.) I figure the review writer will just ignore the electronic tempest or say she was using rhetorical hyperbole to make a point (I have a stuffed unicorn named Hyperbole, by the way. Speaking of nerdness). But I thought I'd make my representative stand on teh internets, anyway. If you don't like the show or the fantasy genre, fine. If you don't like the feminist implications of Martin's work, fine. But don't assume that a group that you obviously have no knowledge of is a cul-de-sac of white, horny, pimply Comic Book Guy lookalikes dressed in elf ears just because that's what your television has told you. Because we're all around you, girlfriend. Fat and thin, near-sighted and not, socially awkward or well-adjusted. And some of us don't like being talked down to by reviewers who assume that everyone of a single gender will share a single opinion.

***

In other news, I get to go to grad school. And they gave me a scholarship and research-assistanceship that means I won't have to pay a cent for tuition. We turned in our final for Brandon Sanderson. I finished 80,000 words in three and a half months, and turned in another 10,000 word outline. Yay me!

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Interview btw Rothfuss and Sanderson + 8-bit Horribleness

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

March 18, 2011 -- 8:08 p.m.

There's a fun interview between Pat Rothfuss and Brandon Sanderson. I particularly liked it because it focussed a lot more on the writing process than the material they're writing.

Also, check out Dr. Horrible the 8-bit game.



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Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

March 18, 2011 -- 6:24 p.m.

They've cast the lead role for Hunger Games. Jennifer Lawrence. She's a little too...um...boobsy for your average starving 16-year-old, but it is Hollywood after all. The book has an interesting and realistic mixed message about commercialized teenage beauty (manufactured beauty is evil but...ooh, look at my pretty dress!) So hiring such a pretty actress could potentially add another layer of meta-subtext to the film. Looking at her, you can definitely see why Peeta and Gale might fight over the woman. We'll see what Miss Lawrence looks like as a raven-haired archer.

Of course, I recognize I'm adding another level of meta-critique to my own blog post by giving my reaction to her casting based on appearance alone, but I've never seen any of the movies she's acted in. The clips of Winter's Bone I saw online looked like she was a creditable actress.

I didn't realize the director they chose also directed Pleasantville, one of my favorite movies of all time, less for the story--though I did enjoy the portrayal of teenage sexuality, particularly how it didn't take the easy way out and just go 'sex is good, adults are bad' like so much modern media--and more for the cinematography and the creative use of color. He was also able to coax a really memorable, strong performance from then relatively unknown actress Reese Witherspoon. I hope he brings a similar touch to Hunger Games. I'm looking forward to seeing who they cast for the other groups, especially Haymitch. I've always pictured Haymitch being played by the actor of Javert who did the Les Mis 10th Anniversary 'dream cast' tv production. The problem with most older actors is they don't look beaten down enough. Nicholas Cage would make a surreal choice for the part. I suspect the director won't cast any big names, but Cage would certainly bring the crazy.

FUN FACT: Reese Witherspoon played a teenage girl in a movie called "Twilight," which was released the same year they released Pleasantville. Thanks, Wikipedia!

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Mouse Me!

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

March 17, 2011 -- 4:04 a.m.

So I was watching Nostalgia Critic and found out there's a mouse named after me in Secret of Nymh 2. Jenny McBride, the mouse.

Weird. It would be more awesome if the movie looked better.

This has happened to me before. For instance, the local a capella singers once did a stage group where they staged a fake date with one "Jennifer McBride" who was one of their members doing a drag thing. It was a little surreal.

Of course, the Nymh mouse is not nearly so cool as Neil Gaiman as a...well, I'm not sure what he's supposed to be.




'Neil Gaiman, what are you doing on my falafel!' has been my catchphrase since I accidentally stumbled onto this episode when I was too lazy to turn the channel after watching Red Dwarf reruns. (Why does my local PBS affiliates run Sesame Street/Arthur at midnight anyway? Bit past the kid's bedtimes, one would think.)

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My Heart Atwitter

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

March 11, 2011 -- 11:07 a.m.

Guess who this is referring too.

Guess who is freaking out and shrieking maniacally at her walls.

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Three Million Dollar Idea

Posted by Unrepentant Escapist

March 9, 2011 -- 11:10 p.m.

Too hilarious. Newbie writers...it doesn't work like that! Don't be that guy!

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