"Frostfire" - by Kai Meyer, Chapter 3 (Part 7/7)

[Finally!  I finished the chapter!  You finally get to find out if Mouse makes it around that darn hotel.  Personally I find this chapter to be a bit poky, but if you've stuck with me this far, you're in for some treats.  Soon.  I promise.]

            Her feet sank deeper and deeper into the snowbanks at the hotel walls; she had long since lost the feeling in her toes.  Just a few more steps to the Nevsky Prospect.  The main street might just as well have been on the other side of the world.  It was too late.  Too cold.  Too Outside.

            Her sight blurred completely as she stumbled with the last of her strength past the corner of the building into the flickering gas light.  Here she fell down, rolled in the snow onto her side, saw at a distance the light of the main entrance, gold and brass and the glass revolving door.  Much too far.

            She was so tired.  And now she was warm.  So that was what Kukushka had meant.  Freezing was not terrible, once you were past the worst.  She was so hot.  So cozy, so relaxed.

            Someone was next to her.

            Impossible.  Not so late at night, and in this temperature.

            But indeed, someone was there.  Bent over her.  Stroked her forehead.  And suddenly it was as though the warmth she felt was runnning out of that hand.  Many colors were there at once, bright as a rainbow before her eyes.

            “Poor thing,” whispered a female voice.

            Then the woman’s actions seemed to stiffen, as though all at once she had found something, sensed something.

            “You smell like her!”

            Like who? thought Mouse.  But then it did not matter anymore, because she was being lifted like a half-starved puppy and carried through the light of the lanterns, towards the high entrance crowned with awnings.

            Soon she would be inside again.  In the Aurora again!  The thought gave her new strength.  “I can walk…by myself,” she croaked.

            “Certainly,” said the woman, but made no move to put her down.

            “Please…I…”

            And then she really was let down to the floor, stood on her own feet, right in front of the revolving door that in the summer led to a red carpet.

            Light.  Warmth.  Walls.  Ceiling.

            Safety.

            Mouse stood there, still uncertain, half staggering.  She looked around herself.  The woman had disappeared, but the warmth inside Mouse stayed.  She was no longer freezing.

            Somehow she stumbled through the revolving door.  The long coat caught on it.  Mouse cast it off while walking and let it lie like a lost shadow.  The night porter looked back at her in surprise and called something but she did not heed him.

            Then she was in the stairwell that led to the cellar, held fast to the handrail, hurried downwards.  There could not be enough stone and wood and mortar around her, sprawling into the heights.

            The memory of the woman blurred together with the warmth in her body.  It was still cold in the cellar, but at least not as frosty as the open air.

            Soon Mouse reached her room, the walled cave in the depths of the earth, where she slept during the day and cleaned shoes in at night.  She crouched in front of the hot coal oven, listened to the hiss of the fire, and felt the frozen tears on her cheeks melt away.

Race, Gender, Sexuality, Violence, and the Media

There are posters from this anti-rape campaign all over campus.  It's a great idea, but as often happens, they got so wrapped up in one cause that they damage another.  Observe:  every single couple is color-coordinated - even the white people are divided into the blond couple and the brunette couple - except the gays. 

They are also the only pair where one isn't looking at the other or resting her head trustingly on his shoulder.  Maybe it is because in all the heterosexual posters, it is the girl (victim) looking at the boy, and they did not want to say which gay was being (not) raped.  Still, they could gaze adoringly at each other?  Or at least smile, or put their arms around each other?  Instead of standing awkwardly with their shoulders squished together, glaring at the camera.  Maybe they're holding hands?  I can't tell.  It may or may not have been intentional, but the way the background looks, there seems to be a line running between them, separating them.  Most of the other couples are entwined in some way, making such a view impossible.  While I appreciate the homosexual inclusion, I feel it could have been a bit more inclusive.

So what are these posters really saying?  1.  People can't date outside of their color scheme.  2.  Gays can't date within their color scheme because then you can't tell if they're gay, they might be brothers or just friends or something.  Oh, and 3. Women don't rape.  Granted, I can see where there might be difficulties, but it is certainly not impossible for a woman to rape a man or a woman.  After all, it isn't always a brutal holding down by force - hence the poster campaign.  There's date rape, coercion, drugs, alcohol, etc.

Obviously, chicks dig guys who don't rape.  You can tell by the way she is gazing adoringly up at you.  Guy, you want this hot chick to be clinging to you like this?  Don't rape her, and don't look at her.  The women are trophialized. 

Except in one of the African-American couples towards the bottom, where she is staring at the camera with a little smile as if to say "Yeah.  My boyrfriend's awesome.  He asks.  Girls, you don't have to put up with a guy who doesn't ask."


I get that the posters are trying to pander to the lowest common denominator, hence the "Guys who don't rape get chicks hanging off them."  This, however, promotes trophialization, a word I just made up.  For a definition, watch a chick flick.  Then watch a dude flick.  There's a romantic subplot in the dude flick too, isn't there?  But she doesn't really do anything except have sex with the guy once he saves the day.  In the chick flick, even if it is about something else, the relationship with the guy is a larger subplot.  I just saw the film "Morning Glory" which was not too bad overall but the plot could have been interpreted as "A girl has to choose between her career and her boyfriend."  Guys don't have to choose.  They just get women as prizes.

Going back to race, I can admit there would be problems with an interracial straight couple as well.  Of course the woman is the darker-skinned minority dating a white guy!  Or:  Of course it is the darker-skinned minority preying on the white female.  Or:  Of course the minorities date each other.  So with the gays, it's on equal footing and they are not sexualizing a minority by showing it as the female (that seems like another unfortunate implication right there).  Solution?  Avoid tokenism.  There are three African-Americans, two caucasions, one latino (and considering the posters are also available in Spanish, you'd think there would be more), one gay/interracial, and one Asian (and personally, I think she has the most sickeing facial expression; it's like she's sniffing him).


I also get that there is a target audience of racial minorities, but what about interracial minorities?  Gays?  Especially gays, because they are much less likely to report it - you would have to out yourself twice shamefully, once as homosexual and once as a victim (not saying straight guys can't get raped, but it's more likely to be date rape for anyone).  However, by including an interracial gay couple, they get two minorities for the price of one!

You may think I am missing the point of this entire campaign, and the truth is that I think it is awesome rhetoric to tell guys that sticking their dick in something doesn't make them cooler and that being a gentlemen is manly and sexy.  But like I said at the beginning, they got so focused on their cause they ignored unfortunate implications - and racism is no longer built of laws and institutions, but implications.  Tread carefully, my friends.

"Frostfire" - by Kai Meyer, Chapter 3 (Part 6/7)

(Not that this has anything to do with Valentine's Day.  There's snow, but that's about it.)

            Step by step.  Agonizingly slow.

            The cold would do her in, if she did not walk faster.  She knew that every night people froze on the streets of St. Petersburg.  People without money, without a place to stay.  She, on the other hand, had an entire hotel for herself.  If not for this wall that separated her from it.  And the endless distance to the front entrance.

            She would not make it.  Never.  With every step that she overcame, another one seemed to be added underneath her.  An endless descent into the pitch-black Nowhere.

            She did not even feel hatred for Maxim and the others.  In her was only panic.  All-consuming panic and cold.

            And then she arrived at the bottom.  The tips of her feet tested for the edge of another step, but the next one was sunk deep in the snow.  She had reached level ground, the surface of the mass of snow that covered all of St. Petersburg.

            She sank in, but not especially deep:  She was too light.  She stumbled over the hem of the coat, let out a sob as she fell against the wall of the hotel, and yet somehow kept herself on her feet.  If she fell now, she would not get up.  The emptiness above would press her down into the snow, like the boot of a giant.

            Onward!  Go onward!

            She pushed herself along with her back to the wall.  The wall gave her a bit of support and kept the outside world far away at least in one direction.  That way she did not feel so entirely unprotected.

            It was cruel torture to battle her way to the next corner.  The narrow swath led into a wider alley.  If the fire escape was found on the back side of the Aurora, then this had to be the side wall. From here, the way along it to the Nevsky Prospect and the main entrance seemed to Mouse to be as endless as if someone had demanded for her to walk to Siberia on foot.

            Hopeless, whispered a voice inside her.  You won’t make it.  You’ll die.  Better to just lie here in the snow. Freezing doesn’t hurt, Kukushka had said; you simply go to sleep.

            She did not give up.  Not yet.

            Behind driving curtains of snow she saw a distant shimmer of light:  the end of the alley, the shine of the gas lanterns on the Nevsky Prospect.

            The soft snow under her feet and the much too long coat hindered her.  With her back against the wall, both hands with fingers spread out on the stone, she pushed herself sideways.  She kept her eyes closed now, to block out the Outside World.  The cold ate at her like fire.

            In the blackness behind her eyelids emerged a picture, like a painting, that drifted up to the surface of the dark ocean depths.  A sharp-edged outline.  Towers and battlements that thrust like knives into the raging sky of snow, high up on a harsh rocky cliff.

            Mouse tore her eyes open.  The vision faded away.  Dream snow became real.  The light had come closer, but she felt that her steps kept growing heavier.  Would someone punish Maxim and the others, if she froze out here?  Unlikely.  No one would blame them.  She was, after all, only the Girl-Boy, easier to replace than a broken window pane.

(Translation note of the day:  There is a word in German, "weiter," that can be translated as wide, far, another, or high/stoned.  I definitely got it mixed up in my first draft before I caught myself.  Still, it's hard to decide whether a path is leading to a "distant alley" or a "wider alley" or "one more alley."  Headache.)

What Was I Thinking?

Hello Hello!  I'm still here.  I don't know if you are, though.  Ah well.  I don't take blogging seriously, like some people I've met.  I believe I'm going to consider this my training blog, so that when I'm a published writer and people actually care what I have to say, then I'll know how to say things worth saying.

Blah blah blah aside, I'm doing better and worse on the writing front.  Worse, because I haven't written anything of significance in...well, I'm not even sure.  Since I decided to finally put that nameless Baleful Polymorph that I'd been working on since high school out of its misery and be DONE WITH IT FOR REAL THIS TIME.  I am now free to work on my multitude of side stories that are all so much more interesting! 

...

...

You know, despite being a hideous monster with a broken plot that had gone through so many versions it didn't even know what it was anymore...I don't really feel the same sort of dedication for anything else.  Maybe it was just my age, and now I realize it was crap, I'm hard pressed to come up with something new that isn't.  At this point I'm tempted to take it out of storage, dust off the pieces, and see if there's anything I can stitch together.  But I can't.  It's dead.  As it should be and it's time to move on.

I did say I was doing better, though, and here's why:  I'm taking Creative Writing.  Yep.  I displaced some poor Creative Writing major who won't be able to take any actual CW classes for another semester.  Eh.  They have so many generals and literature components they won't really fall behind.  It seems that a lot of the people in that class aren't CW majors either, so it's a nice laid-back atmosphere for me to finally rid myself of this damn phobia.

For those who haven't been following, I have an absolute terror of sharing my writing with other people - what I like to term "page fright."  What I noticed the first time I had to read a poem in that class, however, is that it was mostly physiological.  I was twitchy and tense and kept fidgeting with a yo-yo while I took deep breaths and tried to keep my vision from blurring.  You know, like I was on the verge of a panic attack.  Only I wasn't actually scared.  It was weird.  And they liked my poem.  Better than some of the others.  A lot of the others.  I'm not going to say there are some bad writers in that class, but some are better than others.

So I think I'll be able to kick this habit, since it seems to be a Pavlovian reflex more than an emotional response.  Problems:  It's exhausting.  Writing a poem every week. Reading twenty poems a week.  What was I thinking?  I'm a prose writer.  I'm sick of poetry, and we're not even halfway through the poetry unit.  There's only one short story required for the class, and  - best part - the professor will not accept fantasy. 

Now, if his rationale had been that traditional High Fantasy requires a great deal of worldbuilding that does not work well in short works - okay.  I can accept that.  But no, he just doesn't like fantasy because he thinks it's crap.  This guy, by the way, writes crime fiction.  Murder mystery detective stories.  Room to judge?  I don't think so.  He also refuses trashy paranormal romance - but you know that several girls are going to write trashy mundane romances anyway.

 Does it matter if a stupid girl is in love with a stupid angsty hipster or a stupid angsty vampire?  At least if there's a vampire, you know that someone's going to bleed eventually.  And you know, just bcause a story is a paranormal romance does not mean it has to be trashy - people just write with that assumption.  The thing is, there are some good mundane stories about lovers - The Time-Traveller's Wife, The Gargoyle - okay, I lied when I said mundane.  But this just proves the point I was going to make anyway!  Fantastical elements do not automatically make a story crap!  It is how you use them that determines the quality of your story.

Better stop now, I'm rambling.  I shall return anon!