San Francisco: Days 7-8

So I left off on the Mark Freeman interview. 

Later that night, I saw "Keep the Lights On."  My first reaction was:  woobie of all woobies, Sarah Monette would go apeshit for this.  I am mostly able to use normal people words, though I still have some rather strong emotions, which I'll get into later.

"Keep the Lights On" is darkly comedic or comically dark. I thought it was going to be angsty, but I wasn't expecting to care.  But the first scene is a guy surfing through a phone sex line, and the audience just started giggling, and I was like "Oh, I'm not the only one who thinks this is funny?  All right.  I'm down with that."  Of course, then the film gets into the Danish puppy-gay's drug addict boyfriend, and their painfully co-dependent relationship, but all the characters are still so fun and quirky that you honestly feel bad for them.  At least I did.

Yesterday we interviewed Ira Sachs, the director of "Keep the Lights On."  And the actor who played the drug-addict boyfriend of the Danish puppy was there as well.  And...I kind of asked him if I could hug him.  And I may have said something about puppies.  And I feel really awkward and embarrassed about the whole thing, but my only regret is that I didn't get a photo.  It's on film, though.

And if you know me, you know that I don't like touching people and I don't like men, so I don't even know why I did that, except that I have a strange relationship with ficitonal characters.  I relate to characters better than I do to real people.  And an actor, especially a woobie (woobie = kicked puppy.  Adorable and tortured.) messes with my perception because he's a person, but he's a character, but he's a person that I can physically hug instead of just feel woobied about.  And he's a ginger.  Ginger trumps gender.

(I just realized:  Ginger + gay + drug addict + abusive co-dependent relationship + prostitution = Felix from Doctrine of Labyrinths.  It's a book series by Sarah Monette and one of my favorites of all time, and I think I know why I got all gushy now.  Ah well.)

Yesterday was a long day.  We were planning on interviewing Frameline volunteers, but we were all too drained, and I had nearly burst into tears during the morning meeting (don't worry; it's all on film), because for the first time I felt like I couldn't handle it.  So I only went to one movie, "Children of Srikandi," a documentary about queer women in Indonesia, which was brave and an interesting concept, but no "Kuchu."  Very scripted and not informative.

After that I went home and I took time to read a book and be alone, except for when one of the boys barged in my room demanding to know why I wasn't out having fun.  Because my idea of fun doesn't involve alcohol and penises?  Spending time with a book for the first time in over a week was glorious.

But if "Kuchu" made me want to become an activist, "Lights" made me want to write again.  I haven't been able to write since I got here, not just because I've been so busy but because my mind feels really unstable right now.  Not in a bad way, just that it's changing so fast and being opened to so many things, I cannot focus on the creative process long enough to create something.  I'm thinking so much, but I don't have time to process anything, and writing is just a way to process life, isn't it?

San Francisco -Days 0 and 1

As I may have mentioned, I am taking a trip to SAN FRANCISCO as part of a summer course.  What kind of course, you ask?  Well, technically it's in the Women's Studies department, but really it's gay (Ah, you say, That makes sense now.) and movies.  We get to attend the Frameline Film Festival and write critiques of the films, as well as film our own documentay.  My group's assigned topic is activist filmmakers, which we kind of morphed into film festivals as sites of social change.

We are staying in a condo owned by a fantastic Australian man and his partner.  In the back there is a lovely bamboo garden that is going to be a refuge for many of us during the hectic coming weeks.  I had a picture, but my computer is being weird and won't let me show you. 

That first night after we unpacked, half the class went out with the professors for sushi.  Have you ever had sushi with a professor?  It's intereresting.  Especially when they drink sake.  It was only sometime that night that I realized I was actually IN FREAKING SAN FRANCISCO, and it made me a little loopy.  I'm still a little loopy.

Because today I got to see the HRC building that used to be Harvey Milk's camera shop, and the Harvey Milk Memorial Elementary school (seriously, everything's named after that guy here.  He's like L.E. Phillips is in Eau Claire.)  And THE Pride Flag (which I don't think is as big as the, what, 20x30 one we have in EC?  But it was actually flying, so who could tell), and I wandered through the Haight (which I learned is not spelled "Hate," which makes a lot more sense, since it's where all the peace and love hippies hang out).

But if you go to San Francisco, and you're queer, the Castro Theater is the gay mecca.  Harvey Milk appears on the screen, and the whole place bursts into cheers and applause - because everyon knows who he is, everyone worships him, and they're not afraid to show it.

It's not like a janky old movie theater.  Think of a fancy opera house - like the Ordway in Minneapolis, though I was put more in mind of the Semperoper in Dresden.  I was seated on the end of our group, next to a nice stranger who explained the references in the old Frameline trailers that they always play on opening night, and I told him about us being a student group from Wisconsin. 

This year the opening movie was "Vito," a documentary about the life of activist Vito Russo.  If you don't know about him, you should, and a good way to learn about him is through that documentary.  First the guy spent ten years writing a book on Hollywood portrayal of gay characters while running an activist group, and then in the eighties he got big into AIDS activism - even before he himself was diagnosed with AIDS.  Around that point in the film, you could hear the entire theater sniffling.  I was literally handing out tissues left and right - one to my classmate and one to the nice stranger next to me.  Seriously, they say Minnesota nice, but we're also reserved - we don't talk to strangers in the theater.

I love this city.  I thought going to college and befriending other gays was a mind-blowing moment for me, but coming here, and seeing the gay everywhere - it's changing my worldview.  But since I am a cynical bitch (and proud!) I realize I cannot live on a gay island for the rest of my life.  And it makes me think of what kind of narrative I want to create.  The worlds where sexual orientation doesn't matter and everyone is effectively bisexual - those are nice fantasy and commentary, but that's not what we aspire to.  Gays and straights are always going to be different, the way men and women are always going to be different.  But that doesn't mean we can't get along.  What we need is more peaceful crossover between the gay and straight worlds.

Looking at the odd little shorts I've jotted down since I started this course and have had queer theory coming out of my ears, I realize that is something of a recurring theme:  a gay jock rooming with a straight nerd, a sibling too young to understand what her brother means when he says he's gay, a straight-identified girl whose attempts to find her lesbian friend a date cause her to question her own sexuality.  Crossover.  Communication.  And with increased presence and visibility, I believe that we can show straight people they have no reason to fear us, and gay people they have no reason to fear straights.

But I do love this city.  I have decided, with the help of one of my professors who has lived just about everywhere, that I would much rather go to Monterey than New York.  I have a plan for my life!  I know what I'm going to do when I graduate!  And I'm no longer panicking!  San Francisco has done wonderful things for me.

In Defense of the Fantastic

Here's the thing:  My Creative Writing professor assigned us a short story to write.  It can be "about anything you want.  Except elves."  I had mised thoughts on that.  On one hand, I was thinking "I know, right?  I f***ing hate elves."  And on the other:  "Sure, elves are stupid, but they don't have to be.  You could write an elf detective story if you wanted to."

Hmm.  I'll have to get back to you on that.

The point is, fantasy is what you make it.  That is what it used to mean to "fantasize" - to come up with something completely new.  Not to blindly follow the  Tolkien-Eddings paradigm.  Tolkien knew what he was doing when he wrote and epic quest, drawing on all sorts of mythology stuff.  That is why the only thing resembling epic fantasy I can read anymore is The Last Rune series by Mark Anthony; because he, like Tolkien, pays attention to the epic myth, so that even though he tropes up the wazoo, he still manages to convey a sense of awesome.

That and I have two-inch thick nostalgia goggles.

So what if you don't like myths?  They're silly, outdated, nonsensical, boring.  Guess what?  You can still write fantasy.  Set it in modern day?  Urban fantasy!  Set it in a world with technology analogous to our own but they have MAGIC?  Go right ahead!  That is the whole point of fantasy.  You can do whatever the heck you want.

Take Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series.  Sure, it has its fair share of traipsing across the countryside, but there are saints and churches and random French and factories - and that's just background details she throws in to mess with your head.  Monette also throws out your expectations.  You think the wizard is the hero, but he goes insane and has to be dragged across the countryside by his half-brother, and once he gets better you think they're going to be all buddy-buddy, but the wizard is a complete douchebag in the second book, and the one character who is pure evil does not have any dastardly plots to take over the world.  There are no epic battles.  Felix and Mildmay have enough on their hands just trying to save themselves, without saving the world.

In the same vein Sarah Micklem's Firethorn has nothing whatsoever to do with traditional fantasy.  She does all her own worldbuilding, the characters are mostly jerks, and even the ones that are a bit nicer are very not okay by modern standards - but it works in-universe.  The magic is so subtly done you sometimes forget it is there - about all there is is that the main character can see in the dark - and the religion is so intricate I need to start a new sentence.  There are two main types of religion in fantasy.  The pantheon that doesn't do anything, and the annoyingly meddlesome pantheon.  Firethorn has both.  Seriously.  The characters attribute events to divine intervention appropriately, but the reader can still shake her head and say "You silly pagan," if so desired.

And now for the counterexample.

Havemercy.

It is essentially Doctrine of Labyrinths fanfic.  Sure, they made their own world, but they wanted to do esactly what Sarah Monette did.  There's the gay wizard, but he doesn't go insane, and his love affair reads like a slash.  There are the long-lost brothers, who have nothing at stake in their relationship.  All the authors really made up was mechanical dragons, and that is not enough to support the overlarge cast of underdeveloped characters.

Now, what did they do wrong?  They did not write fantasy.  They wrote paradigm, only instead of Tolkien-Eddings, they just used Sarah Monette.  But they completely missed the point.  In copying the elements, they neglected to copy the style.  Tolkien wrote travelogues, so he knew how to write traipsing across the country (your milage may vary).  Monette knows everything there is about the Elizabethan era, and she reads nonfiction everything for fun.  Micklem read army survival handbooks and memoirs - her whole first book is an army waiting for a war.  Not one to save the world.  And the war does not even start until the next book.  The problem with Havemercy is that the authors did not know what they were writing; they just blindly followed what they though they should be writing.  Take the gay character.  Did any of your gay friends hook up because they were thrown into awkward physical situations by the writer?  It sounds like an oxymoron, but fantasy needs to be realistic. 

Sure, you make up a few rules, but humanity remains the same, and that is the strength of fantasy.  Fiction deals mostly in the realm of what is.  Yes, there is a certain amount of imagination in coming up with it, and you do actually face many of the same issues with worldbuilding, but in fantasy, you don't have to match the real world.  It is more than just laziness; you can escape the usual explanations and arrive at deeper truths.  Anything is possible.  Anything. 

Take advantage of it.

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!

The Plague Episode

Have you noticed in series that are longer than trilogies, the authors seemed stumped for that many sub-villains and minor conflicts and will throw in a plague, just to change things up?  Generally of a magical cause, and the hero traipses about the countryside some more until he finds the cure, and everything's fine by the time the next book rolls around.  Unless there has been a token death in the party.  Surprisingly, this is not a trope - there is a "Plague," a "Mystical Plague," and a "Find the Cure," but none are quite what I am talking about here in terms of the episode.

As anyone who has read Albert Camus' The Plague or has a decent knowledge of history (or even current events) is well aware, plagues...don't exactly work like that.  People get sick.  And they go to the resident witch-doctors, who are stumped, but do the best they can.  More people get sick.  The town goes into quarantine.  Fear.  Boredom.  More fear.  More boredom.  Unless you're actually a doctor, but even then finding treatments, cures, and vaccines is really tricky even with modern medical technology.

There is no magical cure, because there is no magical cause. That does not stop people from trying.  The Jews got blamed for the Black Death in Europe - partly because they were the only people washing their hands and so weren't getting sick right away.  This led to lynchings and hate crimes.  After all, what is a hate crime but fear+boredom?  Nothing like a crisis to fuel xenophobia.

The miracle cure is pure wish-fulfillment; sickness is an enemy we cannot fight, and we humans don't deal well with helplessness.  Even in modern western society, we have flus and cancers - we can take preventative measures, but sometimes not even that is enough.  Illness is something universal that has a profound impact on the human psyche - and yet much of modern fantasy literature boils it down to a cure-Macguffin.  This happens in part because the plague is a single episode, not the story in itself as Camus made it.  It lessens the impact.

Dear fantasy writers, if you are going to write a plague story, read Camus and not any of the following.  While Novik is a historian-goddess and has probably read Camus and more, I am still approaching the fourth Temeraire book with caution, as it seems to be that series' plague-episode, and this is usually what Plague Episodes look like:

Plague Episodes in Fantasy Literature:

Temple of the Winds (Sword of Truth book 4) by Terry Goodkind – a witch releases a magical plague from a box to mess with the hero.  The hero and his girlfriend are forced to marry other people in order to cure the plague.  It doesn’t really make sense in context.  The hero gets the plague in the end, but he gets better.  One of the token lesbians dies.

Briar’s Book (Circle of Magic book 4) by Tamora Pierce – a careless witch dumps some magical toxic waste in the sewers, starting a plague. Luckily, the plucky kids notice things that lead the cleverer adults to a cure.  They’re healer-mages, so it works.  A friend of the main character who only appears in that book dies.  The main character mentor gets sick, but he calls her back from the edge of death.  It’s a kid’s book.  Curiously, this breaks my aforementioned pattern by being the last book in the quartet, but the stories are self-contained and switch viewpoint character for each.  Also interesting that there seem to be a lot of book fours.  "Four" is a homonym with "Death" in Chinese.

Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods (Underland Chronicles book 3) by Suzanne Collins – yes, that Suzanne Collins.  Gregor and his companions go on a quest to find a plague, then find out someone dropped a test tube in a lab where the “good guys” were designing a bioweapon.  Gregor’s bat and mother get sick, but neither die (it is Suzanne Collins though; it’s just that she saves the heartbreaking death for the last book).  No named characters die of the plague that I recall.

The Lost City of Faar (Pendragon book 2) by D.J. Machale – turns out to actually be a mass poisoning by the villain intending to start a war.  Only book two so plot is still formulaic.  Secondary character’s parents die, but he’s supposed to be an orphan because of his destiny, so they would have vanished somehow anyway.

The Keep of Fire (The Last Rune book 2) by Mark Anthony – a plague that causes people to burst into flames is affecting both worlds.  Hero and companions travel to title location and send the radioactive magical rock that is causing the plague into space, thus ending the plague.  It makes sense in context.  Main character’s bestie in our world dies, which is sad.  Other plot-relevant people get sick and die.

Lady Friday (Keys to the Kingdom book 6) by Garth Nix – embarassingly enough, I don’t really remember.  I think the title character was causing the Sleepy Plague, and once she was defeated…there was an extra step in there.  It didn’t just go away.  Main character’s friend got sick, but got better and rallied the defense in our world and took care of the plague victims.

Salamandastron (Redwall) by Brian Jacques – the inhabitants of Redwall abbey get sick with a mysterious illness, and Thrugg the otter journeys to a mythical mountain to find a mythical flower guarded by a mythical eagle which is the only cure.  He finds it of course, and the eagle is nice enough to fly it back for him.  It’s Redwall, so there is some token death, though the token death occurs in a different subplot.

Warriors by Erin Hunter – a recurring subplot where it is actually done well.  Cats get sick.  Sometimes a lot at the same time.  Sometimes they die.  Sometimes there are herbs.  Sometimes the herbs are not enough.  No questing for a special cure to a special illness.

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner – as a joke when people would ask her “What happened next?” she would say “Oh, the next year there was a diphtheria outbreak and they all died.”  Which, in a pre-industrial pseudo-medieval society, is not entirely unlikely.  Though she did eventually write a sequel that was devoid of a diphtheria outbreak.

(Top) Five Books About Griffins

Why am I doing all these lists?  Because I'm bored!  And I read too much!  And I've been watching a lot of Nostalgia Chick videos!  And because I can!  And because I just finished a griffin book.

I like griffins.  You may have guessed from the title of this blog, even though it is a word I got form watching a spelling bee years ago and apparently means messy handwriting and has nothing to do with griffins.  The thing is that griffins are way underdone, especially compared to, say, dragons, or wolves.  So instead of being a "Top" Five, this is really just a list of the five books about griffins that I've read and ranked.

5.  The Griffin Mage Trilogy - Rachel Neumeier

This one I only read a couple years ago, but I had to do a library search by "griffins" because I could remember neither title nor author, nor the names of any of the characters, nor exactly what happens.  I only read the first book, Lord of the Burning Sands. So let's see.  There's this girl, who's an orphan, and lives on a horse ranch (points for not making it a generic farm) and then a bunch of griffins swoop in and make the area a desert because they have some kind of Grogromon effect on the environment.  And then they kidnap the girl because she has some special magic.  And...stuff happens, and there's a big fight at the end.  Oh, and there was some sub-plot with this soldier boy, and apparently certain humans have a kind of magic where they can control a particular type of animal, and the big twist at the end is when the soldier boy discovers he can control griffins.  Which makes them animals or what?  They seemed pretty sentient.

What I did not like about Neumeier's griffins is that she focused on making them savage and unhuman, which to me made them uninteresting. 

4.  The Fallen Moon Trilogy - K.J. Taylor

I was at the new bookstore, and I felt like I had to buy something, so when I saw The Dark Griffin  I was like "Hey!  I like griffins.  It can't be too bad."  And it wasn't.  More on that later.

My first big hurdle reading this was when I realized that people are riding these griffins.  They're  bond creatures.  But it is fairly integral to the plot, so I got over it.  And I mean, I had a griffin-rider fantasy when I was, like, twelve, so I can't really judge.  The prose isn't the best - it reads like a draft, but a draft by a rather good writer.  It's like in the original draft she wrote "And then the baby griffin grew up on its own" and by the final draft had to wrack her brains for details that really didn't matter to the plot overall.  And there there was the food.  Literally.  Her characters always eat "food."  As in:  "The food was plain but nourishing" or "His house had been ransacked, the food trampled into the floor."  Again, it seems that she put it in as a placeholder, and by the time she got to later drafts was like "Crap.  What do they eat instead of pizza and ramen?"  Her answer:  Bread.  Cheese.  Dried meat.  Apples.  Oh, and cabbage.  That was the one original item mentioned, only the thing is, you don't eat cabbage raw.  You have to cook it.  So what do they do with cabbage in...whatever the country was called?  Steam?  Boil?  Bake?  Fry?  Pickle?  Or do they eat it raw?  At one point the main character eats stew at an inn, and that's as excitingly detailed as it gets.  Read Redwall if you need inspiration, girl.

The only real problem I had with the book, though, was the characters.  They were so flat I could not tell that the one chick was the main character's actual established girlfried until they were having sex.  This was about three or four conversations in, and I had been wondering if they were a pre-couple.  There were so many times during the book I was practically shouting "Why are you doing that?  You have no motivation!  Real people don't talk like that!  Real people don't act like that!  Real people aren't motivated like that!"  Namely the part where the main characters friends all try to help him feel better after his griffin dies (oops, slight spoiler, but it's fairly early on).  And I'm thinking Dudes, his bond creature just died.  Some 'verses don't have people survive that, though that's usually the telepathic ones (points for no telepathy).  And the friends...you don't get any real sense of friendship.  The author was just "Hey, main character must have social life (insert friends here)"  None of them have a distinct personality and one can tell their only purpose is to be the failed support network.  They are characters playing a role, not people.  Also, more amusing than anything else - the one friend seems to be the only cop in town.  I mean, it's implied that it's kind of a bigger city, but every single time the cops show up, Bran is there.  Every.  Single.  Time.

I will give credit where credit is due, though, and say that the book has a very good plot.  As in I want to read the sequel even though the characters are flat as paper.  It's a Martinesque rather than a Tolkienesque story, meaning (I think; I'm just making this up and I've only read about three chapters of GRR Martin) that it is a human story with twisty political gimmicks, rather than a quest to destroy a Great Evil*.  The main character is sent to capture a wild griffin and told "Oh yeah, you'll be fine"  when really that sort of operation takes a specialized team, but he manages it even though his griffin partner dies.  And there's a mini-conspiracy against him, and this racism subplot that makes it really obvious the writer is white.  The second plotline follows the titiular dark griffin that he captured.  On the whole though, it's a really intriguing story despite the blandness of the chracters.  Plus there are references to Diana Wynne Jones, I swear there are.  The oranges.  The arena that is totally Costamaret.  You don't...?  Oh never mind, just keep reading.
(*Just read on author's website that it is supposed to be a villain origin story.  I am intrigued.  Library, y u no have sequels?!  I don't like it so much I want to spend more money on it.)

3.  The Black Griffin - Mercedes Lackey

Yes, I ranked a Mercedes Lackey book this high.  I actually kind of like this one.  Mostly because of the griffins.  This book is about...um...a sort of masseuse/psychotherapist/companion who hangs around an army camp in the middle of a war.   And so do a bunch of griffins.  Okay, they're fighting in the war, but I think the reason I actually like this book is because it is more character driven, rather than trying to destroy the Great Evil.  The war is there, but it is background to the story until the very end.  The other books in the trilogy are meh at best - the second book could show them rebuilding after the war, except by then everything's kind of rebuilt and Lackey has to introduce a new conflict from the Other Continent.  And the third book is a Disney sequel where the offspring of the main cast go off on adventures that are not nearly as interesting as the parents'.  But the first book is solid.

2.  The Firebringer Trilogy - Meredith Ann Pierce

Yeah, okay, the main focus in this series is on the unicorns, but the griffins are a major subplot, and there's one of the cover of the first book.  They are shown as enemies of the unicorns at first, but then they are shown to have their own culture and traditions, and eventually make peace when the unicorns decide to drive the wyverns out of their ancestral lands instead of squatting on the griffins' ancestral hunting grounds (really, the griffins were only hunting them because they drove out the deer.  It's all just a misunderstanding.).  Only it gets a little weird when the one griffin has a romancey relationship with one of the unicorns, and it's implied that they have offspring, which is like, wut?  I would kind of like to read something about that, though.  The offspring, that is.  Except it would end up being full of race-angst, so maybe it's better she left it at that.

1.  Dark Lord of Derkholm/Year of the Griffin - Diana Wynne Jones

Of course I rank Jones at the top.  Am I biased?  Only because she's a damn good writer.  Was, I mean.  Fuck.

Book 1 of the...duology...introduces Wizard Derk genetic engineering wizard, and his genetically engineered griffin offspring.  Plus the two human ones.  The rest of the plot is about how the pseudo-medieval fantasyland is being exploited for tours from a parallel world.  Wizard Derk is bullied into running the operations for a year, and his kids, griffin and human, all pitch in and help.  The second book is after the tours are abolished, and follows one of the griffin children at college dealing with the aftermath of the tours.  And yes, that makes it sound like a Disney sequel, except 1) Elda was around in the first book, she was just too young to do much, and 2)  Even though it is technically less epic, it is still quite interesting - perhaps even more interesting.  It's not a sequel, it's completely different, slightly related story.  I like these griffins (okay, they were my first impression of griffins) because they are people, not talking animals or mysterious "others."  Lackey actually managed to do that too.  Huh.  Whodathunk?

But I wanted another sequel, dammit!  I wanted to see Elda and Flury hook up!  That would have been so adorable!  And I wanted to see the Other Continent.  And now Jones is dead and there will be no more, ever!

Anyway, we have, in ascending order:  Griffins as Grogromon, Griffins as bond-creatures, Griffins as created race, Griffins as...other race, and Griffins as created race AND other race on the Other Continent.  Griffins as different magic-users from humans, griffins as the ONLY magic-users (I thought that was pretty cool, especially since the didn't spend a lot of time on exposition, just snuck it in there periodically), griffins as the same sort of magic-users as humans, griffins not exactly using magic any more than anyone else, and griffins as mostly the same sort of magic-users with cultural and personal variation.

Shortlist:  Squire by Tamora Pierce, in which there is a griffin on the cover and the main character takes care of a baby griffin for a while which does absolutely nothing to further the plot.  The griffins are just part of a magical ensemble and aren't really important.  And it's Tamora Pierce.

That's about all I had to say about griffins.  Or, well, books.  I realize I may very well be obligated now to read Game of Thrones if I'm going to be making claims like that the Tolkienist movement has now split into Eddingsian and Martinesque factions.  Or maybe I'll just stay with my indie-fantasy.

I like griffins.  I've had a griffin story on backburner for years.  Must write before they become the new dragons...do you think that could ever happen?  There's been a lot of indie dragon deconstructions lately, so they might be on their way out.

Hmm.

Cleaning up the Mess

So, back in November I participated in 30 days of awesome hell called NaNoWriMo.  I ended up with 50,000 words of garbage, and have made it my goal for January - NaNoEdMo - to sort through it and look for anything worth saving.  Well, initially I set out intending to create a readable second draft, but...yeah.  That's not going to happen.

So how do I edit?  I normally don't get this far, so I'm making this up as I go along.  Of course, that's what I did when I first started writing.  Heck, that's what I still do, so I don't know what I'm complaining about.  Anyway, I borrow techniques from several writers I respect (note "respect," not "like").  First step is the read-through.  This is why EdMo is January and not December, besides the fact that in December you are too burned out to even think about writing.  You have to read it as though it is not your own work.  The month-long interval gives you some distance, so that you can read as a reader and not a writer.  Usually it's not as bad as you remember, at this point.

Of course, "not as bad as you thought" is not the same as "good."  On the second read-through, you are allowed to make notes about what needs to be improved - the first time through, you are not allowed to criticize.  I realized very quickly that none of the actual scenes were salvageable.  I had to create a whole new outline for the story I ended up with, rather than the story I began with.  I made notes about which scenes can be used for reference (more just to make me feel that this is a second draft and not a complete overhaul), but over half of it has to be written from scratch, and I have no idea how some of the new plot points are supposed to happen. 

In fact, looking at it all now, I realize I have two choices.  Well, three, but the third doesn't really count.  I can 1)  Add in the new scenes.  Somehow.  2) Cut down what I have and strip it down into a short story.  3)  Toss it all out and give up (You can see why this one doesn't count, but technically it is an option)

I think I might end up going with 2, and possibly taking it a step further and just making it backstory.  You see, my novel did a funny thing this year.  Around page 55, which was about halfway through the month this year, I had nothing left for the story I was trying to write.  So I wrote a slightly related story about witch hunters.  No planning, no prior imaginings, just a desperate gimmick to add words and keep creativity flowing.

Predictably, that is the part of the month I think has the best chance of being saved.

That is what happens during NaNo.  If you look at the pep talk of successful (published) NaNovelist Erin Morgenstern and her novel The Night Circus, her story is that when her NaNovel wasn't going anywhere, she sent her characters to a circus, which turned out to be much more interesting than the original story.  Now she's published and there are over a hundred requests on her book at the library, so I probably won't get to it until after break.  The point is that writing is a process of discovery.  Creation is discovery.  That's what makes it interesting, more so than arranging information into an essay or solving a math problem.  You have control over the novel, but at the same time, the novel has power over you.

Going to stop now before I get too postmodernly semantical.  Have to get back to that editing.  Or possibly that new story with the shapeshifter that's lurking in the back of my mind...

Re-emerging Into Reality

You may have noticed that I have been somewhat less diligent about posting in this month of November.  That is because I have been participating in a cult group madness challenge called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month.  50,000 words.  30 days.  One writer.

Okay, not one writer.  That is what is so wonderful about NaNo.  Writing is by nature a solitary activity, and sitting in a group of people all absorbed in their own laptops writing their own novels does not sound like a party by anyone's standards.  Still, it is a great way to stay motivated.  I tend to write in creative spurts, but I have a hard time finishing.  I get about half or two-thids of the way through, and the story starts to sag, and I start to see all the places I went wrong, and I want to start over and fix things.  And I get to a point where I don't know where to go next and I don't really care.

But with NaNoWriMo, every word counts.  Rule #1 is DO NOT DELETE.  Rule #2 is DO NOT GIVE UP.  I was up to being seven days behind, but I made up the difference in the last few weeks and pulled across the finish line with hours to spare.

I have done NaNo several times in the past, and this was a year of firsts for me.  It was the first year I made an outline the night before from a story I thought of that day.  It was the first time I threw out that outline on the first day and started with a story that had been smoldering in my head for a while.  And it is the first year that I re-started on the second day with a completely new story that had been gestating but I had not considered ready to be born; but it was my most viable option.  It is the first year I had no idea where the story was supposed to go.

That is another thing about NaNo.  It forces you to be creative.  For the first 20k or so I was writing myself in circles.  Then I added witch hunters.  I never thought I would until I realized that I needed something new.  And there they were.  That got me close to 40k before that arc came down.  The rest was a first person account filling in the gaps of the first arc.  Note:  First person in lovely for wordiness.  You can throw in so much opinionation and asides and rants.  It's wonderful.

Then I was still about a thousand short and spat out half a bonus scene with the witch hunters.

Every year after that first one I have told myself that I won't do NaNo - I don't have time, I don't any good ideas, I'm in the middle of another project - and yet somehow I always do.  And I don't regret it.  Any of it.  Even though all my drafts so far have been shit, and I don't very much think this one is any different, I wrote that damn novel.  I have proven to myself that I can can overcome my creative barriers.  It does not take skill to write, after all.  Skill can be learned.  It takes determination and persistence, and I definitely leveled up in that area this month.

Now for a rest. This is also the first year my wrist actually started twinging (at the 47k mark, when I was starting to think I might actually make it).  That has not stopped me from starting a new crochet project.  I want to get back to my translations - I've been making trips to the career center to see what the heck I can do with my life, and translator is still one of my options.  I also want to start reading books again.  Am halfway through the third Temeraire book and also for some reason have a strong urge to re-read the entire Chronicles of Chrestomanci.  Oh yeah, finals are coming up too.

Blah blah words blah oh wait, I don't have to count them anymore.

What Not To Read

My latest obsession, it seems, is dragonriders and gender roles.  So, in order to make my research complete, I tracked down what might be the only book by a male about dragonriders, that is not a subversion or Eragon:  Dragonmaster,  by Chris Bunch.  It has been most educational.

Things I have learned from two chapters of Bunch:

1.  Do not use run-on sentences, they are not, and will never be, your friend.  Fragments, only sparingly when effective.

“Somewhere in the crags just above the village, and Hal thought he knew just where from his solitary, but not lonely, hill explorations, the beast had its nest.  The nest where dragons had hatched their young for over a century.”

2.  Do not overly smeerp.  Worldbuilding is your friend, and if you can’t be bothered to think about how your society works, then you should not be writing fantasy.

“Naturally, we told them to go away or we’d call the warder…Tomorrow, before dawn, I’ll ride for the city and hire the best advocate I can…That’ll put a bit of a stave in their wheel.”

Suppose he had written:

“Naturally, we told them to go away or we’d call the police...Tomorrow, before dawn, I’ll drive into the city and hire the best lawyer I can…That’ll put a bit of a wrench in their works.”

Creating a medieval fantasyland is more than just replacing any modern references with period-sounding alternatives (though a toothbrush is still a toothbrush*).  Apparently, even in this world where the poor are really oppressed, there is still a sort of justice system that even a poor restaurant owner tavern keeper can call on.  Which never comes up again (presumably).

3.  Your main character is not an author avatar.  Go play a video game for that.  Your main character has his (or her) own personality and ambitions.  Don’t have them wander around aimlessly until they find plot.

“He’d been offered other steady work in the two years since he’d left the stony mining village, but had never accepted, not sure of the reason.”

The reason?  The author needs you to not have any attachments so you can drop everything and chase the plot, whenever it should appear.  He also needs you to keep moving so that you eventually find the plot.  If you’re going to do that to your character, at least give them a real reason to be a rootless wanderer.  It also doubles as character-building.

4.  I don’t care how beer is made.  The point of the chapter is that Hal gets drunk and tries to ride a dragon.  We don’t need digressions into beer-making at the hops-picking harvest festival thingy that is never going to be mentioned again.  There’s worldbuilding, and then there’s relevancy.

*A note about toothbrushes in fantasyland:  They don’t often exist.  Occasionally I have run across a mention of scrubbing teeth with baking soda (once, in 10,000 page series), or “tooth-sticks,” whatever those might be.  They do seem rather modern to be in a pseudo-medieval world.  However, according to Wikipedia, methods of dental cleaning have been around since 3000 B.C.  Some ancient cultures chewed twigs from certain trees, and around the 14^th century A.D. toothbrushes with animal-hair bristles were in use in parts of Asia.  However, it is most likely that only those of wealth and status would have the luxury for that.  Toothbrushes were not mass-produced in Europe until the late 18^th century, but the word itself dates from 1690.  Interestingly, tooth-brushing did not catch on in the U.S. until after WWII, when soldiers were required to brush their teeth every day.

In other words, if you want your characters to brush their teeth in fantasyland, you can damn well have them brush their teeth.  It’s your world.  The humble toothbrush does a good job of illustarting how difficult it is to make a convincing fantasyland; you have to consider every aspect of daily life, up to and including brushing one’s teeth.

Writing Again

Sometimes it's easy.

Sometimes it feels like the story is writing itself, like it's all already there and you just have to record it.  Every word it perfect, every plot twist just the way it has to be, the characters developing in new and exciting directions so fast you can barely keep up.  It's like something is burning inside you, just under the ribcage.  It's like being horny; that maddening need to be with the story, to let it consume you.

Other times it's hard.  So hard, you don't want to face it.  You look at what you've written, and you wonder "How did I come up with that shit?" and it doesn't seem worth it to fix any of the millions and millions of problems with the text.  The characters are flat, the whole concept is unoriginal.  Your story is boring.  Your initial creative rush has died to a trickle of foul sludge.  New, exciting ideas hover at the edge of your mind, and you want to leave this one behind and chase them, even though you know it will all end the same, and that you won't be able to commit until you finish this one, and maybe, just maybe, a part of you still believes in that boring old story.

It is this that separates the writers from the dreamers.  Even when you don't want to face the story, you do it anyway, and stare at the document for hours, forcing out a sentence every few minutes.  Then it feels like the story is there again, but trapped behind a glass wall, and it can't get out.  Still, you plow on ahead.

Even when your mother walks into your room and asks "Oh, what are you doing?  Are you writing?"  "Yes."  "Is it for your blog?"  "No."  "Oh, do you have some sort of project, a story?"  "I don't really want to talk about it."  "Well, you could just say a manuscript," as she goes off in an offended huff, because even though we usually get along great, if there is a problem with our relationship then it's always my fault, and she never bothers to ask me if maybe I'm being belligerant because I'm upset about something, and what might that be?  Not unless I have a complete emotional breakdown and burst into tears, and even then it's hard to get her to actually listen.  Note to self:  When you start seeing a counselor in the fall, make sure to bring up your crapsaccharine relationship with your mother.

And then you're all frazzled and can't concentrate, and feel oddly violated and raw, so you maybe force out another sentence or at least finish the one you were on, then close down and let the story recover.  But it is still there, that nagging, unfinished business that you cannot quite leave behind you.  And you're going to have to go through it all over again tomorrow.

This is what separates the writers from the dreamers.

Vampires

I hate vampires.

Sure, I went through my Anne Rice phase when I was fourteen, and I've read (almost) everything Amelia Atwater-Rhodes has ever written, but by the time the Twilight thing came around I was well over them.  Then, well, the Twilight thing came around, and that killed vampires for good.

Or so I thought.

It was the show "True Blood" that brought them back to me.  Yes, I know they're based on novels, and no, I haven't read any but the first one because I want to keep my respect for the show.  Then there was last summer's collaborative Writing Project of Doom, which involved vampires.  Sexy sexy gay vampires.  Well, all vampires are gay, really.  Seriously, the Meyer woman's attempt at making vampires less gay was to have them sparkle.

Because the Writing Project was Of Doom, my collaborator and I made a pact for this summer:  No vampires.  And what do I do?  I get all excited about a Big Gay Writing Contest, stare at a blank page for a few hours, then jot down the first promising sentence that pops into my head, which happens to be:  After my brother was turned into a vampire, my coming out was almost a relief to my parents.

Oops.

Like a magician with a string of flags, I managed to pull a story out of that first line.  As you may have picked up from my last post, the story needs work (understatement).  The scenes without vampires are all good, and can be worked into the new fabric when I have one.  The vampires will need to be completely, if you'll pardon the pun, revamped.

What I did, as the Nostalgia Chick would say, is create a story from hate.  I hate sparklevamps.  I hate the fact that when I walk into a Barnes and Noble, there is a section just for "Paranormal Romance."  (At least there is one for "Fantasy Adventure" as well.)  I hate how a bloodsucking fiend has had its fangs trimmed, turned into a prettyboy badboy for pathetic teengirls to swoon over.  Vampires.  Are not.  Teenagers.

Thus, in my story, I worked to make my vampires as repulsive as possible and ended up with a sort of AIDS/gangs/drugs screwed up mixed metaphor.  As my beta pointed out, I could replace the vampire with any one of those without changing the story a bit.  Furthermore, I hated the vampires.  They weren't any fun.

I don't hate all vampires.  I like sexy Erik Northman, the sexy badass in charge.  I like Atwater-Rhodes, though her vamps are some of her less compelling characters (I may revise that opinion once I get around to All Just Glass).  To be honest, I never really "got" Rice's vamps.  They were just kind of emo and weird.

What I was going for was a similar vein to Holly Black's "The Coldest Girl in Coldtown," a suberversion of all the prettyfication vampires have recently undergone. Which is a stupid thing to do, because she already wrote that story, so I should write a different one.  In fact, I should get started on that right now, because this whole post is simply procrastination.  I just need to lay down some ground rules for vampires first.  Not just for my story, but for any story I will ever write, read, or respect.

Rules for being a vampire:

1.  You are not a teenager.  Even if you were one physically when you were changed, you are an immortal bloodsucking monster.  You will use your apparent adolescence to your advantage and to manipulate your vicitms.

2.  You will not fall in love with a human.  Humans are food.  If you find one especially pleasing, you may turn it and keep it around as an immortal companion until you tire of it and kill it, or it tires of you and kills you.

3. You will be sexy.  Bonus points for bisexuality.

4.  You will be powerful, dangerous, ruthless, and badass.  No one wants to hear you whine.

5.  You will not be psycho.  Crazies are boring.

6.  You will not be stupid.

7. You will be selfish, and above all, inhuman.  But inhuman in a sexy unattainable way.  Eating people who love you is good.

8.  You cannot be "vegetarian."  No "I only eat animals" or "I never kill my victims."  The latter is acceptable only if your reason is that you do not like to clean up bodies.  Any attempt to make you more benign so that the poor teenage sop thinks she has a chance with you is cheating.

So perhaps instead of angsty teenage delinquents, we have a not-friendly neighborhood vampire slowly taking over a town.  Kind of like 'Salems Lot, only...not.  Hm.  Needs more thought, still.

Blah blah blah

First of all I feel that I owe my very best friend in the whole wide world an apology, because I've been avoiding him.  Why?  I just sent him the first draft of the aforementioned vampire story and asked him to critique it.  Then I spent the next few days convincing myself I was busy, when really I just wanted to convince myself that I had never written anything and no one had ever read it.

I think I need to give a name to this problem.  Presentation Anxiety, how about?  It's like stage fright, only with the written word, instead of spoken.

So right now, having finally worked up the nerve to check my email, I feel pretty wretched.  Nausea is my chief emotion at the moment, a side affect of the anxiety.  I also feel a crushing doubt in my abilities as a writer, and a voice in my head is trying to convince me that I am not up to the challenge, that I should just keep these stupid little attempts at stories to myself and not try to do anything with them.  See, I don't write for enjoyment or ambition.  I write to keep my sanity.  So all that matters is that I write, right?  I can handle the world of the writer, but the world of readers is too big for me.

I am now telling that stupid little voice to shut up, because I can get over this.  I've heard everything I knew made that story suck, but I also heard the things I might have forgotten that made it good.  Right now the vampire plot feels a bit off - and I'm thinking "Why did it have to be vampires?  Seriously, where did that come from?  I don't even like vampires." - and it needs complete overhaul.  I might even nix it completely and go for a mundane plot.  Okay, probably not that; I'd get bored, not to mention that thwe whole story sprang from the first line, in which a vampire is essential.  So some hardcore reimagining.  (But seriously, why vampires?) 

Not to mention that the only scene in the story that seems to work and that I actually like (and my beta-bestie agrees) is a scene that has no vampires...

Ah well.  Here, have a metaphor.  It's like (okay, simile) a massive home improvement project.  You have to rearrange all the furniture and completely gut a room, and then fix whatever is wrong, and then you find other things going wrong and have to fix them, and then you make a mistake and have to fix that, and it's just so much work, you don't even know if it's worth it anymore.

Is it worth it to me?  I'm not going to answer that yet.  I'm just going to say that if I should give up any sort of publication aspiration, I should have a better reason than fear. 

Writing

I'm not even insomniac right now.  A symptom of summer vacation.

So anyway, there's this.

For those too lazy to click on the link, it's a gay writing contest.  I could be published.  Seriously.

And so, in a major counting chickens way, I am going to go pretentious writer on you and talk about my writing process.

It starts, naturally, with ideas.  I looked at the contest guidelines, and all it gave me was a fictional (check) unpublished (check) short story about "being queer."  That should be easy, I thought.  Everything I touch turns to gay.  Honestly.  Even dragons (though really it's more like they're third-gendered...hey, they're my dragons, I can give them whatever biology I want!).

Then I dug up the short pieces I currently have in the works (a very generous way of saying a couple paragraphs saved in a word document), and realized that they somehow all featured heterosexual relationships.  No cheating on this one; I would have to start from scratch.

It was obvious to me that there would have to be some sort of fantastical or supernatural element to the story.  Because it's me.  So in a sense this story would be a double subversion, both of a typical fantasy story and of the typical gay story.  No gay angst or bully-story (I hate bully stories, with utmost apologies to anyone who has ever been bullied).  And absolutely NO.  LESBIAN.  PARENTS.  I will save my rants on the gay-lit genre for other posts; suffice to say that, as my last post hints at, a major part of my inspiration for writing comes from being annoyed at how stories are all written this way, when I would much rather someone tried writing it that way.

Essentially, that is how I decided on a recently-outed lesbian high-schooler with a vampire brother.

Sometimes, writing it easy.  The story is just there, burning like an overly poetic flame, and you have to dash to capture it all on paper before it burns out.  Yes, I really do mean paper.  I feel like I think better with paper.  This feeling rarely lasts for more than a week, which is one of the reasons I have trouble with longer works.

The first draft is insane.  You just write.  It doesn't matter if it makes sense; what matters is that it is right.  Censorship is not your friend.

Then, after a rest to ease my cramped wrist, I type it up as the second draft.  My first draft of the vamp story was 30 pages written, a bit over the 5k word limit, so some things had to be cut.  Some scenes had to be cut anyway, because they had nothing to do with the plot; or, at the very least, incorporated into other scenes that were relevant. 

After that comes what is more of a draft number 2.5 than a third draft.  Read through what you typed, fix typing errors, delete pointless sentences, clean up the prose a bit.  Make it presentable.  Because that's the next step.  Presenting it. 

You can look at my old posts to see how bad this is for me.  It really is just pure cowardice on my part, though.

You see, if no one ever sees anything I have written, I can congratulate myself on being an unrecognized genius, and indulge in all sorts of fantasies of what being a famous genius author would be like.  I disgust myself, sometimes, I really do.

If, on the other hand, I do show it to some select, trusted, friends, and they tell me "Yeah, it's good, but you need to elaborate on that plot point and add some description, I only know what one character looks like, and where are they anyway?" and I take their good suggestions and finish up the story, and send it off to the publisher...I get fifty bucks and a published work.  I gain a foothold in the publishing world, so that all this writing I do might mean something someday (stories don't mean anything if you got no one to tell them to, and all that).  At the very least, I get my first rejection note and attain my first milestone on the way to being a published author.  That seems the more likely scenario, because you just know that some 14-year-old girl is going to submit a poem about wanting to kill herself, which trumps vampire junkies by a college student.  With apologies to anyone who has ever written poetry about wanting to kill themself. 

The point of the last paragraph was to say that a real rejection letter is better than dreams of grandeur.  Right?

Then again, I suppose the point of having dreams is to follow them, and no one ever said that would be easy.

Deconstructions

I predict that within 10 years, Hollywood will have made a movie about Osama bin Laden's death.  It makes a great story, after all.  Those rugged, underdog, freedom-loving Americans taking down that evil warlord.

And now for something (almost) completely different.

We know the formulas.  We know what to expect from your typical action movie, romantic comedy, superhero movie, or fairy tale.  That is why "historical" based movies (as well as movies that come from books, or in fact any other source material) suffer so badly.  They have to be shoehorned into the mold, often distorted beyond recognition.

However, there has been a recent trend among moviemakers and novel writers of deconstructing the familiar motifs.  With varying degrees of success.  Superhero stories with a sympathetic villain, for instance.  Or fractured fairy tales.  These deconstructions fall into three types.

1)  Satirical deconstruction, in which the story is written using the formula in order to make fun of itself.  Slapstick comedy.

2)  Brutal Deconstruction, in which the story is shown to have a darker, often gorier side.  Keyword, ick.

3)  Practical Deconstruction, in which the story is played straight, but tries to act more realistic.  Focus on characters.

And if you don't want to take my word for it, I have a long list of examples.

The main culprits for the formula/deconstruction trap are variants of the Hero's Journey - namely, Superheroes, Fairy Tales, and fantasy literature.  For instance, a satirical deconstruction of the superhero genre would be...well take your pick.  I have not seen "Kick-Ass," but from the trailers I believe it one of these.  What I am familiar with is the film "Mystery Men."  A ragtag group of heroes with some awkward superpowers defeat a not very memorable villain.  Played for laughs.

A brutal deconstruction, on the other hand, is Watchmen, both the film and the graphic novel. No superpowers, just the silly costumes and crime-fighting.  The characters are set along a scale of pathetic idealist to villain who kind of has a point.

The closest thing to a practical deconstruction that I am familiar with is "The Incredibles."  Yes, it follows the typical superhero pattern, but it has a few deconstructive elements.  It might almost be considered a family drama. 

Now for Fairy Tales.  You know what I'm going to say.  Yep.  Shrek (Note that "Fairy Tale" in this sense is more of the Disneyfied version, rather than actual folk legends).  In fact, Shrek was created by a disgruntled former Disney employee and is essentially a declaration of war on the entire Disney franchise.  Need I say more?

A brutal deconstruction is, without a doubt, Gregory Maguire.  Author of Wicked.  No, not the musical - that got re-Disneyfied until it wasn't sure what it was supposed to be anymore and sucked.  Good music, though. 

A practical deconstruction is harder to pin down.  I have not seen "Enchanted," so cannot offer any opinion on that.  Perhaps "Ever After."  She marries the prince after talking and having an actual relationship with him, and becomes a princess to actually take care of the people in the kingdom.

And of course my passion, fantasy.  You may have gathered by now that as much as I love this genre, I love to hate it as well. 

Terry Pratchett is definitely the iconic satirical deconstructor.  I have only read one of his books, so I don't have much to say about it, but there isn't really that much to say.

Brutal deconstructions of fantasy have been gaining in popularity.  Terry Goodkind was the first one I have been aware of.  Before he went all crazy anti-socialist and still thought he was writing a fantasy epic.  Very...detailed battle scenes.  Other writers such as Mercedes Lackey sometimes attempt to do this, and heap misfortune and trauma upon their characters, but somehow at the end, all the important people get to ride away on their pretty white horse with seemingly no lasting psychological harm.  This is a case of Failed Deconstruction.

My very favorite books ever - The Last Rune series, by Mark Anthony - is a practical deconstruction of fantasy.  In fact, it is hardly a deconstruction at all.  The story is played completely straight, with the ordinary protagonist from the Real World becoming the prophecized Hero who has to save the Pseudo-Medieval European Fantasyland from a Dark Lord.  The reasons that this series is not cliche garbage are many and subtle, so I will only mention one:  Anthony treats his characters like real people.  All of them.  He also (okay, two) strikes a very delicate balance between "Good always wins," and "The world sucks."

What did any of this have to do with bin Laden? 

The key to a practical deconstruction is making the story realistic, which also has the effect of making the story complex.  But complex stories don't make money.  When we go see a movie for an afternoon's entertainment, we want to be entertained.  We don't want to think.  That is why formulas are so useful.  The audience already knows what is going to happen and can enjoy the movie without any major worries. 

Bin Laden's death changes nothing, and I don't have to know anything about politics to be certain of that.  Al-Qaeda is not going to fall apart like the army of orcs at the end of Lord of the Rings.  But America is so locked into our ideals/formulas/tropes/narratives that we fail to realize that.  Real life is a messy and boring deconstruction of fiction that nobody wants to read.

Writer's Angst (formerly Writer's Block)

Just because I haven't posted anything in a while, and it might help me get things in order.

I am very good at beginning stories.  Not so good at finishing them.  Usually I get about halfway through, then realize that a new plot development changes the way everything was from the beginning.  At this point, I can either a)  Keep writing and go back and fix it later, or b) start all over again. 

There is also what I term the Brick Wall, though the more conventional imagery is Writer's Block:  The story is going along just fine, until all of a sudden everything just stops.  The story is not over, and nothing is resolved, but you are just about to enter the third act, into the deeper machinations and eventual resolutions of things you haven't thought out clearly yet, but assumed you would cross that bridge when you came to it, and...wham.  No bridge, but a brick wall.

The sum of my major works to date, all ending in brick walls:

1)  (Untitled*) - probably my oldest story, which has existed in my head in some form or another since I was thirteenish.  Of course, what I have now hardly bears any resemblence to what I had then.  There are wizards, and one of the major character is an assassin, and that's about it.  This story is like a canvas that has been painted over and repainted so many times, it cannot help but be distorted by the colors and textures of what it once was.  I am considering peeling it all of, tossing it aside, and starting fresh.  Only I've tried that, and somehow, the story always comes back to me.  Maybe this time for real.  Until the next grand variation pops into my head, and I think, Maybe this time it will work.

2)  "Glass and Bone" - a sort of steampunky thing that may or may not also have magic in-universe.  That may or may not be in the same universe as story 1.  A man tries to bring his dead ex-lover back to life.  And succeeds, for the most part.  Only she never loved him as much as he loved her, and had honestly moved on before she died.  And then there's some sort of retribution for breaking the laws of nature, or magic, or both, but as soon as the woman appeared...wham.  Brick wall.

3) (Untitled) - A xenofic about griffins.  Who are in the Frankfurt Zoo.  And are sentient.  And of course, at some point someone realizes they are sentient, but then we hit the brick wall.  I haven't the faintest idea how to bring this about, or what to do about it afterwards, or if I should just leave it where it is and make it a tragedy.

4)  (Untitled) - I haven't even started a draft of this one, it's just a loosely connected set of ideas about psychic detectives, who do not solve supernatural mysteries but instead go to great length to conceal their powers and just use them to have an edge in solving normal mysteries.  Until something different happens, like a sudden slew of murders among espers, and probably some sort of conspiracy...because I haven't started writing it, there are still more doors than walls.

 
*Yes, most of these are untitled.  I'm worse with titles than I am with endings.

Was ist Literatur?

What is Literature?

What kind of stupid question is that? 

This is why I do not like literature classes.  I do like reading, and analyzing, and asking questions about texts.  The problem is that sometimes people get a bit carried away with regards to asking questions.  You are only supposed to ask them when you actually want an answer - and when you have something to gain from the answer.

Literature is just a word; and like every word, it has several meanings and shades of meaning.  For instance, it is often thought of as 1) what pretentious old academics call their favorite books (or the books they want you to think are their favorites), but anyone who works with it in depth usually takes the broader definition of 2) any and all written art.  A colloquial meaning, and the technical meaning.  No need for a philosopher; this is a job for a linguist.

I do not care if "a book is the ax for the frozen sea inside us" (Kafka).  I do not care if the goal of art is "to capture this world in such a way as to show how it is, but as though it had its source in human freedom" (Sartre).  All I know is that I need books the way I need food, and that if I don't write, I will die.  And that is enough of an answer for me.

Writer's Block (Part 2)

I did promise you the rest of the story.  There isn't as much of it as I had thought.

I left off in sixth grade when I was starting to realize that I had a problem.  Middle school did nothing to help any of my social phobias.  In fact, the less time spent dwelling on it, the better.

Seventh grade English class was a joke.  The only good thing about it was that the teacher actually explained what he wanted from a book report - or a "book review," since we were big kids now.  I believe I was the only person in the class who ever got a 100% on one of those.  A rather unremarkable event over the course of a day in middle school, but it was a turning point in my life.  For the first time, I realized that I might actually be decent at writing if I ever gave myself a chance.

That is to say, writing became easier, but having my stuff read still made/makes me feel a bit queasy.  I'm getting better though.  I can physically bring myself to read the teacher's comments when I get papers back.  Most of the time. 

Just don't ask to see my novels.

Big Secret #1:  I write.

It started in middle school.  As though all of the words and stories I had been taking in almost constantly suddenly overflowed.  It started with some typical "normal person discovers magical powers, plot ensues."  Then, as my tastes in literature began to mature, it moved on to deconstructions of fantasy cliches.  I am on something like my twentieth draft, with no end in sight.  Every time I think I'm getting close, a new complication appears. 

There ought to be a better way to connect me child who hated to create a single sentence to me attempting to write a novel, but there is not.  One day I started writing.  And I haven't stopped.

Writer's Block

My parents read my blog - that's what I get for posting the link on facebook, I suppose.  Luckily I had not yet posted any embarrassing information.  Come to think of it, I don't think I have any embarrassing information.  I don't drink.  I've never been romantically involved with anyone.  They more or less already know my secrets.  It's just a little embarrassing.  Awkward.  Something I was not expecting and did not expect to come up during a skype conversation the other day.

Though all my mom had to say was, "Actually, we went to Iowa State University, not University of Iowa."  To which I did not reply. "It's Iowa.  No one cares."
No offense to anyone who may be reading this if you are from Iowa, have friends in Iowa, eventually move to Iowa, or have some sort of fondness for the cornfield I mean state.

So for my sanity's sake I am just going to pretend my parents do not know that I am writing and carry on as normal.

Several readers have made it known to me that they enjoy reading my blog, and that they consider it well written.  First of all, thank you, it really does mean a lot to me.  It's actually a little mind-blowing to hear/read that. 

I've struggled with writing since I was about six, about the same time I was solidifying my reputation as a bookworm, and paving the way for the many ironies of my life.  Of course I could understand those wonderful things called books, and read those magical things called words, but generate my own?  Take those words that have already been laid down in perfect order by holy beings called authors and scramble them with my own clumsy efforts?  Use them to express my own weak thoughts and tiny life experiences?  Impossible.  Every sentence was a drag, and I kept to the bare minimum, ashamed of my puny efforts to control words.

It did not help that in the midst of this, I had a slightly traumatizing event.  First grade.  We had been herded to the gymnasium to watch some concert/performance thing, probably the middle school or high school choir.  Then we were herded back to the classroom and told to write a journal about it.  I stuck with my three sentence minimum, ending with "It was cinduv (kind of - this was, believe it or not, before I devolped my mad spelling skills) boring."

A reasonable statement, yes?  In fact I had enjoyed the concert or whatever it was, but due to the disorganization of the management, we had waited for the show to begin longer than a six-year-old's patience finds acceptable - that was the part I had meant was boring, though I could not think how to express it.  I showed it to the teacher to get it stamped off. 

She did not like it.  In fact, a part of my memory that I do not entirely trust but do not entirely doubt says that she tore the page from my journal.  "That is not how you talk about other people!"  she told me sharply.  The part of the memory I am sure of is that she was loud enough to cause the entire class to look at me and witness my humiliation.  And for a shy child who does not have many friends and does not like being in the spotlight, can you imagine a worse punishment?

Now that I am older (it seems there are advantages to growing up after all) I find the teacher's response to have been entirely unreasonable.  Since when was "boring" a forbidden word?  Since when was an opinion of disapproval socially unacceptable?  And what the HELL gave her the right to frickin' embarrass me in front of everyone and give me a literary handicap that still affects me today at nineteen?

For years I could not show anyone anything I had written.  The safest course, in fact, was to not write anything at all.  It's not like I intended to be a writer or anything, as so many smiling adults asked me when they heard I liked to read.  But there was still curricular writing to deal with.  Make a sentence using each of the spelling words - I couldn't even do that.  Well, I could, but it was very, very uncomfortable, especially when the teacher sat down and read them right in front of me.  Don't even think about writing a story.  Or book reports.  I sucked at book reports.  Summarize the book:  It's about a kid who finds out he's a hero and has to save the world.  Now tell why you liked the book:  ...I don't know, I just did?  Because it was fun to read and a heck of a lot more interesting than my own life?

That fell a bit short of the 1-2 page requirement.

Oh, and in sixth grade, I found out at the end of the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education, for those who don't know or forgot) Program that we were supposed to have written an "essay" about how DARE changed our life, which I had not realized was mandatory.  Nor had I realized that we were supposed to read it out loud in front of the whole frakking class. So I and the underachievers were sent to the computer lab to type something up - I think that was probably my first experience BS-ing a paper - and called back into the classroom to read our pieces.  And I couldn't do it.  A kind girl offered to do it for me, and I let her, sitting for the next two minutes in abject misery, each word a slap in the face from my incompetence.  This part might have more to do with stage fright than write-fright, actually, but the two were closely tied.

It did get better, oddly enough, in middle school.  However, as this post has run rather long (and is not what I was intending to write about at all), I will save the story of how I triumphantly overcame my difficulties (And you can too!  Isn't it inspiring???) for the next post.