Good morning, everyone. Since I’m about to start on a Sooper-Sekrit Projekt as well as a guns-blazin’ edit on Redemption Alley, with wordcount each day on Weasel Boy, it’s official. I’m not even going to have time to breathe. But that’s okay. The living dead don’t need breath, do they? And “living dead” is pretty much how I feel this morning, even after coffee. I feel like I could be in a Romero flick, cocked head, drool, and weird shambling gait included.
So, how about some creepy stuff? Buckle yourselves tightly, dear ones. We’ll start with something small. Something only a little creepy.
Here’s Schiller’s skull. Only, not really. They’ve done DNA testing and it’s not Schiller’s skull, though it was exhumed from a mass grave where the poet was buried and thought to be his. DNA testing has said neither of the candidates for Schiller’s skull are actually his. Neat, huh?
That’s about the last level of creepiness that has some cool attached to it. We’re going to go deeper, into the creepiness that has NO COOL WHATSOEVER.
Now that we’ve stretched out and warmed up, take a look at this publishing scam directed at teens. Yes, for $2500, your teen can become a member of a pyramid scheme/cult! This reminds me of the thing just out of high school, when my young friend got a job selling knockoffs of designer perfumes. Huge bottles of them, and the kids had to work parking lots and mall entrances (running the risk of being in trouble for soliciting without the approval of the property owner) and hand over their earnings to the person who signed them up for the job. In essence, it was pimping perfume. It sounded too good to be true, and truth be told I was kind of glad she did it, because we both needed the lesson. It ended up with her being stranded in California because her car had broke down and they wouldn’t let her come home–but that’s another story.
The creep factor here is way, way higher than Schiller’s skull because these people are targeting teenagers. Ugh. Teen writers: please, please keep Yog’s Law in mind.
Next up the ladder of creepiness is something exponentially worse. How about scaremongering by the Air Force? The absurdity of “throw money and your children at us so we can use and abuse both to guard against fictional terrorists!” is reaching all-new heights. In SPACE!
Now, military recruitment is not and never has been an art of complete unvarnished truth, mind you, but this is an all-new height of untruth. In other words, flat-out, baldfaced, epic lies. Which shouldn’t be necessary to induce people into the patriotic and honorable institutions of the armed forces. Except, well, I’m not sure our armed forces are being used for patriotic or honorable ends.
As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure they’re not. Which just adds insult to injury.
I don’t know why I’m surprised, considering the last (and worst) item on our Creeptastic Parade today. Did you think break-ins by the government stopped with Watergate? You’re wrong. And now arson’s added to the mix as well.
Basically, the story is this: remember the news stories about Republican Party apparatchiks pursuing political “investigations” of anyone in the Justice Department who didn’t toe their political line, or anyone who tried to do their jobs? (Not so incidentally, those jobs might include watchdogging and prosecuting government corruption, something that’s at an all-time high with Rove, Cheney, and Boy Monkey in office?) The news coverage of such things has quietly vanished from the mainstream media. And those political “investigations” have been aided by break-ins, arson, and at least one alleged attempted vehicular assault.
The mainstream media would rather cover John Edwards’s haircut, Obama’s bowling score, American Idol, and Miley Cyrus photo shoots. Arson, break-ins, and vehicular assault by our own government is getting a huge pass.
Yeah, that’s the creepiest thing of all. The Fourth Estate is no longer really our friend, fellow citizens. They’re part of the narcotic drip meant to keep us anaesthetized while the super-rich buy even more power and entrench themselves even further as lords of earth and latifundia.
Cloudy and cool today, and I am very glad. Somehow sunshine and heat doesn’t appeal to me right now–I want to do up a pot roast and some mashed taters, and that’s not a hot-day kind of dinner. Not to mention I want to curl up on the floor and stare out the window, and if it’s sunny I feel like I should be outside doing yard work. I don’t precisely mind yard work, but after yesterday’s huge effort to get Strigara in first-draft form ready for an editor to look at it I’m feeling pretty drained.
A lot of Readers have emailed and commented to ask if they can get Serafim at a regular comics distributor, and when exactly the print edition of Steelflower will be out.
* Right now we don’t have a distribution network or anything for Serafim, so the best way to get it is to order through Josh’s website (look for the little “Add to Cart” button on the top) and pay with PayPal. Sorry about that–but you can ask your local comic store about it. If they get enough requests they might stock it! And that would be awesome.
Urk. My brain still feels like a sponge that’s been squoozled dry. So I’ll bid you all a civil adieu and go do the dishes, preparatory to lying on the floor in the living room and staring out the windows at the sky.
Is it wrong, that it sounds like such a good idea?
Argh. Ahoy. I finished the revisions on Strigara to make it a first draft instead of a rough draft. I’m going to give myself a day, then go back to Weasel Boy. And, not so incidentally, the last-batch revisions on Redemption Alley I’m faced with.
I would much rather have a glut of work than be knocking about with nothing to do. But when I finish this sort of rough-draft revision, my brain feels like it’s been scrubbed out and wrung dry. I have to lay on the floor a bit and stare at the ceiling, drooling, until the sponge soaks up enough water to fill out its accustomed outlines again.
You know, when I started this writing thing, I had no idea about revisions. It’s just as well, or I might have done something desperately stupid just to avoid it. It’s not that I don’t like revisions, it’s just that…Jeez. On an 80K book, you will probably write five times that in revisions, between tweaks, false starts, other bridging, fixing structural issues, emailing your editor–you get the idea. Argh.
All of which leads me to: I’m within spitting distance of 70K for the YA on my pass between rough draft and first draft. (Definitions: the rough draft is the very first corpus of the book, the draft NOBODY SEES because it is messy and unfinished. Prettify and fix it up after a short break and you have a First Draft, which will be savaged by your beta and editors. *headdeak*)
The book will end up between 70-80 (closer to 80) and the only bad thing about this part of the process is obsessively reworking pretty much every freaking sentence. Which (can’t you tell?) I’m kind of avoiding for about ten minutes while I write this.
No, I will not write space opera just yet. Quit asking. I know you’ve got plans for me, but the stuff that’s under deadline is the stuff we have to do first.
Jesus. Quit crying. STOP IT. Don’t look at me like that.
Okay. All right. Fine. ONE HOUR of space opera a night. That’s my final say on it.
Don’t hug me, Muse. I’m going to work your a$$ off for this.
Does it make me unfaithful if I usually work on two books at once?
And the next random thing: Indian cricket in cheerleader cover-up. I understand conservatism–really I do–but why is it always directed against women’s clothing/behavior? All these societies who systematically, economically and otherwise, repress one-half their population–and then make that half something that needs to be mutilated or repressed even further to guard the culture’s “virtue”.
That being said, the idea of cheerleaders at a cricket match kind of makes me put my head to the side with an RCA dog “What? Huh?” look. Do the cheerleaders take tea with the teams or the fans?
And because my brain is wired weird, I went straight from Indian cricket to Bollywood this morning.
I took some bellydance a while back, and I’m here to tell you a lot of those moves I’m seeing are HARD. (I know it’s not belly or Eastern or even Egyptian-style dance, but it looks similar to me and makes the same muscles hurt when I try to block it out.) DAMN. That’s some serious dedication and effort right there.
If you haven’t guessed, I love me some Bollywood. (God bless Youtube, where I can get a quick fix without having to go looking for an Indian grocery, where I can buy ghee and random DVDs that might or might not work in my player.) My favorite, though is a Shahrukh Khan flick titled Asoka, a very highly fictionalized account of an emperor who converted to Buddhism. Here’s a little bit of goodness from that film–incidentally, this is one of the Prince’s favorites. He loves dancing around the room to this, and will beg me to rewind it all afternoon so he can hear it again. (The guys on stilts are a particular favorite.)
Now is the time for me to mention I think Shahrukh Khan is totally hawt, right? Anyway, love me some Bollywood and I especially dig sharing. Enjoy this last one, also from Asoka, it’s got subtitles.
Catchy, ennit?
Now it’s back to revising. I’m halfway through Strigara now, and should have a workable first draft (not the rough draft) by the end of the week if I take it easy, less if I push it.
I did give the talk on writing a series–it turned into more than I thought it would, and I think I totally blew it by getting off-topic. But the audience was asking questions, so I chose to go in the direction prompted by their questions rather than stick like glue to the subject. I’m pretty sure it was a total bomb.
*sigh*
Anyway, off I go. The house is quiet and I’ll get an hour of work in before everyone wakes up. Sounds good. Happy Monday, all.
I think my body’s fighting off another bug. You know that flu feeling you get when you’re just coming down with something? Not sick enough to take to your bed, or even sick enough to take a decongestant. Just blargh, run-down, body aching, head caught in a vise not squeezing very hard but still there and stuffed with cotton to boot.
Yeah. Like that.
My Friday post is up at Fangs, Fur, Fey; it’s titled That’s Great. Now, Do It Again. It is a reprint of a post I did last June. Sorry about that, but the subject has come back up again and I think it’s useful. Above all, I didn’t want to retype the damn thing.
You’ve been continuously mugged and beaten and robbed blind for the past seven years straight, and as you lay there on the cold, hard economic ground, bleeding and gasping and wondering what the hell happened to your vacation time and your health care plan and your mortgage payment, your attackers scoff and leer and toss a couple of bloodstained nickels on your pulverized face and mutter, here sucker, have some bus fare, and then they cackle and stomp away with all your loot and dignity and hope, back to the White House from whence they came.
What, too harsh? Not really. It’s a lovely feeling, made even more sweetly ironic by the fact that Congress will likely soon shove through another $108 billion in war funds like a giant gallstone through our collective fiscal urethra. Right there, that’s about 500 bucks for each and every adult human in America, baristas and Baptists and NASCAR fans alike.
Do you see? Your “economic stimulus” check is meaningless, an empty gesture, a trifling crumb of recompense after robbing you blind via insane gas prices, infrastructure meltdowns, massive failed wars that aren’t really wars. Thanks for the bogus check, Dubya, now where can I buy a sliver of our missing national dignity? (Mark Morford)
Yeah. I really can’t add much more to that. Except that later on in the article, he links to a study that shows meditation can strengthen empathy. Make you kinder.
Boy, do I ever need that today. I’m feeling like Nix, our third cat–the one who looks like a ferret and is jumpy as a…erm, big jumpy thing. (I almost said coke fiend, but decided that would be Too Much. Oops…) Anyway, I feel like every inch of my skin is too aching and sensitive today, like I’m skittering and jumping from one shadow to the next, trying to find one big enough to hide me from.
Anyway–on the reading front, I read Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties and Specials yesterday too. The series was great. A little deus ex machina-y (what the Selkie and I call magic dingus-y) at the end of Specials, but no complaints. It was great, well-structured, and nicely done. Bravo. Usually when I blaze through a book or two that fast I’m not looking under the hood and tinkering with the engine, which means I’m not being pulled out of the story. I did find some of the luck stuff–like the main character just happening to land inside an anthropological experiment–a bit heavy-handed, but what are you going to do? It’s YA, and short YA at that. All in all, it was a fantastic little series, and just what I needed.
Last but not least, my Mother’s Day present arrived. I’ve taken to buying my own and enthusing over them so nobody has to buy me soap on a rope or a tie or anything, you know. Everyone’s happier that way. This year the kids got me a Garbo box set. I’ve always wanted Queen Christina on DVD. Now I can satisfy my longing for sultry Swedes who just want to be aloooooooone. What an awesome gift.
Heh. Not too many complaints, despite the post title. Oh well, it’s nice to be pleasantly surprised. Also: I scored this at Powell’s last time I went. What a great title, eh? I’m hoping it will live up to it. Even if it doesn’t, the premise is awesome and should provide me with grist for the mental mill.
But first, work today. And a nap. Definitely feeling like a nap.
I almost forgot: Saturday (tomorrow) I will be at Cover to Cover Books from 5-7PM for the monthly Writer’s Mixer. I’ll be presenting on the topic of continuity and character development in a multiple-book series. In case you want to, you know, come by and beat me up or anything.
I finished re-reading Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland, and I’ve been reading Crompton & Kessner’s Saving Beauty From The Beast. Both center on an issue that doesn’t get much airtime–”domestic” violence against teen girls by their boyfriends. Since the Princess is heading into preteenhood (I know it’s not a word) I want to know all I can about the warning signs, not from inside this dynamic, (I pretty much have those down after a bunch of bad relationships and therapy) but as a parent.
I don’t know why we think high school is insulated from (gender-based) violence. We’re shown every day that it’s not. I’m not talking about gangs at school or hazing, both violent in their own right. I’m talking about the daily warfare, the daily risk you run by having mammaries and female organs in this society. We’re soaked in that danger literally from the time we’re born.
This isn’t a feminist rant. This is a parent’s rant. I had boyfriends who beat me up and stalked me in high school. I’m not sure my parents ever grasped the nature of the problem. Of course I had punches I had to roll with at home, too. I was disposable.
Sometimes I get so sick of being At Risk just because I have ovaries. The world is full of peril, and a lot of men in America, though sweet and nice enough, don’t understand the pressure of being literally under attack and/or seen as worthless/second class from the moment you’re born, because you’re born female. (It’s like the first strike against you, and God help you if you’re also brown-skinned or poor, too. Those are strikes two and three.) And the worst thing is, this is so implicit, it’s taken for granted that girls are virgins until they’re whores, that marriage is the highest good, that a girl has to belong to someone, that a boy can stalk the crap out of her and it’s “love” worthy of a pop song or movie. (My essay in Nothing But Red, originally titled Rape As A Property Crime and ending up as Half Of Humanity Is Worth Less Than A Chair, is all about this, so I’ll just Move On now. Because the next subject ties in. Let’s move on.)
I hate to point this out, but I was covering the fundamentalist polygamist Mormons years ago for StoryHunters. It’s no secret that these middle-aged, male religious-cult leaders have been providing themselves with teenage harems. It’s what middle-aged male religious-cult-leading bigots DO. I’m sure that’s a major attraction for becoming a middle-aged religious-cult-leading bigot.
It took long enough for someone to do something about it. But the press coverage…dear sweet Mother Mary in a jumped-up chariot-driven sidecar.
Here’s a little memo to the press: Will you guys stop f!cking going on about the hairstyles and dresses those women are forced to wear and start talking about WHY THIS WAS ALLOWED TO GO ON, ON AMERICAN SOIL, FOR YEARS AND YEARS? There are infant graveyards. Thousands of teenage boys thrown out so the older men can get clutches of young wives. Malnutrition. Child sexual abuse. Murder.
And the MSM is fixated on the goddamn hairstyles. I.e., “this doesn’t really matter, because it’s happening to women.”
God.
Yes. Damn right I’m angry. We all should be angry over this one. When a guy “marries” four or five teenagers and gets them knocked up, he’s a bigamist. And guilty of statutory rape. Why should his “religion” exempt him from the law against rape, statutory rape, and child abuse? I mean, I’m all for a dialogue between the people and the law, since the law is the servant of the people. I’m just not for child abuse being sanctioned or overlooked by the law. Which is essentially what we’ve got, with these fundie Mormon polygynist asshats.
I might feel a little bit different if the women could have several husbands each. But then, you know, if that happened, the cult probably would have never gotten off the ground or had a blind eye turned to it.
And the press is fixated on their hairstyles. Not to mention an HBO show glamorizing this sort of thing. Because if it deals with rape and oppression, it must be chic! Women don’t really mind! Hell, they like it! It’s on TV!
I’d better stop before some jerkwad thinks those last four sentences aren’t sarcasm. Or before I blow a blood vessel. Whichever comes first.
Jesus-please-us. This is why I stopped doing the religion-news blogging. I was in serious danger of having a coronary. And, you know, I started getting work elsewhere. But that’s another story.
Good morning (again.) Didn’t get much sleep, but I don’t feel like I needed it–I did fall into bed really tired, couldn’t sleep, read some Bukowski, and finally did sleep, with weird dreams of lanterns and spiders.
Don’t ask.
Anyway, last night the Selkie and I (on kind of short notice) made it to the Alice Hoffman signing at Beaverton Powell’s. Hoffman is only the Selkie’s favorite writer in the world, and we were both fangirly and all. Ms. Hoffman was divine–sweet and funny and old-fashioned polite. She read a bit from her newest book and answered some questions. Both the Selkie and I got questions answered, though mine was pretty much the Selkie’s question; it was about Ethan in Blue Diary. I wanted to know where he came from and the Selkie wondered why we never saw anything from his POV.
Yeah, us writers, always thinking about craft. The Selkie asked about The River King and the answer was so heartbreaking. In a kind-of-good way, though. I suppose if there was a theme to last night it was “writing can save your life.”
Anyway, Ms. Hoffman told us that Ethan was Bluebeard (which the Selkie had got ages ago but I hadn’t, and I’m usually quite good at spotting my fairytales.) And that she had to love her characters, so Ethan–a character who was either evil of had some evil in him, is how she put it–wasn’t someone she could get near.
I understood. Really, I do. The urge to love your characters is deep and profound, and I suppose I do love all of them down deep in some weird way. But mostly I dislike my heroes. I downright hate a couple of them–Michael Constantius, for one, is a manipulative asshat and I hatehatehate him. (One of the best times I ever had writing was that crucifixion scene.) Japhrimel I also dislike in some very fundamental ways, as he’s so wrapped around the axle by what he feels for Danny he won’t tell her anything for fear of losing her or frightening her. Plus, he was a demon, for Pete’s sake, and his idea of “truth” was so flexible as to be absurd. Darik? Insufferable and arrogant, but he’s nicer than the others just because of those exquisite manners. The Watchers? Collectively, they’re one creepy bunch of guys. I do like Jack Gray, though, and I’m awful fond of Merrick. I have a little black spot in my heart for Merrick.
I ramble. But the way I feel about my heroes is usually a complex mishmash of not-very-positive feelings. My heroines I’m closer to, but all of them are flawed–I mean, Christ, try spending an afternoon with Danny while she’s On The Rampage. Or with Elise when she’s in a snit, or Rowan when she won’t do anything for herself. Argh. I can understand my heroines and to some extent my heroes, but I don’t love my characters. They’re people to me, and fully-formed and fleshed people at that, but I don’t love them.
Part of that is because they’re going to leave when the story is done. Another part is that the story demands horrible thing to happen to them, and it’s wrenching. Dead Man Rising was terrible for me, because I understood Dante so thoroughly and could feel what she was feeling. It was awful.
Hrm. I’m rambling, and that can’t be very interesting. Suffice to say that it was ALL KINDS OF AWESOME to actually see Alice Hoffman in the flesh and get some of my favorites–especially Seventh Heaven–signed.
The Selkie and I had a longish dinner afterward, and a chat about character motivations. I can’t wait to read her WIP. *fidgets* Then we both wended our way home, and I settled in and read Scott Westerberg’s Uglies, which was (as I’ve said) a very good, very rolling read. It really reminded me of Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite The Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, which is high praise from me. I finished it in about three hours, give or take about twenty minutes, and wasn’t bored once the whole way through. I did like how the subject of anorexia was approached, in a quiet almost-glancing way, and dealt with very lightly. I can see this book doing a lot of good.
And now it’s Tuesday morning, the kitchen is full of dishes, I haven’t had coffee yet, and I’ve got the YA to do a draft on. I think once I get through the first three chapters–which I’ve retooled and retooled because that’s what first chapters do, for me–it will go better and smoother.
I just read Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies since I got home from Powell’s. (More on that in the morning. Later in the morning.) Wow. It reminds me of Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite The Sun, and is really rollicking-good.
I’m doing a lot of bulleted lists lately, for which I beg your indulgence. All my connect-the-dots is going into the writing. I just found out we need another revision on Redemption Alley. It’s not a HUGE one, it’s just one of those workmanlike things that’s got to happen once a story’s been pruned so an editor can see the nasty bits underneath. Heh.
* Gin, Television, And Social Surplus. This was AWESOME. I hope he’s right, but one of the things I’m struggling with lately is a bit of depression over humans as a species. We just seem so in love with destroying. Not even clean destruction, like a wildfire that clears everything out–but destruction for its own sake, from a dictator destroying lives and culture and social networks to wars destroying everyone who touches them in an ever-expanding ring, to gallons of poison pissed into our own life-support system. It’d be nice to find some evidence of people creating even half as much as they destroy, and just as reflexively.
You see? I’m on a real kick here. And most of it is…
* Holden Caulfield. I bought Catcher in the Rye for the Teen, since he said he’d never read it and I thought it was a) one of those books he should read, and b) that he’s old enough now he won’t go into a huge honking depression over it and end up making some silly gesture that will land him in the newspapers. Then I got to thinking, it’s been a while since I read it, too. So when he was done he put it in my TBR pile, and I read half of it last night.
The Teen says, “It’s scary. I had to put it down and give it a rest before going back to finish it because that kid? He’s me. It’s like the author KNEW me or something. When I was fourteen to sixteen, that kid was me.”
Then I started reading it, and I remember my own painful uncertainty during those years. It’s achingly depressing that Salinger remembered so much of the absolute agony of being a teenager to be able to write it down. Or, more precisely, what is depressing is that I can see the difference between that uncertainty and my adult self, I can see how that uncertainty fed into my adult self, and my heart aches for every kid who has to go through that. You couldn’t PAY me to go back to those years between thirteen and twenty. They sucked bigtime, and I never want to be that lonely and uncertain again. I never want to be that hungry for approval and affection again.
I’ve been talking to the Teen off and on about that hunger, and about the fact that he doesn’t have to have his life all mapped out at 18. I didn’t figure out who I was or what I wanted until I was about 23-25. Now I had Issues, so I was probably happening a little later in that process than I like, and it’s only now at 32 that I’ve grown (by dint of hard work) into someone I like. Nobody tells kids that they don’t have to have it figured out by 18, that it will take them a while to figure things out, and that’s okay. Well, on the one hand it can be a prolonging of adolescence, but on the other it’s necessary to build someone who isn’t a jackass stuck in high school popularity contests.
It’s funny, (she says, fully conscious it’s funny-strange, not funny-haha) but all the adults I like and get on with were outcasts, nerds, etc., in high school. Those were the kids forced to develop things outside the hothouse jungle of school to keep their souls intact. Kids that were popular in high school kind of forget there’s a world outside those glass walls. They learn to game that system so thoroughly, so young, that when they reach the Real World outside they have no fricking idea and end up settling rigidly into what they know–the reflexes that did them good in high school.
By no means is this a hard and fast universal rule, (I AM fully aware that there are decent adults who were popular in high school out there) but all my close friends had trouble/were unpopular/were outcasts/were braniacs/were nerds in school. We sometimes talk about this dynamic–the people who don’t find some way of interacting with the world that’s outside halls and lockers and taunting. And (bringing it full circle) Holden Caulfield is reminding me of that. When I read Catcher for the first time I was nine and had no idea, I just liked that the voice seemed true–not like an adult trying to impress or Teach Me A Lesson. When I read it again at fourteen it really spoke to me on some levels, and on others I thought Holden was such a privileged jerkwad; oh noes he had money and freedom and was So! Upset! And then at nineteen I read it again and thought, Jesus, I have so much else to worry about with the rent I don’t need to be reading this, but still did finish the damn thing.
Now I’m reading it as the mother-figure/friend of a teenager, the mother of a preteen girl, and seeing the painful self-doubt and uncertainties from a whole new perspective. I don’t know if this whole long ramble has a point, but I do know that Salinger did what he set out to do, if what he set out to do was write a book that people can read from several different angles. Truth–telling the truth, a writer’s truth–is like that; it’s got so many different angles. And who was it that said a good book grows with you?
* This upcoming Saturday, May 2, I’m going to be the featured speaker at the monthly Writer’s Mixer at Cover to Cover Books. I’ll be talking about continuity and characterization over the course of a multi-book series. If you have any questions etc. about writing series, why not comment or drop me a line? It will help me gauge the types of things to talk about, and if I talk about it all week I might sound halfway coherent when I do my half-hour thang.
At least, one can hope.
Happy Monday, all. I’m about to go back to the YA (it’s rested for a week) and start weaving in things I missed the first go-round because I was going so fast. Oh, and I’m making chicken tikka masala for dinner. Wish me luck.
