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.
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.
You know? The day when you wake up out of a nice, beautiful restful sleep because they’re having some sort of screaming fire or something at the apartments behind you (no, there was no fire, just a lot of yelling and noise) and stumble into the kitchen for coffee. After spilling roughly a metric ton of coffee all over the kitchen, you finally get some into where it’s supposed to go and make some coffee.
The kids are a little fractious and your six-year-old hates you because you won’t let him watch TV. You consider putting a brick through the television but settle for putting it out in the garage, removing it from sight but not from the six-year-old’s mind.
Various other things threaten to rain on your parade.
You know? That kind of day.
Then the Teen gets up and says, “I’m so glad to be here. This is like heaven, you know, being here.”
And the Prince decides he doesn’t hate me at all, he cozies up to me (pretty much just to watch the screen as I type) and the Muffin decides to take care of some stuff that’s been bothering me, so I don’t have to deal with it.
It used to be really quiet around here. Then they built a huge, stupid apartment complex behind our house, in a field that had been a great place to fly kites and watch cats hunting fieldmice.
Now there’s broken glass everywhere. It’s like some sort of epidemic. The tenants at the apartments throw garbage over the back fences of everyone on the street. And kids who should be in school are riding stupid crotch rockets up and down the street at all hours of the day and night.
I don’t mind the new people in the neighborhood. I DO mind the broken glass, the rubbish, the noise, and the thumping of jet-takeoff-decibel music at 2AM.
*sigh* Do I sound like a crotchety old woman, or what?
Now, there’s an attitude among critics and a certain strata of readers that fast=hack and slow=literary geeeenius. But they’re wrong. That’s blunt, but they’re wrong. You write at the speed you write, slow or fast, flurry or steady pace, many words a day or a few hundred–and if you’re earning a living solely from your craft, guess what? Learn to write faster, slowbie. Discipline yourself to put down 2-4k words a day on the page. It’s rough at first, and you feel like you’re drowning, but a steep learning curve will improve your sentence-level craft like nothing else. Rather than poking out those few hundred golden words, put down 2,000 words that actually move the story. Then, in the evening, you can sit down and edit if you’re that OCD about first drafts.
This isn’t just me railing against litfic, although I do plenty of that. This is the same advice agents, editors, and seasoned pros give. If you don’t meet your deadlines, you have no currency with publishers, because you’re unreliable. This goes for you if you’re a debut author, midlist or bestselling. Sure, if you’re bestselling they’ll still renew your contract, but they’ll be talking about you around the coffee pot down there in NYC, mark my words. They probably put your author photo on the dart board, too. (from Caitlin’s blog)
Amen, grasshopper. I always roll my eyes when I hear, “But wordcount is so HARRRRRRD!” Jesus wept. Just do the goddamn work. If you’re really squeezing to get those words out, figure out where you’re wasting your time elsewhere and quit it. Do a time-log, and find out where the timesucks are. Then get rid of them and use that extra time and energy for writing.
This is a job. It’s not a wave of the magic wand to automatically get fame, prestige, critical acclaim, and a fat check. This is hard work, and you don’t do it because you’re going to get rich (unless you want to be disabused of that notion in a hurry and end up bitter and nasty.) Writing is a job, and it’s a lot less difficult, dangerous, and nasty when you love it, but it’s still a JOB. It requires WORK.
Go ahead and get out the pitchforks, because a lot of people don’t want to hear that writing is work and should not automatically garner praise. A lot of people who call themselves writers never seem to get anything done because they are allergic to the “work” section of it. These people want all the social cachet (however much there is, I guess) of being “artistic” or being called a “writer” without doing any goddamn work.
Not too long ago, during a group meeting of writers, the Beethoven Blonde showed up. This was a woman who talked and laughed loudest when it came to the social part of the gathering, literally grandstanding and steamrolling over everyone else in the room. When it came time to read some pages, though, she had a ready excuse, flipping her long blonde hair back over her shoulder with an affected laugh.
“Well, I suppose I’m still developing. It just takes so much time, you know. I have to go upstairs to my room, where I can have absolute quiet, and then I turn on Beethoven and I struggle to create.”
No sh!t. It’s this kind of “writer” that gives the hardworking midlister–and creatives everywhere–a bad image.
The hideous thing is, I’ve seen this type of behavior over and over again, from the epic-fantasy people who didn’t want to accept critique (and who wouldn’t listen to their editor because he reads Proust and “Proust isn’t fantasy”) to the “writers” with streaks of entitlement a mile wide up their back (they are Speshul Snowflakes and deserve attention not because they’ve finished a manuscript, but because they’re working on one.)
That being said, you’ve got to learn–once you’re disciplined and producing sellable work–to stand your ground and agree to the deadlines you can reasonably meet. Production schedules, once they’re decided, are there for a reason–because bringing books out is a business. If you can’t make the deadline, don’t set it in the first place. It’s that simple. It’s hard to do, because if you consistently produce sellable product editors and publishers will want you to do it regularly. The writer’s natural desire to please (sharpened by constant rejection during the first however-many-years of their careers) and the idea that a publisher could go for someone faster works against this, but don’t let it. You are responsible for the deadlines, and responsible for making them far enough apart that you can meet them.
And Caitlin is absolutely right. If you want to make a living, you need to find out how to work reasonably quickly. There is just no two ways about it. Producing sellable writing in a reasonable amount of time can be done. It requires discipline and hard, hard work, but it can be done. It’s the writer’s job to do it.
That’s just the way it is.
I now close this rant. I’ve got some pages to knock out. *wink*
Hm. Thanks to HutchO for bringing this to my attention–I have completely missed it. Apparently Amazon.com is telling POD publishers that Amazon won’t sell their books–unless said books are printed through Amazon’s POD subsidiary, BookSurge.
Not all print on demand publishers are crap. A lot of small publishers (Samhain, ImaJinn, who I publish through, and I think Ellora’s Cave, even) use the POD model so they can make money to pay their authors. Print-on-demand has a smaller margin, which means the presses can offer competitive royalties to their authors–and, not so incidentally, stay in business.
The cost of distributing through one of the big companies–like, say, Ingram–can be prohibitive. If a bunch of small presses go through a POD service like Lightning Source, they effectively share the cost of distribution and simultaneously cut down on overhead. This cut in overhead and distribution costs means more small presses survive. I suppose to a certain extent that means more drek, but to be honest, the proportion of drek to good writing is about constant everywhere. (I believe that is part of Sturgeon’s Law.) More small indie presses are a good thing for the health of the publishing industry AND for your reading pleasure.
Amazon’s move is Microsoft-esque. I suppose sooner or later they were going to get big enough to start wanting to squash smaller businesses.
Why should you care? Well, a wider array of small presses provides you the reader with a wide selection of products to choose from, places to spend your money and shape the industry–as well as the customer’s ultimate bargaining power of Choosing Where To Spend Your Dime. Writers can go into the indie-house end of the publishing pool to wet their feet or occasionally to try out a different genre. And there’s the not-so-inconsiderable pleasure behind telling what is obviously a Big Company Trying To Squash Someone where to stick it.
Well hello, dear Reader. I had a busy weekend–between working, a haircut, grocery shopping, some body mod, my sister’s stalker (in a minute, hang on), getting some decent bread pans (joy!) and Being Judged.
I had a lovely long leisurely lunch/dinner on Saturday after I left work, got haircut and modded, and wended my weary way home. Waited until it was dark and watched The Blair Witch Project, which was creepifying in some places but obeyed horror tropes with a fine well-trained obedience so far that the shiny new way of obeying said tropes didn’t have the punch, for me, that I’ve heard the movie had for other people. I have to say, the more interesting thing about this film is knowing how it was made, and the psychological terrorizing (lack of sleep, pursuit, strictly controlled food) of the cast that made for such a ring of verisimilitude.
Tomorrow is going to be a busy day for personal reasons, and guess what? I can’t sleep. *sigh* The general stress is telling on me. Dealing with Crazy People is always time-consuming, nerve-wracking, and awful. I know we wouldn’t have police or a legal system if everyone was responsible, adult, and sane; I am very glad both institutions exist. But being under siege and not being able to do much except wait is…well, nerve-wracking.
Consider my nerves wracked. Heh.
Posting is likely to be spotty over the next couple of days while we get paperwork together and make preparations. In the meantime, waiting for the other shoe to drop is just absurd. And no, I cannot be more specific about the situation. Maybe later, probably not.
I still haven’t managed to touch that mound of proof pages. Blasted crazy people messing with my work schedule. It is not to be borne.
I’ve reached the point where everything I type seems like a Bad Idea, so I’m going to sign off. If you have any extra good protective juju, we could use a pinch over here at Casa Saintcrow.
One could spend hours poking and giggling at Mssrs. Zooty and Flappers. Or just Mr. Man-Behind-Zooty-And-Flappers. The spelling errors alone are enough to send a writer into a twitching coma of merriment or irritation, depending on mood and temperament.
Now, I’m not saying the publishing industry is perfect. Far from. There are a lot of things that make it hard for the producers in the industry (i.e., writers) to get a living wage. And forget health insurance for producers! That’s just crazy!
But what doesn’t make it better are predators outside the pool, trying to make a quick buck off someone’s desire to be published.
Now carry me to the bonfire with pitchforks and screaming if you want, but I’m going to say right here and now that not everyone deserves to be published. It’s not an inherent right like breathable air or food security, or like liberty (though the current administration has done its bit to return us to tyranny. That’s off-topic.) Like any job/career, you need a certain amount of training and proficiency to make a living, and even that isn’t assured. It’s serious work. I don’t know why people expect it not to be, but I suppose there are those who want to take shortcuts in any industry. Sometimes a shortcut turns out to be valid. Most of the time, however, shortcuts are a scam.
It’s not easy to pour your heart and soul into a manuscript and have it rejected. It’s not easy to deal with multiple rejections and trying to “break into” publishing. It’s not easy to get an agent or a book deal. It’s not easy because publishers need to make their money back, and consumers don’t want to pay for crap. Nobody can tell when or what the next Harry Potter will be, (consumers are fickle) but publishers have to guess. That makes them nervous, because they have kids to feed and jobs to keep too.
Again, the industry is far, far from perfect, especially when seen from the writer’s point of view. But those offering “shortcuts” that disobey Yog’s Law are predators and nothing but.
There’s a difference between paying a proven editor for his/her time and effort, especially when that said editor makes no promise to publish the work. Paying someone to query-blast or e-publish you is a scam. And scammers usually get nasty when exposed. *sigh* Hence, Internet amusement. I’m left shaking my head when reading stuff like Zooty & Co. I mean, I derive a certain amusement from the errors and the flailing, but I also sigh at the thought that some nascent writers are going to get soaked, and soaked good, and maybe quit writing because of it.
Which is outside my control and power, but it still makes me sad. Even if one doesn’t get published, the exercise of writing is valuable in and of itself. I felt that way before I ever got paid a dime OR got a rejection slip. (And not just blogging, which I distinguish from the art of writing fiction and the exercise of writing a paper diary.)
Anyway, wacky Internet hijinks. I suppose, since I’ve done nothing but bitch and complain in my last few posts (health has not been good, but we’re working on that) I should offer some entertainment, at least.
Here’s the absolute funniest thing I’ve ever seen on SNL, Andy Kaufman and the “Mighty Mouse” bit. Every time I see this, it slays me.
And to add to the Andy K fun, his Elvis was always more Elvis THAN Elvis. And we all know how I feel about Elvis.
And to round it off, Gene Wilder doing “Pure Imagination”. Which was my favorite part of the old Willy Wonka movie, and a song I still sing to the little ones every now and again.
God bless YouTube. Last but not least, to leave you with a smile…
ROBIN OF SHERWOOD PLUS BONNIE TYLER EQUALS WIN!!!!!!
There now. Wasn’t that worth getting up out of bed for? I certainly thought so. And yesterday, when I was so determined to go slow?
Three thousand words of space opera fell out of my head. It seemed so easy and innocent. Jeez. Why does my Muse taunt me with fantasy and then spit out space opera? It just doesn’t make any sense.
Morning, everyone. I’m sipping at some coffee and making various morning faces–not because of the coffee, just because it’s morning. The weather report says it will be drier today than yesterday, thank God.
There are a lot of issues wrapped up in this. First I’ll take it from an author’s point of view, because that’s where I spend most of my time. Being a writer is tough, and so is being an author. You labor over a book, sometimes for months, sometimes for a year or more, go through the masochism of submitting it around, it finally gets taken, and then there’s revisions. If you’re not a quivering wreck by the end of the process, you haven’t been paying attention. Then someone pans your book, gives it a bad review on Amazon, or slaps the cover up on a website and OMG snarks it! AFTER YOU DID ALL THAT OMG WORK! JESUS!
Chill out. You are not going to write a book that pleases everybody. It’s just not possible. Snark, bad reviews, and pans do have a valuable purpose in the ecosystem of the Interwebs. View them as free advertising or as rain (as in, can’t change the weather) and LET IT GO. Queenly disdain and silence is the road to take when it comes to bad Internet or Amazon reviews. Don’t believe me? Two words: Anne Rice. I love Ms. Rice’s early work, but her famous imbroglio of a response to some Amazon reviewers has ensured I probably won’t ever buy a book of hers again unless I can find it used in trade paper. Contrast that with Nora Roberts, who isn’t normally my cuppa tea to read, but who is so classy, especially in Internet brouhahas, that I can see paying full price for her books, no problem. And I have, with the Three Sisters Island trilogy.
We’ve moved from being an author to being a consumer here. As an avid consumer of the printed word, I read reviews and snark to amuse myself. I’m very rarely guided by Internet reviews unless the site I’m reading has evolved a good track record with me. Example: I read Smart Bitches pretty religiously, as you can probably tell, but Candy and Sarah’s tastes when it comes to reading are very different than mine, and I rarely pick up any book either of them recommends unless it sounds like, from the plot synopsis, I would enjoy it. (Case in point was Anne Stuart’s Black Ice, which I read as a direct result of a Smart Bitches review, and enjoyed even though it isn’t my usual fare.) The negativity or positivity of the review, funny as it may be and as much as I may enjoy it, doesn’t really enter into it. (I’m more likely to pick up a book I see reviewed in The Economist, because I’m a boring little geekhead.) I’m more likely to stop reading a particular author if s/he responds with reckless idiocy to negative reviews, no matter how much I love that particular author’s books.
But I never, ever, make the mistake of thinking that negative reviews of books I love are directed personally at me, the consumer. You cannot take everything (or even most things, or in reality ANYTHING) on the Internet personally. An author can’t take bad reviews or cover snark personally, a consumer can’t take in-jokes on a particular site about an author some people can’t stand personally, and publishers, if they know what’s good for them, should confine themselves to being friggin’ thankful their product is getting free advertising, positive OR negative.
Too many people take the Internet too personally. It’s like high school, an artificial terrarium where the heat and moisture are kept on high and things are forced to a boil by hormones, daily contact, and sheer human f!ckw!ttery (always in abundance.) The Internet, as much as we love it (and as much as, I admit, it is my lifeline to a lot of my friends in different parts of the world) IS NOT REAL LIFE.
This is not to say that Internet stalking/bad stuff doesn’t go on. It does. I’ve been stalked, I’ve had my inbox filled with hate mail, and I’ve had people try to personally insult/attack me to draw me out. Sometimes it’s hard to take my own damn advice and ignore or take the high road. That’s a whole different issue, and one I’m NOT addressing here.
The other side of this polyhedron issue is the bookstore worker. I’ve spent a lot of my working life in bookstores, one way or another. (Can’t seem to get away from the damn places.) I’ll ask indie bookstore employees what they thought of a particular book, or I’ll look at “recommend tags” on the shelf, especially at Powell’s. I don’t do that so much at chain stores, because chain bookstore employees seem too harried much of the time. You’re always overworked and underpaid in a bookstore gig, but corporate chain stores don’t give their employees much time or room to do what sells a book best–talking to customers about it. A bookstore employee shrugging and saying, “I thought that was too wordy, but you might want to give it a go if you like _____” carries more weight with me than an Internet review ever will.
Part of being a bookstore employee is being asked for recommendations, and it’s usually a game of Twenty Questions. We take our bookses seriously, so we assume you do, and we want to know what you like before we start recommending. I’ll seriously ask someone at least ten questions about the books they like and why they like them before I’ll venture a recommend, and by and large customers seem overjoyed with the personal attention.
When I review a book here, on my weblog, I’m stating my opinion, on the technical aspects of the work, on the artistic value I feel the work has, the emotional effect it had on me, what I liked and didn’t like. Now, I have to be careful because I’m in publishing. If I didn’t like a book, or couldn’t finish reading it, I’ll very rarely say so here because this blog, as personal as it is, is also a public face. (I think a lot of authors forget that.) And one does not lightly foul one’s coworkers’ nest in an industry as closed and incestuous as publishing. I’m much more likely just to keep my trap shut and just review the books I loved, or that surprised me, or that really moved me.
A site meant only for review, like, say, Smart Bitches, can say why they didn’t like a book with abandon, because they are consumers and giving a consumers’ POV. Which is just as necessary a part of the internet ecosystem as the squeeing fansites. One should not confuse the two. And let’s face it, not everyone is going to enjoy the Smart Bitches brand of humor, or even the profanity. I happen to enjoy both in the context of the site, because to me it’s very well done.
But if you don’t? Close your damn browser. Don’t go back, and most especially don’t go there and yell in the comments “OMG U R MEAN GIRLZ U INSULTD MY AUTHORZ AND I HATE U!” It just makes you look bad. Just like going on an author’s website/fan forum and hurling personal attacks at the author or his/her books. It’s inappropriate in the venue and idiotic to boot. If you feel compelled to vent your spleen and talk about how you hate Smart Bitches reviews/a certain author’s books, get your own damn blog and publish your feelings there. If you do it with snark, pizzaz, proper grammar, and a healthy dose of proportion, you might get a following comparable to the Smart Bitches.
If you’re still stuck in high school and just want to vent your spleen, you’re only going to get trolls and other oddfellows stuck in high school. That’s just the way it works.
Far and away the best thing to do if you don’t like what you’re reading on the Internet, if it’s making you angry, if you just want to reach through the screen and throttle the person who wrote what you don’t agree with…
…is to shut your damn browser and go do something else. All sorts of Internet kerfuffle could be avoided by just that simple step. Just don’t take the Internet personally. It’s a vast bubbling sea of opinion, with occasional rocks of brilliance and actual content that your browser may beach on and bookmark, that you may return to after surfing waves of dreck. Getting upset at the dreck for being dreck, or mistaking the sea of faceless dreck as something directed at YOU PERSONALLY, is a fool’s game. Even those rocks of brilliance and content may not agree with your personal hobbyhorses, opinions, and tastes. That’s life.
In other words, pre-coffee. I suspect this post will get more coherent the more caffeine I imbibe.
Back to my swashbuckling. I think I’m going to switch things around a bit–work in the mornings, and answering email etc. in the afternoon. I need to get Hedgewitch Queen revised and Tristan’s story started. I have five chapters of Tris’s story, but they need severe pruning since they were just “noodling”–me fumbling along, thinking about the character and trying to get to know him.
Today, however, is a busy day. There’s a class to be dropped and one to be added. It’s kind of funny–the UnSullen One was excited about taking a Women’s Studies class. He came home from the first one shaking his head and handed me the syllabus. “The woman’s like an evangelical Christian,” he says, “only it’s women.”
“Fanatic of a different stripe, eh?” I scan the syllabus, and something catches my eye. On the “style sheet” for how the instructor wants papers done, I count no less than six errors, including one that curdles my nurnie. On possessives ending in s, she wants just an apostrophe. For example: the car belonging to Elvis? Elvis’ car.
This is so wrong I don’t even know WHERE to begin. Even a cursory reading of Strunk & White lets you know it’s Elvis’s car. Standard usage nowadays is the apostrophe and the extra s.
The UnSullen One doesn’t wince when I explode. “Yeah, I saw that too. She says since she’s helped publish a book, she knows all about this.” He pauses. “I just kept my mouth shut.”
“Bitch please!” I rant. “Helped publish? What the hell does that mean? This sort of sh!te is the reason people don’t take women’s studies seriously! Bad enough that she wants to be a frocking Monty Python I’m being repressed! skit, but to pull improper possessives–”
“Can I drop it?” he asks. “Please?”
Needless to say, I gave my blessing. Now, I encouraged him to take the women’s studies class in the first place. The local community college, however, seems to have a high share of “professors” who have an axe to grind, not to mention improper grammar and punctuation. The English class he took to get into Running Start? That teacher was gunning for a women’s studies class and tried to inflict that on her students instead of sentence structure.
I do think women’s studies classes are important, but when one has fanatics teaching them, well, the whole point of the exercise is lost. Reverse inequality in the classroom does not foster a true sense of egalitarianism outside. Unfortunately, with women’s studies seen as bastard children of academia for those who have the leisure to pursue them instead of integral parts of a curriculum designed to foster inclusiveness in the cradle of critical thinking…
That’s the problem with institutional inequality. It breeds fanatical behavior on both sides–those who benefit want the status quo kept and kept hard, consciously or unconsciously, and those who are marginalized find it easy to retreat into fanaticism just to keep their fire burning against the crushing weight of said inequality.
I suppose I should find it funny that I might have counseled him to stick with the class if it hadn’t been for the punctuation errors on the style sheet, if only for the valuable experience of learning how to deal with a teacher who isn’t interested in the students learning so much as interested in forcing his or her own pet issue down the throat of impressionable youngsters. And I really do think a women’s studies course would be a good thing for the UnSullen One.
I suppose we’ll have to go back to discussing economic inequality at home, and reading things like A Doll’s House, Sleeping With The Enemy, and Queen of the South, no to mention The Yellow Wallpaper and Jacob Have I Loved and The Great Cosmic Mother.
