Back in the fall of the year last year, during the Occupy movements, one of memes that was circulating the internet was of people saying “I am wealthy– tax me more!” I, being the cynical person that I am, wondered aloud why these people didn’t give the money they thought should be taken in taxes to charities, if they really cared so deeply.

Then I thought about that more, and it actually seemed an excellent idea. If you think you should be taxed at a higher rate, or if you feel that the government is falling down on the job on a certain issue– give a bunch of money to a charity! That way you actually know where the money goes, and you don’t have to wait for tax reform to roll around, a process that might take five or more years.

Side note: I am not advocating for high-income persons paying taxes at a lower rate than middle-income people. That is absurd. I’m thinking about the possibilities inherent in making 200k or more a year, which is the benchmark for the Canadian 1%.

At any rate, I was so taken with my idea that I mentioned it to someone else who was taking an interest in the Occupy movement. His reaction was first to accuse me of conservatism, and then when I requested an answer to why this idea I’d just come up with would be bad, he responded.

“Well it doesn’t work to just have people give money to charities, because then it gives people free rein to be bigots with their money.”

Now I found that to be a fascinating response, primarily because of all the assumptions it contains. The first one is that it presumes that the government is free of prejudice and/or bigotry. Is that true? On the one hand, no, because no choice can be free of a value statement. Every decision is prejudiced one way or another. But semantics aside, is our government free of prejudice?

I have been thinking about this, and I don’t believe that simply because the government is the government it is imbued with some quasi-mystical protection against awfulness. The record of history is that governments make mistakes, and usually when they make mistakes they make horrible ones. They also do good things, but it is far from a 100% skew in favour of infallible government. Yes, our governments are committed to justice and equality. In Canada we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which the government is committed to upholding. But so is every other institution– and  by law. If I want to go around discriminating against people on the basis of age, class, race, gender, marital status, sexual orientation, etc, I am prohibited by law from doing so. I could be working for the government or the local corner store, it makes no difference. So there’s that.

And the second presumption which that statement contented is that it’s the government’s role to stop bigotry. And that also, I think, is incorrect.

Please don’t stone me.

I don’t mean that the govt should be advocating or turning a blind eye to bigotry. Our duly elected officials, as representatives of the people, should be fighting grossness and injustice, protecting the powerless and disenfranchised, and helping those who need it. But that’s just it, as representatives of the people. Change shouldn’t come only from the government, it should come from the people, with “official” channels being only one of the channels which change travels.

So yes, it is government’s role to stop bigotry and grossness. But it is also EVERYONE ELSE’S role to stop it. If we rely on legislation as the only path to change things, I think we make a mistake. Social change usually comes in small increments, on the community and household level, after all.

So that is how a simple statement about charity and taxes opened up a whole can of worms in my head about the role of government and re-established in my own head that legislation is not the end-all-and-be-all of society. Feel free to point out my mistakes and mental flaws in the comments.

I’m brainstorming world building for a book I’m gonna write, and I’m having LOTS of fun. Working out food shipments and gravity generation and all kinds of stuff. However, it seems both boring and inaccurate to assume that SOCIETY OF THE FUTURE would be primarily drawn from my own culture. Particularly because, y’know, I come from an island in the North Atlantic. People eat fried bread dough and fried bologna for breakfast, with molasses on both. SO I wanted to take a bunch of other cultures and make a melting pot of awesome, basically. 

AND then I was wondering whether it would just come across as rude and appropriation-ist if I have this stew of elements from cultures that aren’t mine. If I have, Asian and European and American ELEMENTS, but not a careful homage to any culture. 

I figured I should ask this now, before I get a bunch of it all nailed down in words. 

My motivating theme for the book is THINGS THAT ARE AWESOME, and you know, racist grossness is not exactly awesome. 

P.S. The world has kitchen gardens and chopsticks and awesome collars and kids with wings and magnetic trains and quarantine zones and DEATH and grapefruits (maybe) and biometric scanners and embassy blocks and spy trains and secret thieves writing and NO KISSING and amnesia (yes, this is my amnesia story (I figured I’d go all the way and try so make a novel out of my one story.)) and friends and con boys and oxygen rationing and incense. And possibly faith, too. Also, a girl named Pax who has a sideline as the personification of Justice. 

I think we’ve established in the past that I don’t consider myself a literary fiction writer? For a number of reasons? I mean, these are the guys’n'gals who have Prose where I have Stupid Jokes. They’re GOOD with words, and images and. *break to add description to the story*

Anyways, while the idea of sending things out to Tin House fills me with gibbering panic, the logical part of my brain is cooly pressing me forward. In the last few weeks I have been reflecting on how absolutely excellent it is to receive good news you weren’t expecting, and how embittering it is to never receive news you were expecting. I’m not going to go into examples, but I have certainly experienced both. Given the possibility of both options, I’d rather expect to have to do things the hard way and be delighted at any step towards ease, than to expect the express road and be pushed back onto a canal tow path.

So I reflected on that, patting myself on the back at how wise I was, and then realized that I somehow expected loads of acceptance and ease in my writing life.

Anyone who has frequented the writing world is probably laughing at this point. Laughing loudly.

Because I’ve sent my writing almost exclusively to my friends and Clarion (which I was accepted by) I have this childish expectation that everyone is going to like my stuff. That’s not to say that I don’t think I write well– I think I have some skills in that direction. But I have a long way to go. And I’m not going to fit what every person is looking for. And I like to use sentence fragments and other broken grammars, (^_^) which everyone knows is the KISS OF DEATH. I need to collect some rejections and put myself on a better mental footing, where I understand both mentally and emotionally that rejections are more likely than the opposite.

So yes, sending to Tin House seems like an EXCELLENT start in the rejection-collection. So I should stop writing this post and actually hit the “send” buttons.

/pause/

I have now sent things out. I’m on my way! Now I only have to wait 90 days till the their average rejection time catches up with me.

*goes forth to conquer the world and collect rejection*

*and names. Totes collecting names*

I review Cinder here.

Click through for the rest of the review!

*watches 99% of blog followers drift away*

Ah, my loyal spambots! Thank you for staying.

So I started thinking about this post about two weeks ago, when I was going to bed dissatisfied with the productivity of the day. After I had pointed out to myself that I’d read 200 pages of a MG novel and worked for seven hours, myself realized that my subconscious has for some time now been ignoring activities that don’t involve writing in some way. The hours that fill my bank account? PSH. They are nothing. The two hours spend scanning for “ly” in a short story– now there is where my satisfaction lies.

Part of me was absolutely delighted to figure this out. I finally knew, with proof from my  emotions and everything, (exactly one year after I decided to try a workshop to see if I wanted to try this writing thing seriously), that storytelling was where my focus and love was. So yes, I went in and changed my facebook employment information to add “writer” as a part-time job.

Another part of me was closer to despair than to glee, because I knew that writing was what I want to do as my final career, and yet I have three years of 50-60 hour weeks ahead of me in school and work-for-money-for-school. My current method of devoting time to writing involves chunks of four or more hours at a time– which has not been a useable tactic as I keep having chucks of two or less hours, during which I am a starey-creature-who-stares-at-walls for at least half of that time.

You see, I am wimpy and thus I tire easily, and I don’t do well if I don’t spent time talking to/stalking the twitter/tumblr feed of at least one of my friends on the internet, and I don’t do well if I don’t get enough sleep, and so on, and so on. I know what I want to do, I just– can’t do it yet.

It is extremely tempting to just scream at myself for being so weak. I should push myself through writing anyways, damn the consequences. Edit anyways, no matter if I hate it and I can’t think straight and only one of my eyes will focus and all I want to do is cry. I need to get this done. I have done this before.

That is to say, I’ve gone the self-hatred route. It’s really good for producing self-hatred, not great for producing anything else. And I mean anything. Socialization drops, faith drops, work that I am being paid to do drops…

So I need to find another way forward. I need to (1.) teach myself to work in small snatches and (2.) to not fall into the habit of hating myself for my weakness whenever I can’t. (Legitimately, I asked someone if being depressed whenever I was tired was normal. It was suggested that I try being nice and rewarding myself for work done when I was tired. I literally had never considered that, as when I’m tired it’s a sign that I have failed to complete the work I wanted to and I’m giving up too soon darn it. Yeah. So that was another eye-opening realization.) I need to (3.) take advantage of my current jobs which provide exactly zero life of the mind, and use that time to ponder and brainstorm. I need to (4.) eat right so I don’t get tired sooner than is necessary, and I need to (5.) embrace the fun of writing (after all, I’ll be doing it for the rest of my life, (*squee!bounce*)).

Because writing should be fun, I have decided. I get to make things. I get to make AWESOME things. (I should stop abusing italics.) I get to think about Themes and Messages and Characters and Worldbuilding and Cultural Assumptions and Plot and Voice and ALL THIS FUN STUFF. (Note: that is an entirely appropriate use of italics.) And then I get to string them all together, using language, which I love. I love all of these things. Why would I not have fun? I’m not talking giggling-euphoria levels of fun, just that these are things that I adore thinking about, talking about, and dealing with. Seriously, I SHOULD BE HAVING FUN. If I’m not enjoying this thing which delights me, I probably have other baseline things wrong with my mindset right now and maybe I should– I dunno– eat or something. Sleep. Play Tetris. Take a shower. Sleep.

There’s so much STUFF on the internet about “write every day” and “write even if you don’t want to” and “butt in chair” and “the reader can’t tell the difference between words you wrote when you were having fun and words you wrote when you hated everything,” etc, etc, ad nauseum. The attitude seems to be that if you’re having fun you’re doing it wrong. You should be sweating blood, you know. You should feel PAIN. LIKE AN ADULT.

And I’m using my status as an adult to choose to ignore all that. Gonna have fun, gonna do cool stuff, gonna make things explode. *nch nch nch*

I am also going to find a way to explain this picture.

I feel as though in deciding this and then saying it in text I am committing a great heresy against the orthodoxy of the internet. YEAH I AM A HERETIC WHOOO.

To sum up: I have two victory conditions for achieving Success: that I write things I am proud of– that are funny and awesome and people want to re-read, and that I do not hate my life and how long it took me to get there. I need to be nice to myself while I live and write and work and get to my dream job.

See, I told you it’d be a rambling blog post.

P.S. World-building note:  How WEIRD is facebook and our self-construction of our identity through it?

Also, after making this video, I am SO IN LOVE WITH TEXT-BASED COMMUNICATION. It was killing me in editing to not be able to touch up words here and there, polish phrasing, put this intro on that outro…

Yeah. Writing is better.

“What happens when we find ‘The Line’ as viewers?“

In it, he talks about how, as a movie reviewer, he has seen hundreds of depictions of rape, and how he finally just snapped. He’s questioning why this happens so often, and coming to the conclusion that is essentially laziness on the part of the writers/directors, in most cases. (It’s quite a good article, you should read it.)

Anyways, I sent it to my movie-buff friend, and he came back with this.

He makes a much-needed point. I haven’t seen a lot of movies that included on-screen rape – only one comes to mind, and I’m hoping it’s only that one, because otherwise something is seriously wrong with me that I’ve just gone and forgotten the others – but the same principle applies (in a lesser sense) to other depictions of extreme violence and sexuality on-screen.

And I responded;

And it goes beyond mere gratuitous violence/sex, which is the usual accusation against pointless content. It’s just sloppy. So much writing nowadays is short-hand for emotional impact. (And I’m guilty of this too.) We need the audience to feel grief– so the child dies. We need the audience to feel horrified– so we rape someone. It angers me on two counts, because a.) it’s sloppy writing (something I feel strongly about), and b.) it cheapens the actual grief, pain and violence. Which is something I feel even more strongly about.

I thought of you when I read this, because I seem to remember you saying something like that in the past.

Well, I sure hope I said something like that. ‘Cause, yeah, it’s true. I think it also indirectly leads to lack of character development, because seriously, what kind of writer would be able to write a convincing, sympathetic, well-developed character and then just casually have another character rape him/her, or the like? I mean, maybe a psychopath writer, but I sure can’t imagine doing that, and I think what generally happens is that that kind of thing is used as a substitute for character development, which ties in to what you’re saying about sloppy writing. Ironically, because the audience or readers won’t be all that attached to the character being brutalized in some way, they won’t feel the affect of the act as keenly, which, yeah, cheapens the evil on display and feeds the growing prevalence of apathy towards this kind of stuff.

The magazine I review books for, (first review forthcoming soon,) has a volunteer slush reader position open. It’s a YA spec fic magazine, so young adult fantasy, science fiction, horror and any mixture therein. And as a slush reader you’d read 5-10 stories a week, give brief feedback about whether it works or not, and why, and get an excellent add-on to put on your resume.

So, stats;

• unpaid
• 2 hours a week
• excellent on your resume
• USEFUL FOR WRITING

You want to apply, yes? Yes. Here is the link.

LINK TO APPLICATION INFORMATION.

I really wish I was exaggerating, but I am actually pulling the dates on the last few stories I critiqued. Oops.

Anyways, this lamentable tendency has in fact led to an interesting piece of learning.

In the last week, I critiqued something close to ten stories. Not a clarion-week’s worth, but still a respectable amount. And because I was close-reading so many stories at once, and thinking hard about how they were put together, I was also thinking about how I was thinking. (The byline for my blog used to be “I spent too much time in my own head.” It’s still flirting with being true. (My next business venture will be INTROSPECTION ‘R US. Tell your friends.)) I finally put my finger on an undercurrent in a story– the emotional through line– which I’d been trying to figure out but never quite managed it. And it’s not to say that I can do it with all stories, but there were a couple in a row where I was able to pinpoint emotional setup and payoff, and the line I was walking as the reader, and whether I got lost in the story and cool stuff.

And then I realized that I was learning something from critiquing.

It– shouldn’t take so long for me to figure this out. I did go to Clarion. I talked to people before about how it would be valuable, and to people afterwards about how it was valuable. But in much the way as the full import of ethics and what that does to a culture’s art took a full three years to impact in my head, this only fully clicked last week.

Critiquing, as an activity, is so valuable.

Just think about it; you are studying a story (in my life a story written by a friend) looking for ways it could be made better. So you are looking for strengths and weaknesses. You are looking for what makes a story work. You are looking for how to make a story work. For a writer, that seriously has to join Writing and Reading to make a holy trinity of “how to get better at your craft.”

A disclaimer should here be sounded, because I don’t know, maybe for you critique isn’t as useful. Maybe you get all you need to know by reading masterworks of the style of fiction you aspire to. Maybe critique isn’t useful at all; you learned everything in english class. But for me, the interaction with a story is intensely valuable. (I also have taken a grand total of two (2) english classes in my entire life. They were valuable, but not where i get the bulk of my knowledge about story.) So your milage may vary.

BUT DUDE LEARNING. LEARNING IS AWESOME. Because, you know, critiquing is a learned skill, just as writing is. It’s not as though you can walk in and sit down with a story and then every mark which proceedeth from your pen will be shining pure brilliance undiluted. Or okay, maybe that’s how it works for you. For me, it went like this.

I’ve had writer-friends for as long as I’ve been writing. (Yes, the two things are deeply connected. Correlation AND causation, you might say.) And when I joined in with the writing circle we would share around what we’d written, for fun and adoration. After all, what’s the fun of writing hilarious adventures if you’re the only one who gets to see them? Exactly. Not much point. Thank you for agreeing.

So we’d share around stories, and tell each other they were amazing and hilarious. And that was awesome. That was about Level 1 of sharing reading.

But along the way, and I’m not even sure where or when it happened, but we started offering critiques as well. Level 2! We’d read, and offer suggestions about what wasn’t working.

This was a rocky road, because a.) critiquing is a hard skill to learn to give, and b.) critiquing is a hard skill to learn to take. And I am a selfish and temperamental beast who doesn’t take personal criticism well. Anything directed at my story was suddenly an attack on myself. I had a track record of criticism taken so very well, indeed, that there was an intervention before I applied to Clarion from people who thought it would be bad for me and everyone around me. Once I was accepted, it was the one thing I was most terrified about. Writing six stories? No big deal. Having people tell me my stories suck? The night before my first crit session I barely slept, and the last time that happened was when I watched Blink and then went to bed in a huge empty house.

(Fortunately, I neither cried in class or attacked anyone physically.).

Clarion, my friends, was something like Level 10 of critiquing. I just skipped all the intermediate steps and went straight into a group of people who can tell you what is wrong with your story (everything) while making you feel proud of how good it is already, and excited to fix it with the suggestions they offer. Do you know how easy it is to take critique in that group? Very easy. Do you know how hard it is to critique like that?

VERY HARD.

Lamentably, being part of that circle of awesome did not mean I immediately achieved all the critiquing and critique-presenting skills. This is probably quite obvious from the part above, where I said I only just figured out how to identify the emotional paths of a story. But I am learning; slowly, surely and with great delight for each fragment of knowledge collected.

It’s fun.

And at first I didn’t even notice. There were adventures, I was reading them, I was seven, and so I just read myself into them. I was constantly the main character, daring and smart and able to escape and virtuous and awesome. I was AWESOME.

And then, somewhere in there, I started to notice gender. I started to notice that I couldn’t be the main character in the books I was reading. There was this divide, and I was on the wrong side of it.

I can’t trace it back to any one book, I think it was just a combination of figuring out who I was (and wasn’t), and the sheer amount of adventures, historical fiction, and books written a century ago that I was cramming into my head. Sometimes the characters said explicitly that girls couldn’t participate in the expedition, and sometimes it was the more insidious assumption that girls would never want to come along. And again, the selection of books that I was reading comes down to a lot of factors, (what was available in the local library being a big one), but I took to heart the universal message that guys had adventures and girls were the impetuous for adventures; they were either in need of rescue or there to be impressed by the exploits of the male sex.

And oh, I took that to heart hard. At first I tried to deal with it by fully taking on the virtues of a frontier woman. They were super competent and vital people, and sometimes had adventures of their own. Frontier women were the most badass of the role models available, in fact, because I wasn’t rich enough to be a Nancy Drew and I couldn’t quite wish myself into being a princess. There still exists a terrible picture I have not managed to destroy which shows that my dedication to a frontier aesthetic also extended to fashion. It’s really terrible. Anyways, that attempt worked just about until my temper came in.

Don’t worry, this is not another history of my reading habits. (We’ve had enough of that lately.) My point is that I was still looking into books for characters who were like me, and I kept slamming up against the gender barrier. So, did the writers intend that? In the case of books written 50 or more years ago, I think it’s quite possible. This is, after all, the era of Children’s Literature With Morals, and strict gender roles were certainly a moral good. In books written more recently, I think I fell more afoul of the assumption that “adventure novel” means “novel meant for boys”.

Eowyn is just here to be rescued...

And when I first started thinking about this I spent a great deal of time being righteously indignant that I couldn’t find myself in these books, just because of my sex. How ridiculous!

Er, yes. How ridiculous, self. You should look to that. Because the brainwave that hit today is a two-parter.

The first deals with the older stuff, where gender divides were specifically put in. The authors have expressed their view, do I agree with it? A swift look at reality proves that having your reproductive organs on the inside does not guarantee you a rescuer in all situations, so unless you want to be a tragic casualty, it’s a good idea to be prepared to rescue yourself. Damsel in distress– not a viable lifestyle. Consulting reality also shows that my lack of eye-hand coordination and cardiovascular capacity makes me a poor choice to bring on an adventure, at least as the muscle. Does that have anything to do with my chromosomes? Well, as far as my chromosomes indicate I have weak eyes and like reading, yes, but that’s about it. On the other hand, if an adventure needs a storehouse of trivia and bizarre information I am so there. I think the author and I can agree to disagree on the subject of their quaint gender views, and I can enjoy the adventure for its merits or lack thereof. GENDER ISSUE SORT’D.

And the second part of the brainwave comes regarding books written more recently. They tend to be free of side characters pointedly staying home to cook, so why would I have issues with them? Because I know I cannot be the main character? Yes, and that matters why, exactly?

I think I’ve been reading at a basically basic level. I’ve been looking for myself in stories and rolling around in the awesomeness of me for a while. Which is useful– after all it’s nice to know that you’re not alone in the world, there are people like you– but it’s hardly the only way to read. Only reading in this manner is like only eating chocolate. You’re missing a lot of the essential nutrients needed for living. In this case, empathy.

Because really, gender is only the most obvious and silly place to draw a line. If I say I can’t enjoy books with Male MCs, can I also not enjoy books with Female MCs who are sporty, or social, or interested in romance, or who live in different worlds, or who follow a different faith, or who have a different skin colour, or hair colour, or who don’t have to worry about being blind without their classes, or who aren’t interested in history, or who don’t like tea? I mean, it would be hard to get over the tea barrier, but if I can empathize past that I should be able to empathize past anything.

So delicious...

Ahem. What I mean to say is that I would be severely restricting myself, to solely allow myself to enjoy books “about me.” The reading of the books which aren’t about me is the joy of it! I can see someone else’s experience, and what it’s like to be human in another life. Unless I get new eyes I am never going to be able to play sports: I have neither the depth perception, the eye-hand-co-ordination or the interest in that activity. But I can read about someone who loves sports, and as a bonus I don’t have to experience the pain.

I mean, this realization opens up SCADS of new horizons. And for goodness sake, self, I read science fiction and fantasy like they are the chief balm for my soul. Imagining the reality of another type of life should not present a huge problem for me.