Four

In a couple or three weeks, it will be Penelope's fourth adoptiversary. In some ways, Pen feels like she's been with me always, and yet the memories of our early days never quite fades, either. It was a hard time for both of us, but great ZOT you never saw an animal more eager to please or learn or just be utterly OSUM than my girl.

Goss is like any cat. He came fully assembled - no litter training, and cuddlesome and highly portable. He is gorgeous and hilarious and boyish and sleek (and you never saw nimbleness the like of his; I sure haven't, and I've had four cats now).

Ahh, but my Pen. The Yellow Poobah, the bestest girl-thing, the bestest dog, the bestest yellow thing in the history of ever.

I knew I was going to love this little maniac, but geez how MUCH I do.

Four and a half or a hair more by now, she has become a powerhouse of a magnificent canine. Just the most beautiful dog I've ever owned; even Sid, who was gorgeous, did not have quite the ineffable dingo-ness that is Penelope's magic. Sid was more wolf, more a dog I was familiar with from the word go. She was aristocratic and majestic. Calm.

But Penelope is the ur-puppy, that elemental dogness, a breed little mucked-around-with by mankind, my ghost from an Egyptian stela, my swamp thing, my Carolina dog, my Yaller Dawg, my Dixie Dingo, my unexpected living ancient. There is something both ineffably alien about her and everything else overwhelmingly PRESENT about her. She is the most *here* animal.

Her alacrity is of course legend among her friends. "Sit, you say? I can sit for you. Look, I've sat. Ooh, and I can also 'down' for you. I'm down. See? Down. Ooh, but wait. I can 'belly' too - see this? This is my belly!" It's unbearably endearing and extremely funny, and of course being a boring old PERSON, I try to train her out of this. "That's not sit! Gimme sit. Good girl."

Her alacrity in greeting is also pretty legendary - and, unfortunately, is the main reason others don't tend to love Penelope as I do. Doing the ignore-her-turn-around-till-she-calms-down thing is all very well and good, but the effusiveness of a happy pup is not so easily to be gainsaid every time. Bless her bones.



But age has been working upon her of late. At four, she's hardly old, but she's much more capable of checking her OWN energy now. When even her "grandma" comments, "Penny has been good" - you have to know, that dog has been dadgum near perfect.

Milestones of note: a week or so ago, I ordered pizza, and when I told her to sit and to stay, that dog sat AND she stayed. First time ever. No "A FRIEND HAS COME TO THE DOOR, BEARING FOOD NO LESS, I MUST THANK THIS FRIEND AND PERHAPS GO SOMEWHERE WITH THEM IN THEIR CAR" greetings.



Pen's effusiveness, and I know it, owes a lot to her doggy-mommy's own mental energies, and when someone is coming to the house there's some skein in my awareness that amps up, even if I'm not thinking directly "the dog's going to wig", and even if I behave calmly.

I worry less now. Pen wigs less.

It has not been my habit to compare Pen with Sweet Siddy La generally. (Yes, I've done it here and am now, but in daily life I don't go looking at Penelope and seeing my late dog.) But as she reaches the age Sid was when I adopted her, Penelope reminds me more of Sidney than she ever has before. And Sid was universally LOVED by my friends and family. A great sitting-at-your-feet-and-napping dog.

Which Pen has always been, but she punctuates greetings with *such* emphasis, few people know what she's really like.

If they are fortunate, they'll see.

My dear yellow soul. I'm lucky she said, "ADOPT ME" when I met her.



Awwwwwww. and when I went to find an image of an Adopt Me vest or a pup wearing one, I found this along the way. That very first pic could have been my Poobah on the first day we met. That pure, perfect coat, the white-white teeth, clear eyes, and black-black nose. Even better than a labeled-for-reuse graphic. Please click.

Not-Trek

A funny thing happened on my way to Star Trek: Beyond. Every other movie for the past few years.

There's long been a hallowed tradition in American filmmaking, where (especially with Ye Summer Blockbuster) shit-blowin'-up-real-good is perhaps the core of the attraction. We like watching buildings explode, continents going kablooey - we even had fun with CGI destruction of major cities for a while there. Gosh darn it, good clean American fun, where nobody gets hurt (they're all just digital ants, right) and loud noises suffice for entertainment.

Rebooting has also been a big money maker, so we've rebooted the CRUD out of, say, Spider-Man (we're on #3 in under ten years, folks), every television show known to the Baby Boomers and now even some Gen-X'ers, and ... oh yeah, Star Trek.

Three years ago, DC Comics debuted their 'verse challenge to the box office, television, and beyond domination of Marvel's stunningly successful multiverse, giving the world the grey, grimy, gloomy, and petulantly self-indulgant Man of Steel. Antithetical to almost any possible character trait of Superman as he's existed for GENERATIONS now, this movie failed to score in one very major way: its sickening collateral destruction. The hue and cry against Supes' heedless and violent smackdown of his enemies, and the resultant, ya know, complete razing of some significant areas of human habitation, were loud and lamenting.

For those who are not fans: Superman is essentially a Christ figure. He never quite dies for our sins, but the only son sent from, well space, who gives up a normal life to serve mankind: yeah, it's a bit of a parallel.

So to make him an emo jerk with zero personality and a whinging little ax to grind, and to indulge an entire grubby looking feature film to the insane amounts of damage he and Zod leave around them without the slightest nod to those people and properties they destroy? Unpopular. And the movie sucked.

The result has been Batman Versus Superman. Not greatly more loved, as far as I have heard: but wow did it backpedal on the whole collateral damage thing.

Add to this Marvel's own multiverse spending now literally *years* addressing exactly the same issues - in the Netflix series Jessica Jones, on an existential level; in ABC's Agents of Shield, almost for the run of the series; in Captain America: Civil War, one of the biggest movies of this year. And it's no accident Civil War bears Cap's name, not The Avengers. He is all but alone, of his compatriots, in all the sacrifice and service we once saw and loved in Supes. And he's not a gun-toting ass, he is a human, the most human perhaps of all the Avengers, striving for principles and fiercely moral. Cap has become one of the most fascinating characters cinema has had to offer in a long time; his portrayal at Chris Evans' hands has been pretty remarkable on multiple levels.


So. Violence, and the fact that even in America its emptiness has begun to cause backlash.



I've been on record most of my adult life as being an open-minded fan - I will take what I'm given and generally try to enjoy it. Expansions of the Trekverse have rarely struck me as a bad idea.


Now we are "Beyond" the universe.

The latest Trek is a good movie. It's got some humor, it's got characters I quite like. I was surprised when I saw Simon Pegg was a writer (I might have expected *more* humor, if I'd known; but I was fairly successful in going in - even as late as I did - with little knowledge beforehand).

Pegg's Montgomery Scott has been a wonderfully winsome, moral presence himself, through the reboots. In Darkness, he was the voice of reason asking "hey, do we really want to go hauling possibly illegal weaponry into territory we're not allowed to be wandering around in in the first place?" and lost his job for it. For a while. He had to kill at one point, which was horrible to see and made me sad, but at LEAST it was theoretically justified by the script.

Beyond ... well, goes beyond. And over the top. And so forth.

The level of CRUELTY in Beyond is something worse than merely distasteful, it is both disrespectful of the entire Trekverse (and fandom) and a betrayal of the ideals on which every franchise used to be built. It is also incredibly tone-deaf.

In a world where DC Comics has to answer for wanton destructiveness, TREK of all things has produced a story in which hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths just mean nothing. We've all joked about red-shirts, I can't pretend not to have myself. But the level of viciousness, the level of truly morally bankrupt violence in Beyond is heartbreaking.

TOS killed off the occasional redshirt, but generally to make a point about the awfulness of death - or, at the very least, the awfulness of whatever enemy/obstacle the crew were up against. TNG didn't do much killing, but they honored the redshirt tradition here and there, and stuffed up their crew's shirts with a fair amount of moral superiority along the way (I will say: not always justifiably).

DS9, long my favorite of the series, took death and allowed war itself into the Trekverse. But even the war was not a wanton reaction; it was an attrition, a defense, and tapped very much into the ideals of Roddenberry's universe. It explored with more depth, at times, the twisted moralities and allegiances born out of humanoid conflict. It was, for the most part, honest - and earnest.

There is no earnestness in Beyond. Much urgency, but little morality.

Our villain, in Beyond, is a confusing morass of magical properties. We're not supposed to recognize what he is, so he is capable of changing appearance for no particular reason. He's supposed to be scary and evil, so occasionally he's some sort of energy-draining vampire. How this works, why it is so, is not much explained; he's just BAD GUY (and a cruel short-changing of the talents of Idris Elba - and also, was nobody at all a bit squirmy about making a large black man the villain, after the racial issues attached to whitewashing Khan?). His entire motivation is, um. That he is semi-immortal and went nuts because of it? That he was abandoned (shades of Bond Reboot #2)? That he is personally offended (shades of Trek Reboot #1 or CA;Civil War)?

Trek villains are usually greedy or (sigh) culturally inferior (see also, my many issues with TNG's unrelenting smugness), not torturing madmen giving mental illness a bad name.

The villain - as we've seen so often in recent years - is merely the mechanism by which we get the story, such as it is, and the 'splosions, such as they are, into motion. I don't even mind that; many's the Bond film predicated on such red herrings.

But you have to tell a good story once you get the mechanism ticking.

Beyond ... is not a bad story. But it could have been so much better.

One friend of mine commented on the old "tech that's been lying around for centuries magically working just like that" but I stand by that as a Trek trope of long standing. Fine. And, if it bugs you, well consider that Jaylah has been caretaker of "her house" (and all its tech) for some years, apparently. So she kept things in trim.

More than anything else, I wish I could have seen even ACKNOWLEDGEMENT by the crew that people were dying left, right, and down the middle, and that was A Bad Thing. Nope. They're driven, yes, and death is bad, but there's no feeling towards the masses of people destroyed along the way.

And the Enterprise herself is killed off early in the film.

It all feels like a character is missing. And the killing-off here is done along the way to action scenes we've seen before.

The character sliding down the hull of a dying ship. Check: Khan did this in Reboot #2. The characters flying through space/midair without any craft. Check: Reboots #1 and #2 both. Exciting once, amusing twice, retreading now, and taking up time and space that could have had some sort of story going on. Spaceship rising out of the water. Check: Avengers did this a few years ago, and Enterprise did it in Reboot #2, opening sequence no less.

Trek depends upon tropes; I've made this clear right here - redshirts, and gee-whiz tech, and setpieces, oh my. But retreads are just a drag. And laziness is a killer.

I came in wanting to love Star Trek: Beyond, and knowing as little about it as I could. Reviews were sounding good, but I'd seen some doubt.

And I liked it. I liked it in parts. I liked Jaylah, a good character for a woman, something all to hard to come by. Cis-checked and Hollywood pretty of course, but still a strong opportunity in an industry not plagued with good women's roles.

I enjoyed what humor there was, and appreciated the memorial to Leonard Nimoy. Some of the nostalgia felt earned, even as strategic - and manipulative - as necessarily it was. It was respectful, and I loved the shot of Nichelle Nichols and the TOS cast.

The delving into Bones' and Spock's relationship was not merely Pure Comedy Gold My Friends, but lots of genuine fun. THAT was a great movie, braided into a couple other movies with hit-and-miss quality.

I thought Kirk was great, here. His reactions, his actions. I believed him wholly. Same with Zoe Saldana's Uhura, which has been among my favorite aspects of the reboots. This magnificent woman, played first by the marvelous Nichelle Nichols and now by the sensitive, powerful Saldana, has been wonderfully developed through the new films. Her beauty is impossible to miss, but the fact that that is only the smallest part of her has been too. Uhura has been a glorious part, character, image, story, since Abrams took the helm. She is not short-shrifted here.

And yet. And yet.

I liked it in parts. I will get it on disc, when it comes, for those parts. I'll listen for the places this film harmonizes not only with its fellow reboots, but with the Trekverse itself. The music of the spheres, Trek-style.



But oh dear me. The ways it failed are truly bleak.

Collection, With A Lot of Villainy

It’s the wrong Donald, Gromit.

Apparently (in certain others' minds, anyway) I am a ... PANK. Hm. Sounds distasteful. I'm not persuaded this is a label worth accepting - indeed, I'm not entirely persuaded by this article. Still, it's interesting to note that, invisible as I am being an old biddy aunt, I'm an impressively fast-growing demographic.

NPR did a piece today on why villains are always the interesting characters. I'd argue against the old "good guys are always boring" routine; a good writer doesn't leave the protagonist drab. As good writing goes, "good guys are boring" is lazy right there. It is right after they say villains are always the interesting ones, using Shakespeare's Iago (I am NOT linking that for you, if you don't know the reference, look it up) as a juicy example, that I immediately think of Claudius. Not Graves' Claudius (nor Derek Jacobi's), but Hamlet's. He does not steal the show. James Bond villains often don't either - Bond villains are MacGuffins, simply there to set everything in motion. Captain America: Civil War was the same - a villain we spend no time with, care about not one whit, and who in the end has nothing to do with anything at all. Surprisingly good movie, out of that.

But still. The montage of famous villains' voices at the top is worth the ride. Could use more of the Star Wars evil march music, though.

The MOST fascinating part of this story is its point regarding villains' never thinking they ARE bad guys or women. No matter your place on the political spectrum - right now, this year, there is no way around seeing that as a reference not to movies, but to this election.

Questions. I have Questions ...

Re-watching Battlestar Galactica (the reboot) recently, I have questions, profound questions. They start out merely as practical issues ... but they grow, into an exploration (and note that word choice as I get comparative) ...



How is it, a world bombed about five minutes ago, with nuclear explosions we SEE engulfing most of the surface of the planet is (a) habitable by humans (yes, even with radiation meds - what are they EATING? and, in that one episode, how are they conceivably imagined to be fertile?) and (b) filled with *still-standing cities* ... when a planet bombed-out TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO is unsuitable for settlement?

In a fleet where networked computers are verboten: how do they communicate with one another by phone? Across vast distances? I know we see much made of staticky radio, but their feats of electronics and communications without wireless networking of any kind do begin to stagger the imagination - most especially with the extraordinary precision of their faster-than-light jumps through space.

There are those who think BSG made huge leaps forward in every way from all the Trek series. I'll grant, the writing is taut. But BSG depends, with a frequency none of the ST series ever quite matches, on The False Deadline. "If this person isn't recovered by X moment, we all die, or they die, or whatever - and DISASTER ENSUES" ... but recovery is made just in time - or just after time, but because we fudged the deadline. This creates tension, maybe, but the tension is false.

As to the rest, the acting is not entirely superior; only different. The major nit people pick relates to production design, and I'll grant that BSG looks "lived-in" and bears internal logic most of the time in the way things work, but there are weird set choices and usage of space, and Trek's relative slick sheen was of course intentional - the idealized look of a world originally conceived to BE ideal, pretty, perfect. But put Grace Park next to any ST castmember in any series you like, including TOS, and I'm going to call BS if you claim the acting is better. Honestly, for all he's been sainted time and again, I found Olmos pretty one-note (gravelly) and ponderous at times. Not unbelievable, but not exactly a deeply layered character - stamping "complex" on his name on a script doesn't convince me. And I have every bit as much trouble watching Kara Thrace's overly poochy pout as I do with Jolene Blalock's overly poochy pout in Enterprise.

Image: Wikipedia

Adama and Athena. He is profoundly betrayed by her - "throw that thing in the brig" - heals offscreen - she's his loyal, trusted sidearm - he is profoundly betrayed by her - and then he gives her her kid and lets her out, again. The reversals, I can't accept them. Not ALL of them. It's too regular. And it too-well suits the needs of one episode's plot and/or heartstring-tugging to be believed.

BSG has often been touted for its focus on humanity - no silly rubber masks and so on. But BSG's idea of "humanity" is extremely limited. Only the Greco-Roman heritage exists. There are a few faces of color, but zero culture exists but - essentially - white Western history. Anyone looking more diverse is merely assimilated, not actually representative of anything but the Greek (and LDS) traditions on display. Even the Cylons are strictly and entirely part of this tradition.

So ... in the entire universe, wherein they meet no form of life other than humans and Cylons (and what's the difference there being the final point of the whole series' arc, we really meet nothing but humans and watch them squabble) ... no form of culture exists, AT ALL, but this?

At least ST *tries* to represent diversity. Even when it fails (see also: kind of a lot of TNG), it attempts. (Though let it be said, I have diversity issues with ST; not least, the overwhelming tendency of black actors being put under layers of makeup to hide their faces altogether - ask me YET AGAIN why DS9 is my favorite series: see Benjamin Sisko and his son, and "Far Beyond the Stars", as well as *many* other episodes directly dealing with prejudice and bigotry, Earthly and otherwise. DS9 is notable for its redemptive treatment of the Ferengi, who were written as shameful stereotypes in other series.)

BSG's fleet is really just a construct. Apart from central cast and recurring characters, the forty-seven thousand (and less ... and less) survivors of humanities might as well be a pack of redshirts. Even with their avatar, "the press", they have almost no presence in the breathlessly emotional stories of Kara Thrace, Laura Roslin, the Adamas, the arbitrarily-assigned Final Five, and so on. It's a decent sized ensemble, but as a representation of all of humanity, the all of humanity part is pretty elusive. We *hear* about unrest and upheavals, but surprisingly often, we're told, not shown.

On one occasion we're shown - a young student assigned to a job he does not want because of his background, and his disgustingly contrived death because of that job - we might just as well be told, because it's insultingly badly done.


But the real question I have is ... why there must be a rivalry between BSG and Trek at all. Why people hold them up as opposites.

Ronald D. Moore alone is a major part of the DNA of all three ST series of the 1980s and 1990s, TNG, DS9, and Voyager. He's so much involved in BSG his image appears in the ending production titles on every dang episode.

The real wonder is how different they appear - or, at least , how differently they are received and perceived - given the commonalities.

Setting It Right

Yesterday, I ran across a new old-TV channel on the air locally, and saw that one of the shows coming up for the evening was The Lieutenant. This show was EARLY Gene Roddenberry, before he launched Star Trek. It stars Gary Lockwood, who was in the second TV pilot of Trek (ST's FIRST "reboot" - with Captain Kirk instead of Pike), as the bad guy with the silver eyeballs. He also appeared in a little-known sci fi outing called 2001. Look it up, it's tripendicular.

I met Lockwood and Kier Dullea the first year Mr. X and I were dating. They asked us if we were “in The Business” because we were so good looking. Then we met David Carradine, which was a whole 'nother story. Oh the good old days.

Anyway, one of the eps of The Lieutenant on last night was “To Set It Right” – about racial conflict on a Marine base. It includes Dennis Hopper and Nichelle Nichols. This episode was not aired at the time it was made. Too controversial.

Supposedly, this episode’s shutdown was part of the reason Roddenberry conceived of taking the issues and themes he wanted to explore into outer space. So he could get away with it.

Watching the ep now, it almost feels like something that’d have a hard time even today, and not just because of the 50-year-old linguistics. It really is pretty incendiary; I’m fully impressed with how brave a production it was.

Ms. Nichols is terribly young, wonderfully warm, and absolutely, brilliantly intelligent – and, as she remains even today, just a breathtaking beauty. She has some meat in this part, really difficult dialogue and a couple showcase scenes in which her education is on full display. “He’s been a negro a lot longer than you’ve been thinking about his problem.” She gives the would-be liberal white boy some SERIOUS what-for without a shrill note. Without her scenes, what the script has to say would be queasily uncomfortable - dated in the awfullest way - but she provides relevance that lasts and is meaningful *right now*.

I could not find the whole episode, but if you have Get-TV, look up the schedule for "The Lieutenant".

And, if not: here are a few scenes:

This episode does use the N-word, "negro" and "boy" - but not in the casual "well that was how they *talked* back then" way, but in a pointed way, questioning the way they talked, in what was "now" at the time. It also gorgeously deconstructs the White Guy Saves The Day plan, and avoids becoming a Very Special Episode - or making things easy. It looks at the perspectives of multiple minority characters, each of whom has their own voice, and is an actual *character*.  So by the time it does end with a pair of special moments, it feels more earned than a completely pat TV script.

This gets the "save until I delete" treatment on the DVR. And I'll watch more, to be sure.

At the 16:44 Mark

Janet Reid's post today was about deconstructing characters in the BAD way. Reducing women to anatomy and tossing hair - or, for that matter, men. Janet's sensitivity this poor writing has increased in the current political climate, but pointless physical descriptions of characters has irritated me for YEARS now. I can remember the time I had to tell a guy for whom I was beta reading, "If I NEVER read another scene in which a woman looks at herself in the mirror and mentally assesses her physical appeal, it will be too soon" and he had absolutely no idea that was bad. He'd read it so many times ... and, unfortunately that alone wasn't a hint in itself.

I will admit to having a little fun, early on in my work on the WIP, writing a scene in which my at-that-time MC visited her mother's homeland in Gaul, meeting Clovis I (her uncle), and describing him in some detail. His whole court.

This sort of cutting-room-floor personal amusement is the reason I say even *now* anything I "write" in the WIP is subject to trashing.

One of the most memorable descriptions of a character I ever read was in Pippin, the moment we get a paean of joy to the arch of a foot. Colleen McCullough once arrested my attention memorably with a sex scene that started with a description of the line of downy, soft hair that descended from a woman's nape down to her spine; a feature which in this day and age might well be used to delineate a woman's irredeemable hideousness.

Writing Clovis, I used almost no descriptors at all; for a first-person novel from the POV of a character little concerned with his lieutenants' looks, to do otherwise would have been disingenuous. His physical interest in his wife is palpable, but through his eyes we see little more of her than the mole that charms him and her slender, tiny hands (a feature I borrowed from my oldest friend in life, TEO, and even then gave little detail). One character I did "draw" to resemble myself. She dies early in the going, and that was an intentional reminder to myself: my characters are not my avatars.



It's at 17:55 things truly get epic with Julia Sugarbaker's epic takedown above, but starting in at 16:44 is good for context. Give it a few minutes. Donald Trump does crop up, and it's absolutely perfect.

William Golding

In 1986, I was privileged to meet William Golding. He had a family member living in my state, and during a health crisis the doctor somehow extorted from Mr. Golding the favor that he visit their child's school.

(Have I mentioned that I went to the most obscenely privileged school in the region at that time?)

So William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, was thrown amongst the children - a curious fate - and gave us maybe an hour or two of his wisdom.

Often times, high schoolers are the least likely to benefit from, care about, nor comprehend wisdom, but I was at an especially dramatic point in my life, and the heady opportunity to meet a writer whose work had graced my brown formica desk was enough of an impression to get my wee and paltry brain to pay attention.

The immediate impression of William Golding in 1986 was first of his smallness and second, notwitstanding girth, the inescapable association of his white hair, beard, and twinkling eyes with Santa Claus. It may not be he was so very jolly, but high schoolers are so little beyond Santa maybe I had few mental options to associate him with someone more appropriate.

... Golding, 1983 - not so unlike he was in 1986 ... (Image: Wikipedia, credit below)
"William Golding 1983" by Unknown - [1] Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 Bestanddeelnummer. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 nl via Commons

He was overwhelmingly generous to give us his time, and appeared happy enough to do it. And his intelligence was of the sort that does not loft above anyone, but lifts those around a thinker to their own level. Inspiring.

He discussed Lord for some time, and opened the floor to questions, and I managed to stand up, spiral in hand, and ask him "Why weren't there any girls on the island?"

This may have been an early attempt at feminism, or it may just have been the internal sensation of being left out that books (movies, plays, YouTube videos) engender in anyone who does not see themselves in their world. I could not tell you with any integrity, but it was my question. And Mr. Golding's answer was as abundantly generous as it was simply bloody smart. I remember it vividly, in two of the key phrases from a slightly longer response.

"Well, I've never been a little girl. And if you bring girls on, sooner or later dreary old sex enters the picture."

It was of course hilarious, and I felt that frission you get when you find someone brilliant responding to you as if you were valid, and they do so in memorably hilarious form.

Lord was not meant to be about sex, it was something else. He first sequestered his characters in a setting uninterrupted by reality, and then from influences beside his point.



He talked about the liberty and joy of just making shit up.

As a writer, he could have researched and checked his facts and created an island following the geological dictates of the planet Earth: but he built his own island, rich in pink granite cliffs he apparently later understood to be geologically impossible. He excluded from his world and his characters those things which would have brought him back to what we so carelessly call "reality" and he wrote and wrote and wrote.

He pulled the trigger, is what he did.

To this day, William Golding stands the end of my line when I begin to go too far down the rabbit hole of research. Sometimes: inspiration STOPS us, too - from doing that work that distracts us from doing the truly inspired work.

The signpost to stop researching and get writing: "If William Golding can get away with pink granite cliffs: I can stop researching after fifteen sources and just name this slave Glykeria."

I even made UP a Frankish name, writing The Ax and the Vase, and said so in my notes, and did not ever edit it out.

There is a need, in any fiction, perhaps most of all in historical fiction, for that pink granite cliff that will make a reader go "hm" and then go read history itself, and learn more, and go from there.


I can also still delete Glykeria - her name alone or her entire character, if I want to. This is where we are in the writing.



Some of what I do is making shit up. Research is a wonderful thing, but making up is even better (much as it is after a fight!).

Some of what I do is taking a trusting leap off a pink granite cliff.

I can assure you: it is OSUM.

Unrecognition

This is one of those things I read, and cannot remember when I wrote it, cannot recall why, or what inspired it. But I love it ...

The only sensation in her was of absorption. The heat; the hard, sure heat under her. The leather of her new red shoes, leather tanned soft as fruit skin, holding her foot, wrapped all the way around it, to her ankle, where it was loose and gentle. The sound of the grasses, whispering. Soft as voices, safer than words, asking nothing of her but to hear them.

Soft as fruit skin? Where I came up with that, I have no idea; still I can feel it.

I hated my own red leather shoes. Is it that, that has me writing about a queer little girl, loving nothing more ... ?

Peculiarities

It’s a boring old truism that one of the jobs of a writer is to spend some level of mind-time, *all* the time, on finely observing people, the world, and experience and quantifying these things for themselves so they can eventually steal these considerations, then cannibalize and synthesize them within stories.

It’s a fascinating fact that this self-consuming manufacture comes out of our minds into really cool stories, plays, movies, poems, the texts of graphic novels, and all the genres and forms my wee and paltry little brain has slighted or forgotten. The recent reading of H. G. Wells has provided a master class in tension and character, and the ridiculous as well as the finer points of a society we’d like to pretend was consigned to a dustbin 103 years ago … And all in what, at bottom, is the straight
forward and simple story of two people who get married. If I reduced Marriage to its plot, nothing could compel most people to read it. It would not be possible to baldly explain his wit; and yet, phrases from throughout the work have stuck with me, and may do so for a long time to come.

THAT is awfully good writing.

Now and then, I contemplate regurgitating those things on which I spend my own mind-time day by day. I consider blogging the experience of my commute home, or the way the rain fell yesterday – not from the sky, but from a single oak tree, shuddering from what unknown cause I could not imagine – or the absorbing and yet ugly sensations of what it is like to suffer from prolonged, untreated eczema intentionally, at its height and in preparation to meet a new doctor.

Most of the time, I either turn away from writing these minute observations or vignettes. Illness and injury are my stumbling blocks, and I am all too likely to tarry on the details there, because honestly this sort of experience engages me – probably unhealthily – but there it is. Usually, though, I go in real time, writing my moments or those I witness, letting the words mean something in their course, and letting them go as they pass. Not unheeded, but unrecorded. Some considerations need no more memorial than that we know they *are*, that life has been witnessed. Maybe a prayer, later on. Maybe oblivion, though the moment becomes part of that great swath of memory whose details are invisible, but exist even so.


All caveats intact (though Marriage is nowhere near so awfully uncomfortable as The Cone, it has its share of problematic philosophies), I spent every page – indeed, almost every paragraph, through many long passages – dying to know What Comes Next. What would happen, what decision might be made? Marriage___ may be the deepest exploration of (mostly) two characters I have ever read, and certainly it does expend copious philosophy in the bargain. The latter may be less gripping, but I never put it down, as it were. I read every word, and committed many to memory on purpose.

I honestly recommend it pretty widely – and people who know me know I am rarely to be found spouting about my reading. Either because I have this intimacy issue with my reading, or because in my childhood I was often amusedly chided for sharing in exhaustive detail every last story that crossed my path, *sharing* a book is all but imposible for me except in the most personal of circumstances. And yet – for my readership here, the writers, the history lovers, the random one-offs – I hereby recommend a book. Its language is sumptuous and wonderfully slightly-foreign. Its story is ordinary, and yet keeps you wanting more throughout. Plain as it is, it’s also an astoundingly limber piece of literature. A drawing room comedy; a Sagan- or Tyson-esque musing on science, religion (and the lack of it) and philosopy; a scathing social critique and/or satire at moments; a road novel; a romance. It’s the most acute rendering of a young girl’s mind I’ve ever seen an old man render, and at points an evocation of family relationships par excellence.

Yes. There is recourse to the term half-breed in one act of this saga, which is queasily unforgiveable, and the gender and Semitic politics have aged badly. Indeed, the recurrence, for a while, of the term Eugenics is not clearly pejorative, which is giddy-making in the extreme.

No good-guy here wears a purely white hat; even if there aren’t really any black-hats on hand. And it’s not as if we’re above such problematic currents in any writing today … Perhaps, in a way, it’s worthwhile to read flawed fiction in any case – warts and all.


***


For those of my readers who are writers: do you write down your vignette moments? Do you blog them? (Or share them in the vomments at Janet Reid’s blog?)

I wonder sometimes whether it’s economy or callousness on my part, that I let go so easily of the screeds, scenes, and letters I write half-in-my-sleep; that I sacrifice moments which excite me one hour, but I lose because time gets away from me?

How much of what you think to put on your own blogs/sites do you think better of later, or for one reason or other file away unpublished – invisible, but there, like those experiences we all observe … ?

Precipice

The WIP is at that sweet spot stage where I’m giddy as a schoolgirl getting to know it, shyly gazing at its characters and treading a little deeper into its world and generally having quite a crush on it … and *just* beginning to formulate more acute interests in it, which will direct research for a while.

This stage, of course, has curtailed my usual blog reading and writing, but I suspect a general wellbeing ensues, without readers gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair with less of my blather to consume. Russia and Ukraine, for their parts, are certainly barfing all over my stats; still getting hundreds of bots every day cruising in here, so at least there *are* hits showing up – even if most of them happen to be horsefeathers.


It’s an interesting time for a writer, this period of a new work – and a downright entangling time for me.

On the one hand, I’ve had this novel in mind since very very early indeed in the going with The Ax and the Vase; it came up during research for that, and the captivation I had for the subject has never diminished. Indeed, through the querying periods for Ax, it wasn’t rare I wished that could all be over with, I’d be agented and be able to get on with this work.

It hasn’t worked out quite thus, but on with the WIP I am in any case.

When we meet someone who excites us romantically, there are phases of being, and if a relationship ensues, changes come fast and furious. It’s all very exciting, even as it’s giddy in some ways that remind us of our vulnerability.

It’s hard, that is to say, to read Janet’s blog (and commenting community – such as I can these days) about How Long It Takes to write a novel, and not think both, “I’m working so much faster than I did on the first one” and “Yeah, but faster than a decade is still hardly market-speedy.” Hard not to be excited—and, at the same time, remember my experience with Ax.

I’m a confident cuss. But that has done its damage, and as much as I know this book is different (in good and publication-necessary ways), there absolutely IS some temptation to stick with the liberty and freedom of just never becoming a published author (nartist/freedom links).


But back to “that stage” …

I was once told by an ex, “I am quakingly aware of my capacity to fall in love with you.”

That’s where I am right now. I’ve been swept off my feet. I’ve had the second look, more deeply apprasing prospects with my new crush. I’ve started to figure out the fit, and some of the surprises too. The unexpected things are happening – both binding me more tightly to the work, and blindsiding me with expectation-bending surprises that change the prospects entirely.

This WIP – born of Ax though it indubitably is – has never been a sequel, never even been tightly tied to The Ax and the Vase.

And yet, the extent to which it is turning out to be unalike is still a breathtaking vista.

I knew the fundamentals would be not merely different, but outright foreign (figuratively … literally) to Ax. One was first-person from a single POV, told by the possibly unreliable narrator of His Own Glorious Destiny. One was an overwhelmingly male story. Story of power, story of success, story of a bunch of men in the late-antique North. Story of the building of a nation.

Myth, really.

Ax is a ripping yarn, and its central facets are those I’ve come to fear are in fact its stumbling blocks as a debut property.

So – a novel in omniscient voice, a novel featuring more women’s voices than men’s – a novel in which slaves (decidedly marginalized, in Ax) play integral roles … a novel of riots and terrors and unrest and failures …

I knew it would be another proposition.

What didn’t I know … ?

I honestly didn’t know how far I might shift from the character who first enticed me, whose story I thought I needed to tell.

I knew the POV would become more flexible, even inclusive.

I didn’t know just how much #WeNeedDiverseBooks would get into my blood, and amplify characters I didn’t really realize the novel was about.



Its’ been many years since I first sketched what still is the opening scene of the WIP. I couldn’t resist it; needed to get one little yaya out, needed to let that breath exhale – and, indeed, it was about all there was to any kind of draft *writing* (as opposed to research, which cropped up as I was researching Ax itself), until this year.

What is interesting is that, in writing that first scene (a Grand Guignol setpiece of a labor and delivery) – I researched and chose a name … and included a fictional character. There was a face, even back then, on a figure who didn’t necessarily need to exist so early on.

And she is becoming so much more than a supporting character.

I know her hair, I think I have heard her voice (no, seriously – on TV – I heard someone speaking with her timbre).

She’s not alone in surprising me; or perhaps bringing to the fore things I might hardly have suspected, but had somewhere in my wee and paltry little brain.

And that’s the thing. It’s in my brain; even if, to me, it seems external, almost mystical – the idea is mine, if only by right of conquest.

More ideas will show themselves, particularly as I get into more research – little surprises about the way the world worked, the food my characters ate, the color and pomp and dust around them.


And so: exciting times. Even as they’re indubitably weird times.

Peek Inside the Mind ... Authorial Choices and Offstage Action

In contemplating (and, essentially in practice, actually) giving up on actively supporting Ax, the WIP has all along been the compensation; yet I honestly had not counted on just how much it has occupied me emotionally (a good thing). Even depending upon it – “take me away from all this, make me forget!” – its yeoman response to my need to WORK has been surprising. Perhaps I’m unaccustomed to being able to depend on anything. Perhaps I was holding back on hope and enthusiasm, either unseemly as I mourn the loss of the first work (for now), or just because the disappointment is so present it hardly seems worth getting hopes up once again.

Ah, but there it is. Hope is hard, but in me it’s harder yet to kill. I’m a cussed thing in this way.

The WIP – let’s call her Wippy, just because I want to (any title is still probably months away; right now, I don’t even know whether the end is where it ends) – is getting wonderfully energetic. Ending or no, the order of things is falling into place, and I’m in discovery mode, learning what I’ll need to learn, to flesh out the hints and tempting bits already waiting.

Today I had to choose which of two possible Germanuses was the son of Matasuentha (for the novel – as always, I make zero pretense to being an historian, and this in particular is a specifically arbitrary authorial prerogative). One of these men, early in the seventh century, had a daughter who married Theodosius, son of the emperor Maurice. This Germanus rescued Theodosius in 602, during a food riot in Constantinople, but later may have been involved in a conspiracy to set himself or Theodosius on the throne; Maurice branded him a traitor, but Germanus survived until Phocas usurped the throne and Maurice, along with all his family, were executed late in 602.

The other candidate as Germanus, son of Germanus and Matasuentha, was husband of Charito, the daughter of Maurice’s predecessor Tiberius II Constantine. Tiberius was said to be so good a man the people did not so much as deserve his rule, and he died after three years as Caesar in the East, in 582. He disappears from the record after marriage to Charito, yet there exists the possibility he and the Germanus above are one and the same; this makes for some tantalizing story possibilities, but the seventh century is off my list and male characters have so far not been at the core of Wippy, and so these possibilities must wait for some other author to deal with them, I think.

Any “choice” I make at this stage in the writing—and given Germanus’ minority and the unlikelihood I will stretch Wippy across a century (or more)—is more theoretical than a practical part of the novel, mechanically or creatively, but I want to know the child I will write about, even if I don’t write about him as a man.

And so we choose the husband of Charito, and because I am a child of a certain decade, I will inevitably view her as a tiny hoochy-coochie girl with ponytails on top of her head (… or not …). A boy who grows up to be associated with a ruler beloved for his benevolence. A boy who marries … and then disapears.

The Dull Ache ... and Something Else ...

Of my readers who are also writers, a question: has any one of you who is going or has gone the querying route to publication ever received a request for pages or a full more than a week after an initial query? I never have.

It’s been a few weeks since my last query – and so, regardless of all those agents’ timelines now commonly stretching to three months for theoretical viability (“will try to respond within” or “if you don’t hear within twelve weeks, no means no”) – I essentially view EVERY submission I’ve put out there as a done and dead deal.

Which is why this contemplation that Ax is not a viable product right now is my ever-growing expectation.

It’s a good novel, The Ax and the Vase. Of that I have no question. But a novel and a product are two different things; and the publishing industry is a business in need of PRODUCTS. To sell. I can polish a piece of gold till it shines (and it does) but if the kind of bauble it is is out of style, it’s out of style no matter how gleaming.

So I have this precious thing *I* still find beautiful, and which can be appreciated by many – but not a *market* … and so, increasingly, I find myself pushing it less, and focusing on another piece, not even close to ready to polish yet. Still in the making.

It’s difficult not to think of the years I have invested in Ax. We all know, I’m a Thoughtkiller, not shy nor squeamish about “killing my darlings” and open to professional feedback to make my work the best it can be.

Even so. Abandoning something I’ve worked on so long, putting it away as a “maybe once I sell the next one, this one may follow another year” – or, heart-crunchingly, putting it away with the possibility it will never sell at all …

That is painful.



I once married a man I knew was A Good Man. I knew those were thin on the ground, and I recognized (and still do) so much that is fine and good and worthy and fun and loveable. Beloved Ex was, and is, a marvelous property, and the fact he’s not with someone even still kind of kills me. He’s a catch, and there are so many women who deserve the heart that beats in that man.

And I loved him. And I married him.

And love is no reason to marry someone. I love him still: and yet, my life is full enough, and fulfilling – even without Beloved Ex participating daily.

You marry someone not because he’s a treasure, nor beautiful, nor fun or sexy or any of the rest of it – but because life, without them, would be *less*.


The point is: I know a good thing when I see it. And I inherited a tendency from my mother: I sometimes grip things because I know they’re precious.

I married a man I truly did love, but a very big part of the marriage was acquisitive. It was nothing on which to build a lifetime, and the mistakes we both made drew blood. We may be friends now. But there were many years we were nothing to each other, and there resides even in our old bond not only the memories, but the damages. I wasn’t the only wounding party. But I know my part was, *in* part: a matter of greed.



Ax is another treasure I know for what it is. I know how good it is, I love it, I MADE it – and that didn’t draw blood exactly, but it occupied years of my life. I can admit, I have been greedy to see it succeed. Greedy.

As life tips past what we call Middle Age (yeah, I look fine and am healthy; yes, people like to think Middle Age lasts into their sixties; but I’m pushing fifty, and frankly don’t expect 100 years – I am decidedly getting past “middle aged”), the prospect of losing *years* of such work as the intimate, intense, and exultant craft as writing …

It’s really kind of heartbreaking.

Losing all that. Wasting it … ? No. Not waste. But not being able to share it.

The loss is giddy enough to make me somewhat sick.


My life is FILLED with good friends, good music, good food, and the two best pets any person could hope to be blessed with. I have a nice home, a spiff car. My mom is near – and, as far as they are, my brother and nieces and their mom are not truly *distant*. There are so many ways now to be with those we are not near to. My paying job is constantly fulfilling, and I honestly love it, and its people. There is so much to be grateful for.

Yet.

Writing Ax has, as I suspect any fool can see, has been a balm to me through the years Mr. X has lived half a world away. I’ve hated having no partner. But I’ve had this thing – this “second” job – this work I have poured my heart and mind int. This work which has returned the favor by expanding my life itself, by making even fuller a blessed existence which was more than I ever should have dared to ask in the first place, and by teaching me so much more than its business and process.

It’s also been, in some way – both a tribute to my grandma and my dad. Dad, because he missed my writing it. Because he never knew I would make such a thing as this great book. Because, honestly, I think he’d have really LIKED it. And my grandma because … I am her namesake.

If I’d not been The Louise of my generation – there would have been no Clovis. A reverse etymological progression.


The prospect of losing this almost-memorial effort, this thing I have done, which has sustained and enriched so much of my wee and paltry little life …

It’s really kind of heartbreaking.







And yet …



And yet.

There is the WIP.





The energy, and the transportive experience of writing – of experiencing creation first in the learning/exploration/discovery of research and then in experiencing *what it is* to CREATE something. To *make* something, and know it both for your own and for the inspiration that it is. To understand that it is possible to both bleed a thing, and still somehow see it as an object so nearly-miraculous that to claim it for your own is almost hubris.

To write.

The bouyant power of … making … of creativity – that elemental, ineffable thing that comes from within but is sparked with something so much more than we are in and  of ourselves.


It is … compensation.


There is no art without pain, they say.



But, Christ Lord. I have to believe: it’s worth it

Point of View

One of the things you learn in the sketching phase of writing a novel is what the novel is actually going to be. I’ve posted about the liberty I'm feeling, getting out of the first-person singular voice of The Ax and the Vase … and I’ve written much, recently, about #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the failure of Ax to live up to that as an ideal I personally support.

What I haven’t written about is the fact that two of my characters – one a main character, and one a main character at least for the duration of his stay in the pages – do happen to be People of Color.

This isn’t the case out of a desire to “write for the market” (that trap pre-published authors fall into, of picking a trend hoping to cash in on it) – but, frankly (har the franks), sheer boredom at the lack of diversity in Ax … much as I love it.

Perhaps as part of the process of figuring out whether it’s time to (*temporarily* …) shelve Ax in favor of the WIP … perhaps simply because of the first flush of energy in working on said WIP … very definitely owing to a lot of my social media and query-researching exposure to the awareness of the need for literary diversity and the obvious White Liberal Guilt attendant on a novel utterly lacking in anything but White Powerful Male voice (much as I love it …) …

It’s been very exciting to feel the POV of the WIP limbering up, and *opening* up.

I’m not trying to write about fascinating/objectified brown skin and exoticized eyes, but I’m getting to know my main character who is *not* the princess. With getting to know the world itself – the period perspective on everything from the sound and use of a human voice, to emotional relationships and protocol within a court unlike any milieu familiar to a modern mind – comes getting to know a woman living in this place, working in it, making sure she can hold her own and stay in it.

The character’s name is Plectrudis, and she is midwife to the queen in the very first scene (as of *now* … !), and becomes nurse to the child she brings forth, and eventually HER midwife as well. She has all the intimacy and remove of a servant in the most privileged of households, and even as I write about writing about her, I know some of my favorite sketches are already wrong, and I know I can’t see her completely just yet (so I am almost afraid to so much as tell you her name, because the WIP is at the point where EVERYTHING I’ve scribbled is liable to change, and probably should, both as I learn and as the story asserts itself).

But something of her character – and fleeting breaths in her voice – is formed, and these things will only grow.

More exciting still is the man.

I’m still in the precious, protective, deeply-skittish-woodland-creature phase of creation here, so I can say even less of him. But he tapped me on the shoulder this week, and … the resulting sketch was terribly exciting.

I think he may speak.

I think he may get to be more than the object of the feminine and royal gaze of our princess – who was only my original reason for writing the novel, but who can’t sustain being the only thing IN the novel, it seems – and who … perhaps … loved  him. At this point, we know only: they *liked*.


He is historical, and that too is kind of thrilling. One of those tantalizing creatures we know existed, but have no information about, but the barest of facts. Primary sources do give him a name, though – which, to me, is almost joyously intriguing. He has a name. We have his name. And he lived, and he breathed. And he is so much more than the mere footnote that moved the princess herself on to the shocking career that was her life.

He was her first shock.

And I think he may speak.


When I first tried to see his face, I didn’t know what color he was, nor any of the workings behind the skin. He did not speak. He was (there is a study in this, my being a female author) entirely the subject of the female gaze.



I saw through his eyes, this week. I have seen almost enough through Plectrudis’s gaze to learn to *look* at the world with hers.

Just cannot wait to hear his voice.

#WeNeedDiverseBooks

There is a movement in publishing which has gathered a great deal of momentum just in the past six months, and which is gratifying to see - and which I have DECIDEDLY failed (with The Ax and the Vase, that is) to participate in. Ax is not only about a royal white dude, but it's self-absorbedly told in first person POV, *and* includes a long and inextricable subplot about, essentially, hating and punishing homosexual behavior.

I've talked about it before, and don't defend these things in their essence. Ax is the story that made me tell it, and (failings and all) it still captivates me, and it's a great novel. I didn't think, when falling into the story, about its demographics, and have wrestled with my own culpability as an author since.

The WIP happens once again to be about a royal princess, but (a) this novel will be told, at least, from the point of view of a woman, and (b) takes place in world by far more cosmopolitan than an ancient Frankish stockade. At least two major characters are people of color, and the issue of how one of these must die is one I am dealing with at great mental length these days, because it echoes, for me, the insensitivity of a White Dude King killing off the gay man in his ranks, and there is concern not only for my ethical expectations, but also the genuineness of the world. I shy away from political correctness in dealing with any story, and yet there is a definite need to "redeem" myself from some of the constraints my original first-person novel brings with it, no matter how good it is.

There is also the concern of my being a white person of undoubted privilege and freedom, and the extent to which I exoticize diversity, as opposed to presenting it properly. I couldn't even bring myself to add to the community response at Janet Reid's recent post about diversity; they do too good a job there for me to improve on it. I just know I want to participate in #WeNeedDiverseBooks - in the right way for who I am and what we all want to accomplish.

How to do that ...

• Avoid exoticization - turning someone's entire culture into a Hallowe'en costume (or, even worse, a sexy Hallowe'en costume) to dress up my book.
• Avoid appropriation - imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery; sometimes, it's just a reductive presumption, and can lead to a loss of perspective. Not good for writing about something.
• Don't impose myself on a character or a culture - researching a world to build it, without demolition in order to reface it. Storytelling is not a wasteful home design show out to impose a fresh new face on an old house, it's an exploration of structure and style which should be true to intent. I don't jam 21st-century feminists into my works, and I don't fetishize the worlds into which I want to bring my readers.
• Follow the story. If the characters are allowed "their own truth" so to speak, everything will work better. I love to be led, as an author.
• Keep #WeNeedDiverseBooks and the great diversity and voices *in tune* all the time. I find inspiration in Twitter all the time for this, connections and perspectives not only keeping me honest about my privilege, but affecting the way I live and write, and how I think about approaching everything.
• FIND THE HISTORY. There are more and more people every day seeking to illuminate sources beyond the powerful white men. Researchers are amazing people, and they share - it would be madness not to take advantage of that, as a writer.

The WIP is bringing with it, every day, more exciting opportunities in its story, its research - its *characters*.

Wish me luck ...

Low Self-Esteem

The one time in my life I can ever remember not only agreeing with George Will, but actually shouting in acclamation at the TV at something he said, was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He said something along the lines of, “They say she has low self-esteem, but if anybody ever had more self-esteem than they have earned, it is Monica Lewisnky.”

One of the more stunning (and I mean that in the literal, brain-numbing sense of the term) effects of low self-esteem is that *everything* becomes about the sufferer. They are so wildly and giddily unimportant to the world, that the world positively revolves around the void. They ostentatiously and melodramatically observe their unimportance, enshrined as it is in the hearts of every person they’ve ever met. They refer to it and nothing else in any conversation, and occasionally crop up “surreptitiously” in order to ask whether their unimportance has been noted and catalogued for a random day. They go away so they can eat worms, and then React to every possible imagined hint that their absence has exacerbated the notice of others, to their unimportant detriment.

If the sufferer has an object of romantic interest, unrequited is best. That way, they can assume the extremely over-acted skittishness they display with such ostentation every time they chance to be exposed to the beloved has caused her or him to loathe the sufferer.

If the sufferer has a friend, they have the boon of a sympathetic ear to listen to the minutest and most extensive questioning regarding their every imagined shortcoming and failure – with the extra bonus round of reassurance, all of which will simultaneously confirm the sufferer’s utter centrality to the universe itself, by virtue of time and (insert giddy sigh here) attention, and have no effect whatever on the actual problem. The actual problem being, the sufferer is insufferABLE, thanks to this monomaniacal religion of self-doubt, to which all must pay homage and worship.

Another unfortunate effect of low self-esteem is that it sucks people into the vortex of this all-powerful unimportance. The void is one of personality and pleasantness, unfortunately – and yet, any soul with the slightest compassion is at risk of being bonded to the void, merely by “being there” even only once. The void knows how to attract pity and attention, and placating the void is the ultimate pitfall. Having succumbed to the impulse, the sufferer of low self-esteem will do all he or she can to exploit it and trap passersby, ultimately using this vacuum of personality and pleasantness to suck in any chance pity and attention, with the aim of transforming it into inextricable bonds.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever found yourself with a significant other in this way.

I thought so.

Ever work with one? The person about-to-be-fired every hour of every day? The one you have to escape with increasingly repetitive ruses that “I think my phone is ringing” or “Oh! Meeting in five mintues!” or the rhetorical throwing-up-of-hands that is “gosh, I wish I could say something useful” or, when turning around and typing even while they’re still looming at you, instant-messaging someone to please save you. And then pretending you just got called … um … over THERE. Somewhere. Else. Where you can’t be followed, gosh, sorry, coz it’s about that confidential, um, stuff, we’re doing. Bye.


The amount of mind time humanity is forced to spend on the terminally unimportant is staggering. We staunch the fatal flow of self-esteem with niceties, vague friendly gestures, or the dread night out with drinks, yet still the hemorrhage is unending – yet the sufferer never dies.

The true pain of it is that the empty fulcrum of the universe, sometimes, is actually attached to someone you want to like – if only it were possible to get past their overwhelming unimportance and awfulness. Sometimes, it’s possible to see the heart beyond the bleeding wound, and to honestly wish you could staunch it. Sometimes you’re just with someone so much, or related to them, or honestly think they are redeemable, and can’t give up hoping.

The only cure for low self-esteem, of course, is healthy self-esteem. And who needs that? That places perspective on a person accustomed to the conundrum of being the most important thing in the world, by virtue (hah) of being the worst thing in it. Perspective is for boring people, people who don’t get attention, people who go through life without DRAMA and excitement – oh, and attention. Mmm, attention.

So it’s little wonder, every now and then, those swirling a vortex have happy dreams of providing some sufferer the singular attention of a sledge to the brainpan (specifically aimed at the mouth). Ah, sweet dreams.

Thank goodness for puppies and kittens. And weekends all our own.



People. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t punch them in the neck and live without ‘em.

Passive VOICE

For those who think in these terms at all, “passive aggressive” is one of those ways of dismissing someone for whining, but the truth is, “aggressive” is truly a key point in the term. Passive aggression is far more than the martyred reverse psychology of a sitcom, it’s a strong social weapon so effective it can even be devastating.

I sat in a meeting one time with someone who used to bug the bejeezus out of me; not someone in my group, not someone I really had to deal with to speak of, but someone whose very name set my teeth on edge. The prospect of talking to them would enact anxieties that had nothing to do with anything, except that they upset me (and, I am convinced by the experiences of others) *meant to*.

As a woman, I have used passive aggression to head off difficult situations at times – when passing someone, looking down (which is not always a submissive posture, by a long shot*) – ostentatiously demonstrating deafness to certain approaches – gazing in blank, expressionless incomprehension at other approaches. Passive aggression can absolutely wither someone who thinks that any social entre’ will necessarily get some response, any response. *And refusing to see someone trying to catch your eye is as strong a rejection as overt ostracision. That person I once worked with would open a floor to response, but continue talking without pause, looking pointedly away from any eye contact, and thereby shut down all but the most intrepid colleagues … or actually make others appear rude, when they had to interrupt to contribute.

It can be a devastating strategy. It can get people so jumpy about another person that interpersonal undercurrents become rivers, and carry others away emotionally when they “KNOW” there is no reason to get so uptight. It can keep a strong woman safe if she feels alone and doesn’t want to feel *weak* - and it can alienate completely.

The Silent Treatment is an especially bitter weapon humans are able to use against one another, and one of the threats that can lead to conformity, direct aggression, submission, and unexpected rage or destruction. To shut a person out, as a group or just one individual to another, is perhaps the ultimate expression of power and control. “You have fallen short” becomes an insupportable exile, denied fire and water for eight hundred miles.

I’ve shut people out of my life; indeed, one of the more bewildering things about FaceBook, for me – apart from extreme security issues that give me the IT nerd willies – is its potential (nay, likelihood) to make it possible for any of the less useful friends from my foolish youth to crop up at any time. It takes work, this kind of passive aggression – ask any man who ever ignored calls from the date or conquest he had no further use for, or any homeowner importuned by a homeless abandoned cat. Emotionally, as effective as ostracision can be, for the non-sadistic, it’s not particularly a pleasure. But sometimes, relationships must end – and they don’t always end easily.

Sometimes, of course, the aggressor is just swinging their privates, to prove how big they are, and people who serially just cut people out of their lives, one by one, may just be avoiding what’s actually wrong with their lives rather than curing anything. And they end up ostracized, themselves, because their concern for control has crowded out life itself – which, though messy, is undeniably a more worthwhile business than solitary confinement in the ever-narrower concerns of a life, in the end, really left un-lived.


When I was younger and prettier, I took great pride in the ability to be an Ice Queen; in the fact that I didn’t get bothered much by strangers, and was able to prevent uncomfortable situations from becoming outright dangerous, with the strategies mentioned above.

Usually.

I came through young-and-pretty largely unscathed, but hit that link for a look at what “unscathed” means in the culture we live in, which I’m persuaded is not getting easier. Insofar as passive aggression is the “feminine” weapon so often pejoratively portrayed in poor writing, I used it as well as could be expected.

The older I get, though, the less I want to render those around me invisible by these methods. It is fortunate that there is nobody like this wandering around my lifescape these days, and that I can speak and act in other ways than silent cutting.

And the older I get, the more bewildering it becomes when I encounter those who do still employ/enjoy/indulge such plausibly-deniable cruelty and control. Those who cut deep, yet who would leap up – shocked, SHOCKED I TELL YOU – at the idea they ever intended to wound.



If you have a sound voice, you don’t need to remove others’ ability to speak.

Collection

Man, it's a shame JJ Litke's blog is bad and she should feel bad, because - actually, it's pretty good. I envy her ability to title things amusingly.

I also couldn't agree more with her about the irritating tendency of alt-historical (and also historical) screenwriters/authors who jam celebrity cameos into their works. Either write about the celeb her- or himself, or skip 'em.

A good pairing of links:

The History Girls on whitewashing history.

Leila Gaskin on diversity in books.

At an Age

Very recently, I ran across a talking head in one of those documentaries I so enjoy, discussing a historical figure at age sixteen.  She described the woman as being “at an age” where she would be highly self-conscious, while events played out in her life which would have been humiliating and difficult.

In a way, the point is valid; though we invented the teenager in the twentieth century, those things that cause humans genuine embarrassment and pain are not unique to any particular time period.  Yet I was struck by the implication of tortured adolescence.

The figure in question, hardly a personage famed for a typically twentieth-century persona (indeed, almost a symbol of precisely the opposite, when that time came upon her), is not one I would readily cast in the image of tortured adolescent, no matter what happened to her at age sixteen.  I also, as an amateur student of and writer about history, find the tendency to view the population of our past, no matter how far back, through the lens of the psychological and social expectations of the past century or so a little bewildering more often than not.

A part of my personal fascination with history is not just taking myself out of the present and an ordinary world I know, but also taking myself out of the present and ordinary mindsets and people familiar from my own life.  So when I see all-too-identifiably contemporary characters waving the occasional fan or scimitar or what have you, it is frustrating.

Let it not be said that I am any expert at honestly, fully, and accurately rendering a 5th-century Frank in all his glory, but I did what I could in relating Clovis’ story to address both the misconceptions about what “Barbarian” means, and to avoid, as much as possible, turning him into a corporate raider or king of the surfer dudes.

This goes beyond *not* modeling his character on anyone I know, but into an honest consideration of those things that make up the whole of who he might have been, given what I know.  I didn’t throw around a lot of self-consciously antique language, but did work hard avoiding anachronism.  I thought about the smell of the air in his cities, northern and on down to Paris, the quality of air containing different kinds of pollutants, the manner of food, the way time would worked and been observed.  One of the deepest dives I took into Clovis was the examination not only OF his religion, but its ultimate expression in the novel.

In sum, while I didn’t gadzook my way around the place, I did *look* around it, really consider motivations, remember that humans in every age are funny … and maddening … and go from there.

This. will. NOT. satisfy everybody.

There will be some who quite love a good gadzookering, and will resent not finding it in *Ax*.  There will be others who’ll find the voice alienating and foreign even without a thou to be seen.  And that is the world WE live in.  I’m too old to try to create one where I can make everyone happy.  It would take far more hallucinogenic drugs than I am capable of dealing with, and there’d still be some guitarist with commentary about the décor.

Take My Character - Please!

Last night, I happened to be in a hospital room with my mom and stepfather, and a nursing student joined us for a little while.  He had a list of questions for his patient, and we all had a nice chat, finding out he shared a hometown with SF, and of course with my mom he had in common that she had some nurses’ training Lo Many Moons Ago, and that in many ways she’s been a frustrated nurse ever since.  If it weren’t for the dagnab studying, by golly – she’d have been a stupendous caregiver, if she does say so herself.

I haven’t blogged a ton about my mom, but she is one of those surprising Little Southern Ladies who can be thoroughly awesome when she puts her mind to it.  Last night, her mind was to it.

She was talking about nurses’ straining circa, I guess, about 1960 or so (I believe it was before her career days, but am not sure how soon out of high school her brief curriculum ensued).  It seems the doctor coordinating the student nurses was a minimal fellow – no taller, no bigger, than my mom.

Mom, by the way, is 5’2” and had the nickname Razor Butt in those days.  She was noticeably TINY.  So this guy – not a bruiser.

She described to our friend the nursing student how this doctor would take them around, wearing his white coat and smoking a pipe (Oh the Places you could Smoke in that day and age … shew!), and concluded,

“He was a strutting little bantam.”



Let it be said, I could probably find a use or two for a strutting little bantam of a character – but, given my chosen eras, so many of these details would be lost.  To all my writerly pals, I implore you – find the place where the Strutting Little Bantam fits, because he’s a plot bunny of a story element I can’t do justice to, and he deserves justice.

Or, perhaps (particularly if you write humor) a little injustice?

I give him to you gratis – formed, unformed, strutting, pipe, lab coat, and all.  Use him in good health!

Or … as he’s a physician, after all … perhaps find some gripping ill health for him.  It’s your story!

Blood for Gender

It’s a funny thing in its way – and what’s odd is that it’s not ghoulish to me … the only scenes with much meat on them I have written for the WIP so far seem much preoccupied with blood.  Apart from the view of Clovis through Amalasuntha’s eyes, the only writing with any meat on its bones consists of the scene of Amalasuntha’s birth (the opening setpiece, the first piece of “writing” I ever did on this WIP), and a consideration by Ama of the advent of womanhood – and how rather frustrating and repellant she finds the process.  Another sketch is that of the execution of a slave, which she is forced to witness.

The two scenes involving women’s blood, it occurs to me, are directly biological entre’s into female characters.  I have written for so long from Clovis’ POV, perhaps this has been a necessary subconscious impulse – to approach Amalasuntha and Audofleda, her mother, by way of the most obvious expressions/functions of their bodies, their genders:  in menstruation and childbirth.  The torture of the slave, too, is in its way related – Ama is forced to watch as the man she has lowered herself to mate with is punished for his presumption in taking her.  Sex.  So, his blood in that one, but still someone bleeds.

I’ve taken a look at Amalasuntha’s son, and have contemplated, too, her daughter (Matasuentha), but at this point the novel largely fixates on Ama.  The flexibility and freedom of omnipotent POV means I don’t have to hew so tightly to her as I did to the single character (… protagonist … ? the readers will decide …) in Ax.  So this novel may evolve into a more balanced three-generations-of-women story, but I never have seen Audofleda as central at all.  *She* bleeds, in the WIP, only so that other women may take the stage in their turn …

As to the shadowed figure of Matasuentha—the daughter, perhaps the trickling-down of story, the disappointment or denoument (?)—the glance I’ve cast in her direction is bloodless, but concerns her marriage.

I’ll leave you with one thought about Audofleda, the sister of Clovis, the tie that did not bind him to Theodoric the great, the queen, and the mother (a line surely to be cut … but starting something, and that is still good) …

The queen took pride in her own forbears, but she had committed to leave them behind—brides always left their own behind, even as their blood was the currency of alliances and peoples—and she never spoke of herself as a Frank.  She would speak of her brother with a transfigured glow, but not of herself as if she were them.