Category Archives: Rant

Frances Slocum Redux

23 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in Grace, Movies, Personal, Randomness, Rant

≈ 2 Comments

I’m watching the rain out the window right now, trying to motivate myself to be productive. So far it’s not working. Watching rain is nicely hypnotic, but it makes me feel more like sleeping than writing. And unfortunately, I did a really, really stupid thing this week — I read A Lonely Magic.

I try not to be mean to myself, but every time I stare at my Grace file now, the mean words start running through my head. I need Noah to get to work. He’s got things to do. Instead, my imagination wants to play in Sia Mara. Worse, I want to go back and fix things in ALM, instead of writing the next book! Sigh.

When I wasn’t trying to write, I had a really nice week. It included video game time with my nephew — I’m a little obsessed with a game called SkyForge right now; camping and kayaking with my niece; and much berry picking with my brother. We’ve hit the stage of the summer where the berries are getting ripe faster than they can be eaten. If I had a bigger freezer, I’d be filling it with an easy summer’s worth of berries. As it is, I did look at the blueberries on my counter last night and think, “nope, no more berries.” Not sure that’s ever happened to me with blueberries before. Fortunately, my blueberry ennui wore off by morning.

Camping with my niece was lovely. We spent two nights up at Frances Slocum State Park, which is a park I visited last summer, including a stop at the cemetery where a few dozen of our ancestors, including some of her great-great-great-grandparents, are buried. There’s something inherently romantic, I think, in the idea of great-great-great-grandparents, but I had a weird little moment of shock when I realized that my niece is entirely a child of the 21st century. The 20th century is just as much history to her as the 19th. So obvious, I know, but still…

Frances Slocum State Park

Most of our “camping” time was really more like cozy, hanging-out-in-a-tiny-house time. We read our books, we played on our iPads, and we watched movies* — not exactly the campfire – tent – backpack scenario. But we did go for a nice walk, and we kayaked, and she came home with eleven or possibly twelve bug bites, so it was close enough to camping.

But this is not really close enough to writing, so time for me to get back to the real words. If I stare at my file for long enough, Noah is bound to do something, right?

*I must add a teeny-tiny vent about Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: Spoilers Ahead.

WTF? Obviously, it’s not the first time JK Rowling has written about abused children, but the ending left me… horrified. And then creeped out. Yay, happy bakery, but what the hell happens to the little girl left traumatized and cowering under a desk? I think my niece was disappointed by my response — she likes the movie — but I told her that sometimes being a mom gets in the way of appreciating movies where children are treated badly. And that one — just ugh. Despite my spoiler warning, I’m reluctant to say exactly what happens, but suffice to say I disapproved. Vehemently.

Unnamed Trope

23 Friday Oct 2015

Posted by in Randomness, Rant, Writing

≈ 4 Comments

One of the sessions that I went to at the FWA conference was titled something like, Putting the Super in Your Hero and it was a fun look at what makes superheroes entertaining and what authors can do to make their characters more like superheroes. Characters should be decisive — they should make decisions, not just let the universe push them along. They should be active — even if their action fails or has negative consequences, characters that simply react are less interesting. Then, for the superhero thing, they should be courageous, take the high moral ground, be colorful, do extraordinary things, be flawed, and be likeable. The two that most interested me were the first two, though — making decisions and taking action. I’m definitely adding “Make decisions, take action,” to my little mental list of rules to remember. (Others: “Abandon reality” and “Solitude sucks”.)

And I have no idea why I got onto that digression. I started this post meaning to write about searching tvtropes for a name for a trope that I’ve decided I hate, hate, hate. Hate with a deep passion. Wish to never see again and will always stop reading when I uncover it in use. But I can’t find its name. It’s some kind of a mix of Broken Bird and Bratty Half-Pint only… she’s playing the heroine.

In the case of a book that I downloaded yesterday, started, and returned to the library after fifty pages or so, the heroine is a grievously abused teenager. Parents dead young in a tragic accident, she’s been sold as a slave multiple times, starting from when she was five years old. In the first few scenes there are repeated incidents of violence against her, as well as plenty of implications of the miseries of life as a slave, scarring, and implied sexual violence against children. And yet… she has absolutely no hesitation about talking back, being defiant, doing exactly what her new owners ordered her not to do, and being incredibly rude to people who have not offered her threat or unkindness. What kind of caricature does that? I like urban fantasy’s damaged, kickass heroines just as much as the next genre, but I don’t like it when they’re stupid. And I don’t like it when abuse is trivialized, so that years of torture just become a convenient backstory for why a character is wary. I like unrealistic genres, but I want the characters I read about to behave like real people might, even when they’re super tough, magically gifted, super-hero characters.

It’s funny, I hated the book so much that I have immediately forgotten its name. It had a pretty cover, though.

So many interruptions today — it’s almost 5 and this blog post, which I started at 8:30, is my sum total of accomplishment. Well, except for phone calls and laundry and cooking and assorted other useful things. But words must get written, so on to the real work!

Shaming Your Heroine

14 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in Rant, Writing

≈ 5 Comments

NSFW: Bad language ahead.

I want to rant about a book. I’m not going to.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the book that I want to read, that I’m probably never going to write, but that I wish someone would write.

In that book, someone tries to shame a girl. Let’s say her ex-boyfriend posts pictures of her giving him a blowjob on the internet. Revenge porn, that’s what it’s called.

But this girl, unlike Jessica Logan and Audrie Pott and Hope Witsell (Note: just the top three found after searching “teenage girl suicide naked photos” on google, without even leaving the first page)… this girl says, “Oh, hell, no.”

This girl goes straight to the ex-boyfriend and says, “Dude, you get those photos down or you are never having sex in this town again.” Turns out it’s too late–it’s always too late–so she does what she says she’s going to do.

She gets her sisters–not literal sisters, but women who are sympathetic, which is what, all of us, except the very few evil ones?–to plaster the campus in posters. Maybe even her pictures, with the most x-rated bits blacked out, his parts circled and the heading, “John Smith. The kind of guy who takes photos and puts them on the internet without permission.” Or “John Smith. He’s the kind of p***ck who posts photos of his girlfriends on the internet. It’s ’cause he doesn’t know how to use his.”

She buys the domain names for his name, all of them, and posts his image, with a detailed listing of what he did, including the number of times she’s had to hear about her photo from friends and acquaintances and how she feels it may affect her future. She ends the post, on all the domain names, with “Warning: Sleeping with this man may lead to future humiliation and pain. (And won’t get you off. He’s a lousy fuck.)” She looks into SEO optimization and learns how to make her pages the top hits on every google search for his name. Every future employer, every future girlfriend, will find her pages first.

And then she gets nasty. Every time she sees him, she makes the circled finger blowjob motion with one hand and a hard slashing knife motion with the other. She gets her girlfriends to do the same. They get their girlfriends to do the same. Pretty soon, every woman on campus, at the sight of John Smith, the crappy smug ex-boyfriend who thought it would be funny to post her picture online, threatens to castrate him. But not with words, just with a gesture. He complains, of course. People get called into the president’s office. But the women go with wide-eyed innocence and start making their moves more subtly.

He gets nasty, too, of course. That would be inevitable. But she’s been waiting for it and the moment he threatens her, she slaps a restraining order on him. Clever girl, she was carrying a recording device in her pocket and caught the threat on audio recording. (Digital, I’m sure–probably just her iphone, ready to go at the click of a button.) She never goes anywhere alone and she lets him know that if he violates the restraining order, she’ll be perfectly happy to kneecap him with the gun she carries with her.

Meanwhile, when her English teacher gives her the look–you know the one–she looks back at him steadily. Should he even hint at something, she says, acid in her voice, “Been looking at porn, Mr. Jones? I wonder how the administration would feel about that. I hope you haven’t been doing it on your work computer.” He’ll think twice before he tries again.

Books that slut-shame girls by making them think they should be humiliated by photos of themselves engaged in sexual behavior are supporting the culture that tells girls to kill themselves over those photos. I want someone to write the book that tells them to get angry instead. Tells them to be furious at the betrayal of their right to privacy, of their ability to trust. Tells them that there is nothing, nothing, NOTHING wrong with the sight of their naked bodies and that what is very, very, VERY wrong is the behavior of a guy who would share a private moment with the world without permission.

I want someone to write this book. It would be so much more useful to the New Age readers than the books that encourage them to think that their lives are over if people they know see pictures of them engaged in sexual activity.

Rant over.