Maybe it isn't all about guilt?

Yesterday was my birthday.  Not being big partiers, my husband and I decided to celebrate by getting a babysitter (thank you, Grandma) and finally seeing Avatar.  He's the type that tracks down every trailer on the internet, listens to several scifi podcasts and takes note of what's said about the film, and reads a lot of fan discussion.  I'm not.  I saw the commercial, liked it, decided I'd be willing to see it.  Not cut off from the outside world completely, I heard the buzz about it being a huge blockbuster, but that was it...until the news started flashing bits of conservatives bashing it for being anti-military and anti-capitalist. 

So I went into to the film trying to keep an open mind about the conservative point of view (if only as a mental exercise).  I loved it.  I adored the effects--extra special for me because my eyes don't work together as eyes should so previous 3D has been mostly movies marred by bad coloring with a rare thing popping out in a cereal box hologram sort of way.  I enjoyed the story.  Yeah, you could see that plot coming from a mile away, but...."There are only one or two human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they never happened before."  (Thank you, Willa Cather.) 

The conservative commentary on the movie seemed more like a secret admission from the critics than anything else.  James Cameron probably isn't anti-capitalist.  He didn't hang himself in disappointment that he's making serious money on this movie.  It's anti-EVIL-capitalist.  Unless you're evil...  The only thing that I could say I wasn't wild about when my husband pressed me later was, "It did seem a little Rambo Syndrome, didn't it?"  Surely I'm not the only who saw the first Rambo movie as a kid and thought that if vets were really like that, the war would have ended way differently. 

My husband disagreed.  After all, Sully didn't do it all by himself.  "Fair enough," I said, "but isn't it still more of the white guy riding in to save the day?"  We went back and forth on that, letting it go in the end because we did agree that, if you have to look for a message rather than just enjoying the movie, that wasn't the most important message. 

That was the end of it until coming across author Jim C. Hines's critique lead me to When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?  If you have seen the movie, or at the type that doesn't mind spoilers, take a look (skim if yah gotta) at the links.  In case you haven't and don't want the spoilers...

But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy...

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

As I've said before, I think that racism is still relevant to our society and to our fiction.  The conversations are a good thing, and I'm certainly not going to tell a white writer not to critique....er....whites in the media.  But what I keep wondering in all the negativity about Avatar I've checked out over the last 24 hours is, isn't there room for a kinder view of the narrative?  Maybe it is a fantasy about white guilt, but within that is also the story of someone who stopped viewing people--er, aliens--through differences and stereotypes, and learned to respect and understand.  That's not so bad.

An gives YA a thumbs up

This Turkey Day, I was thankful for coming across a young adult book that had me laughing, crying, and reading well into the night. 

Midnight Girl by Will Shetterly is about Cat Medianoche, whose father hosts a paranormal show, mother is dead, and grandma lives in the basement.  Every year on her Halloween birthday, before the separate parties for each side of her family, a mysterious costume appears.  This year, the mystery will be revealed.

Shetterly made this great YA urban fantasy available for free on Scribd, for $3.95 in several e-formats on Smashwords, and at Lulu in trade paperback and hardcover. 

If you're unfamiliar with his name, don't let Scribd and Lulu scare you off.  Shetterly's work has earned  a place on the International Reading Association’s 20 favorite books of US teenagers, Minnesota Book Award for Fantasy and Science Fiction, and finalist status for the World Fantasy Award.

While I'm in YA land, I know that I've mentioned City of Bones, book one of Cassandra Clare's Immortal Instruments, but did I tell you how much I enjoyed the series?  There is controversy about the author's history as a fan fiction writer that comes up enough that I feel compelled to mention it, but isn't so deep that I won't rec the books.  They're imaginative and fun with a heroine that I quickly came to care about and a leading "man" that I wish I were young enough to crush on. 

No worries about less-than-appropriate crushing with Kelley Armstrong's The Summoning, but I do appreciate the understated adventure poor Chloe finds herself in when meeting a ghost gets her diagnosed as schizophrenic.  Learning the truth about the group home she gets put in is one thing; getting out alive is something else entirely.

I don't know it all, but...

Other people's words often inspire me to write my own. With a scene half existing in my mind's eye, but not quiet clear enough, I opened up an ebook ARC I've been looking forward to reading. If I found any inspiration, it was to count the paragraphs of info dump (18), then to check the publisher while composing my complaint: Don't give me Dickens-like language unless you're going to give me his depth. Actually, since I've never read any Dickens that I wasn't forced to, don't give me either.

The publisher wasn't easy to find--no listing in the ARC itself, no declaration on the garish blog; more like a trail of cyber crumbs that lead to a new e-publisher with two books each under "Now Available," "Recently Released," and "Coming Soon." New doesn't have to equal bad. I was ready to stop checking out the book's background and go back to reading the book itself, hoping that beneath the painfully flowery prose, the promise of the premise would be fulfilled. (Now who's being painfully flowery?) But I stumbled upon one more bit of info: the author is one of the company's editors.

Ugh.

As a writer, I'm still floundering with a broken middle and won't pretend to be any kind of expert. As a reader, I say:
1. No one's going to tip you by the adjective. Less is more.
2. Write what you mean. While your metaphors drip with analogies, some things end up just not making sense.
3. There's only so unreliable your third person narrator can be. It ends up reading like I hold this thing to be true, and I will continue to hold it as true and cram it down your throat (in case you missed it during the initial info dump) as everything I write around it contradicts it.

Okay, unpublished writer to kinda-published author, having a guy who sort of works for you as your editor is like having your mom be your beta reader. Don't do it.

Not taking helpful advice

I should be, at this moment, sneaking an illicit smoke before rushing into my Physical Anthropology class. Instead, I'm fighting with my body. Again. Since I've been absent more than I can stand already, I will win in time for American Identities. The struggle got me thinking of something my mom said just a few days ago as I lamented about the the pain I was in and the classes I was missing: "I don't know why you're even putting yourself through going back to school. Why don't you just stay home?"

It came from a place of love; she's the mother of a woman with a chronic illness--one I've managed very well by rejecting the steroids the docs would have me on, and by moderating my activity level. For all the great things about going to college, there has also been the painful reality of my flares increasing.

Why am I putting this in my writing blog? Because my answer to her question also applies to my writing: The benefits are worth the struggle. And it got me thinking about other advice that shouldn't be taken as well.

Someone recently suggested I change something about a group of people in a story I'd posted for critique because she couldn't relate to them. I had to fight down my knee jerk reaction to fix that. She wasn't supposed to relate to them. What she showed me, however accidentally, was my failure in showing how the main character is disconnected from them for much the same reason.

A better example comes from the experience of friend. She sent out several queries for her young adult novel, and got back some really good feedback--and some feedback from one agent saying that 85K was pushing the edge for YA and that she should scrap it and start over.

Seriously?

Anyone who's semi-actively followed this blog knows that YA isn't my thing, though that's changing slowly as I stumble upon (or have crammed down my literary throat) more and more YA that is good urban fantasy regardless of the intended age group. Of those, two seem thinner than the typical 85K plus I find in adult fiction. Even if I tend to read the exceptions, "pushing the edge" suggests the work needs to be trimmed not scrapped!

If, say, two out of three had given such advise, maybe the passive-aggressive message would have been, "You've got great story ideas here, but the delivery is all wrong." Don't just ignore the input coming at you; mine it for gems. But as it is, I think that agent's hidden advice was, "You've got talent enough for me to respond personally rather than shooting out a form letter, but I'm not really the person you should be wasting your time on."

Drive by post #1

Praise is a funny thing. I sat in my Pop Culture professors class today listening to how good a writer I am and thinking, "Who, me?" And I was wishing that he'd tell that to my Women in Global Perspectives professor. :-) But then, that was why I was in his office.

I'd decided to go back to college for American Studies because (1)I can't go back to my former career so I need to learn something else and (2) since I'm pretty anti-academia, I needed something that would good for my writing without being/leading to an English MFA. One look at my school's American Studies program and I was geared up for learning. Then one look at the syllabus and an hour in his class and I knew I wanted to teach it.

Exciting stuff. It might be more than exciting if I can stop denying the good and learn to make it better.

Meanwhile, I'm behind on NaNo, so I've gotta run.

For fun?

Even when I just do it for fun, I don't just do it for fun.

I realized that last night while IMing to a writing friend. I've had no time, as evidenced by the long gap between the last post and this. Like so many others, my family has been hit hard by the massive economic drop. In the years prior, I was a work-at-home and then a stay-at-home mom, and that had to change. My spirit was willing, but my use to employers was weak; there are too many people who have not been out of the work force for so long and who have the proper skills and/or degrees competing for the same jobs. I decided there would be no better time to return to college and get that degree.

Jumping in head first and late, I selected five classes for my 'add/drop' plate (one more than required for full time in case I didn't get one of the others), never realizing that they would all be reading (and most also writing) heavy. I'm having a horrible time balancing full time student with wife and mother, other things in my life are being neglected, yet I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month again this year.

My brother pushed a small (but still heavy and painful, damn it!) T.V. on my head when we were little and apparently the effects are just being seen now.

There are better reasons for me to do NaNo than insanity. It's tradition. I do it every year and fall short of the goal; why change now that I have good reason to fall short? It might actually force me into better time management skills. I love the feeling of community NaNo brings. And I haven't really written fiction since school started, and I miss it.

So I was chatting with my friend about NaNo and explained my big idea...See, with no plot or characters calling me into November, I'd decided to use pre-NaNo October to populate a city. I dedicated a spare notebook, and in between studies or riding on the train, I could jot down character ideas. At midnight, when Halloween becomes All Saints', I would sit and write for whatever character "has the most to say."

Why not? It's just for the joy of it and to get the creative juices flowing. But then came my "ah ha moment." Wouldn't it be fun to make a play on all the mystery books/movies that have a killer staging murders out of some hapless author's books? What if some psycho ill-casts all the characters into urban fantasy scenes? It sounds, to me, dumb and brilliant and a blast to write.

I went on about the legalities to my friend who said something like, "Who cares? It's just for fun. Don't worry about that until you're getting published."

Heh. I treat every story like it's going to get published, don't I? Is that a good thing? A sense of striving that will someday push me over from would-be novelist to novelist actual? Or is it part of the pressure that gets me hung up on poorly paced middles and unsatisfactory endings--so hung up that these things never quite get fixed in revision? Hmmm....

untitled. don't even read it.

...As a writer having fun with story, I understand doing what you want because you want to.

....As a fangirl sort of hoping that the last book in a series will literally be the last, that the engaging author will let go of characters that managed to hold interest for two and a half out of three books, and perhaps come up with something that will hold interest again....As that fangirl, I'm thinking that if you didn't write the great and rousing speeches in Braveheart, The Two Towers, or Independence Day, let's not pretend you did.

...If you must, and you choose to twist a phrase in tribute, just quote. It makes it clear that you are honoring a classic and keeps grumpy fans from writing stupid blog posts like this one when they should be finishing your book.

Fell deeds await... Now for Wrath... Now for Ruin... and the Red Dawn...

There's a good one.