Wednesday, May 29, 2002
meow
If it's playing where you are, The Cat's Meow is well worth the ticket. It's a movie about one of the biggest scandals of 1920s Hollywood, the death of producer Thomas Ince aboard the private yacht owned by William Randolph Hearst.
The guest list on the yacht that weekend read like a cross-section of who's who at all levels: Charlie Chaplin, Marion Davies, writer Elinor Glyn (who called sex appeal "it"), gossip columnist Luella Parsons, director Thomas Ince, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and a few hangers-on, assorted mistresses, a doctor, and a jazz band.
Hearst owned newspapers on both coasts, and had interests in movies, especially those that starred his mistress, Marion Davies. (If he hadn't meddled in her movies, insisting on heavy drama rather than the light comedy at which she excelled, she'd be better known for her acting today.) In this movie he's presented as obsessed with knowing all about his guests, spying on them with hidden microphones and viewports. It's an unflattering portrait and it serves its point for the story, though I really doubt that this is a fair portrayal of the man. Kirsten Dunst plays Marion wonderfully; she's charming and funny and warm-hearted and every bit real.
But the portrayal I have the most problem with is Chaplin. First, there's the looks. Eddie Izzard, who plays him, doesn't look like early Charlie Chaplin to me. Chaplin was, among other things, an athlete and gymnast; at the time the movie portrays, halfway through filming The Gold Rush, the real Charlie was skinny and bouncy and energetic. Izzard plays him as if it's already the 1940s, when Chaplin's health was poor and he was snide rather than charming. No bounce here. The perfect Charlie Chaplin, of course, would be played by the man who perfected the role before, Robert Downey Jr., who looked and sounded so much like Charlie Chaplin in his movie of the man that Chaplin's daughter said it was an exact likeness.
The problem is that the movie hinges on whether Charlie is having an affair with Marion (and whether Hearst found out, or thought he did, and killed Ince by accident), and the way the roles are played gives Marion all the charm and Charlie all the slime. That's not a likely couple.
I do have to give the moviemakers a big gold star for *not* tinting everything on screen a vague sort of golden ecru, as if the past were pre-faded. That fake color ruined Gosford Park for me. The Cat's Meow was full of the colors of the era, which was a lot more like the 1960s than anyone wants to admit.
The neighbors downhill are moving out; the van's in front of the house as I write. They've been here five years, long enough to add a child and renovate the house twice. I think we've spoken probably ten times in all those years, usually about the fence and retaining wall that keeps our front yard from falling into their driveway, and its repair.
I'd really like it if someone friendly, who reads books and likes fandom, would move in. The street has nice people, but there are fairly sharp divides: the elderly Jewish residents who moved in after the war when the houses were new, the military-medical types stationed at Walter Reed Hospital or local bases, who are here for three years or four, the people on the other end of the block with the children who walk past the house to the school by the park on our end of the street. From what I've seen of those I've met, there are several computer programmers but very few if any readers.
We don't have children, and the neighbors moving out made it kind of clear, over the years, that that lack made us uninteresting. There are worse things than having your neighbors think you're boring, and there are worse kinds of neighbors, but I keep hoping for someone I can get to know as a person and not just as the people that live in that house over there.
economic theory and fannish endeavor
Much of fandom can be seen as a laissez-faire political-economic system within itself. Despite the many fandoms and fannish groups, it's unorganized overall and it has no overarching legislating governing its behavior per se, other than the rules of copyright.
This makes it more of an anarchy than a pure democracy, though there are elements of both present; everyone has an opinion but there are no elected positions of authority over the group as a whole.
Of course someone's going to be making a buck at it. That's what happens in laissez-faire economic systems.
A vast amount of fandom these days is about buying and selling, about owning things -- episodes of shows, vids, zines, t-shirts and so on. It's been that way for years. How far do you think you'd get if you told everyone coming to a con not to wear their fannish clothes? There is a market for goods, and where there's a market there will be suppliers to provide those goods.
(I am not saying this is all that fandom is. There's also, for lack of a better economic term, a marketplace of ideas, where the coin of exchange is wit and creativity, the payment is satisfaction and the result is friendship. But the marketplace of intangibles is hidden, for better or worse, inside and within and behind the marketplace of physical goods, and I'm only deaing with tangibles here.)
This isn't baseball; there's no Commissioner of Fandom who's going to run you out of the game for betting on the outcome and making a little money on the side. It's not that kind of regulated affair -- and it's also not that holy, either. Fandom isn't The Great American Sport that Must Be Kept Pure for the Sake of the Children. (Hah!)
In every human endeavor I can think of, there are people who make money as brokers, as barterers, as salesmen with or without commission. Look around. There are people who act as brokers to make money on bubblegum baseball cards and those little toys that came inside CrackerJack. Why should this be any different?
(If someone is going to try to convince me that slash fandom is more holy than this, I'm really going to have to wonder where they're playing with a full pack of rubbers. I've seen slash fans pay hundreds of dollars for props from their favorite shows, or for a beer bottle that an actor drank out of.)
Yes, it's a creative pastime, and the creators don't make money at it (because of copyright law), and making money isn't the point of the creation. I'm not arguing that. I've written more than fifty stories, some of them novel-length, not counting the single sixty-part multi-crossover metafiction that I wrote for the hell of it one summer, and a fair share of them have been published in zines. I don't have an argument with a dollar being made on a zine I contributed to, when I know where the money goes and what it's used for. My profit, plain and simple, comes from working at the writing and becoming a better writer. And, although I've done it in the past, I refuse to put my stories in zines that are badly produced and poorly edited, because the lack of quality detracts from the amount of effort I put into the writing in the first place.
Given that, I tend to think along the lines of whether those who are making money are giving good value for the money, providing a service well, and being honest about it. If the publisher makes a profit, and is public about where that money goes, that's not a matter of good or evil. I know of only one person in all of fandom who actually makes a living from it. In all other case I know of, the so-called 'profit-making' is used to benefit fans in several ways, and that's fine with me.
Let's look at pricing, for a moment. According to basic microeconomic theory, goods are sold for whatever the market will bear, e.g. whatever someone will pay for them. They will be too expensive for some people and too cheap for others, and often the factor that makes the difference is the quality of the goods. As my economics prof used to say, no millionaire ever wants to spend his money on Tuna Helper.
Fannish goods are no exception to this. They are priced to sell to the greatest number of people, at a price that should cover the tangible and intangible costs of getting them to the marketplace. That should include, if everything's added in, the cost of transportation as well as the cost of production and storage. If you buy something by mail, you're paying for the convenience of not having to leave home and for the cost of transporting the goods to you. Most people who sell things by mail add a shipping cost that's an average of the actual cost of postage over a wide range; I don't know anyone with a business who actually sits down and figures that this package weighs L and is going to M, so it will cost N for every single package that's sent out, and adds in the cost of packaging as well. That's what standard shipping costs are for; if someone makes a few dollars on it occasionally it's balanced by the amount lost on other transactions.
Besides, let's get real here. It's not like anyone is making anyone buy a zine or a t-shirt or a vid or anything else fannish. This is not An Issue Of Life And Death. This is not a Big Puritan Deal of good and evil. It's a marketplace, a basic laissez-faire economic activity, where the Invisible Hand that governs affairs is not the hand of deity. The people who "should" acquire goods, in the economic sense, are those who have the money; those who don't have the money, no matter how nice or worthy they are, don't buy the same goods or as much of them. That's how the world works. If your friend will give you a copy of a zine that sells for $15 or $20, that's a wonderful thing, but it doesn't really affect the dealer who sold the zine in the first place. Dealers of new products sell the equivalent of 'first rights'; after that, it's a matter of the intrinsic value of the item determining whether it will sell again, or be given away, or be discarded. That kind of value, too, is determined by the immediate buyer and the seller. The person who created and produced something has no say in it after it's sold the first time. There are no residual or rerun rights in fanfic.
Fannish goods are luxuries, not necessities. Nobody needs to buy another zine in order to get from one day to the next without starving. If you don't like the person who sells the zines, nobody's breaking your arm to make you buy them, just like nobody forced you to get on the plane or bus or in the car to go to the con where they're sold. Usually, if you wait a few months, you can get a used copy from someone else. If not, the supply was obviously too small for the demand and, in economic terms, the cost should have been higher.
If that makes me cynical, so be it.
5/29/2002 09:54:00 AM
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
alarums and excursions
I guess you could say that Memorial Day weekend was unexceptional, more or less. Quiet. Homey.
Most of Sunday was spent at a wonderful birthday party that a friend decided to throw to celebrate turning 50. She reserved a shelter in Rock Creek Park and invited a good mixture of everyone -- family, colleagues from the university, friends. We ate, and talked, and painted mehndi (probably misspelled -- it's henna tattoos) designs on each other, and read tarot cards for whoever wanted them, played with the dogs, enjoyed the good weather. I wandered over to the restrooms, in the stable nearby, and saw large signs: Do Not Ride South in the Park. You Will Be Ticketed. Of course; the police would not appreciate horses scrambling any remaining clues near where Chandra's body was found. All the horses were friendly when I went through the barn on the way out; they sniffed at my hand and didn't try to bite, though I'm sure they would have been interested in chewing on my straw hat if they thought they could get away with it. It says a lot for a rental stable that the horses are that friendly and well cared-for.
My friend's son, S, came over yesterday to help me clear out brush in the back yard, and we did good work on it until the temperature got warm enough for the air to feel too steamy for long sleeves and jeans; then we went to the local deli for lunch. He's in the chorus of a local production of South Pacific and was telling me he hadn't heard all of the songs, and I mentioned that I have the original cast Broadway version on vinyl -- ancient vinyl, 1949 78-rpm vinyl. And he suggested copying it off and putting it on CD so both of us would have it.
(My mother bought the 78s the day they hit the stores. She was supposed to be getting a new swimsuit, but she fell for the music instead, took it home and played it nearly every day on the old radio-cum-record player. She must have taken immense care with them, because even now they're unscratched. I grew up listening to them, and to this day if the voice singing "Some Enchanted Evening" doesn't have the breadth and depth of Ezio Pinza's, the song doesn't sound right to me.)
Fine idea -- except that three hours later we discovered that neither of my old record players that had needles for 78s (they had to be sapphire, not diamond, to avoid damaging the records) would provide output; the newer one had problems with the turntable and the older one with the reliable turntable was an all-in-one, speakers-attached job that I'd gotten for cheap when modular systems were new and way too expensive. We were stymied until his father checked online and found the CD of the same record for sale at Amazon for $9. Ah well. We settled for the mercantile solution and consigned my poor record players to the category of archeological relics. (Amelia Peabody, please note.)
Then, this morning, after the third night of thunderstorms in a row, I woke with lots of ideas and words in my head, and went to put them into the project I'm writing -- and the software (also an older version but uploaded to my new little iBook) refused to save. It ate five pages. I searched online for support and discovered a site that had an updated version of the software on free download that purported to solve the problem, so I downloaded and installed, and apparently it worked. Well, I'll find out the next time I open the program...
I'm still working on installing other software and hardware on the iBook that was previously on the pc; this is not something at which I'm skilled, so it's taking entirely too much of my inadequate patience to begin with. I'm an applications person, not a programmer. Give me an installed program and I'll test its limits and make sure it does everything the manual says, but don't ask me about installation file structures and so on.
Fortunately, at the point when I was most frustrated, there was a jar of Thomas Sweet hot fudge sauce on the shelf, unopened. It doesn't have to be heated to taste good, especially when eaten with a silver demitasse spoon. (Of course I didn't use a soupspoon. I'm not that desperate for calories.)
5/28/2002 02:49:00 PM
Saturday, May 25, 2002
rough country
The New York Post said it best, in a 96-point headline that stretched across the top of a full-cover photo of her face, staring endlessly at us with a Mona Lisa smile:
It's Her
Now that Chandra Levy's body has been found, half the waiting has ended. We know what ultimately happened to her. We don't know when, or why, or at this point even how. We don't know if she ended up on that brush-clotted hillside the day she went missing or if her body was dumped there weeks or months later.
I've heard some criticism of the searchers for not finding her earlier. I'm sure the criticism came from people who never worked a search pattern in thick brush or forest -- and Rock Creek Park has both, including small stands of uncut timber dating back to when President John Quincy Adams used to skinny-dip in the creek. The park curves into the city following the creek; it has its own population of deer, foxes, raccoons, rabbits and possibly coyotes, and the southern end of the park emerges near the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, on the Potomac. It's five times as large as New York's Central Park, and there are probably a hundred miles of official trails, not counting the small informal ones made by deer, stray dogs and kids cutting across from one place to another.
The location of her body, and the way it was missed, remind me of the rescue I helped with in 1973, on Mt. Marcy in the Adirondacks. Then, a kid with a small-gauge rifle had gone hiking without adequate clothing in April, when the weather is treacherous and snowstorms can blur up out of almost nothing. I was a volunteer on the Adirondack Search and Rescue Team from Potsdam State College, and we were asked to go over areas that the police and rangers had already covered, just in case something had been missed.
Searching in that kind of rough hillside, covered in brush, isn't as easy as it looks on television. It had been about a week since he went missing, but the footprints were still visible in the frozen -- and drying -- mud. He'd wandered on and off the path, and ultimately hadn't wandered back on. The area where we searched was covered with thickets of blackberry and raspberry cane, and low bushes; the visibility between the stems and roots and branches in those areas, even in winter, was poor. I sprained my ankle, trying to keep from falling downhill on a rocky slope, and was sent back to the base camp. The rest of the team continued on with cross-country skis on the snowpack, but found only occasional shreds of cloth on thorns.
The boy we were looking for wasn't found for twenty years. Almost exactly two decades later, someone found his skeleton, and the stock of his gun. If I remember correctly, they could tell from his remains that he'd slipped and broken his leg, unable to get back to the trail. He'd probably died of exposure, though there were marks on the gun stock that indicated that a bear had chewed on it at some time.
I couldn't tell you how many people were searching that mountain for twenty years and missed finding him, any more than I could tell you how many hundreds were combing the park and any other place around and not finding Chandra. But it happens, and it's not that unusual.
But the thing that makes me fairly certain she died somewhere else is this: we had a hot summer last year, and not even the search dogs smelled anything in that area. Think about it. There's no mistaking the smell of death; just check with anyone who's ever had a deceased mouse in a furnace heat run. A human is a lot bigger than a mouse, and if there were a body on the slope during that heat, someone should have noticed from a fair distance. This tells me that her body wasn't on that slope when the searchers were combing through the park. It may not have gotten there until months later.
I still wish, in some ways, that we hadn't found her like that, if only because it would be nice to think that she was somewhere else, maybe sipping a margarita in a foreign bar under an assumed name. (People do disappear like that, even these days. It was possible.) But all those possibilities brought to mind when she disappeared have fractured and fallen in on themselves now, just ghosts of imagination.
She's the real ghost, the one who keeps us asking what's going on, and why, and how she ended up on that hillside in the city. And we won't know the answers until she tells us.
Something further on the discussion of writing other people's characters not being something done outside fandom:
What about scripts for television series? Chris Carter and Joss Whedon are the exceptions in that they personally wrote much of their shows; most series buy scripts from screenwriters from all over the place, and those screenwriters don't own the characters and haven't created them. One of my college professors wrote a Star Trek TOS episode, and another friend has been involved in scripts for various SF series for years; neither of them lives in Hollywood or New York City.
A grand prize for writing other people's characters must go to the writers who work on soap operas -- five scripts a week, every week, and the characters in most of them were created decades ago by someone who's probably not around any more for questions.
And (to switch back to novels) certainly some sort of award should go to The Ghostwriters (in the literal sense) Who Are The Late V.C. Andrews, and who perpetuate the horror series that started with Flowers In The Attic.
Actually, if you look at young adult books, there are vast and endless stretches of series books written by individual authors that overflow bookshelves and can be seen as far as the horizon...
I'd be willing to argue, for the sake of discussion, that what's original in most writing is viewpoint and not characters. No two people have the same point of view, the same exact way of expressing themselves, even when writing about the same characters. Robin Hood, anyone? Check out the differences between Robin of Sherwood, Robin Hood: Men In Tights and The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn swinging through the trees. Or Robin and Marian, with aging heroes. Okay, it's all part of the same mythos, but different people wrote those stories, and it shows -- and they're all, identifiably, slightly alternate versions of the same Robin and Marian and the Sheriff of Nottingham.
5/25/2002 09:45:00 AM
Thursday, May 23, 2002
armed and dangerous
I love movies, always have -- but I'm not watching them on tv much any more.
The pornography of war is getting to me.
It's one thing having The History Channel with its unending newsreels of World War II. Even given the amount of editing that goes on, the events in those newsreels did happen. I can't argue with that, though I can and do think there are better ways to present some of the footage. Certainly, there needs to be a better critical sense applied to some of the topics.
But war movies that have cropped up everywhere on the tube -- and I'm not just talking Midway, A Bridge Too Far, Tora-Tora-Tora. I'm talking about all the second-rate B movies with Ronald Reagan trying to look noble as the hero's best friend, and all the "we're going to do our part against The Enemy" ones. These are
the movies that had one viewpoint -- we're against Them and They're 100% wrong and nasty and evil (just look at Them, They're different and that's wrong and nasty and evil), and we're gonna win, by damn because we're pure and good and right... )
Life isn't that simple. It wasn't that simple then, and it isn't now.
I know that moviemakers weren't always inclined to consider war critically at some times in the past -- and certainly some of the movies were made purely as propaganda, with no attempt at any sort of alternative view of events. But I have to take issue with the attitude that comes through them. That attitude put thousands of loyal Americans in camps because they looked like and were related to the Japanese who had bombed Pearl Harbor. And that same attitude, if it's followed today, could be disastrous as we deal with terrorism.
And there are exceptions. All Quiet on the Western Front, which looks at World War I from the viewpoint of a German soldier. Apocalypse Now, the transformation of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness to Vietnam. To some degree, The Deer Hunter. I haven't seen Coming Home on Turner Classic Movies yet, but that may be because its owner might not feel like looking at his ex-wife for a while, (though it is depriving the rest of us of an excellent movie.)
But there are other movies that I'd consider in the "war" category that at least give me the idea that the filmmakers weren't thinking two-dimensionally at best. John Wayne's The Searchers is overtly a Western, but it takes place during the Indian Wars, and its attitudes date from that time -- from when it was more important to kill a woman who'd been captured and lived with the tribes than to rescue her and let her live because there was no place for her in the society from which she'd come. Actually, that's not as archaic an attitude as I'd like to think -- consider the women who were raped in the former Yugoslavia, who could not go home again.
A Town Called Alice, which was made into a miniseries (and hasn't been reshown again either) looks at WWII from inside a Japanese POW camp for women; at one point, the women try very hard to take care of the health of their ailing guard, because if he dies they will be sent someone who is far less willing to look aside when they gather food for themselves "illegally". Part of the appeal of this story for me is that it considers war as part of life but not the most important part, and not the entirety of it. The heroine survives, and goes to Alice Springs, Australia, to try to find the man who had been kind to her in the camp, whom she had thought was dead. She's not the same, any more, and neither is he.
The important thing about these exceptions is that they show what goes on in the minds and hearts of the people who are carrying the guns and giving the orders -- whereas in the B movies it's doubtful that the characters have either minds or hearts that wouldn't get soggy and melt or turn into paper mush in a light rain.
So I'll head back to the video store and look for something a little less ... unilateral.
5/23/2002 10:02:00 PM
Tuesday, May 21, 2002
aargghh
My mail server has instituted a spam filter that is eating anything from a maillist or from people who have certain addresses, like aol.com or hotmail.com. As a result, I have to go and comb through it to make sure I don't miss things, and I probably did. If you're expecting a reply and it's not coming, please bear with me. Technology is not being kind to me today.
5/21/2002 11:16:00 AM
Monday, May 20, 2002
A few examples
In the last post, I talked about character and canon in fiction writing and how writing fiction is the same process, regardless of whether it's for money or for love. This time I'll list some more examples of voice and character.
- The Bone People by Keri Hulme.
Three main characters, from different backgrounds and with different voices -- and one of them's mute. This book rightly won the Booker Award; I really wish it were possible to get her other books here more easily; they're published in New Zealand, where she lives and writes and where the stories take place.
- In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden
Rumer Godden writes amazing books, and it's no accident that this one has endured. On the surface it's a story of a woman in her 40s who enters a Benedictine monastery (yes, that's what it's called, not convent) and changes her life, but beyond that it's about the search for what is real. Rumer uses her characters' voices and personalities to show different parts of the quest, and its stages, from the vocalist who becomes a novice to the commonsense older nun who unexpectedly becomes mother superior.
- Three by Rita Mae Brown: High Hearts, Six of One, Bingo.
This is characterization through word choice, brought to a high art. Listen to these characters talk, and you will be able to tell without their names which ones are from what backgrounds, which ones are formally educated, which have educated themselves.
In the "Mrs. Murphy" novels, she does the same thing but with the voices of animals, and does it while maintaining canon for the series and solving fairly complex mysteries.
- The "Dolly" series, by Dorothy Dunnett, including
Dolly and the Singing Bird, Dolly and the Bird of Paradise, Dolly and the Cookie Bird, Dolly and the Starry Bird, Dolly and the Nanny Bird, Send a Fax to the Casbah
This is what Dame Dorothy did for light entertainment on the side while she was writing her Lymond and Niccolo historical novels. Let's talk about character here. Each of these books is told in the voice of a different main character, who may appear as a minor character in other books in the series, but none of them are told in the voice of Johnson Johnson, the portrait painter and espionnage agent who is the thread tying all of them together. Johnson Johnson lives aboard his yacht, the Dolly, and is searching for the people who set off a bomb that killed his wife and crippled him -- but that's seldom said right out on the surface. On the surface, he's trying to solve problems for the various narrators, sometimes problems caused by the various narrators themselves. And let's talk about writing from inside a different body: the narrators include an opera singer, a totally dyslexic makeup artist who does special effects for movies, a nanny, a chef, an astronomer, and an executive secretary.
- Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.
In a sense, every story about a man coming home from war is a variant on The Odyssey. This time, the main character is coming home from the American Civil War, and has to go a long way through poor country to do it. What makes this book wonderful is the phrasing and the language. Frazier consciously chose not to use any words in it that entered the language after 1865. He didn't do it in the way Spenser did in The Faerie Queene, who purposely used obscure and obsolete language, but by using the plain words that were common at the time and have fallen out of use since then.
- War for the Oaks by Emma Bull.
High fantasy meets gritty reality when the two Courts of Faerie decide to hold their war in Minneapolis. Yeah, right. This could be just any old fantasy novel, except for its crackling good characterization and the way she uses language to show background and intention. Am I boring you yet by saying that vocabulary choice is employed deliberately to portray the status and background of characters? It is, and the characters range from a pooka who changes from a giant black dog into something like The Artist Once And Now Again Known As Prince to a rock guitarist caught up in the struggle to a fiddler who isn't entirely sure how to behave in this century (as opposed to the last four or so), and the piece de resistance, a Scottish brownie who manages to make her skills of housecleaning, cooking and gardening into the arts of warfare.
- The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (or someone else of the same name)
Find a good version you like and read it aloud, and listen to what you are saying. This is how the story was supposed to be told, with the "wine-dark seas" and "rosy-lipped Dawn" and other now-cliches used to keep the listeners' attention and anchor turning points in the story. You can't get more involved in character than by centering a story on the anger of the greatest warrior because he didn't get his way, and showing how everything else around him reacts to this. (Notice how, when the goddesses Athena and Hera take the field, the gods of war leave because they're outclassed.) It's worthwhile, also, to notice the differences in how women are treated from the Iliad to the Odyssey -- who is treated with respect, who is not, and why. If you come to the books with the preconceptions of decades of watered-down myths, you might well be surprised. Xena would not have been out of place here.
5/20/2002 10:36:00 AM
Saturday, May 18, 2002
it's writing, damn it. writing.
I've got a headache that hasn't gone away completely ever since the eye infection I got two weeks ago, but I've just got to respond to something that I read in Destina's journal.
With all due respects to her, and to others who have been discussing this, let me just lay it out in black and white (or black and orange, or whatever colors your browser sees this in):
Writing fan fiction is not different from writing original fiction. It's fiction writing. It takes the same skills.
Destina's list of skills that she suggests fanfiction writers have that original fiction writers don't have (or perhaps don't need -- this wasn't clear) included:
- An ear for dialogue. Yes, writers of good fan fiction have to be able to give the characters lines to say that are reasonable, realistic and intersting, and in character for that story/canon/character. So do writers of original fiction.
One of the major complaints of editors I've talked with, who read submissions for professional publication, is that they get far too many stories with poor characterization, particularly in the dialogue. They can't tell the characters apart by the way they talk. These editors absolutely love to see a manuscript come in that has distinct voices for each of the characters. (And these are editors from Tor, Baen and Del Rey -- respectable names in publishing, not Joe Blow.)
Books that endure and are read for years and decades and centuries have this kind of clear character dialogue: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an excellent example, as are Pride and Prejudice, Portnoy's Complaint and Bridget Jones's Diary. (If, in the more British of those books, all the characters sound the same to you, you need to read more closely and pay attention to vocabulary. It's not all one voice, not even in the diary.)
- A deep understanding about characterization and show canon. Granted, much original fiction doesn't necessarily include pre-defined characters, but it often includes pre-defined character types, and when you get into genre fiction such as detective stories, certain kinds of science fiction, Westerns, and almost all romance novels, there can be "bibles" in the publishers' offices that govern how those character types are to be represented, what they can do and what they can't do.
Even without the "bibles", the types are still there; everyone knows what a detective should or shouldn't do, or a hero, and that there are major differences between British and American forms of police work and courts. A good author, like Louis L'Amour or Georgette Heyer, will take those types and play with the reader's expectations about them but will never discard them entirely. An example here is Georgette Heyer's Cotillion, in which the rich and handsome hero is rejected by the heroine for his not-as-handsome friend and cousin, who hasn't a brain in his head but loves her dearly. I could go all the way back to The Odyssey with this, and talk about the ways in which writers both set and change types and play with readers' expectations, but I won't bore you with all that.
- Canon. I touched on this in the last item, but let's go further in terms of professional fiction. There's the "bible" that I mentioned earlier. If the original fiction is an adaptation of an historical event, there's the question of adherence to history; if it concerns types, there's character typecasting so that it's clear to the reader which characters are the hero, heroine, rake, soubrette, crone, and so on (the less familiar terms come from early theatre, including Commedia del Arte).
It's not the same kind of canon that's found in fanfic -- but it's there. It's knowledge that the reader brings to the story about the world in which that story is set, and it can be extremely exacting. I doubt very much that Jackie Collins, Susan Isaacs or Rita Mae Brown would sell as many books if each of them didn't adhere, in her own way, to the canon of the world in which they're set, the expectations of the way various characters would act and the obligation to fulfil those expectations.
And the golden word of the day for this is series: series authors must adhere to the canon and characters they themselves create, such as Agatha Christie, Dana Stabenow and Dorothy Dunnett. Dorothy Dunnett wrote both intensely researched historical fiction and "light fiction" mysteries that are among the most densely plotted books I've ever read; there are continuing characters and she never violates canon, not once, not in the roughly 100,000 pages of her fourteen linked historical novels of Lymond and Nicolo. Yes, I've read them all. Nowhere in the Chronicles of Lymond is there a place where I could say that her lovely fair-haired hero violated the rules by which he lived, which she created in the first book and continued through the other five parts of that section of the work. There are eight books on Niccolo de Fleury as well, all interlaced with those of Lymond, and each of them runs 600 to 800 or more pages.
- Ability to transcend the body you live in. Give me a break. Every good writer has to do this, has to get inside the mind and heart of the characters who don't share the same body as the author, or the same aches. Every one of them. No exceptions. Any woman who ever writes about a man does it, and any man who ever writes about a woman does it, from Dorothy Sayers writing about Lord Peter Wimsey to D.H. Lawrence writing about Lady Chatterley. There are no exceptions. Anyone who doesn't manage to do this isn't a good writer, and I don't care who it is or how big a name that person has.
The difference between professional writing and fanfic, in terms of these, is not that it's done worse in one than the other -- I could probably point to hideous examples of both, if necessary, as they certainly exist -- but that the most skillful writers in fanfiction are seldom as appreciated as those in pro fiction. Granted, there are fanfic writers in every fandom whose work adequately illustrates "how not to do it" just as there are in professional publishing. And certainly the emphasis of some of it is different -- the major emphasis on the sexuality of relationship that's seen in slash is less common in pro fiction, or else more often veiled, but it does exist. Imagine some of the bestsellers without the sex scenes -- you know they wouldn't be bestsellers. (And, as you know, the mind is the largest sexual organ in the body; it all happens there, whether it's explicit or not.)
But none of that matters. In terms of skills, it's the same. It's fiction. It requires characterization, setting, a story line, and action. It needs a beginning, a middle and an end (no matter what order the writer puts them in.) If it's successful, it takes the reader into a different place and makes the characters come alive. And it's all the same work for the author. Just because a dachshund doesn't look like a saluki or an Old English sheepdog doesn't mean they're not both dogs -- the apparent differences don't make one a cat and the other a bear.
Now, if you'd said it was different than technical writing or political speechwriting, I'd have to agree that there are some stylistic differences (though I still believe characterization is crucial for speechwriting) ... but for the moment I'll go back to staring at something I keep posted by my computer or typewriter or notepad, something James Joyce said a long time ago: Write it, damn it. Write it. What else are you good for?
Something I noticed while watching something else: In the Andromeda episode, "It Makes a Lovely Light", just before Beka talks with Tyr at the start, the camera pans the corrugated metal ceiling of that part of the Maru -- where a section clearly reads, "Made in USA". (Upside down, but it's there.) Hmm. Does that mean the Maru is made of spare parts from a lot further in the past than anyone is giving it credit for?
5/18/2002 02:05:00 PM
Friday, May 17, 2002
them? them who?
I'm somewhat in favor of what's been called political correctness, at least as far as it gives people to think before they spew obnoxious invective about others. Good manners are always welcome. But a CNN news article has had me thinking a lot about just who is or is not being offended, and why.
Briefly put, California may force schools and universities within its borders to drop American Indian team names and mascots.
I realize that people representing many tribes have been petitioning for this kind of change for years -- but people from just as many other tribes are proud to have their names on teams and mascots. A Cherokee woman I knew said once that she was really pleased whenever the Cleveland Indians won a game, because as far as she was concerned they represented her people.
This still seems to me to miss the point altogether, though. It's as if everyone is thinking far too narrowly about who "we" and "they" are.
Let me put this quite simply. Anyone whose ancestors were in the United States more than 125 years ago has at least a 50-50 chance of descent from one tribe or another. If your ancestors came here before the Civil War, or earlier, I'd guess it's probably close to 100 percent, unless they all intermarried, never traveled, and only associated with other immigrants from the Old Country.
Dig deep enough in any family west of the original thirteen states, and you'll find that pretty much everyone has ancestors who were here when the others were getting off the boats. And dig deep enough back here in the original thirteen, or in eastern Canada, and it's even more certain. Nearly everyone has, somewhere along the line, a Mohawk or Seneca or Tuscarora great-great-grandfather or a Cherokee or Ojibwa or Wyandot great-grandmother. If you're lucky enough to be from the kind of family that talks about ancestry, you find this out when you're a kid and grow up with it. If you're not, sometimes it takes you by surprise. A few years ago, a friend asked me, "What tribe are your people from?" and I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I started asking questions, and found out there's probably a very good reason for that handmade silver Mohawk heart emblem that my mother left me, but the aunt who knew all about it has died and the only remaining aunt isn't interested in talking. We're not even sure if the ancestor we'd like to track down is Algonquin or Mohawk, but we're sure he's there (or maybe a couple of "he's", since there are two places on the family tree where it's likely.)
So. If such a high percentage of the population has American Indian/Native American ancestry, who is being offended and who is doing the offending?
This leads me to other questions, for which I don't have answers. I know a lot of people who have adopted religious beliefs or practices that they learned from people of various tribes, or books written by people of various tribes. I wonder, at times, where the line can be drawn between sharing one's beliefs and approach to the world with others of a different culture (even when that different culture is mainstream) and allowing the mainstream to exploit and trivialize these beliefs and practices.
For instance, In Canada, if I walk into a shop run by First Nations people, I can buy a small Iroquois 'False Face' medicine mask, a wood carving used in healing ceremonies. They're not sold in the US. The people who make them live in both countries, sell them in one, don't in the other.
On the other hand, I've also heard American Indian/Native American speakers condemn "white" people for adopting AI/NA practices, with the thought that the natives had already lost everything else and should at least be left to follow their culture without interference. I've also met people who "look white" who are registered Mohawk and Cherokee, as well as others who are not registered (which requires genealogical proof that not everyone can verify) who sincerely follow the old ways. Is appearance everything?
I'm not discounting the horrific treatment that people from every tribe on the continent have received over the past five centuries, and I'm not discounting the various ways in which government has harmed, rather than helped. What I'm thinking, though, is that the worst hurts that ever exist always come from people who are within the same family. We aren't hurting "them", we're hurting us. If some of us live in one way and some of us live in another, that doesn't deny that we're related, whether we can "prove" it or not.
And all of this seems to wrap around a difficult concept: what is the proper or best way to respect a culture that you may or may not share, may or may not be related to, may or may not be part of? I don't have any answer to that.
The image I still have in my mind, though, is of my college basketball team, the St. Bonaventure University Brown Indians. That's who they were for 150 years or so; now they're the Bonnies. I wonder how the Senecas who live in that area and used to come to the games to cheer for "our team" feel about that, and if anyone asked them about the change before it was made.
5/17/2002 03:47:00 PM
links, chains, bars and other things
When is a hypertext link a convenience? When is it illegal? You might be surprised.
If it makes a copy of an already copyrighted photo, it may well be illegal, according to a California court case. But a Dallas newspaper recently objected to a website linking to a specific article rather than to its home page.
Where do you draw the line? It seems to depend on whether you view the content of a site as property to be hoarded (in which case, why is it on the Internet in the first place?) or property to be shared. Some artists, for instance, go to great lengths to make sure nobody can even right-click on their pages, while others offer freebies and hope you'll use what they post. But it might be worthwhile to keep an eye on the courts in this.
In other matters:
- It's 10 a.m. (or 11 p.m.): do you know where your credit data is? Is it safe from hackers? Are you sure?
(Personally, I'd rather see these guys called "crackers", since hacking per se used to be an honorable way to learn more about the 'Net, without disturbing anyone or anything, rather like wandering through a wildlife park and peeking at the critters. But not any longer.)
- And here's something useful from the Digital Freedom Network: how to trace an email back to its sender. (No, I'm not going to track down the source of every one of those spams...not even for practice...spam is like coathangers in a neglected closet.)
- While we're on the subject of technology, identity and privacy, this gives me the willies: scanable people. Data chips embedded in people who can then be scanned like potato chips in a supermarket checkout line.
I get nervous about things like that. Suppose someone decided that it was a good idea to have all of us "chipped", rather than handing out national identity cards (which I'm not entirely fond of either.) What information goes on the chip? Is it true? Is it accurate? If it's wrong, how can it be changed? Or can it be changed at all? If a chip gets into the wrong person, with the wrong medical information, how can it be corrected? Put me at the end of the line on this one, way back at the end, over the curve of the horizon where I'm heading the other direction.
5/17/2002 09:33:00 AM
Wednesday, May 15, 2002
complications
Things are still a bit wonky here on the old Federalist-era oak desk (very thirdhand.) Windows 2000 apparently wants to chew up and spit out my modems like a junkyard dog. It's been dissuaded from doing so, but instead has turned its attention to Netscape Communicator, and is gnawing and drooling on the email.
I can get to my email through good old Pine (blessed be Pine and its creator) but it would be a whole lot easier, all the way around, if anyone who needs to contact me should write me at this address for the time being. I can get to this one through a browser, since it contains its own mail program. (Please, no spam, no much-forwarded chain letters... you know the stuff. Even if I might ordinarily find some of it funny, I don't have the time or energy to give to it right now, so it will be summarily deleted.)
Other than that, the purple podded beans are sprouting in the little garden, I'm getting somewhere in the writing projects I'm doing, and I'm starting to plan summer excursions ... and possibly buy a laptop ...
5/15/2002 09:18:00 PM
Sunday, May 12, 2002
due to circumstances...
I've upgraded to Windows 2000. This should avoid having the operating system step on its own toes, as a result of some nasty virus stuff that corrupted a couple of Win 98 files. However, some of the things that should work aren't working. The new system doesn't recognize my modem or touchpad-mouse properly, and I'm having what might be called (politely) an "interesting time" getting online and getting around once I'm here.
And that includes email.
If I owe you a reply and it isn't forthcoming, please be patient. I am trying to get through and send things; it isn't always working. Also, my apologies for dropping out of chat last night (because of impending system failure -- at least this time I got warning) before being able to reassure everyone that what I was talking about was a) my thoughts and nobody else's and b) meant to be taken metaphorically and as a silly thought and joke, nothing more. I apologize if anyone thought differently based on anything I said, or didn't say, or didn't get the chance to say.
And now, back to our downloading of Important Things That Must Be Gotten In Order To Make Everything Go Back To Working Properly...
5/12/2002 12:12:00 PM
Friday, May 10, 2002
thoughts on watching Spiderman
Heroes exist to teach us how to live and die, to show us alternatives to the way we live our lives, and the consequences of choice.
The ancient Greeks had Hercules, Jason, Perseus -- and Prometheus. They also had Orpheus, the hero of song and hope beyond death. Different choices, different lives.
It's easier to see where changes can be made when it's on a screen than when it's in your own life. It's always easier when the situation is SEP -- someone else's problem. (Thank you, Douglas Adams.)
We need a hero to be real in ways we know -- to walk streets that need sweeping and not always have enough money, to want the one he or she loves to love back even while watching that loved one walk off with someone else. We need to know that heroes have everyday problems to deal with, like school and work and transportation and relatives, and not just enormous crucial apocalypses to avert -- because we have to deal with the small things all the time, and we know they don't stay small.
We deal with life and death every day; we just don't know it. Heroes do know it, and still choose to go ahead. That's the difference. They all do it differently, which is another clue to the way things work -- or should work. (Or, as I've said before, monoculture kills.) Sometimes they get to make the choice twice, and learn what might have happened; sometimes, not. We don't often get that, either.
To the degree that heroes are safe and nonthreatening for us, they have failed in their work as heroes. It takes something out of you to follow a hero, to learn from a hero, and it gives something back, too. Staying in safety ultimately fails as a survival technique; learning which risks to take and how to take them wins every time.
5/10/2002 09:30:00 PM
Thursday, May 09, 2002
first, you say something to get the story started
Is the first line of the story what's important? Or is it the first paragraph.
Sentences act as a measure of thought -- he thought this and then did this -- but paragraphs are an expression of emotion. When the emotion changes, there should be a new paragraph.
That's one of the major things Hemingway did that I haven't heard anyone talk about. People talk about his short sentences, but seldom do you hear anyone talk about how his short sentences and short paragraphs portray deep emotion. One good example is the end of A Farewell to Arms, which has no obvious emotion-bearing words but is full of pain.
(That, according to S.I Hayakawa, is one of the criteria of good art: it does not tell you what to feel. It is not emotionally manipulative. These days, I find the music in movies to be so manipulative that I consciously try not to listen to it because it gives away too many cues about the action. I'm a musician; this isn't easy.)
My fiction-writing style is influenced by the years I worked as a newspaper reporter, learning to write short, declarative or interrogative sentences and translate technical jargon into smaller, more easily understood common language. The lead, the main point of the story, had to be in that paragraph, ideally in the first sentence.
It took a lot of work to be able to get to write the first sentence of the last paragraph, instead of: My style is influenced by the years I worked as a newspaper reporter. In that position, I learned to write short declarations or questions and interpret technical jargon for the everyday reader. Or: I learned to write brief sentences when I was a newspaper reporter. I still write in that way.
The lead in a news article should get your attention and tell you what is important about the article -- and it should do that immediately. In a short story or novel the writer has more time to set the scene or raise the issues, but ideally the core of the story should be there within a few paragraphs. If it's not there, and the paragraphs look good, maybe a different story is being told than what the writer planned.
Newspapers are written, as much as possible, in a neutral voice. It is amazingly difficult to get past this when writing fiction. I believe this is the major reason the mystery novel I wrote while I was a reporter was bounced back from multiple publishers as if it were on a bungee. I don't send it out any more; I'd have to rewrite it thoroughly, and that's not at the top of my list.
But to get back to first sentences, here are some of mine, with story name and fandom in parentheses. I leave the question of their effectiveness to the reader:
Joe Dawson never knew when she'd call, but he always hoped to hear her voice on the phone. (Love on the Line, HL)
He woke in a cold sweat, sitting bolt upright in bed, shaking, staring blindly into the darkness and tensing to hear the sweep of deadly steel toward himself, so close, so close... (Deadly Nightshade, HL)
Amanda Darrieux was wearing a hole in the new Oriental rug in Duncan's loft as she paced, back and forth, across the same path in her low-heeled black boots. (Thanksgiving, HL)
"Again! No, go left." (Three of a Kind Makes a Pair, LFN)
Rifle fire spattered along the top of the stone wall over Nikita's head. (Aces and Eights, LFN)
The early November wind blew Casey and Dan through the revolving door into the hotel lobby, though Casey was helped by the ice underfoot, sliding him into the building. (A Winter's Tale, SN)
It wasn't the sound of combat in the alley that caught Wesley's attention, but the deep growls and shrill cries accompanying it. (Janus, Angel/XF)
I can't do it any more. (Facing the Demons, TS)
"Who am I?" has got to be one of the first questions that everyone gets to address these days. (Identity, TS)
Ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodnonononononononono (The Last of the Wine, TS)
It was starting to drizzle, cool and misty, and I didn't have a good place to wait out the weather. (Life on the Street, TS)
Blame it all on ZZ Top. (Legs, TS)
Blair Sandburg sat on the couch, reading and making notes on an anthropology journal and enjoying the feeling of the late afternoon sunshine on his skin. (As If, TS)
If Jim knew what I was doing, he'd add another ten house rules. (R U There?, TS)
He's not perfect. (Recreational Cartography, TS)
I like to run in the morning before I head in to the station. (The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, TS)
When I heard the knock at the door, I practically groaned with relief. (Face in the Mirror, TS)
People change. (Soliloquy, dS)
My conscience made me do it. (Duet for Three Stooges, dS)
I brought her over into the Andromeda in my arms. (Illusions, Andromeda)
It should make no sense at all. (The Recreation of the Warrior, Andromeda)
And, for comparison, a few first paragraphs:
"You going to Anthony's tonight, Dan?" Casey shrugged his way out of the jacket he wore on camera. Usually the jackets chosen for him fitted perfectly, but something stuck out from the back of the collar this time, making his neck itch. He turned the jacket in his hands, but couldn't see what it was. (Ice, SN/dS)
Blue ribboning into sweet bright green, curling overhead, hissing at the edges. Oh, so beautiful. This had to be one of the best things about the cold Northwest Areas. Who needed three hundred channels of golf, cooking and bad wrestling when he could have the biggest light show in the world for free? (Fairy Tale, dS)
"I don't buy it." Walter stared at Birkoff over a hot cup of coffee. "Keep your voice down, kid. Remember where you are." (Full House, Jokers Wild, LFN)
"Again! No, go left." (Three of a Kind Makes a Pair, LFN)
He had to get out of Seacouver. Now -- before Mac recovered enough to come after him and finish the fight Joe Dawson had interrupted with four shots from a 9mm pistol. (Rock of Ages, HL)
Nick was washing champagne glasses behind the bar on Monday morning, while Amanda was out shopping. Lanier, the barman, had had to leave early on Sunday evening, so he'd filled in and left the cleanup for today. He was almost through when the girl ran in out of the rain. (A Question of Honor, HL-Raven)
I never thought I'd have anything in common with Jackson Brown's music. I'm a Santana man, I like Latino rhythms and sounds, things like 'Black Magic Woman.' Jackson Brown's stuff has some rhythm, sure, but it's too undefined for me. The guitar chords all sound the same and the words don't do a thing. (Rosie, TS)
Blair still looks fragile, ephemeral, as if he might vanish if I didn't keep looking at him. We take the elevator up to the loft, and by the time he's inside he's looking tired again. (Rebirth, TS)
Spike glared up the wall at the afternoon light, retreating from the alley where he sat. It could go at its own pace today; for once, he wasn't in a hurry for night to come. When it did, he'd be as much a fool for love as he'd always been. (Trust, BtVS)
It had been a long slow evening. Joe was just winding up his last set as he saw her walk in on the longest legs he'd ever seen. His heart jumped, but it wasn't connected to his fingers so none of the audience even noticed his glance toward the door. (Blues for a Summer Night, HL)
From where I sat at the computer in my office, I could hear the footsteps coming up the walk, not quite stumbling on the shallow stairs and up to the front door. I ignored them. I was trying to find an ending for a La Femme Nikita fanfic, and it was driving me crazy. I headed for the kitchen to turn on the hot water for tea; maybe it would knock some ideas
loose. (Great Interactive Movies of Our Times, TS/LFN/HL/original characters)
I don't like all of them any more. I'd rewrite most of the first paragraphs in my stories if they bothered me more, but then I'd have the itch to rewrite *all* the stories and that's too much. I can't go back to what I was thinking and feeling for a lot of them -- as with the rejected novel -- and I have other things to write now. The leads in those stories will just have to stay the same, to remind me to do better next time.
5/09/2002 10:03:00 AM
Wednesday, May 08, 2002
legal briefs (not boxers)
1. If you're interested in wading through it, the official text of Boston Cardinal Bernard Law's deposition before Suffolk County Superior Court provides an inside view of the church hierarchy's view of and actions to deal with sexual misconduct. The deposition is long, painstaking and thorough.
editorial note: I am restraining myself from further comment on it, lest my computer, the Internet, and your computer burst into flame.
2. Under the terms of a cybercrime bill passed by the House of Representatives, sentencing for those convicted could now take the intent of the criminal into consideration, as well as the extent of the damage caused and whether sensitive government data was targeted. If human lives are put at risk by the cyberact, the perpetrator could face life in prison. (Current guidelines allow only for sentencing based on
the monetary value of the damage caused.)
In addition, quoting the USA Today article:
The bill also would make it easier for Internet service providers to report suspicious activity on their networks. Current law prohibits service providers from reporting user activity unless it presents an immediate risk of death or injury, and allows users to sue for damages if their privacy is violated.
Smith's bill would loosen those requirements to enable service providers to report threats that are not immediate, and would protect them from lawsuits when they do so. Providers would face penalties if they did not store electronic records, such as customer e-mail, for at least 90 days.
In other words, be careful what you say, ladies and gentlemen, because you don't know where it will go.
The bill has to be passed by the Senate and be signed by the president before it can become law.
3. And, in the People Who Don't Get The Point example for today, we have a man who brought his crack cocaine and pot in his pocket to his trial on drug charges. Would someone please hand this man a ticket to the clue bus?
5/08/2002 07:06:00 PM
dreams, visions, nightmares
Scattered thoughts, a little rain:
- "If you build it, they will come." And they did. And you can too: the Field Of Dreams movie site is open for tourists.
- Some people hate their work. Some love something else, and find a way to make it what they do for a living. And here's how some people went from loving something to working at it.
- After hearing complaints for years about the dearth of talent or new, interesting plays on Broadyway, it's really good to find there's real competition for the Tony Awards this year. What's big on Broadway this year will be in local playhouses next year and (at least some of it) in school productions a year or two from now, so it's worth noticing.
- And, speaking of entertainment, the television ratings system is undergoing a technological upgrade. Will this change the shows we watch? Or will it give us six more channels of Lost in Space and M*A*S*H?
- Speaking of science and technology, it's fun to visit the Superballs site, even if only to watch your cursor be followed by a string of superballs acting like ... superballs. (And if you don't know what I'm talking about, check it out. I remember the one I had, and it was amazing, if for no other reason than it was too tough for the dog to chew and it still bounced after he tried.)
- I haven't a clue about the "International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences", but they're nominating websites for The Webby Awards. Unfortunately, they seem to be lacking sufficient categories for such things as fan sites and blogs. Perhaps there'll be a counter-Webby moviement, the equivalent of the IFC Independent Film Awards?
- Wouldn't it be great to have a tailor-made weather forescast that would tell you about how the weather will affect your sports plans or allergies, any time you want instead? Wait no more. Intellicast.com is here.
- Why are some people so very unskilled and unaware of it? Deficient metacognative skills. They don't know they're incompetent because they can't tell the difference, and consider themselves superior, according to this article in the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology. (Thanks to B for the link.)
- What makes someone an adult? Voting? Marriage? Graduation from high school or college? None of the above. How about personality changes?
- It's not just jumbo shrimp any more. Think about 'honest oxymorons' and then, when you've considered a few check the longest list of them on the Web. (Of course, a lot depends on your definitions...)
5/08/2002 12:01:00 PM
Monday, May 06, 2002
cor*relation*ally speaking
This will be short, because I'm having a lot of trouble with my eyes (hint: if walking down a dusty street in the wind, do not take off the sunglasses...
Anyway, I had brunch Sunday with a friend (who shall be nameless here for the sake of her reputation) and we were talking fanfic and fandoms. And I told her the odd thought I'd had when I woke up: the cast of Andromeda maps almost perfectly as the basic dysfunctional television family, at least in terms of personality traits. You have Daddy Dylan, Mommy Beka, rebellious college-age Tyr (who probably runs with a gang of Those Kind of People from That Side of the Tracks). Rommie is so clearly Daddy's Little Girl who does everything right, and Trance is the one who grew up strangely and nobody understands her any more. Harper is the pesky little brother who's always trying to make people laugh and fix things. (And Rev, if he were still around, might be the family ... pet?)
And she thought about it and said, "No, Rommie is Alice from The Brady Bunch." And we both decided not to go there.
That led us both to a far more deadly thought, though I believe she voiced it first. "How about Lost In Space?"
It works. Make Tyr the pilot who ends up with them by mistake (which matches him with Trance, in a weird but possible way). That makes Rev into Dr. Smith, which is also weird but bearable. However, if Rommie (or Andromeda's hologram) ever says, "Danger, Seamus Harper! Danger, Seamus Harper!" I am heading for the hills.
(I know what you're thinking. No, we came up with this before I got crud in my eyes that put me on antibiotic eyedrops. You can't blame this on the eyedrops.)
Anyway, speaking of the eye situation, at the moment I resemble Yoda far too much for comfort (except that I'm not green, which in itself is somewhat comforting.) I'm hoping things will improve a lot in the next day or so, but if you happen to be waiting for email from me, please give me a day or two before panicking, okay?
5/06/2002 10:27:00 PM
Saturday, May 04, 2002
on critique
I had a close encounter of the weird kind last week, when a woman whose daughter studies voice with my teacher thought I was the mother of one of the other students (probably because we sat together during a workshop and I'm a lot older than he is.) Once we sorted that out, she started to complain to me about the teacher being too hard on her daughter -- and was fairly surprised when I didn't agree. Her daughter, while still in high school, has a lovely voice; I know from my own experience that the better my voice gets, the harder my teacher is on me, so I'll learn to find where it needs work before she does. In order to do that, I have to be dispassionate about it -- singing is something I do, but the sound is the product of work, and it can and must be considered as an "it", not as part of me.
It's the same with writing and critique.
Writing a story can be an intensely personal experience. It can be simple or complex, comfortable or screamingly difficult, and there can be a lot of emotion involved in the work. But once it's written, it is a separate item, a created work, a thing. It is no longer part of your body and mind. It is itself, and it has to stand or fall on its own; you cannot be there every time it is read to prop it up if the metaphors fall apart.
(I am resisting using the term "invested" as in emotion "invested" in the work, because I have been growing increasingly annoyed with the impression it gives, which is that everything must be related to money and must pay back the time and effort put into them -- as if they were Treasury bills. That's an incredibly crass approach to life, and I don't think most of the people who casually use that terminology think about it much.)
Once a story or poem or article is written, it is an object that can be judged according to commonly accepted standards. Is it easily understood? Does it achieve a basic technical competency -- are all the words spelled correctly and is it free from grammatical errors? Beyond that, do the ideas flow in a reasonable and comprehensible way from beginning to end? Are there emotional high points and low points, and does the work come together as a whole or does it appear to be piecemeal?
Critique can involve asking all these questions and more -- and they are, every one of them, questions about the story, not about the author. Writers have to realize that when a story is being examined, no matter how personal it is to the writer, the writer herself is not under the microscope or the dissecting scalpel. Critique can be serious, but if it is to achieve its goal -- helping the writer improve the story and ultimately become a better writer -- the writer cannot afford to take it personally.
Why? Because when a criticism is taken personally, the first reaction is to argue with it, and the second is to ignore it. And neither reaction helps improve the next story and the one after that.
If I tell you, after reading your story, that you've mixed up the homonyms to, too, and two again, or there and their, or cite, sight and site, you should realize that I'm saying you're using the tools of the language incorrectly and I'm asking you to learn to use them properly. I'm not telling you you're a bad person or saying you're stupid, I'm saying you goofed and you should fix it or people who read it won't understand what you want them to know. I'm asking you to pay more attention to what you write, to observe your words the way you'd observe a bird on a tree and know which one it is by its attributes -- for the bird, coloring and size, for the word, spelling and grammar.
In terms of characterization, I'm asking you to show me by a character's speech and actions not only what that character does but why the actions are done, and how those actions and words affect other characters. You can have a completely different interpretation of a character than I do, and that's fine, but make me see how you got to that point. If, for instance, you have Tyr Anasazi wearing a pink dress, I'd really like to know why he's not in black leather and metal, how long he's been interested in cross-dressing, and whether this is serious or a disguise or a joke -- or his own worst nightmare.
And none of it is personal.
I know I expect a lot from writers. I expect a lot from myself when I write, too. Nobody gets everything correct all the time.
(You don't want to know what my stories looked like in the era of typewriters and erasers. Really. The ability to backspace and correct while writing is the single greatest boon to writers; the second greatest is cut-and-paste; the third is being able to save a file, copy it and have more than one version available.)
Personally, I prefer to see a story I'm critiquing/editing/betaing in plain text, or as unformatted a state as possible. I want to see the story, not the frills. It's the rare story that requires a full layout presentation before editing -- and if a story requires that, I'd still rather see the plain version first. It's possible to get so caught up in layout that basic errors are missed -- but the reader won't miss them at all.
Of course, you can disregard what I say. After all, who am I to tell you this? I haven't won any online awards for fiction. I do have two New York State Associated Press writing awards, for business reporting and depth reporting from when I was a journalist, but you're hardly interested in those. I'm going to answer the "who am I" by saying that I'm the daughter of two teachers, one who taught English and worked as an executive secretary (in the US and in Canada) and insisted I know what I was saying from the time I could talk, and one who taught me to read and read poetry aloud to me and told stories. If that's not a good enough reference, then I think nothing would be.
But that's me, not you. Write clearly. And take the criticism seriously, but not personally. If it helps you to put your critic's photo on a dartboard as a target, go ahead -- as long as you fix your writing while you're at it.
5/04/2002 09:53:00 PM
Friday, May 03, 2002
not just in my back yard
There's something profoundly disturbing about the way the problem of abusive priests in the Catholic Church has been treated by the Vatican, and I don't mean the long delay in admitting the problem exists. What disturbs me deeply is the inference that it only exists in America.
American cardinal-archbishops were summoned to the Vatican to listen to the Pope. Why only them? Why not all the cardinals in the world? Isn't the topic important enough?
As hard as it's been to get anyone to admit that some priests have abused their parishioners -- and I'm not drawing a line here between those who abuse boys and those who abuse girls and women, because it all happens -- it's even harder for the Church as a whole to admit that it's not just a result of what used to be called "the American heresy."
Americanism -- the ideas that the culture in which one lives should have an effect on how one worships, and that the Church should adjust to changing times -- was condemned as a heresy in the 1800s, I think around the time of Vatican I. The current Pope still views American Catholics as problem children, as if he could shake a stick at them and they'd fall in line, trembling.
(The First Vatican Council, mid-century, was interrupted by a war, during which the Pope fled from Vatican City for his life. The only section of work that was completed during the council, of the nine or twelve sections that had been planned, was the one on canon law. This is a major reason for the legalistic attitude of the church hierarchy during most of the 1900s, until (and sometimes after) Vatican II in the early 1960s: since the only thing done in Vat. I was law, church officials erroneously concluded that it was the only important thing. Pope John Paul II grew up and was ordained under the Vatican I system of thought.)
But why lecture only the Americans about the criminal sin of injuring children and abusing one's responsibilities? It's on record that the same problems exist in Ireland -- a bishop there fathered a child, hid the situation, and got the woman and child out of the country. I wouldn't be surprised if it existed everywhere.
And why only the *Roman* Catholic church? There are seventeen distinct churches that are united with Rome, and though the RC is the largest it's not the only one. There are small national churches, like the Polish National Catholic Church, or older denominations like the Maronites of Syria that fall theologically in the west but that have practices closer to Orthodoxy -- except for celibate priesthoods. People are people; I have a lot of trouble thinking that every priest in all of those churches is entirely perfect and that none of them have cause the same kind of problems that are emblazoned across American newspapers.
One reason is that in Ireland the Roman Catholic Church is, if not the actual state church, the closest thing to it. It is the norm, from which everything else is considered a falling-away. (The Church of Ireland is Anglican and Protestant.) In Austria, Roman Catholicism is the Established Church, and you depart from it at your peril; if you officially want to leave, you have to sign papers that say you accept that a priest will not come if you are dying. (A friend of mine signed those papers so that she could join an Anglican-based church in Austria.) There are other countries, around the world, where the Catholic Church still has this much power, where it is The Establishment and runs the schools and orders the way things are. It's very difficult -- next to impossible -- to get anyone in places where this kind of power is wielded to be willing to say that something is terribly wrong, even when it's wrong and has been wrong for a long time.
Why am I not including the Orthodox Churches in this? One simple reason: Orthodoxy does not force celibacy. When a man aspires to the priesthood, he is given the choice of marriage or not, before ordination. He can marry and have children and still be a priest. Or, he can choose not to marry, then or ever (I'm pretty sure that priests who haven't married before ordination aren't supposed to do so later on.) This, I realize, isn't terribly helpful for those who are gay and aspire to priesthood, but let me point out that, statistically, more than 90 percent of the men who abuse children are heterosexual. I am no psychologist, but it seems to me that if some of this abuse comes from a warping of the human need for touch (which seems true), the option of marriage would at least help. (And yes, I know, there are married men who are abusers too, and some of them abuse their own children. I don't have an answer to that. I really wish I did.)
Also, celibacy rules are strict. They include any sexual expression at all. It's not just playing with others that's forbidden, it's playing with yourself as well. That's pretty all-encompassing, regardless of sexual orientation. In contrast, chastity officially means "right use" of sexuality, so it's entirely possible to be married and chaste according to church law.
The official reason that celibacy was instituted, about a thousand years ago (surprise!) was that the sons of bishops kept trying to inherit their father's authority, for the sake of power. Thus, by cutting men off from having families, the hierarchy kept better control over property and over its people. But this got warped into the idea that celibacy was *better*, was *holier*, was a mainline into God -- which just is not true.
(It's also not true that no married people were canonozed by the church: St. Peter, the first pope, was married and had a daughter, Petronilla. So were many of the first several generations of apostles and martyrs. St. Margaret of Scotland, considered a holy woman in her life, was happily married to King Malcolm (who, if you remember your history, acquired the crown from a certain MacBeth.) It happens. But since the church had a stake in promoting celibacy (as a means of control), those who did without the hugs and loving were the ones who got the most attention. If you read the lives of medieval saints, you'd think some of them were training for the Masochism Olympics.)
Personally, I think they could have gotten around all of this a thousand years ago simply by legislating that no child of an ordained person could inherit the parent's parish/bishopric/diocese. Children of priests and bishops and archbishops could certainly follow in their parents' footsteps, as long as they did it somewhere else. But that would have been too easy, right?
If I were the next person chosen to be pope -- and I say that deliberately, since according to canon law any man in good standing in the faith can be chosen (and any person regardless of gender may be chosen to be cardinal, with or without ordination, and in the last few centuries only cardinals have been chosen as popes) -- I would convene a council immediately to address sexual abuse in the church on a worldwide scale. It's long past time to do this. Other matters that could be addressed at the council would include ordination of married persons and ordination of women, and fair wages for all clerics and sisters, with accountability. (I'll get into that another time). I'd also have them walk into the current century with presentations from top researchers and scientists on gene manipulation and cloning, the horrible spread of AIDS (heterosexual and homosexual) in Africa, and the loss of genetic diversity and species in plants and animals around the globe and its effects on people.
These presentations would all be conducted in plain language, not jargon, not theology-speak, not euphemisms that could later be said to have been misunderstood, so that no one there could say he did not know what was going on. And, with knowledge would come the responsibility to do something to address the situations arising in each cardinal's archdiocese -- because no one could then say he didn't know or that the situation didn't exist.
Yeah. I know. It ain't gonna happen. But it should.
But in the meantime, remember that any problems that show up in America still exist everywhere else. We may be the canary in the coal mine, but this isn't the only coal mine or the only canary that's singing as it suffocates. It's just the loudest.
5/03/2002 10:38:00 AM
Thursday, May 02, 2002
birds, bees
I've just chased the mourning dove off the ledge in front of my office windows for the third time. It would love to nest on that wide stone ledge; but I can't let it. That's where the neighborhood cats like to wander so they can jump up to the roof and chase the squirrels, and I just don't want to be a witness to squab sushi a la sill if I can help it.
As the weather warms up, the house bees are also buzzing around the window edge; I think they're probably trying to look for holes to nest in, which shouldn't be there after the repairs we've had. But they mistake the windows for holes, and keep bumping their heads. I draw the line at putting little colored dots on the glass to keep the bees out. They'll just have to learn the hard way. It doesn't seem to deter them, though.
But I'm waiting eagerly for the return of the fireflies; they like to land on the window, blinking hopefully. Male fireflies fly; female fireflies are hidden in trees or bushes or on the ground at various levels (and are slightly different colors at those levels) waiting to blink back. On a quiet night, it looks like Victorian fairy lights, all of them romantic fireflies looking for love.
5/02/2002 03:24:00 PM
a thought on style
I've noticed a trend toward more use of italics and bold and other "accented" type in some fanfic, in the past year or so. In most cases, I think it detracts from the story.
For example, it tells the reader what phrases to emphasize. This shows very little respect for the reader's intelligence. Shouldn't the reader be able to tell, from the way the sentence is written, what is important? It also tries to lock the story in, requiring it to be read in one way only, rather than allowing the reader to read it as he or she wishes.
Most of the time, excessive typographic emphasis like that is a clear indication that the story's not strong enough to stand on its own without those props -- and any story that can't stand on its own should be rewritten and reworked until it can. Emphasis is supposed to be frosting and trim, not flour in the cake.
Use of italics and bolding -- and quote marks -- on phrases also makes me look at them as if the meaning were suspect. Does the author mean this to be taken as satire or irony? If the actual meaning of the word or phrase were intended, why would you set it apart?
But last of all, it reminds me far too much of some employment resumes looked like back when Apple MacIntoshes were the latest thing, and every other word or phrase had to be emphasized so the reader wouldknow it's important.
Please. We really don't need that kind of highlighting to know the words are important. We're literate enough to tell that without the special effects. Just tell the story clearly. That's all it needs.
5/02/2002 01:29:00 PM
mixed fruit and nuts
The bookmark file is getting full, so you get a stack of short takes today -- some sweet, some sour, some nutty, and, as usual, some that don't fit any category.
(And, as usual, you get to decide which are which.)
- The steel didn't melt, it weakened. That's why the towers fell, in this article from JOM: The Member Journal of The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. The article is technical, but understandable; well worth reading if you want to know more about how buildings are designed and what will make them better.
- The first real Spiderman movie isn't coming out tomorrow; it was made in Baltimore a few years ago. You don't believe me? Check this out.
- Gambling is a survival mechanism, so say researchers in a study at the University of Michigan.
- It's been a year. A California Congressman has lost his seat. Police have searched unendingly. Murder? Alien abduction? Transformation into another identity? We don't know. Where is Chandra Levy?
- The Americans With Disabilities Act is a powerful piece of legislation, but seniority is more important than disability in keeping people on the job, according to the US Supreme Court.
- This article from the Manchester Guardian Unlimited has got me thinking. Is America really the land of inequality now instead of opportunity? Or is this an ahistorical view?
Certainly the problems that come with starting poor and trying to get rich are as difficult as ever. However, I'm not completely convinced by his rhetoric. Why? This account of antisemitism in Britain, for example. Add to it the rise of antisemitic, anti-Muslim politicians in France, Austria and Belgium as well, and nobody there has any room to throw stones at the US.
The Danish author Isak Dinesen, whose life was portrayed in the movie Out of Africa, hid Danish Jews from the Nazis with her elderly sisters during WWII, and campaigned for fair treatment for her farm workers when bankruptcy made her lose her land near Nairobi. If she were alive today to hear the comments from her homeland, she would weep -- and then write more startling and beautiful stories, but we would be unable to read them because they would be too painful to bear.
This isn't a new phenomenon; when I was an exchange student in Switzerland in 1971, workers from Southern Italy and from the Middle East were being brought in because there were more jobs than people available to take them. The "guest workers" were never accepted as part of society; my host family came under criticism for renting rooms to a delightful Italian family. But it's at least a generation later -- and guest workers had been brought in for a generation before I was there -- and the situation hasn't changed. With the rise of the European Union, this xenophobia toward people who have lived all their lives within a different culture than that of the majority of their country will need watching. It only takes a spark.
- On to something less political, more personal. I've heard of dress codes in schools, but this is taking it too far.
- Gordon Lightfoot sang about Carefree Highway, a road that still runs across Arizona north of Phoenix. The US did a lot of road-building in the last sixty years, but a bit of road-neglecting too. Take a look at a site on Lost Highways. Maybe you can contribute to it.
- I will proudly admit to having read Doonesbury since it first showed up in my local newspaper, during the Vietnam War. I even have the original, uncensored version of Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, wherein Megaphone Mark Slackmeyer provided his opinion of the Attorney General in his radio broadcast (that whole section was removed from later printings...) Even though I haven't always agreed with Trudeau's take on politics and American life -- sometimes he was far too easy on his targets -- I've never stopped loving the comic, so here's Doonesbury Town Hall and Web Presence for your delectation. (Also available on a link in my sidebar column.)
- A federal judge has ruled that jailing as material witnesses people who have not been charged with a crime, in the hope that they'll provide evidence, is unconstitutional. Hmph. Took long enough for someone to figure this out. Now, maybe, we'll find out what happened to those thousands of people who have been held incognito since Sept. 11 for little to no reason.
- I have to admit there's something to this modest proposal to deal with priests abusing their parishioners. However, if the action suggested were to be taken at the time of ordination, it would render the priest unable -- by church law -- to celebrate Mass. Perhaps more thought is needed here?
- In search of some empowering stories of strong women? You could do worse than check out this review of Booty: Girl Pirates on the High Seas, by Sara Lorimer.
- Hartford, CN, residents are taking aim at a noisy annoyance that is driving them insane. Boomboxes? No. Screechy dance music from clubs? No. It's Mr. Softee.
- Interested in space exploration, beyond Star Trek, Bab-5 and Earth Girls are Easy? Try Brian's Space Hotlist, hosted by the Space Systems Laboratory. Not all links work, but those that do are cherce.
- Just what you always wanted to know: answers to five pathetic questions for Sherwin-Williams Paint.
- Digging in a little: Six Feet Under gets a third season.
- Sometimes you find more than you look for. Scientists aimed the Hubble at what they thought was a blank spot in the sky and got photos of 3,000 more galaxies. No wonder Seamus Harper wanted to get into space; beautiful doesn't even begin to cover it.
5/02/2002 12:04:00 PM
Wednesday, May 01, 2002
on not quite knowing it all
I'm not big on planning. Ask anyone. I tend to worry if I have to plan something too far ahead. It's a really good thing I only had two months to plan the wedding, ten years ago; any longer and I would've gone nuts.
Of course, planning a wedding isn't like writing a story. For one thing, once you get a caterer you don't have to do the cooking for the reception; the caterer does that. Ditto the music, the dress, etc. When you write and plan, you still have to do the writing.
And that's where I don't.
I learned a long time ago that if I went to the trouble of making an outline and doing character sketches, I wouldn't write the story itself. Why do it, when all the juice that should be making the story good has already been drained out into the outline? Not fun. Too much like work -- by which I mean too much like that Dept. 16 assembly line with the float bowls for the Olds carburetors, and zapping two screws holding wing nuts every 5.5 seconds with an overhead electric screwdriver. (I have worked in worse places. I won't discuss them.)
Too boring. Writing should not be boring. If it is, something is wrong.
I make notes. I scribble on bits of paper and little odd notebooks -- I'm a notebook addict, though I seldom finish them and sometimes can't find the one I want when I want it. What matters is writing something down. If I can remember I wrote it down, I usually remember what I wrote (except for numbers, but that's different.) I scribble on napkins and placemats and whatever is handy. I sit in coffeeshops and unfold my wonderful little keyboard that goes with the Palm Pilot and tap ideas into it. It's slow, but reliable, and when it downloads I can cut and paste.
I just don't organize it outside my mind.
I have to know it all to write, but sometimes I have to forget I know it, or let it slip behind the curtain. It has to be back there, but not out where I trip over it every other second.
This makes writing an act of faith, more or less, and a jump off a high tower without a bungee, hoping to fly. I sit down -- the blank page, the blank screen, anything without a word on it already is terrifying -- and put a title on the page and a byline, because that's what I did as a reporter and it's comfortable and then the page isn't completely blank. I find a first sentence -- can't write anything without a first sentence -- and I dive in.
I type whatever comes out the tips of my fingers. Often I don't quite know what it will be until I see it onscreen. When it stops, I stop. Sometimes it stops (usually) at five pages. Occasionally, like yesterday when I was reminded suddenly of a story I owed someone that I'd forgotten about, it stopped at 16 pages, and later I added four more. (I didn't think of it all; I called a friend and brainstormed. She helped. My arms hurt today.) It's almost done; it needs a better ending. When I was writing my thesis, in grad school, which was hard and grinding work, I put out a steady two or three pages of carefully worded text a day, full of statistics. Writing fiction is a lot happier than that, so it is easier to write more and faster.
If it's any kind of discipline (a word I'm not fond of) it's mental only. It doesn't take any effort to keep me in the chair when the writing works. It takes chains and force to keep me there when it doesn't, and I've learned that if it's not working I might as well quit for the day and do something else -- research, pet the cat, go for a walk, laundry, anything nonverbal -- because the dark side of my mind hasn't finished working out the next section.
Someone told me a long time ago that a writer's mind is like the old Library of Alexandria -- it has every book in the world in it, but no card catalog. You have to go read the shelves and wander around to find what you want, but it's there. It helps if you take a lantern with you, but try not to set the place on fire.
Thing is, I don't have a staff of Greek philosophers to restock the library or circulate the books, so I have to do it myself. I read nearly everything; the 'nearly' covers the things I used to read that I got bored with or decided were less important than other things. Good fiction is important, any kind that has strong characters in a story. Poetry is important. Cookbooks are important. The Whole Earth Catalog. Miss Manners. Botany and herbcraft. Knitting. Beadwork. Comparative theology. Physics can be important, if it's discussing theory and not just spitting math at me (I can do some of the math but I don't need the headache.)
Taking a walk on the local park trails usually gives me a lot, just from observing birds and trees and plants. Right now, the bush jasmine and the elderberries are the ones that overwhelm the paths with scent. Someone upstream has been washing his car too close to Sligo Creek, because I could see the suds in the water; I can sort of tolerate that, though I really hate it when idiots dump their used oil into the little creek because it kills everything and turns the pretty rust-and-tan stones black for months.
(Non-interests? Insects. A lot of economics, which might as well be speculative fantasy for its actual applicability to reality. Technical computer language. P.J. O'Rourke. Pat Buchanan. Propaganda, whether political, commercial or religious.)
But it's all something that feeds the mind, dances on the dark side until it needs to come out later on. Nothing is ever wasted. If I need to think of it, it will be there, even the mosquitos.
(In Alaska, the mosquitos are the size of what we think of here as 'mosquito hawks', which eat the smaller mosquitos. The mosquito hawks in Anchorage are about six inches across, look like delicate flying fantasy creatures, and don't bite humans. And I was delighted to find dozens, probably hundreds of polliwogs in the local park's pond; I hope they all make it to frogdom. Anything that likes to eat mosquitos and flies is great and wonderful, as far as I'm concerned.)
5/01/2002 09:41:00 AM
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