Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 223

Cherry Saturday 10-29-2016

Today is National Frankenstein Day.

You know, I get Rabbit Day and Friendship Day and even Spinach Day, but Frankenstein?

Yesterday was National Chocolate Day. Let’s go with that:

The post Cherry Saturday 10-29-2016 appeared first on Argh Ink.

So I Tried Lucifer, Season Two . . .

Some of you may remember the absolute fit I threw over Lucifer when it premiered last year. Hated it. Hated it, hated it, HATED IT. I was insulted by the lousy writing and the tragic waste of a solid cast. So I stopped watching because after a while, you’re not a critic anymore, you’re just a bitch. Then I read on the AV Club that it was actually good this year, so I went back to try a couple of episodes from Season Two.

It’s actually good this year.

Keep in mind, it’s not great. We’re not in Person of Interest territory here. But it’s settling into itself and it’s using its female cast really well, which is so nice for a change. And Tom Ellis as Lucifer has dialed back on the smarm (or maybe the writers woke up) so while he’s still nuts, he’s smarter nuts and now he’s fun to watch. Dr. Linda is no longer sleeping with Lucifer, which is a good thing because she was smarter than that. Maze is no longer whining about going back to Hell, which is a good thing because she was tougher than that. Amandiel has developed layers and Detective Dan has been released from petulancy and given a personality, which is good because I really like that actor and I hated seeing him stuck with the same whine. Actually, nobody’s whining this year. They’re all mad about something but they’re not whining. And there are two new characters, both of whom are female, so that whole woman-as-sex-object bit has slunk off into the shadows. There’s a perky new ME because every case-of-the-week needs a Manic Pixie Coroner, and then there’s Mom, whose mythological basis I have not quite glommed–she’s God’s wife, she gave birth to a lot of kids, I dunno, whatever–but she escaped from Hell–how? no idea–and ended up in the body of a murder victim who looked like Tricia Helfer, so good taste there, plus the chance to see Tricia Helfer pull a screwdriver out of the back of her neck. I don’t trust any character played by Helfer because I’m a Burn Notice fan, and the lovely sublte ambiguity with which she’s playing this character just reinforces that, but mostly I’m just enjoying the hell out of her portrayal of a goddess stuck in the body of a married lawyer with bratty children.

Which brings me to next change: The show is actually amusing. I wouldn’t call it funny, I haven’t laughed yet, but there’s a lightness to it that helps it glide over the absurdity of its premise and plots. It’s fun to watch now because, although there are still those ridiculous case-of-the-week plots to contend with, it’s really about family: families breaking up, families negotiating relationships, family bonding together (see Mom and her boys in the picture above). Chloe and Dan are getting a divorce but they’re being careful around Trixie and treating each other with respect, which is nice because that kind of thing is usually low-hanging dramatic fruit for TV shows. Lucifer and Amenadiel are negotiating the shift in their sibling rivalry now that they’re both on Earth. And they’re both dealing with Mom, who insists she just wants to be with her sons. The end of “The Weaponizer,” Episode Five, brings that all together in a genuinely harrowing climax that makes me think there’s good stuff ahead here.

I wasn’t wrong about Season One; it’s bad. (In the comments on one of the online reviews I read, somebody said, “So I should go back and watch Season One?” and there was a chorus of “No, don’t do that . . .”) But this season has great potential. You should watch.

And while you’re at it, if you tried to watch the abysmal Legends of Tomorrow last year and couldn’t hack it (that would be me), that’s another show that’s having a sophomore surge. There’ve only been two episodes so far, but they’ve been manic as hell and a lot of fun, including Victor Garber singing “Edelweiss” to Nazis in WW2 Germany, several years before it would be written, and Dominic Purcell in a puffy shirt in Marie Antoinette’s France. I’m not happy they killed off Wentworth Miller’s Captain Cold, but it’s the Arrowverse where death is more of an inconvenience than anything else, so he’s going to be showing up on all the DC shows this year, spreading the wealth, so to speak. Mostly I’m cautiously optimistic because, based on the first two episodes, the writers have evidently decided that if they’re stuck with the dumbest premise in the history of TV SF (and I’m including Alf in that), they might as well run with it, and the absurdity of it all is really fun. (Bring back Cold.)

All of which is to say, I’m watching TV again even though I’d pretty much given up after they cancelled PoI, Agent Carter, Limitless, and Galavant, and delayed iZombie into 2017. Fortunately, I’m not watching a lot of TV because I have much work to do, but still it’s nice to have weekly stories (even nicer to binge watch, but you can’t have everything).

And I really would have hated missing Dominic Purcell in a puffy shirt.

The post So I Tried Lucifer, Season Two . . . appeared first on Argh Ink.

Cherry Saturday 10-22-2016

Today is National Nut Day.

The jokes just write themselves.

The post Cherry Saturday 10-22-2016 appeared first on Argh Ink.

Extinction Bursts, the Election, and Writing

Yesterday, reading comments about the American election on another site, I came across the idea of Extinction Bursts. Yes, I know now it’s a common idea, but that was the first time I’d heard it, and I took enormous comfort from it. It’s the idea that, right before you change a long time habit, your brain does everything it can to blow up your path:

Extinction Burst: a predictable and common blast of defiance from the recesses of a brain denied familiar rewards.

The example used in the essay on You’re Not So Smart, is the mad craving you have for chocolate and french fries when you go on a diet. It’s not just that fattening food tastes good, it’s that your brain is used to that reward in your life and will start fighting you to get it. Another example from the site: If somebody uses an elevator every day at work, and one day it stops working, that person will stand there pushing the button over and over again before he gives up and takes the stairs. I would imagine that if it were a special elevator that not everybody can take, if everybody else has to use the stairs, then that guy would be pushing that button a lot longer because people like him do not take the stairs. That’s for Other people. He’d be pushing the button and screaming about unfairness for hours.

That, said one of the commenters I read, is what’s happening in America. White men are no longer the Master Race, and Donald Trump is just their Extinction Burst. They’re pushing buttons on a elevator that no longer works for them. They’re gonna have to take the stairs like everybody else. And here’s the good news:

“If you are ready for the extinction burst and prepared, you can weather the storm and watch it pass. You can watch the bad behavior go extinct, forever, and only see again as a fossil in photographs from previous epochs in your life, part of a previous you.”

The essay is talking about bad habits not white entitlement, of course, but the absolute paroxysm of rage in Trump supporters seems to me to fall squarely into this concept. And I think in a lot of ways, the anti-Hillary stuff is in there, too. I know people have real reasons for not liking her, but the big one seems to be that she’s been in government for over thirty years and she’s done stuff they don’t like. Now try to imagine a female outsider running for President, the way Trump is running. She’d never have made it past a primary. Now try to imagine anybody in public life for more than thirty years who hasn’t done things that people don’t like. There’s the box the Extinction Burst has put Clinton in, but thank god she’s been busting out of boxes her whole life. The only reason Hillary is going to win is because, as Saturday Night Live put it, she’s made of steel, and it was honed in the crucible of thirty years of political hell. So much of the crap she puts up with–“She should smile more,” “She wants the Presidency too much,” “Her husband is a cheater”–is all dog whistling for “What’s a woman doing up there?” It’s an extinction burst, the last spewing of vitriol before America rolls over and gets used to a female President the way it got used to a black President (whose favorable rating right now is really good and climbing fast).

The problem with the extinction burst is that you have to wait it out, and the more strongly your brain believes you deserve that reward, the bigger tantrum it’s going to throw until you give in. This election is white America’s tantrum, and it’s going to take a while to play out, but even so, looked at that way, it’s a really positive thing: Hillary is slaughtering Trump in the polls and the Republican dog whistling is putting them out of business.

What does this have to do with writing? It’s so much easier not to write, that I’m beginning to wonder if writer’s block isn’t just a very long extinction burst. I hate the old “just sit down and write” because in truth, that doesn’t always work for me in the beginning. But once I get to the place I am now, not writing is just my brain saying, “Don’t do it. It’ll be hard and you’ll forget the people in your life and become obsessed with the story, and you won’t sleep at night, and then it’ll all be crap anyway. Have a cookie and crochet something.” I’m thinking of having my brain say that in Donald Trump’s voice, hovering behind me while the Jaws music plays. Because that guy, I’d punch.

But the big thing is, I feel better about America. If we’re violent, racist asshats, then everything I believe about my country is a lie. If this is just an extinction burst from the Old Guard–Joe Arpaio is fifteen points behind his Democratic challenger and he’s in line for a jail sentence for contempt, the least of his crimes, so up yours, Old Guard–then it’s a brand new day coming and I can’t wait until January to see a great, strong woman take that oath of office.

And then, god willing, she’ll appoint a young, lesbian, Wiccan woman of color to the Supreme Court. I’m really tired of old, Catholic white guys determining what I can do with my body and my government.

In the meantime, I have to go tell my Trump brain to fuck off and get back to work.

Edited to add: Cate just linked to a Cracked essay that may be the smartest thing I’ve read about the election:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons...

The post Extinction Bursts, the Election, and Writing appeared first on Argh Ink.

I’m a Nasty Woman

Of course, you all knew that, but after last night’s debate, I’m gonna be a lot more upfront about it. It’s gonna be the eighties all over again, except not those horrible clothes. Instead, it’ll be a T-shirt:

Fifty percent of the proceeds go to Planned Parenthood.

The post I’m a Nasty Woman appeared first on Argh Ink.

Cherry Saturday 10-15-2016

Today is Sweetest Day.

This is the committee that invented Sweetest Day in 1922.

You can just feel the romance in their hot, steely gazes that nevertheless show the vulnerable yet macho souls within.

I’m sure none of them were gropers.

The post Cherry Saturday 10-15-2016 appeared first on Argh Ink.

Things Have Changed

So a couple of things happened this week.

Bob Dylan won the Nobel for literature. That was so wonderful it lifted me up and filled me with joy.

And Donald Trump’s history of sexual battery is now the big story of the week. This did not lift me up, but it is filing me with hope.

For a long while, “Things Have Changed” was my favorite Dylan piece: “People are crazy and times are strange/ I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range/ I used to care, but things have changed.” The older I got, the less things bothered me. I cut things out of my life that made me feel like less, embraced the things like Dylan that filled me with joy, and I thought I’d found a level of Zen that would see me out the door.

Then Donald Trump happened.

I was sure he’d be defeated in the primary because he was so vile, but it turned out that when there are sixteen candidates in the field, vile can get you a significant number of pissed-off white men to give you the nomination.

Then he proceeded to violate everything my country is supposed to stand for: He’s racist, anti-immigrant, sexist, and stupid. Any one of those things should have disqualified him but he kept moving up in the polls as racist, anti-immigrant, sexist mouth-breathers in this great nation fell in behind him and made America less great. (Or as he put it, “I love the poorly educated.”)

And then came the second debate. American debates have always had their weird moments–this may be my fave–but this debate had a question that changed everything. Anderson Cooper said, “You bragged that you sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?” and Trump denied it: “I didn’t say that at all.” And then the kicker: “Have you never done those things?” “No, I have not.”

And then the deluge. The thing about that kind of not-quite-rape-but-still-assault crap is that it lives in a twilight zone, that “Oh, big deal, so he touched you without your permission, get over it” zone, the “don’t make a fuss, just move on” place that so many of us have been in. We shove it back into memory and we think we’ve forgotten it, and then . . .

Almost every woman I know has had something like this happen to her, because almost every woman has had this happen to her. And we don’t say anything because it doesn’t do any good, because it’s no big deal, because that’s just guys being drunk or being assholes. We put up with catcalls on the street and comfort ourselves in old age because at least we’re not getting harassed and assaulted any more. It’s just life as a woman. Shrug your shoulders and move on.

What I realized this week, what I think a lot of women realized this week, is that I did not move on. I just shoved every grope into a dark place in my mind and locked the door on it all. And then Anderson Cooper asked the right questions and didn’t stop asking until he got an answer, and a lot of brave women said, “The HELL he didn’t do those things, he did them to me,” and the door just disintegrated. I’m so angry, not just because Donald Trump is a vile and evil human being but because of all the damn men in my past who knew that the most that would happen if they grabbed me was a fist to the nose, that their buddies would laugh and high five them and they’d be “winners” no matter what. There’s a reason most gropers smile when you confront them: They think there’s nothing you can do about it.

Donald Trump is plummeting in the polls because he thinks there’s nothing American women can do about him. But I think he’s unleashed something that’s going to change things. I’m enraged, not just by all the incredibly anti-feminist defenses his people are putting up, but also by so many of the half-hearted condemnations from men who can only see things in the context of their experiences. “As a husband and a father . . .” makes me so mad I could smash the TV. “Until they came for MY women, I wasn’t concerned . . .” How about “As a human being, I’m appalled by this molesting predator and think he should not only be defeated but go down in so many flames that he makes the Chicago fire look like a barbeque.”

Of course, his alt-right base loves this stuff; they’ve started the hashtag “#repealthe19th” because if women didn’t have the vote, Trump would win. (I find this suspect; there are a lot of deplorable men in this country, but there are a lot of good men, too, and I refuse to believe that the majority would vote for an evil human Cheeto.) They’re eating his misogyny up with a spoon, the same way they consumed his racism and fascism (“If I’m elected, I’ll lock Hillary up!”) and religious zealotry and utter inability to see himself and themselves as the nightmares they are. He’s Their Guy because he’s given them a focus: Elect Donald Trump and the world will belong to Poorly Educated White Christian Men Again.

But now Trump has given another group a focus: Women. He’s released so many buried memories that the weight of them is sending him plummeting in the polls. All that repressed rage–“Don’t be angry, sweetie, it makes you less attractive”–isn’t buried any more, it’s pouring out into essays and internet comments and conversations everywhere women gather. Hell, yes, it happened to me, and I was mad then, and I’m still mad, but now I’m not feeling guilty for being mad, now I don’t feel powerless about it, now I’m going to fight back, not just by voting against Trump because that was always a given, but by taking down anybody who says, “That’s just locker room talk,” (no, it isn’t, as any number of athletes and former athletes have stepped up to refute), or “If they were upset about it, why didn’t they say something?” (because saying something always makes things worse for the woman than the man), or “It happened twenty years ago, why get upset about it now?” (because you NEVER FORGET, that’s why, you sexist entitled asshole). I’m even angry with all the men who are saying, “My god, this is vile, I never saw any of this” because it was right there in front of you, it happens all the time, everywhere, and don’t tell me no man you know would do these things because unless there’s a small band of men roaming the world molesting women 24/7 for decades, you sure as hell do know men who do this. You just haven’t noticed because you haven’t had to. It’s not happening to you. And for a long time, when we told you, you laughed. Or you said it was no big deal. Or you patted us on the shoulder and said, “That’s awful, honey” and changed the subject. Because it wasn’t sexual battery it was just guys being guys.

It’s a big deal. And I think it’s an even bigger deal that women are talking about it now everywhere, sharing stories that make us angrier. For every Katrina Pierson making dead-eyed excuses from an alternate dimension there’s an enraged Mary Beth Glenn telling her fellow conservatives that this is a moment of reckoning: “If you can’t stand up for women & unendorse this piece of human garbage, you deserve every charge of sexism thrown at you . . . ”

I hope Glenn is right when she says to the Republicans, “. . . one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door. And what you’ll be left with are the corrupt masses that foam at the mouth every time you step outside the lines.” I hope this galvanizes the GOP to become a real political party again because the country needs true conservatives for balance, and I hope this changes the national mindset on sexual battery so that my granddaughters will at least be empowered to smack the guy who gropes them while loudly letting everybody in the room know that he’s a predator who should be shamed and derided.

But what I know is that it’s changed me by awakening all that buried rage. I wish that younger me could have fought back more than just smacking the guys who groped me, I wish she hadn’t grown up in a sit-down-and-be-quiet-and-don’t-make-waves anti-female society, but mostly I’m glad that Anderson Cooper asked the right question and Donald Trump gave the wrong answer and that Mary Beth Glenn tweeted from the other side of my political spectrum, and that women everywhere are talking and supporting each other and making speaking out the norm. That’s even better than Dylan getting the Nobel.

I used to pretend I didn’t care, but things have changed.

The post Things Have Changed appeared first on Argh Ink.

Nick

This is the fourth post I’ve started on Nick. Which tells me all I need to know: I don’t know Nick.

Actually, I knew that already, I just didn’t realize the vastness of the problem. So Nick’s all over the place. I think most of the “why would he do that?” comments in the critiques (all justified) are from my different stabs at setting up the character. I was looking at a picture of Matt Ryan as Constantine this morning and thought, “Huh. Maybe that’s the direction to go in for Nick,” and realized that every pass I do at that second scene has a wildly different character named Nick. By the time I got to the fourth or fifth pass, there were so many different Nicks in there, he was practically Orphan Black.

So I have to figure out many things here, including what powers he has (because that brings up the Kryptonite problem) and how being dead affects him, and what’s going to happen to him as he assimilates. But basically, I have to figure out who the hell he is, in and out of Hell.

Which is why I have three posts on this and none of them are worth spit. Argh.

The post Nick appeared first on Argh Ink.

Cherry Saturday 10-8-2016

October is Adopt a Shelter Dog Month.

It’s the gift that gives back.

The post Cherry Saturday 10-8-2016 appeared first on Argh Ink.

Antagonists and Luke Cage

I’ve been working on the Nick thing, but the other night I took a break for dinner and decided to watch the first episode of Luke Cage, just to see what it was like. Full disclosure, I consumed the first Daredevil series in three days, but quit after the first episode of Jessica Jones (fantastic production but I just couldn’t face another damn rape back story) and the first two episodes of the second Daredevil (because it was boring). I fully expected a street vigilante to be a one-and-done experience because I don’t like vengeance/vigilante stories.

Seven episodes later . . .

The show hits it out of the park most of the time. I had a few quibbles in the beginning–there’s one character that reminded me of the Far Side’s “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal” because he might as well have had a target on his forehead and a red T-shirt that said “Born to Be Fridged.” I’m against fridging because I find vengeance a lousy motive. If your protagonist needs to have somebody sacrificed to spur her or him to action . . . never mind. Anyway, the refrigerator door slams and our hero is off to the vindictive races. Except he’s not vindictive, he’s more . . . corrective. He’s interesting. (He’s also gorgeous, but let’s not be shallow.) And he’s supported by a truly astounding cast. Plus after the stereotypical opening (and come on, it’s based on a comic book, they’re all stereotypical hero openings), the story slams into gear, building its momentum and expectation and delivering two sit-up-and-stare plot twists that are fully foreshadowed and yet still stunning.

And yet I haven’t gone back for the second half. Last night, sifting through the comments on Nick (extremely helpful, by the way) while waiting for the poly to dry on the kitchen counter I’m trying to finish, I thought about why. I love these characters. I love these relationships. I love this setting. The music is incredible. The performances are riveting. Why am I not interested in going back?

TURN BACK NOW, MASSIVE SPOILERS COMING UP.

The main conflict is between Luke Cage, a former cop framed and sent to cliched hellhole of a prison in a flashback I’d just as soon forget who is now on the run in Harlem, and Cornell Stokes, a musical prodigy denied his music and forced to follow in his mother’s footsteps as a crime boss in Harlem. They both have a lot of rage and they both hide it under false demeanors, Cage under almost catatonic calm and Stokes under almost manical expansiveness. And they’re both willing to give each other a lot of room until one of Stokes’ minions goes rogue and fridges the aforementioned character. Cage goes out to exact revenge, but he doesn’t try to kill anybody, he’s too smart for that. He decides to cripple Stokes’s organization by breaking it financially: he invades the fortress that Stokes calls “Fort Knox” and creates a crime scene so that the local police department will take all the money as evidence, taking enough to save a small business that’s important to the community, cementing his This-Is-A-Really-Good-Guy status.

He can do that because he’s bullet-proof. The science is a little hazy on this, but as explained in the back story, he was so severely beaten in prison that he was on the point of death, so friends put him in this experimental chamber . . . you know, it doesn’t matter. He didn’t get bitten by a spider or hit with gamma ray, but it’s the same thing. An event occurred and now bullets bounce off him, literally. So he breaks into the building and a lot of people shoot at him, and his hoodie damn near disintegrates under the fusillade, but Cage implacably walks on, taking out the fools with the guns (fuck you, NRA and racist cops) as he deals a body blow to Stokes’ organization.

Mike Colter plays Cage and Mahershala Ali plays Stokes and they’re both terrific, setting up a complex conflict with even more complex subtext, Cage going quieter, Stokes swinging wider as the story escalates. The characters in the subplots are equally good, and Alfre Woodard as Stokes’ cousin Mariah Dillard is more than equal, she’s amazing, never more so than when Stokes, in his hour of triumph, makes the mistake of telling her that she wanted the molestation she suffered as a teenager. That scene is a tour de force, and the follow-up scene is quietly just as stunning, setting up the second half of the series.

SERIOUSLY THIS IS A MAJOR SPOILER, DON’T READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE SHOW BECAUSE IT’S REALLY GOOD AND YOU SHOULD.

Here’s the thing about a central conflict: It becomes the central story question. Will Cage defeat Stokes and save Harlem from his toxic influence? It’s a super-hero story so the answer is yes, but we don’t care that we know the answer, we want to see how it plays out. The question is not “who wins?” but “how?” and the payoff is Cage vs. Stokes at the climax. But at the end of episode seven (“Manifest”), Stokes is dead. (Cage has also been brought down by an alien bullet, but let’s face it, Luke Cage isn’t going to die, he’s a superhero plus he’s going to be in The Defenders next year.) My central story question has been answered. Even though I know Dillard and Shades are going to go after Cage, and even though Woodard’s Dillard is a worthy antagonist, complex and driven and, after episode seven, clearly lethal, and Theo Rossi’s Shades is a quietly intelligent and malevolent force on his own, that’s a new story, one I’m not invested in. You killed my antagonist, I’m gonna go have lunch.

So this has been nagging at me: How do you fix this and still tell this story?

One way is to change Luke’s goal from bringing down Stokes to saving Harlem. But that’s a lousy goal, unfocussed and probably impossible since Harlem’s problems are many. Focussing on Stokes as a malevolent force whose removal would make things better is an achievable goal. “Saving Harlem” is basically “world peace,” not achievable because it’s too wide.

A better way, I think, would be to make Dillard the antagonist, but that may just be because I love Alfre Woodard. She’s in there from the start, but she presents as a partner to Stokes, a second tier antagonist, a council woman who is legitimately trying to make Harlem a better place, allied with her cousin in illegitimate money schemes to finance her recovery project. She’s complex and conflicted and driven and haunted, a fabulous character, but I don’t see a crucible for Cage/Dillard since they both want to help Harlem and their solutions aren’t antithetical to each other; in fact, Dillard solves Cage’s conflict for him when she offs Stokes.

Which brings us to Theo Rossi’s Shades, the quietly thoughtful sociopath who observes and then moves when the time is right. The way he invades the stunned Dillard, seizing on her moment of madness as an entry into her confidence, is masterful. Watching these two characters (and these two actors) develop that relationship forged in violence is probably going to be great. But watching him use Dillard to bring down Cage is probably not going to be as great as the conflict that just ended. It’s just not as thematically rich, although the fact that Shades is white might add a layer of intensity there.

So then I read the spoilers, and the series is going to bring forward another character, Diamondback, who has that relationship to the Cage character. So we’re starting over. Luke Cage, season two. Diamondback has always been present in the script since Shades works for him, but I don’t think we’ve seen the character, he’s just a presence in the background. And I’m thinking maybe the background was the wrong move here, that if we’d seen Diamondback manipulating Stokes through Shades, then we’d have been anticipating that final conflict. It would have weakened the Stokes conflict, but any conflict that ends halfway through a story should be weaker than the central conflict, and I think it would have raised the stakes since fighting with Stokes was dangerous, but not nearly as dangerous as the fight with Diamondback would be. The idea that if Cage takes out Stokes he’ll be fighting a much bigger threat would add a lot more weight to that. It would even help with the problem that Cage doesn’t actually take out Stokes, Dillard does that, but she does it because of the blowback from Cage’s Fort Knox heist: the bad publicity from that endangers her council seat and she goes to Stokes in a rage, which he then fans, the idiot. Do not mess with Alfre Woodard.

I’m still puzzling this out. Those of you watching this, too, any ideas? Disagreement is good, too, although I would prefer not to hear about this show is racist because it doesn’t have many white people in it. Seriously, there’s actually a wave on Twitter trying to make that argument. I assume they’re all voting for Trump.

The post Antagonists and Luke Cage appeared first on Argh Ink.