Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 248
September 12, 2015
Cherry Saturday 9 – 12 – 15
Today is Chocolate Milk Shake Day.
We’re open-minded here. You can have strawberry.
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September 11, 2015
The Writing/Romance Blog is Up
Yes, I know most of you know that. I’m experimenting here. The first post is “Conflict: A Definition.” And look, cartoons:
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September 9, 2015
Random Wednesday: The Random Vagina
I was reading TPM, something I do daily, when I hit this article:
Texas Woman Arrested With Loaded Handgun In Vagina
It took me awhile to wrap my head around that.
First of all, vagina or vulva? Because it would take some shoving to get a gun into a vagina, and she had a bullet in the chamber. She’d have to Kegel like crazy to keep a (I’m assuming small) gun in her vulva, but getting it clear up in there? Of course, she was also carrying a lot of meth, so that would help.
Then the article says she told the cops it was up there. As in “police found a loaded Smith and Wesson pistol with a round chambered” in this woman’s interior space. I’m not sure “found” is the right word here–“Hey, Bill, look what I found”–but more than that–how did they find it? Would you go up there looking for a loaded gun?
And then I wondered, why did she tell them? Was she afraid they’d do a cavity search and set it off accidentally. “Before you go in there, you should know . . .”
And that reminded me that a code word for vulva in Shakespeare’s time was “purse.” I googled to make sure and found a lot vulva and vagina purses on Etsy. Again, I thought, “Why?” but if it exists, it’s on the internet, and I was the one who put the key words in, so I should have seen that coming.
And then I thought of the vagina dentata. As always, TV Tropes has a more fun explanation than Wikipedia, but it’s basically a very old terrified male myth of the woman whose vulva is lined with teeth that will bite down. According to TV Tropes, there are anti-rape female condoms that are \ this myth made real. Also according to TV Tropes, “It’s worth noting that if a (normal, human) woman really did have teeth down there, she would still need to Kegel the crap out of her pelvic muscles to make them strong enough to tear skin.”
Of course, if you have a loaded gun in there, kegeling would be a remarkably bad idea.
In other news from TV Tropes, there’s a movie called Teeth about a teenage girl who discovers while being raped that she has a vagina dentata.
And now I’m looking at this scene in a whole new way (warning: what has been seen cannot be unseen):
Really, that’s a feminist statement. A really angry, vulvular, feminist statement.
Where was I? Oh, right, the gun up the crazy. So I did some more googling and found this:
During Castaneda’s transport to the jail she told the officer that she had concealed a handgun inside her vagina. Officers immediately stopped and a female officer searched Castaneda discovering she had in fact placed a loaded Smith and Wesson pistol inside her body cavity. The weapon had a round chambered and a full magazine of bullets.
So were they going over potholes and she thought, “This could be a problem?” Here’s a picture of the gun from that same article:
I wish they would have put something beside it to show scale. Like a tampon maybe.
Again from TV Tropes, which is so much better than Wikipedia:
A Japanese legend involves a demon hidden in a woman’s vagina, who would bite off men’s penises until he broke his teeth on a specially-made steel dildo made by the woman’s eventual husband, who also was the local blacksmith. The legend is commemorated with the Kanamara Matsuri (Festival of the Steel Penis) where people eat loads of phallic pastries. Today, it is also used to raise money for AIDS awareness and research.
Okay, fine, there’s a demon in there, but why is he male? Give a woman a little power down there and it’s immediately co-opted. On the bright side, there’s pastry:
Those are actually lollipops, I couldn’t find a picture of the pastries, but really, google that festival. It looks like a blast.
But back to the woman who probably did not have a concealed carry permit. (You know, the jokes just write themselves.) The thing that kept me obsessing on this was the bullet in the chamber. Let’s just accept that a vulva is a good improvised holster if you’re carrying a lot of meth and intend to defend it with gunfire. (Just go with me here.) How long does it take to chamber a bullet? I know nothing about guns, but surely the few seconds that chambering the bullet would take would be adequately compensated for by the “Is she pulling down her pants?” “My god, she’s not wearing underpants,” “WTF is she pulling out of there?” “You can keep things in there?” “OH MY GOD IT’S A GUN” series of thoughts any attacker would have to cycle through.
Plus, after I thought about it, the only way you could carry a gun up there is if you used the barrel in a tampon-like manner which would mean you could keep clenched around the barrel with the handle (grip?) of the gun in your vulva. Which means you’d be pointing a loaded gun at your spine.
At that point, I remembered I had a lot of work to do and and quit googling, but this one is going to stay with me.
And now I’ve shared it with you. Have a nice day and don’t put loaded guns in body cavities. It never ends well.
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September 5, 2015
Cherry Saturday 9 – 5 – 15
Today is Be Late for Something Day.
Like I need encouragement.
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September 4, 2015
Cleaning Up the Place
You know, Argh posts are not easy to categorize.
The archives of this place are a mess. There are still two hundred and some posts in the “Everything Else” category, which should have about twelve things in it, if that. And there are over six hundred writing posts, many of which are not about craft. And then there are the various movies and TV shows I’ve obsessed on . . . We’re talking over 1300 posts, most without tags and about a quarter of which are uncategorized (we lost categories in one of the reboots a couple of years ago). This place is a virtual echo of my house: too much stuff, none of it put where it belongs.
Then there were too many categories and they were all over the place, so I consolidated some and expanded others. Over six hundred posts labeled “writing” is worthless; I split it into “Writing Craft” and “Writing Life” so that people who wanted to know about conflict didn’t have to wade through on-the-road and cleaning-my-office posts. As far as I’m concerned, people are animals and animals are people, so they can go in the same category since that’s mostly talking about personalities. Many of my rants were part of reviews and all of them were reviews of something, so I put those in the same category: You want to hear me yelling, go there. I’m not sure why I have a Publishing category at all. And tags, my god, all the posts that have any value need tags.
This is gonna take awhile, especially since I’m not doing it for more than four or five hours a day. But I do want that Writing Craft category fixed so I can put the links on the website. One damn thing after another. Bright side: the blog is so much cleaner even with just the little bit of trashing of old posts that I’ve done (nothing that you’d miss).
In other news, Lani and I started watching Sense8 last night, me for the seventh time (really), and her for the first. It’s always interesting watching TV with Lani because she had a nice career in TV production before she became a writer, so she sees things I don’t. She was blown away by the production values in the first three episodes we watched, and she was annoyed as I was by the structural screw-ups and exposition. Also we started typing FLASHBACK every time there was one. Good times. We did it on a chat platform called Slack, which is really good if anybody is interested in setting up a chat. Lani uses it for her classes to replace Blackboard, so if I ever teach again, I’m going there. It’s also really good for watching TV with somebody who’s in another state.
And now back to cleaning up the blog. I’m finding a lot of writing post drafts, so there should be a useful writing post here shortly. Oh, and I bought myself a Wacom tablet for my birthday, so someday there may be webcomics. Because learning new things is good for me. As soon as I clean up the old stuff.
Any suggestions, ideas, complaints about making this place easier to navigate, put ’em in the comments. Believe me, I can use all the advice I can get.
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September 2, 2015
Pride and Recreation
Remember Sweetness, Lani’s little girl who moved in with me back when we all hung out in Squalor on the River? She’s not so little any more and she has a Tumblr you must see, Pride and Recreation, which combines pictures from BBC’s Pride and Prejudice with quotes from Parks and Recreation:
Our little girl is growing up (sob). And she has a great sense of humor (of COURSE).
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September 1, 2015
The Writing/Romance Project
As many of you know, I’ve been thinking about doing a writing book for quite a while. Teaching the two McDaniel’s classes helped me organize all the ideas in my head, and I’m in the process right now of sorting out all the writing posts on Argh and the website thanks to the hack, and after that, I’ll go through my hard drive and see if I can pull together the mass of information there into a coherent form. I have STUFF here, and a lot more stuff I want to say, and now is the time to put it all together.
But I can’t just throw all of it out there in the form it’s in now. I need to design a way to communicate it to people so that it’s easy to understand and useful. I don’t think most people go to writing books to read them cover-to-cover, I think they go to learn about craft and solve problems, and they usually have an idea of what they’re looking for. I don’t think that’s the writer’s philosophy of life (we’re talking about craft-specific books here, not writers talking about the process of writing) or big blocks of text or draconian rules or ornate theories. The basics of writing craft are pretty simple; Aristotle had most of them down. And those basics are not rules, they’re tools writers can learn so they can tell stories more effectively, to communicate with their readers. So the first thing I need to do is organize and simplify.
Then I need to design a format for that simplified organization that reflects the fact that different people learn in different ways. Some people learn by reading large blocks of text about theory (I’m not one of them). Other people learn by seeing pictures and diagrams with minimal text. Other people learn by analogy and examples, extrapolating the abstract into the concrete world. Still others have to hear the information for it to really sink it, and others have to learn by doing, applying the knowledge in the real world (in this case, to their stories). When I taught, that meant using textbooks, diagrams on the board, lectures, video, games, and of course assignments so that my kids would learn by doing. I went at the information in every way possible so that I’d have a chance of finding every student’s path to understanding.
Of course in order to do that, I have to synthesize the information down to its most basic level. Any teacher knows that you pick a single goal for a lesson, and that’s your focus. It’s one idea, one thing that you want students to understand and remember, and if you can communicate that, the lesson is a success. You can surround it with other things, but every one of those things has to feed into that one concept. More is not better in teaching, it’s one idea at a time, made clear and usable, and then adding the next idea which builds on the first.
All of which is to say, I’m not just going to drop a bunch of essays and blog posts into a file and call it a book. This has taken some thought here, Argh People, and you know how that takes a toll on me. And what I’ve come up with is a book that would present the basic theories of fiction in general and of romance writing in particular, in an easy-to-use, varied format that would accommodate the three reasons I think people go to writing books. The format would
• give readers who want a fast overview the TL;DR experience by starting each section with a brief (under 500 words), two-page abstract of the topic.
• give readers who want in-depth discussion of a particular concept different ways of approaching it, including essays, analyses of stories in print and film, exercises, and examples.
• give readers who have a particular problem specific fix-it suggestions in each concept’s troubleshooting section.
That seems do-able to me. So I’m writing the drafts of the short intro pages for the first section on conflict, and I’m going to be posting them on a new blog called Writing/Romance on the first Mondays in September and October so that anybody who’s feeling helpful (that would be you guys) can beta-read them for me. I’m doing it on a different blog because this place is such a grab-bag of stuff that it’s hard to see organization here. Also, I was going to put ads on that site, but god knows what could show up there, so I’m thinking no. And then if these first two months of very short posts turn out to be valuable for both you and me, there will be sections on Structure (Nov-Jan), Character (Feb-Apr), and Unity (May-June). And if I’m really feeling gutsy, one on Publishing. And maybe while we’re spending those months talking about those things, I can get the units they introduce finished. If nothing else, I’ll get the intros finished. See? I have a PLAN.
Right now, there’s a short post over there that says pretty much what this one says much more briefly. The first conflict post goes up on Monday, Sept 7. If you want to kick the tires now, go to The Writing/Romance Project. And as always, I thank you for your support.
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August 31, 2015
And We’re Back . . .
So the blog and website are stable again. Not in their final form, but at this point, stability is a HUGE step forward. I like the simple interface for now, it’s a big improvement for tablets and phones, and the whole mess has been a wake-up call for both the blog and website. So here’s what’s changed:
The Jenny Crusie Website: I’m still cleaning up the place, and I haven’t gotten to the Books tab or redone the Bio yet, but I sorted all of the other miscellaneous stuff into two tabs, “For Readers” and “For Writers.” “For Readers” has collages, food from the books, soundtracks, etc, a lot of the same stuff that was there before, some of which still needs revamped. “For Writers” now has four new subsets: “Essays,” which was there before, “Workshop PDFs” and “Argh Ink Writing Posts,” both of which are in progress and will be for some time (that’s a lot of stuff), especially since I have to wait until Mollie gets things re-ordered on the back end to put in the links so that when we shift to the permanent new domain, I don’t lose the thousand links I set up. So the website will be a lot more valuable to writers in the future.
Argh Ink: And then there’s here. Once I clear out the archives and make sure they’re all categorized and formatted (and deleted if they weren’t all that valuable to begin with), I’ll have a better idea of how to shape this blog in the future. The categories will change again, and I’ll do better with the tags, but mostly it’s just re-organizing and house-cleaning here. If you have any requests for the blog, now would be a good time to make them before I wander off to do something else. Like, oh, write a book.
The Writing/Romance Project: Some of you may have noticed the fourth link on the “For Writers” tab on the website. That’s an experiment I need feedback on, so of course I’m turning to you. Back to you on that tomorrow.
So thank you very much for sticking with us through the upheaval. Like all turning points it was traumatic, but it’s turned us in a new direction and we’re happy about it. Nothing but good times ahead, Argh People.
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August 29, 2015
Cherry Saturday 8 – 29 – 15
Today is More Herbs, Less Salt Day.
One of my favorite greeting cards of all time had a seed packet on the front and said, “Do You Like Herbs?” Then you opened it up and there was a little naked guy with his arms wide open saying, “Herb likes yours!”
I haven’t been able to see a sentence with “Herb” in it since without thinking of that guy.
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August 27, 2015
Blog Remodel in Progress
So you may have noticed that Argh looks a little different. We fumigated the pages and moved the entire blog and website and we’re still trying to sort things out. So there will be intermittent weirdness here until that gets done. We’re on it.
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