Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 49

Guest post on Levi Pine…

I was invited to send in a guest post to Planetransgender about the discrimination case of Levi Pine against his gym. If you’d like to get my take on the issue, head on over and give it a read.

Um…this is a short post, innit? Yeas.

On gun control…

I’m a bit more calm today, so I want to talk about guns. Note, I didn’t say rant, and I will try very hard to avoid my usual favorite words to make my point. On this topic, I’m willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and watch my tone. (Yes, this is bordering on a miracle, so I do hope you appreciate my restraint.)

Yesterday, gun fans online made ubiquitous comments like “it’s too soon to talk about gun control.” I’m sorry, but how many mall and school shootings do we need before it’s not too soon? Over 10,000 people died in the US from guns last year, and most other civilized nations didn’t break triple digits. Why is this not the right time to talk about gun control?

Gun people, the first thing you need to understand is, no one is suggesting that you lose your second amendment rights. But there does need to be some talk about assault rifles.

Let’s use an example, Joe N.(ormal) Hunter. Joe has a handgun in a kid-proof gun safe for home defense, and he stores his hunting rifles in a larger gun safe in the closet. Joe is responsible with his guns and has taught his kids to never trust that a gun isn’t loaded. Joe has a shotgun for pheasant hunting, a rifle for deer, and another for boar or bear, or some other large game.

This is fine. I don’t need a gun to go hunt chicken or cow at the store, but if Joe’s a DIY meat collector with a taste for venison or wild turkey, I’m cool with him. But I don’t believe Joe should have an assault rifle. As a hunter, the ability to hammer out a clip into one animal isn’t sporting, and it isn’t necessary if Joe has spent a bit of time learning to shoot. A good hunter needs one bullet to do the job, two if the first was merely a crippling shot.

Assault rifles are not made to hunt animals anyway. They were designed by the military to lay down suppressing fire and prevent human enemies from advancing. They were made with a principle of quantity over skill. So you hand Joe’s Army cousin, John C.(rappy) Shooter, an assault rifle to give him multiple chances to hit his enemy while burst firing.

Assault rifles were made to kill people, and when Bush lifted the ban on these kinds of guns, he opened the doorway to mass shootings with many more victims than we’d get with a handgun.

There is no defense from the hunter’s position that they need to empty a clip in Bambi. There is no argument for home defense that a gun owner needs an assault rifle to stop a thief when a Magnum revolver has similar stopping power per bullet, and it carries near the same intimidation level when it’s aimed at you. Look down a barrel that big, and you can readily imagine a similar sized hole in you. If you still go on the attack with a gun aimed at you, you are a moron, and I feel no regret for some gun owner putting a bullet in your dumb ass, fatal or not.

But gun people, you’ve got to stop acting like gun control is an all or nothing proposition. You can keep your hunting rifles and shotguns. You can keep your handgun for self-defense. But I want to suggest that we reinstate the assault rifle ban, because these are machines meant only for killing other humans. You don’t need them. You have plenty of other guns. The only reason you could want a gun that spits out so many bullets is that you are looking forward to the end times and your chance to kill everyone you don’t like. And that’s not a defensible position. It’s an irrational fear of the unknown bordering on paranoid delusion.

So please, can we not wait for another mass shooting to decide that it’s finally the right time to talk about gun control? Because I’m tired of turning on the news to see that someone else who shouldn’t have an assault rifle bought one legally and then went to town to bag a dozen innocent people for no damned reason.

In shock…

Last night, I went to take a bath, and after working all day, I felt really good for a change. I came back from my bath hyped to talk about the chapter of Little Star I’d just read, and then I saw a tweet that started, “How can such evil be possible?” I clicked the link, and my stomach turned upside down at the headline. I felt sick instantly, thinking of all those dead kids, of the families with Christmas presents under the tree for children whose lives were snuffed.

I chose to do the only thing I could. I pulled away from Twitter, and I cried. We were supposed to go out to have dinner with a friends, and I went along. But I barely tuned in anything hubby and our friend talked about. So many kids who no longer have a future. Each of them had a story. Their stories should have stretched out to old age, until they were watching their grandkids going to school. But no, their journeys ended in what’s supposed to be a safe haven for children.

I came back home and sat down, and I turned Twitter back on. A few people were already standing on the dead children as a soap box for why we need more guns. I unfollowed those people, and then I closed Twitter and sat hugging myself. Then a few hours later, I signed in again. It’s like nothing happened. People chatting up their hobbies, hawking their wares, as if this wasn’t a tragedy worthy of shock lasting more than a fleeting moment. “Oh, my heart goes out to those families…and now that I’ve expressed a token amount of grief, why not buy my new erotic novel for Christmas?”

You might think I’d want to talk about guns, about whether we have too many or too few, or about gun control, or about mental illness. You might think I’d rant about how no one is paying attention to the warning signs before these mass shootings. But instead, I want to just ask, where the hell is our empathy? Why is it that even with a tragedy this huge, we’re incapable of stopping and feeling something longer than five minutes?

What’s wrong with us that even the deaths of so many children no longer reaches us? How can anyone see this on the news and turn around and be cheerful five minutes later? Why can we no longer grieve and feel a shared bond over something tragic? Are we all so hard up for cash that we can’t take a day off from the constant polishing of our personal images and our projects? Why are the chants of “me-me-me” more important than taking a collective “we grieve”?

I don’t have any answers, and I’m not making accusations. I feel so hurt and confused right now. I want to fly back to Texas to check up on my brother’s kids, even though my brother hates my guts and thinks I’m a freak. I want to visit my niece and play with her baby boy. I want to appreciate every young life around me, because it can be ended in a flash, simply because some adult wishes it.

I want the human race to rediscover humanity, and now watching people move on quickly from this with no sense of connection to the young victims, I worry that we’ve reached a point of no return. What’s happened to us that nothing touches our souls anymore?

I’m all epic-ed out

So yesterday was not a good day for me. I spent most of the day sleeping on the couch, and I was only up for a few hours at a time before dropping again. During one of the times I was upright, I checked Twitter and found several followers had RTed ads for a book that just the elevator pitch had me ready to snap. The villain was described as having the power to destroy stars.

I’m rubbing my forehead now, because I want you to ponder this. If your villain can blow up the sun, why in the fuck would they bother chasing your Mary Sue hero around? Why not just blow up the sun? Boom, done. No risk of getting killed by the hero, because the hero and all their friends are dead. But of course the villain didn’t bother reading the guide for megalomaniacs to see where their plan sucks a dick.

I’ve just about given up on reading any story where the scale approaches saving the whole world, but now I’m seeing some writers trying to up the scale to the whole solar system. This is lazy writing. It’s like “Well gee, I can’t think up a story that’s interesting. Might as well threaten the whole world to make the hero look good.” Most of the time, this choice to go for a global scale story is sacrificing character development for the sake of plot devices. The hero is ultimate good, the villain is evil, and there’s no need to examine either character’s underlying motivations because they don’t have any.

I’m not opposed to saving the world every once in a while, but in spec-fic, this is turning into a go-to trend for writers who want an easy route to The End. It’s a glut of people stuck in creative ruts, and it’s getting tired. I’m even seeing teen romances crank up the epic scale, sacrificing their romance story for the sake of saving the world, and it’s not worth it to read the books. Why bother reading cardboard cutouts spewing stereotypical lines when there’s nothing new or creative to keep me hooked in?

I wish I could say this was only a problem with new writers, or that it’s only a problem with certain indies. But this is popping up in work from the big publishers, and it’s showing up in the stories of writers who I know have better skills than this. Maybe it’s a sign of creative burnout. Maybe this is the result of people forcing themselves to write every day, so they crank out ANYTHING to keep the word count up for the day. I don’t know.

What I do know is, increasing the scale of the plot hurts the most vital aspect of any story, character development. I want to see more villains that have stronger motivations for their evil plots. I want to see heroes who have a reason to be good. Or failing that, at least give a better explanation of how they get sucked into the role of hero. Don’t just hand me another black VS white plot, because I’m rage quitting these things faster than a preteen in a Madden game at half-time.

I’m really not saying writers can never go for the save the world angle, and one of my stories coming out will involve a global scale plot. But if every story you write cranks the tension to eleventy by threatening the whole world, you need to slow down your writing output and examine your motivations for writing. Are you interested in telling readers about your characters at all? Or can any of your books be swapped for each other with only a new set of names applied to the same roles? Because if I can take all your books and describe the same plot, but with different character names, that’s not good.

Just put more effort into your art, please. If your plot starts heading to a fate of the world scale, step back and look around to see if there’s some other way to tell the story. If you still can’t avoid threatening the world, at the very least, make the villain more fleshed out. And for the love of God, don’t tell me they can blow up the sun, but choose to chase around one person on a planet they could easily atomize. Because that’s neither creative, nor believable. And literally, I’m not buying that.

Assassin’s Creed Rant (Not a review)

Yesterday’s rant was probably about as coherent as a kangaroo playing hopscotch in a giant dictionary of cuss words, but despite my extra use of salty language, I wasn’t actually mad. I was incapable of anger because somebody in the weather department set a dozen temperatures in a blender, walked away, and then forgot to come back to turn the blender off. So I spent most of the day in this mental fog where very little reached me.

One thing did last night after dinner. (I suspect the carbs helped lift the fog) Kotaku showed a video of Assassin’s Creed III where the final part of the game is a chase sequence. Except every five steps, your chase is being interrupted by random, stupid, impossible shit. And this did reach me, because I stopped playing Assassin’s Creed: Liberation for almost the same reason.

In the Vita game, I’m told I must find a man in the Spanish Army to question him about some Templar plot, and the moment we walk into this fort, he takes off running. Then the games says “chase him, you saucy assassin. Oh, but don’t let him get more that fifteen meters away, or you lose.” Well okay, fair enough, (what a lie that turned out to be) and so I dash across the fort while this dude goes running up a ramp. Said Spanish dude has 80 pounds on my lithe French Creole killer, and his ascent up the ramp causes nary a shake of the planks. But the moment my character gets on the ramp EVERY SINGLE PLANK COLLAPSES like I just trundled on them with Fat Princess after a particularly gluttonous cake binge.

And this is Bullshit with a capital B. Ubisoft are a bunch of fucking wankers who’ve made bitch slapping the players a part of their definition of fun. Their games start off with “We hired cultural experts to make sure this game won’t be offensive to anyone.” Yes, anyone except the fucking people trying to play this shit.

Is there just not enough air in Montreal to fire brain cells up, or is there too much beer at the Ubisoft office? Because I can’t believe some moron looks at a sneaking assassin and says, “But what this character needs for accuracy is a broad daylight direct frontal assault leading to an improbable Hollywood chase scene.”

No, you fucking yutz, what this scene needed was you pulling your fucking fingers out of my nose and remember that you were calling this piece of shit Vita game a “sandbox”. If it were a sandbox, you would have given me the options of the full frontal assault and chase OR to climb the fort wall from the opposite direction, tail the Templar fucker discreetly until he’s out of sight from his troops, and then handle an interrogation.

And really, I wasn’t the least bit impressed by how Ubisoft handles assassinations. I’m set up to kill the governor, right? Well, the game just puts me in the same fucking room with the governor and his guards. So the guards shout and more guards arrive, and soon, I’m running down a hallway chasing the governor while being pursued by an out of place set of the Keystone Coppers, and the only thing missing to make this vaguely amusing, and thus entertaining, is a saxophone playing Yakety Sax in the background for that proper Benny Hill feeling.

Once I do finally kill the governor, THE GUARDS LEAVE. WHAT THE FUCK?! OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK BARBECUE! Listen, if I fucking murder a governor of ANY place, IN ANY TIME PERIOD, you can be damn sure the twenty guards that just saw me do it are going to jump my dainty ass and kick it around a long, long time before anyone gets around to saying words to the effect of “You have the right to remain silent.” (Yes, I know they didn’t have that yet, shut up. It’s not like Ubisoft is big on historical accuracy either!) But no instead, the “Matrix” makes the next scene so fucking unbelievable by giving me a long time to talk to the dying governor ALONE.

And fuck you Ubisoft, for these long death speeches spoken clearly and without the slightest shake of the voice acting despite the fact that I’ve just stabbed this guy in the heart 22 times. When I leave this stupid speech, the guards all left and went back to their fucking posts. But when I get outside, ONE guard runs into the courtyard and yells, “The governor has been assassinated!” At no point does he say who did it, or more sensibly point to me and yell, “And that’s the bitch who did it!” But from there on out to the edge of New Orleans, EVERY GUARD IN THE CITY just knows it was me. Why? Is it because I’m black? Oh, you Spaniards, you evil racist profiling fucks.

I run all the way out of town, picking up every single guard on the way. Can’t change my clothes, because “You have attention.” Well no shit, Ubisoft, and how did I get this much attention? Because you forced it on me like a jock forcing himself on a virgin cheerleader. I can’t climb a building to hide on a roof, because you’ve TOLD me to wear only one type of costume for this mission. Seeing as how I’m dressed in a ball gown, I would have been content to walk home quietly, but every guard just knows I’m the bitch wot done the guv.

So fine, it’s another Keystone Capers as I run down a dirt road and start to gain some distance on my pursuers when I run face first into an invisible fucking wall. Oh, the immersion! So magical! I’d almost never know this wasn’t the real New Orleans. Except for all the bullshit, of course.

But FINE, I turn around and begin the most ridiculous battle I’ve ever had in a video game, running around in circles in petticoats and a ball gown while I wait for guards to straggle off from the herd following me.

NOTE: Real people would have stopped chasing me, formed a circle and kettled me. No, really, Ubisoft, fucking stop hiring cultural sensitivity consultants, and start hiring security consultants who can tell you why your guards are hideously stupid. Spend your money on something that will improve the game play instead of the script, because frankly, NO AMOUNT OF CONSULTING on the script is going to change the fact that you write like shit-faced fratboys after a major kegger.

It’s not like you even need to hire a Native American to make sure you got Connor right. I didn’t need to consult an expert to know that when Peter Holmes meets a Native American in his last book, the chief shouldn’t talk like: “Me am big chief, me live in wigwam. Me think cheerleader wolf should lay down the pompom.” Similarly, you don’t need an expert to tell you what not to have your characters do in your game. No, the kind of expert you really ought to hire is a fucking writer who hasn’t drank away half their fucking brain cells yet. Or if you’re springing for consultants because you just have too much money, why not hire some gamers and tell them it’s okay to be bluntly honest with you? Then, in a shocking twist, actually fucking listen to what they don’t like and fix that shit.

But let me get back to that fight outside of town one last time. I finally picked off stragglers and killed everyone, but not after taking about 40 stab wounds. Finally, at long last, the flashing alert indicator goes silent, and now when I walk into town, no one recognizes me. No guards jumping me, and no citizens running and screaming. Which doesn’t make much sense, does it? I should be getting even more attention now, being a bloody staggering black woman who matches the physical description of the suspect wot whacked the guv. At the very least, I wanted one of the NPCs to yell about how I’m covered in blood.

But of course the game doesn’t really register injuries, because despite these Ubisoft guys stroking the word realism like a pubescent boner just discovered (by its owner, not by Ubisoft. Cause that would be creepy times 100) there is in fact no realism to this game whatsoever. Realism won’t even take Assassin’s Creed’s calls, and if it somehow got caught on the phone, realism would stammer about needing to wash its hair…for the next ten years. Or something.

But you know what? I forgave all of this shit even though I wasn’t having any fun, and I was willing to play along and accept that, despite just being a human pincushion, my assassin is just so fucking hardcore she can walk off a missing uterus and say “It’s merely a flesh wound!”

But then…THE CHASE. Did the Spanish soldier I chased have an army of trained mutant termites to collapse the ramp right after he ran up it? No, he had a team of game programmers, not one of whom apparently reads fiction, watches TV, or has any passing relationship with the physical world aside from blurry tourist photos from their parents’ last vacation. Because if even one of these anti-social assholes had been outside, someone should have said, “Wait, so the whole ramp section collapses? Not just the planks under the character, but all the planks at the same time?”

Now I really did give this chase a try, and after being dropped off the ramp, I ran and “parkoured” my way up a wall to get to the next section of ramp…WHICH ALSO COLLAPSES IN CATASTROPHIC ORDER RIGHT AFTER THE FAT FUCKING SPANIARD JUST RAN OVER IT.

Fuck you, Ubisoft. I don’t understands why you make video games when you aren’t even clear on the definition of a word like fun. You might have thought you were aiming for challenging, but most of your game is hand-holding linear bullshit followed immediately by these stupid chase scenes that bitch slap me into a major rage. Having only played two of these AC games, now I know that you’re creatively bankrupt. And I don’t even have to play ACIII to know you used the exact same cheap punk tactics in that game too. You make me pay an arm and a leg to buy your shit, and for what? For you to treat me with all the respect of a whore who specializes in scat clients?

And you know, when Hollywood insults my intelligence, at least they charge me a quarter of what game makers do, and at no time do the characters stop the film and say, “No, you can’t see the rest until you’ve chased me across California.”

I wouldn’t even mind doing the chase if it was interesting instead of frustrating. But the way Ubisoft is making chase scenes shows they’re suffering from creative burnout. AND again, if this is a game about assassins and this is supposed to be an open world where I can “parkour” (I put that in quotes because this shit wouldn’t be around for a few CENTURIES, but what’s historical accuracy matter by this point, right?) up walls and houses, why don’t I have a sneaky, assassin-like option for these scenarios? Why must Ubisoft run me out in broad daylight when THAT’S NEVER BEEN HOW ASSASSINS OPERATE? It’s like the company couldn’t be bothered to look up the job description before making up these games. “Oh, stealthy and sneaky? Well…fuck that, we’d rather ambush the player in the open. That sounds like loads more fun.” For who? You can hire consultant to make sure Connor isn’t scalping, but you can’t look up tactics of actual assassins?

But you know what would be more fun than playing Assassin’s Creed: Liberation? Putting down your game, going to my bedroom door, and slamming the door on my neck a dozen times.

A long as fuck rant about “real” anything…

Over on Twitter, I’m taking a temporary holiday from promotions, mainly because it’s depressing as fuck, and even if I get RTs, I never get anything else out of it. Not traffic or sales or reviews or ratings. I spend 12 waking hours posting links to books, and for all that work, maybe one or two people buy the books, and no one else does until seventeen months later when I’m trying to promote another new book that everyone’s doing a bang up job of pointedly ignoring. In most cases, the people who do buy my books right away bought them within my first five tweets, and the only reason they didn’t buy on the first is because it wasn’t payday yet. One reader can be predicted to buy almost all my books, and since I’ve only name dropped her a billion times as one of my three super fans, regular readers can probably figure out who that is. (For the newcomers, it’s Becka. Hi, Becka! You still rock harder than a rock concert in Rockport. *Huggles*)

But this is not the topic I want to talk about today. Today, I want to rant about my problems with the word real as a means of belittling and diminishing others. It seems I can’t go a day without finding someone using real as a way to lift up one group of people while at the same time treating another group as slightly more contemptible than Nazis or the Ebola virus. Or a Nazi with the Ebola virus.

“Real women have curves!”

“Real gamers don’t play Angry Birds!”

“Real men don’t feel empathy for women!”

“Real comic book fans don’t read girls’ manga!”

“Real nerds aren’t whores with glasses!”

“Real vampires don’t sparkle!”

And so on and so forth. It doesn’t escape my attention that the vast majority of these uses are spewed from the mouths of men. I’m not sure when men latched onto the word real as an attack on anything they can’t be bothered to look at more closely. It’s also odd how real usually excludes whole camps of people from out of the men’s clubs based on the flimsiest evidence.

Really men, why is it that to make full-figured women feel good, you’ve got to trash anyone who is skinny either by genetics or by a lifestyle of strict dieting and exercise? I totally understand the media is down on larger women, and yes, that shit is terribly unfair, but instead of targeting the elitist media men who define skinny as beautiful in the mainstream, many of you misguided dickheads turn around and attack skinny women as if they were paying for the endorsement, and as if this mainstream media objectification of their skinniness wasn’t already making them feel like shit for being mere sex objects, like furniture to be placed over or under men as an accessory to their tiny dicks.

And big ladies, stop encouraging this bullshit. Don’t fucking retweet “Real woman have curves!” Because what you’re doing is picking up the tool of your patriarchal oppressors and beating down another victim of the same oppressors. You’re having a cat fight while the media men cheer you on for attacking other women instead of the evil fucking male wankers who originally defined you as an unattractive fatty. In the game of class warfare, the men have just pulled a huge gotcha on all your plus-sized asses, and they get to laugh over their divide and conquer strategy working brilliantly while you just get to cry into your Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey over how those mean skinny chicks won’t stop oppressing your body image.

You’ve been tricked, chicas! Stop falling for it and start attacking the word real instead of propping it up and supporting the same patriarchy you claim to despise.

Moving over to gamers guys, some of you having been playing the same FPS shite since Counter-Strike first came out. You can’t sneer at anyone about playing clones of the same game premise, because you’ve been doing that these last 20 fucking years. And surprise of surprises, some gamers who play FPS games also play all the versions of Angry Birds. Maybe because it’s something fun and quick to do between all these godforsaken menus and loading screens in modern FPS shooters. But since the Call of Medal Warfare: Black Blackness of Blackery clones haven’t had an original idea in a decade, you aren’t in a position to judge gamers who won’t touch your favorite genre.

Also, maybe a lot of people don’t play these games because in multiplayer, some of you male gamers come across as being slightly less friendly than AIDS. I’ve tried to game online, and I find the trolling of new players (especially new female players) to be so ridiculously petty that I would rather game solo with a rabid hedgehog for my pointing device than spend ten seconds in a gaming lobby with your potty-mouthed racist, sexist, bigoted asses.

Here, look, I’ll give you all something to chew on. Real writers don’t write about the Cthulhu mythos. Lovecraft was a racist classist hack who wasn’t popular while he was alive, but who has the biggest collection of fan-fiction propping up his dead ass long after his sell-by date. You can’t go a week without some desperate indie publisher shouting, “Wait! Why don’t we do an anthology of Cthulhu stories? Nobody’s done that in at least the last five minutes! AND, we’ll pretend to be original by asking writers to set Cthulhu in the old west!”

I’m not really sure why selling pastiche fan-fiction for a dead racist hack with a problem describing his monsters allows you to collect a paycheck when doing same thing to any other licensed property would result in a cease and desist letter from some major corporation or possibly even the writers themselves. But since Lovecraft is dead, there’s a whole fan club of no-skill writers lined up outside his grave asking, “Hey, H.P.? Can I climb down in your coffin and hump your old dead bones rather than have an original idea for myself?”

While I’m on the topic, real horror writers take an old trope and do something new and original with it. If you have the same evil seven hundred-year-old vampire eating tender teen virgins and leaving a trail of evidence behind that even inspector Lastrade could follow blindfolded, then you’ve got no fucking right to sneer at Stephenie Meyer for writing a romantic parody of the trope and taking the piss out of it. Because what you’re doing is even less original, and it stopped being charming sometime shortly after my testicles dropped and I began having panic attacks about my emerging pubic hair.

I honestly don’t get what you’re all on about either. You loved Angel and Spike, a pair of vampires who turned vegetarian and ate animal blood like Edward, both pined for the same underage girl like Edward, and who fought other evil vampires, JUST LIKE EDWARD. And while I love Angel and Spike, I can admit that Joss Whedon made a jump the shark baby and totally fucked his own series with some of the stupidest fucking plot twists EVER. Yes, he made up for it with that Fred plot twist, and I totally forgave him for the ending of both Angel and Buffy because many of the individual episodes are amazing and hit me right in my surgically-altered girl bits.

But his writing can and does descend into pure shit, and so I think it’s perfectly fair for you douchebags to read about another vegetarian hebephile vampire and not act like you haven’t seen this bullshit before. You have, you liked it, and the only reason you won’t give Twilight a chance has got jack shit to do with the writing and everything to do with the body glitter Stephenie put on your monsters.

Never before has this level of butt hurt been justified for a full fucking decade. Never before have so many weak as fuck excuses been thrown up to challenge one comedic change to a trope. Jeff Strand can make fun of your monsters and that’s worthy of praise, but that romance bitch who made your fanged wankers sparkle should die on a fucking flaming stake.

Get fucked and stopped whining, you Angel/Spike loving hypocrites.

You vampire writers can’t even complain that she writes badly, because you’re all fucking hacks who can’t sell more than a few hundred of your pathetic copy pasta monsters who all go “Grrr argh, fear me, for I am the most ancient evil ever,” but who always get killed by some gimp human who wouldn’t stand a fucking chance against said monster if they weren’t a moralistic Gary Stu or Mary Sue for the author to act out their delusional black and white moral fantasies. If all it took was one determined modern white protagonist to defeat this seven hundred-year-old evil, then why wasn’t he killed six centuries ago by an equally determined white protagonist with the exact same low-tech wooden stake?

It doesn’t matter if you know how to judiciously cut out extra verbs, because readers don’t really give a fuck about your goddamn grammar rules. No real reader has ever said, “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly read that bestseller because it’s over the quota of linguistic liberties.” The only people who do that are literary fiction wankers with liberal arts degrees, and they wouldn’t read any speculative fiction even if it was endorsed by Noam Fucking Chomsky himself.

Really, all some of you horror writers do is make up an evil monster to act out your murder and rape fantasies, and then you feel guilty for it and make a bullshit hero to kill the monster in some denouement of your pathetic bloody fantasies. It’s a bit like the writer who makes up a child molester and graphically details their raping and molesting exploits of the neighborhood children before killing the character off in the last chapter in gruesome fashion, as if that somehow forgives everything you wrote before that point. You may feel better getting it out of your system, but dimes to donuts, I’ll fucking guarantee you there’s some skeezy caterpillar-lipped pedophile jerking off to the first 20 chapters of your book who never reads the ending and just goes back to the start for all the good rapey bits.

And if all you have to offer readers is “Monster shows up and nobody knows what it is despite all the evidence the monster must have been leaving around for centuries, but the hero still figures out how to kill them easily,” then it’s time to pack it in, take a real job, and stop wanking about pretending you’re an arteest. Because you aren’t a real artist. You’re just a fan-fiction hack who got lucky and found an audience for your self-indulgent shite.

Does all of that sound like hypocritical bullshit? Well good, because I’m taking the piss out of you to illustrate that nothing I’ve said is a fact, only an overvalued opinion with only my snooty attitude to back it up. And that’s exactly what many of you are doing when you use the word real to cut off other people from your little cliques.

Grow the fuck up, get out of the high school mentality, and stop using the word real as a dividing term simply because you don’t like what other people do with their creative efforts. I don’t like half the shit you people turn out, but I’m not about to say your shit isn’t real art. Because if I did, I couldn’t call my shit art either, and then I’m in the same boat with the rest of you exclusive elitist assholes. We can’t have that because none of us wants to be in the same boat with each other. God forbid we recognize our commonalities instead of pointing out our differences.

And you know what? It is possible for you to like things outside your normal range of interests if you just get over yourself, shut the fuck up and open your eyes and/or ears. Just look at the bronies, a group of grown men going on and on about a little girls’ cartoon like it was made for them. Well, actually, let’s not look at the bronies, since, typical of male-branded fan clubs, they’re so devoted to an ideal that they’ll threaten death on the creators of the show for doing something they don’t approve of. (Even if they DID have a valid point about Depy Derp’s voice change, their manner of dealing with the issue is more childish than the actual children watching the show.)

But let’s glance at the bronies with a side-eye and I’ll go on with my point. Because if grown men can squee over a show with a unicorn named Twilight Sparkle, it does show that not every girly thing is man-proofed to keep them out.

Which is funny, because while girls and women are eager to share their fandoms, hobbies, and clubs with men and boys, the same is not true in the other direction. Male gamers shout about girl gamers not being real players and trying to “ruin” their male power trip murder/rape fantasies with the suggestion that maybe the CGI tits on the female rape accessories in the games might be portrayed in a slightly less one-dimensional manner. (Or for suggesting that you not say hurtful things like “Rape that bitch” at a fighting tournament. Heaven forbid you mongoloid gaming motherfuckers ever learn to join the rest of the human race and stop talking like you’re a stereotypical 80s movie villain.) Girl gamers don’t go on YouTube and write things like “How dare you call my friends sexist, you ugly stupid slut! I hope you get raped!” No, it takes a special kind of man to deny his sexism in the same breath that he’s showing off his sexism. And by special, I mean mentally retarded and less capable of empathy than a young child with severe autism.

Let me go back to the horror fans for a moment, because I get no end of their “I’m so persecuted” bullshit, and yet they have no trouble sneering at romance readers and judging them based on pretty much the same flimsy as fuck arguments that have been made against horror fans. Right, horror fans, I know most of you aren’t demon worshipers, nor are you really acting out your rape and murder fantasies by indulging in a bit of the old ultra-violence. I read the same books as you and I’ve never worshiped…and I was only briefly a demon worshiper. (It was a confusing year for me because I’d been huffing an awful lot of modeling glue from a plastic Band-Aid box.)

But by the same token, not all romance readers are simpering, passive, lonely sissy women pining for fantasy males who don’t exist. Nor do they really want the kind of relationships they’re reading about anymore than you want to sink your teeth into the fleshy thigh of a virgin teen and drain her femoral artery while she mewls like it’s the best oral sex ever. If it isn’t true about you, then why in the fuck do you make up this bullshit about them? Why? Because you’re fucking hypocrites, that’s why.

And frankly, I don’t give a fuck about your fandom critiques on writing styles. You wank off to Lovecraft, a man whose writing style is pure piss. “Yay verily, I gazed upon that which hath no visage or distinguishing characteristic, and my sanity discombobulated, casting me everlong into the recessive pits from the precipice of—” Oh, piss off with all those flowers and seven dollar words, you namby git. Take a lesson from Hemingway and stick to shorter words. The five dollar words certainly worked fine for him, and he was a real man, unlike that lisping, swishy Lovecraft motherfucker.

I’ll move on. J.K. Rowling is known as the fucking queen of the adverbs, and she can’t go ten pages without the most contrived plot devices because her main character is a magical bully middle manager in training who has the deductive capabilities of a bonobo with brain damage and who only solves the “mysteries” because the bad guy waits till the end of the school year to seek him out and explain all the bloody fucking clues he missed. None of this is good writing, but as we all know, good writing isn’t what sells a bazillion copies. So your point is invalid, and always has been.

(Some of you Potter fans seem to conveniently forget that the sorting hat told Harry he could be in Slytherin because he was evil too, which also allows you to forget the hat is implying that Harry is a fucking bully wanker just like Draco.) And okay, Rowling said Dumbledore and Fred are gay. Big whoop-dee-fucking-doo. The big closing moral of Rowling’s fantastically overpowered female sidekick heroine is “study hard, and you too can become the wife of the hero’s other sidekick.” Well, that certainly is fucking empowering, innit? Oh wait, no it isn’t. You know what else isn’t empowering? Inserting an Asian character as a fetish object for your main character. That’s sexism AND racism from a woman writer. But kudos to her for slipping all this shit past her fans using a bit of verb-heavy prestidigitation. (Oh fuck you, Lovecraft, sometimes I can use big words too. Go back to your grave, gimp.)

Also? You perverts watching Emma Watson like she’s a magical bit of meat on a hook need to admit you’re pedophiles and stop pretending you’re watching the movies for the Quidditch. You’re watching for the underage quim. Yes, I saw the meme pointing out her panties in the bathroom scene of Chamber of Secrets, and did you know that I never would have noticed had some hypersexual objectifying male fan not pointed right at her crotch in a demotivational meme poster. You ruined that movie for me, and you’re really just as sad as the people who made clock counters winding down the days to the Olsen twins being legally fuckable.

But it never fails that the fans of this shitty magic fantasy writing turn around and sneer at the shitty romance writing of another series with absolutely no sense of irony whatsoever. Frankly, I wish the lot of you would go to an orgy and get fucked on your fake plastic magic wands before strangling yourselves on your color-coded school scarves.

“But hang on Zoe, aren’t you also attacking us in the same way you just chastised us not to do to you?” you may ask. And that’s a good question, invisible commenter who isn’t allowed to comment on my blog anymore because I’m tired of racists and sexists showing up to defend themselves in the dumbest fucking ways possible, except you’re still missing my point that I don’t actually believe you aren’t real fans or real writers or real readers or real whatever.

No, what I’m doing is showing how thoughtlessly stupid your arguments against other people are by throwing your bullshit back in your face with slightly different wording so it now might be offensive to you, and thus make a point that will work its way through your overly thick skulls. If you still don’t get my point and think it’s okay to attack others because boohoo, your precious fandom is so misunderstood, let me make one last example.

I was beaten up and mistreated for having the wrong gender. I’ve had bones broken for talking wrong, walking wrong, or for forgetting myself and skipping instead of running. When I went to the adult authority figures who kept telling us kids to report abuse, they looked the other way because attacks against queer children don’t count as real abuse.

This is real persecution, and unlike you petty little shits appropriating the term, this kind of violent persecution is still happening to people like me in epidemic proportions. We’ve got the highest suicide numbers and drop out rates of any demographic in the world because even chess nerds feel it’s okay to fag bash guilt-free. So someone asked you if you worship the devil for reading horror? Someone sneered at you Potter fans for wearing a robe and scarf and you scarred your forehead with a lightning bolt? Well grow fucking thicker skin, you fucking whining pansy. Until you’ve had your ass ghetto-stomped into the ground by several larger attackers for your reading habits, you don’t have the first fucking clue of what persecution is.

The fact is, half of you misogynistic motherfuckers were anti-social by choice, and your suspicion of the opposite sex came about because they couldn’t relate to your gamer funk and impenetrable fandom jargon. It doesn’t mean they didn’t like you. It means you couldn’t make a better effort to be sociable, and all of your imagined persecution is your fault for being a twat.

Did that make you mad? Then perhaps you’re not a real man, because you don’t have thick enough skin to handle a little taste of your own fucking medicine.

There, you see what I did there? I’ve turned you into an enemy using the word real. That’s how it feels to be on the other side, and if you still think it’s okay to play Us VS Them to appease your self-important ego, you deserve to be mauled by a group of sparkling underage Twihards and impaled upon an unlubricated two-foot pearlescent cock named Twilight Sparkle.

New Book! A Frosty Girl’s Cure

It’s taken me a little while to sort out the cover for A Frosty Girl’s Cure, but last month I hired H.D Harris to handle art duties. He’s also the cover artist for my upcoming YA werewolf story, A Boy And his Dawg, and at some point in the future, I plan to hire him to do a new cover for Waiting for a Miracle. So, let’s look at the cover and blurb for my superhero dark comedy:

Who wants to live forever? Terry sure as hell doesn’t.

Meet Terry Donalds, adopted daughter of retired criminal overlord Duggan Masters and a clone with a unique problem: she’s permanently trapped at the age of twelve emotionally and physically. Because of her ice powers, Terry’s temper tantrums can cause blizzards, and despite the support of her friends and family, she’s developed a death wish.

Returning to City California, Terry hopes to find a cure by working with Morgan Funeral, her father’s former lab assistant. There she meets a mentally unstable vigilante, Dale, and she crosses paths with City’s greatest superhero, Miracle Man. Terry claims to have no interest in playing “the game” as a hero or a villain, but trouble keeps finding her, often with explosive consequences.

Terry’s quest will take her from the seediest sides of City to the cold vacuum of space, and even to a parallel world where superheroes don’t exist. And if the journey doesn’t kill her, she may just learn to live with herself.

___

A Frosty Girl’s Cure is $3.99 and you can find it on my blog store, on Kobo, and on Amazon. If you’re a reviewer who wants a freebie to read for your blog, email me at zoe_whitten (at) yahoo (dot) com and tell me which format you prefer. You can choose from mobi, epub, lit, or PDF. And if you buy a copy and read it, I hope you’ll consider leaving a rating or a review.

So, that’s the new release for this month. There will be another new release in January, my fallen angels YA, Saving Gabriel. It’s going to be a busy early year for me, so you can look forward to more new stuff soon.

Oh, and to anybody who buys the book, many thanks in advance for your support. =^)

The Twelve Days of Christmas – Indie Edition

On the first day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

An email full of praise for me

On the second day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the third day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the fourth day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Four debit cards

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the fifth day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Five cover votes

Four debit cards

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the sixth day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Six betas reading

Five cover votes

Four debit cards

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the seventh day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

A seven critic beating

Six betas reading

Five cover votes

Four debit cards

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the eighth day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Eight tweeters tweeting

A seven critic beating

Six betas reading

Five cover votes

Four debit cards

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the ninth day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Nine Facebook shares

Eight tweeters tweeting

A seven critic beating

Six betas reading

Five cover votes

Four debit cards

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the tenth day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Ten lattes for sipping

Nine Facebook shares

Eight tweeters tweeting

A seven critic beating

Six betas reading

Five cover votes

Four debit cards

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the eleventh day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Eleven shippers shipping

Ten lattes for sipping

Nine Facebook shares

Eight tweeters tweeting

A seven critic beating

Six betas reading

Five cover votes

Four debit cards

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true fans gave to me

Twelve Goodreaders reading

Eleven shippers shipping

Ten lattes for sipping

Nine Facebook shares

Eight tweeters tweeting

A seven critic beating

Six betas reading

Five cover votes

Four debit cards

Three PayPals

Two interviews

And an email full of praise for me

Gad, what a week…

Ever since returning from Lucca, I’ve been having every possible health problem known to me; fatigue, vertigo, nausea, stomach pains, joint pains, muscle cramps, and of course, mood swings. (Because what month would be complete without those?)

Despite the constant and chronic problems, I’ve been working hard on writing. I’ve been able to build a buffer of episodes for All Maid Up, and now that I’ve moved past the stumbling blocks from the prior season, I have a relatively clear path for the next 2-3 seasons. This has also given me a bit of free brain space to start another novella WIP, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

I want to talk about how All Maid Up has been an ongoing experiment for me in several ways. I don’t normally show my rough drafts, and even when I was posting serial fiction online, I’d already written the books and had been through them many times for revisions. But a lot of WebLit people write stuff on the fly and post it rough, going back to refine after the story is done and maybe releasing an edited ebook afterward. I’d often said, “I can’t do that,” and after a while, I guess I took it as a personal challenge that maybe I could.

Second, being that this is a serial soap opera, I didn’t have a central plot to focus on. Rather, I had a lot of minor subplots that all worked around the relationships of the main character, Ginger Berkley. Ginger’s story is half fantasy, and half reality, in that Ginger’s transition in high school has a lot of support from the school staff and her friends, something you won’t find happening in the real world to this degree. At the same time, Ginger is still constantly the target of bullies, and there’s this recognition that even if everyone else was supportive of trans students, the bullies would still need to be dealt with. I’m not going to propose a solution to bullying in this story, because the point isn’t that Ginger defeats bullying and ends it at her school. Rather, she endures it to the point that the abuse no longer has any power over her.

But there’s a lot of other stories going on in this, and while the bullies and their attacks remain a problem, the bulk of episodes are about Ginger’s social and work life. It’s not explosive stuff. In fact, it’s probably one of my more mundane efforts, if you set aside the occasional steamy sex scenes. But I think I enjoy writing this because it doesn’t have to always be explosively tense. It’s a slow read, which probably explains why it’s only got two regular readers.

Anyway, my other WIP is the third book in the Zombie Era series, Raising the Undead. I’ve got 6 chapters so far, and the story picks up with Susan in another tribunal. The first novella from her perspective will cover her mental growth from a handicapped toddler into an emotionally stunted “adult.” Along the way, her journey also uncovers a number of mutations the undead are undergoing as a result of their vastly different diets.

Folks who like their zombies slow and shuffling will still find those here in this story, but the larger threats are much faster and more dangerous as singular hunters, while the shambling varieties need to travel in hordes before they can present the same level of threat to the living.

But while the first two books covered the epidemic from the eyes of the living, this second half of the series should shed some light on what it’s like to be undead. For Susan, this means dealing with threats from both the living and the mutated undead. In the fourth book, she’ll have been taken in by the same military unit that worked with the first main character, Eugene O’Donnell, or G. I can’t say what will happen in that last book without major spoilers, but suffice it to say, there’s going to be some major changes in the undead. You’ll either love the changes and think it’s an original take on zombies, or you’ll hate it and call me a hack. Well, I am a hack…let’s move along, okay?

Yes, moving on, here’s a link to a review I got for my free short revenge story, Served Cold. While the reviewer was upset by the dark tone, he also said of my writing: “…Whitten captures and presents the wild melodrama of the young with the cold, stepping logic of a sociopath to create a nastily believable little tale of a young person’s humanity being ground down to nothing.”

Strong words, but then Served Cold remains one of my darkest efforts, and hubby still says it’s the most disturbing thing I’ve ever written. Definitely not a tale for people who like their fiction with more cheerful themes, but if you’re a fan of horror or dark fiction, you might give it a shot. It’s free, of course, and it’s probably a twenty minute read, at most.

I want to thank Jim for reading my story and reviewing it, and I want to close out this report mentioning Saving Gabriel, which hasn’t had many new readers in the last week, but still managed to eek up to 12,000 page views before it plateaued. This is a good reaction, and I’m hoping that with a bit more polish, I can get the sold to at least a hundred or so people in the first month of publication. Which would be nice.

Anywho, that’s where I’m at right now. I’m working hard, but this cold weather is truly draining the life out of me. And just four more months of cold before we get back around to warmer temperatures. *Sigh* But hey, it’s a good week for writing, so it’s not all bad, right?

UPDATE: It appears I’d missed the posting of a 5-star review for Peter the Wolf on Amazon. This makes three recent favorable reviews, with the first being a 5-star review for NINJAWORLD. Not too shabby, even if it is a slow sales month. Anywho, thanks very much to the reviewers of all three books. Your help really means a lot to me.

Game review: Project Diva F for PS Vita

I mentioned in an earlier post that I picked up two PS Vita games while attending Lucca Comics and Games, one of which was based solely on me recognizing the character Hatsune Miku because I’d bought a bag with her likeness at a prior con the year before. I bought Project Diva F, and had barely unwrapped it before I thought I should get Assassin’s Creed: Liberation too, in case I didn’t like or couldn’t fully understand the import game.

Ha. I’ve played Assassin’s Creed three times total, and Project Diva F has dominated my game time even before I left Lucca. A rhythm game, the screen plays music videos with buttons prompts or star icons to indicate screen swipes. At higher skill levels, more button swaps and swiping gestures are needed to pass the same songs, a rather generous collection featuring a nicely balanced J-pop vocal cast.

A caveat. Do you like anime theme songs, or do you find them irritating? I LOVE anime theme songs, and for me, the best parts of some shows ARE the theme songs. I’ve also listened to J-pop and loved it, so this game is familiar ground for me, musically speaking. That helps draw me in, that I like the music and don’t mind seeing the same animated sequences over and over.

The other caveat to be aware of is, this game is HARD. Not hard to understand, mind you. In fact, I sorted out how to get to the tutorial and learned how to play the game knowing only hai, and iie. The tutorial has this quirky but infectious earworm song to start you off with, and then you go into the main game with five videos to choose from. Pass a song and you’ll unlock a new video.

At first, I couldn’t pass ANY song on any skill level. Symbols seem to rush at their targets too fast to keep up with, and even on Easy, when you only press the circle button and swipe the screen, it’s possible to fall behind the beat. Hitting each target dead on earns you one Cool point, while being slightly off center will earn a Fine. There are no points given for any other range, though there are Safe, Sad, and Worst scores for each beat. Missing a beat will also mute the singer’s voice, though there is a setting in the option to turn this off. Most beats are tapped, but to keep your thumb busy, so symbols have a trailing tail, meaning you have to press and hold the button, releasing at the end of the tail for another Cool or Fine point.

To pass a song, you fill up a score bar at the bottom with three white lines near the end. These lines are the goals for passing with a Standard score, or with Great or Excellent. There is of course one further passing grade, and I’ll get to it in a moment.

After unlocking all the songs on Easy mode, I began working with Normal mode levels. These are the same videos, but with more prompts for two face buttons, and for use of the d-pad in combination with the face buttons; and with different patterns than the Easy mode. Normal mode is a LOT faster, and falling behind can be devastating for a score. I’ve still got four songs on Normal that I still can’t pass even after 30 or so attempts. I can’t even get close to the speed needed, and thus I can’t unlock those songs in Hard mode. Which is a moot point, because Hard mode is insanely difficult. The few levels I have tried it on have sneered at me and smacked my thumbs around like…like little girls’ thumbs. And while those little girl thumbs were crying, the game kicks their puppy.

Or the game calls me Cheap. Which is like almost as bad as puppy kicking.

Despite this high difficultly level, the game has me hooked, and I’ve heard many of the songs twenty and thirty times now in my efforts to wring out another perfect score. I wouldn’t be this enamored of the game if I didn’t like the music or the anime videos, but I’m a big manga fan, and like I said, I’m a fan of this kind of music. Turning this into a game is like a form of digital drug, and long after I post this review, I’m going to be trying to unlock the rest of this game. And maybe once better translations come out, I can buy some of these helper items and cheat my way through Hard mode. (>_>)

I decided to see if I could go back to Easy mode and unlock a perfect score, with all beats hit on Fine or Cool. It is possible, and I’ve since passed seven songs with a glowing gold Perfect score. Keeping a chain going all the way through a song, even a short song, is a lot harder than you think. I’ve sunk whole nights into passing one song, only to bash my fingers hopelessly against another.

Supposedly, there are items I can buy to help my game, but I can’t find reliable translations for those menus, so for now the items are a mystery to me.

These scores all earn you Diva points, which are meant to be spent on the above mentioned helper items, or in the Diva rooms. This is like a virtual pet side game, but with idol singers. If the game has a weak spot, it’s this, and it’s because so little effort was put into animations. Everyone does the same motions for every gift they’re given. You have to give gifts to level up the idols to level 6. At this point, you unlock a trophy for spending a “year” with this idol, and there’s a cake you buy them to celebrate a birthday. A cake that costs 30,000 points. Leveling up ain’t cheap either, and aside from unlocking the trophies, it doesn’t add anything to the main game. It’s a dress up doll house, except most of the outfits kind of suck. (One character, Meiko, has a dress with a belt around her boobs. It doesn’t look comfy at all.)

The side game’s biggest flaw is all the “are you sure” menus that pop up, and all the loading screens in between every menu swap. SEGA went and put in some lovely loading screen art, enough so that the loading panels are rarely monotonous. But there’s a LOT of loading screens and “are you sure?” popups peppered throughout the virtual idol maintenance process. So it’s dull AND tedious.

And, the two male idol singers have the same body motions as the four females, so once you’ve leveled up one idol, you just click through the animations later because you’ve already seen them before. So the side game is only there for completists who want to get all the trophies. I really feel like this could have been more fun, if only the characters were all given their own distnct motions and personalities instead of all being stuck to the same polite girl animations.

Moving along, if ever there was a game to prove the Vita’s ruggedness, it’s Project Diva. I think I’ve gone through a million button presses in less than a month, and my thumbs are sore from all the manic workouts. What makes this game addictive is combining catchy J-pop singles with flashy, pretty music videos and tossing in a simple premise of hitting the right button at the right time. And let me talk about those video on this screen. The Vita’s screen is made for bright flashy colors, and this game video serve as a proud tech demonstration of how good the Vita screen is.

The music sounds good whether I use headphones or the Vita’s speakers, and there’s only one song where I didn’t feel the beat of the song ever matched the prompts. All the others have this natural rhythm that you can fall into and use to coast in combos. But the song Dye is badly out of phase with the music. It can also be argued that Dye is a terrible song, a mash up of English words that almost mean something, but don’t quite work as coherent lyrics. (The song is so bad, I blocked the lyrics out as a traumatic memory.) The backing track is all over the place without a steady beat, so you can’t trust the music to guide you like in the other songs.

In any case, with only one weak song to spoil the fun, I’m giving SEGA’s Project Diva F an enthusiastic five stars, but only on the condition that you’re a fan of this kind of anime game. If J-pop isn’t your thing, you could end up hating the game and thinking I’m crazy for loving it so much. But if you like J-pop and anime, this will be perfect for you. I’ve grabbed the Vita thinking “I’ll just play one song.” Then after I finally score a Perfect, I look up and it’s 4 AM. Yes, Project Diva is that addicting. It’s the kind of game that makes me glad that I got a Vita. Now, if only Sega would import these games, using the same music and voice tracks, but with English menus. Because that would be bad ass. If they imported Project Diva, I love the game so much, I’d buy it again.

I want to gush more, but I’ll just shut up and go back to playing. I’ve still got three other idol singers to level up. And unlike Portal, there’s a real cake this time. Bonus!