Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 56

Book review: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Be warned: this review contains spoilers and unbridled rage.

I started Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children because I was interested by the blurb and the premise of a story mixing old photographs to illustrate the text. But the farther I got into the book, the more it tried my patience with a contrived plot, lousy dialogue, and cardboard character development. By the final chapters, I was actively fighting not to throw the book in disgust, and though the ending implies this is the first in a series, I may never read anything by this author until they learn to stop humping lousy clichés like a lusty necrophiliac on bloated corpses.

The blurb is a complete lie. Let’s get that out of the way first. The blurb makes it sound like the kids on the mysterious island that the main character, Jacob, visits are evil and doing something to the normal people. In fact, this is so far removed from the actual plot that I started to feel cheated halfway through the story.

Let me start at the beginning. Jacob is a teenager who has grown up listening to his grandfather tell stories of fighting monsters, and he comes to think of these as tall tales until the night his grandfather is murdered by a monster. With his dying breaths, grandpa tells Jacob to “find the bird in the loop.” Clues soon lead Jacob to the island where his grandfather had stayed as young Jewish orphan during World War II. Only one day later, he learns his grandfather’s stories aren’t such tall tales after all.

Before I go on, I must say, Jacob’s parents live up to the worst kind of stereotypical YA trope, the parents who don’t really care and are more interested in their own dysfunctional lives than their kid. So Mom is only too happy to be getting rid of her problem child on this road trip. Dad is a bird watcher only interested in using the trip as an excuse to study, and he doesn’t really care that Jacob wanders off every day, all day. This is problem one, the stereotypical parents freeing the writer from having to deal with normal parental behavior.

Problem two is, the author sends the character to a Welsh island, yet everyone speaks American English, except on occasion they say bollocks for local flavor. Even if I set that aside, all of the dialogue is strained and poorly written. The whole story is like this, and it reads like a rough draft that never went to an editor.

Problem three is, Jacob is a moron. I’m being nice putting it that way too. He steps through a loop in time, returning to town to find no gas generators and all the modern tractors replaced by oxen pulled carts. YET he still heads to the pub, where everyone is different (Yet still speaking American English with only a few odd word choices making the WELSH inhabitants talk unrealistically.) AND YET, he still tells the barkeep that he’s got a room upstairs beside the blatantly obvious fact that this is not his time. He still needs to go through a stupid chase scene and be taken prisoner by the peculiar children, finally seeing a calendar before he recognizes, GASP, he’s traveled through time. Jacob never stops being this clueless and dense, and EVERYTHING slips past him, even the most blatantly obvious clues.

Problem four is Emma, a pyrokinetic who was the girlfriend of Jacob’s grandfather. On the day she meets Jacob, she threatens to kill him, calling him a liar and a spy even though she later admits that she’d recognized him instantly. She was just threatening to kill him and acting suspicious because she knew Jacob was coming with news of her boyfriend’s death. Riiiiiight. Yet, only a day later, Emma is cuddling with Jacob, and by day two, she’s trying to kiss him. Emma is eighty-eight years old, has just learned that her old boyfriend was murdered by monsters, and is ready for a bounce back relationship with her boyfriend’s GRANDSON AFTER TWO DAYS. UGH, CREEPY OLD GIRL IS CREEPY. And this coming from someone who accepts that Edward Cullen is permanently trapped in the mindset of a teenager. Edward doesn’t pounce Bella on day two of school and try for a snog. Emma does after barely knowing Jacob, and it’s way too creepy for me.

Problem four is that while all peculiar children have different powers, Jacob has the exact same power as his grandfather. And what power is that? He can see the shadowgast, a race of peculiars who turned themselves into “hollow” monsters by exploding a loop. We’ll set aside the problems with this contrived plot for problem five, because with problem four, I want to point out how convenient it is that not one, but two peculiars developed the ability to see the recently created shadowgast, and that they alone are the only ones who could see the monsters. Since Jacob’s grandfather is dead, that also conveniently makes Jacob THE CHOSEN ONE to save the peculiar children from evil monsters who are of course plotting to take over the whole world.

Problem five is, while it was stated that the shadowgast have no memories of their past lives, the story contradicts this time and again, and it seems rather convenient that there is a process for the shadowgast to become solid again…by eating peculiars. OF COURSE. It’s like peculiar vampires and zombies rolled into one stupid convenient monster package. It’s even more convenient that not even peculiars can see the monsters. So they’re like supa-stealth vampires. Worse, transformed shadowgasts are called wights. Why? Because their eyes are all white with no pupil or iris. Get it? Wights have white eyes.

I won’t bother talking about how the book ends, but obviously, being YA it sets up the kids for another sequel while conveniently getting rid of all adult supervision. I’m not going to bother reading the sequel, and I don’t care if the writer learns something about dialogue and character development before publishing it. I’m disgusted by the awful dialogue in this book, the lousy character development, and the fact that the photographs are included so the author doesn’t have to describe most of the cast. The only people they bother to describe are those who don’t have a photo. Otherwise, the author has Jacob say “I recognize you from my grandfather’s pictures,” and on the next page, cue another public domain image. This is just as bad as an author saying their character looked just like a movie star so they don’t have to work for better physical descriptions. I’m trying to be kind because this is the author’s first book, but frankly, this didn’t deserve to be published. I’ve read better anime fan-fiction from people with smaller vocabularies.

I give Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children one star, and I cannot convey my disgust at what a terrible story it is strongly enough. I’m also pissed because the blurb is a complete lie, and I was sold into this piece of crap on a false premise. Shame on the publisher for lying to sell copies of this. Shame on the editor for not sending this turd back for massive revisions, and shame on the author for making a story so unbearably stupid that I want to smack them into a loop.

A request for help

I should perhaps title this another request for help, since I’ve already asked this before. I need to preface it with some not so relevant information and hope that maybe I can sway a few of you to go through with my request. Most of you should by now know that I have multiple sclerosis, and that my plaque scars are in my brain, resulting in mental instability even in the best of times. During unstable weather with wildly divergent high and low temperatures, that instability becomes more pronounced, causing me to go from manic happiness to crushing depression to deep paranoia that everyone is out to get me.

But I also am having “plumbing problems” downstairs, and I really need to fly back to Thailand to have my doctor correct these problems with more surgery. I also need to get new dentures. Just as my oral surgeon explained, the shape of my gums is changing, and my dentures no longer fit. The difference in the two is resulting in sore spots, and I have to either glue them down frequently or deal with pain even if my mouth isn’t moving. And considering that I talk to myself even when no one else is around, I’ve had to just not wear them to allow my gums to heal between meals.

I’m not asking for donations, and I’m not asking for contributors in an online campaign. I’m asking those of y’all who haven’t bought books to look over my collection in my bookstore and buy something. And if you do and finish the book, I’m asking you to leave a review. That can be on a site like Goodreads or your blog, if you have one. If you don’t, but you bought a book from me at Amazon, it could be a review left there. If you somehow decided to buy print and went to Lulu, you could leave a review there.

So, that’s it in a nutshell. I desperately need your help in convincing other readers to try out my stuff. I have a huge collection of titles in just about every flavor of speculative and genre fiction, and in theory, I should have something for everyone. I’m working as hard as I can to promote all my titles on Twitter, but I’m not making that many sales on my own, and certainly not enough to cover medical and travel expenses. Even if I saved up funds and didn’t give them to people like my editor, or to cover artists, a year of sales would not cover a plane ticket, much less my doctor’s constantly rising fees for surgery and a three-day stay in the hospital. Nor would I be able to afford a new set of dentures by saving up for a year.

I have received two sales on my store through Gumroad, both on the same day. Just those two sales alone gave me $9 in royalties. This is a good start, but I get paid quarterly, and I won’t see that money until the end of summer. And $9 by itself is meaningless for the kinds of problems I’m dealing with. I need a whole lot more to be able to help myself, and to do that, I need help from y’all. I need more sales, and I need more vocal support in the form of reviews. Yes, even if you decide to give me two stars and a bad review. Even if the review is just one sentence about it being a lousy book. Any publicity is better than no publicity.

I’ve been told for a few years now to just keep going, that my writing is good, and that I just need a lucky break somewhere to start the flood of sales. But so far, I haven’t found that lucky break, and mentally, emotionally, and physically, I’m running into walls and can’t just keep going anymore. That’s not your fault. As I get older, MS eats away at my energy reserves more and more. The plaque scars eat a little more of my brain and take with it more of my internal strength and self-control.

In other words, I’m losing the fight, and I’m sinking deep and deeper into quicksand. I’m screaming for help, and there’s still no rescue coming. So, I’m calling on you to help, and I hope you will at least consider making some small effort at a rescue.

Goodreads event recap, and a Wattpad update…

So, the Goodreads event didn’t go nearly as well as the Indiegogo campaign. I sent out 234 invitations in my Goodreads friends list, and most didn’t answer. I got 11 yays to 4 nays, and 1 maybe. But the thing is, roughly half of the yays came from Twitter promotions. (What a shock, Twitter coming through again like that.) So, not really having much luck using Goodreads as a social hub for meeting readers. Of course, I might have had more response on Twitter if the event ran longer, but the point wasn’t to attract Twitter peeps. I wanted to see if my current Goodreads friends would be willing to try my stuff if they knew they could have any book for free. (As opposed to only offering a single book in one genre and maybe missing out on a few more potential readers for an older title.) The answer there is a silent rejection. Kinda like what I get with publishers and agents, really. Boh.

I haven’t had much luck doing anything social on Goodreads. I visit groups, but don’t want to read the books they’re buying for monthly discussions, and I don’t see a point to promoting in these groups when most self-promotion seems to be ignored. About the only thing I get out of Goodreads is, it helps me keep track of what I’ve read, and what’s in my TBR pile. I don’t really mind that, because that’s why I joined Goodreads. Not to promote my stuff, but just to keep track of my books and tell the difference between print copies and ebooks. So I don’t really mind that the promotion failed.

I DID join Wattpad to find readers, and I’m seeing traffic on all the stories I post there. Maybe not enough to climb the ranks to the top 10, or even the top 100, but certainly not so few that I’d give up on the site. I think I could pick up a few more as I post new chapters, and it’s still too early to decide if this is a success or not. So…yeah.

I have found a number of stories that I want to read on Wattpad, and my read later list is growing with stories that sound interesting to me. So I’m not just peddling my crap and walking away. I’m finding stuff to interest me and give me a reason to hang out and see what the other writers are up to. The story I’m currently reading and loving is Windswept by Gwen Cole. The paranormal angle concerns people who are “drifters,” and they have the ability to teleport anywhere they want. The story so far has kept me turning pages, and although I think I know a major plot point in advance, I’m enjoying the characters so much that I don’t mind feeling like I’ve guessed where part of the story is going.

One thing that’s turning me on? Parents who act like parents. This impression is made with little details dropped at just the right moment, like when Sam says she’s going upstairs to finish the homework she never started, and her mom smiles and asks, “You mean start your homework?” It’s only a single line, but it conveys an awareness of her child’s habits, and it’s a little good natured ribbing that feels very mom-like. In another chapter, the mom is thinking to go on a trip with her hubby to Australia for the weekend, but before she goes, she asks Sam if she will be okay on her own for the weekend. She’s noticed that Sam is feeling antsy recently, and she doesn’t want to go away if her daughter needs her. Sam tells her to go and lies about why she’s antsy, and both of these things feel realistic and believable.

I can’t tell you how many times I roll my eyes while reading YA stories where it feels like either the parents are non-entities shoehorned into the tale without having any role in their kids’ lives, or the teen’s actions are unbelievably stupid or just plain unrealistic. When teens act horridly stupid in some YA stories, it makes me feel like the writer hates teenagers, and is only writing the book to exploit the market. And that shit pisses me off. So seeing this book play both the adults and the teens straight, it really makes me happy to see an example of great YA that doesn’t insult my intelligence or make the characters feel dumbed down just for the sake of maintaining a PG-13 rating. Good stuff, in other words.

In other news, for as much as I’m enjoying the graphics in Gravity Rush, I’m not liking the combat because of the lack of a lock-on button. I’m sorry to say that the majority of reviewers were right, and this game suffers a lot when it forces players into the same old “defeat all the monsters to advance to the next arena” cliché. The game is so much fun when I’m flying around and exploring areas for items. Even fighting the lower-level Nevi isn’t so bad, but the boss fights are nothing short of infuriating. Just like the reviewers said, this is a great game with a unique concept that suffers when it forces you to to stick to the path using the same tired themes that have been done to death by games with much smoother combat systems. This would be more forgivable if there were a way to lock onto enemies, but sometimes the bosses are aggravating because they move in such a way that instead of hitting your target, you fly though their body, out the other side, and 1 Km away from the fight before you can stop to reorient yourself. (Usually getting shot in the back by what seems like homing missiles in the process, of course.) So what I’m saying is, while I love exploring the game world, I also hate some of the core decisions the game makers made about the combat aspects. So I suspect this will bring down my score from a glowing 5 to a 4, possibly even a 3.5.

Aaaaand that’s my update. Still no sign of the muse, so for now, I’m gardening and goofing off to pass the time. I hope to have news of her return soon. But if not, fuck that bitch. She’s a fucking stuck up diva who won’t even let me make honest criticisms about her ideas. So if she wants to stomp off to Tahiti because I thought her werewolf story needed more tension, I don’t care. I’ve got better things to do than put up with her speshul snowflake ass. (Still feels weird to talk like this about a piece of my own psyche, but oh well.)

A final Indiegogo update and some butt smooching…

Today marked the conclusion of our Indiegogo campaign, and while I would have liked to stay up all night and attempt to get a few last hour contributors, fatigue dropped me pretty early. Still I did get a bit more energetic near the end, resulting in 4 donations on the final day. (Our average was 1 every 3 days, so this is really a huge improvement, relatively speaking) This brought our amount up from $288 to $348. Had we used Kickstarter, we’d have lost the funds for not meeting our goal. But, we used Indiegogo and flexible funding, so my editor will be pocketing this hard earned cash, minus 9% for processing fees.

Almost repeating myself from an earlier post, this is about $348 more than I was expecting us to get together, and all of the funding came through Twitter. I made attempts at promotion on Facebook and LinkedIn, but those places don’t share shit, EVAR. Meanwhile, over on Twitter, I’d come back from lunch to check the status of tweets and find complete strangers had retweeted for me. And more compelling, most of the people who funded the book had never read the first two books. Though we offered a $1 incentive and a few people gave that amount anonymously, almost everyone else sent between $5 and $50. That’s all Twitter. So other sites like Facebook can claim to be social sites, but they mostly are full of wind-tunnel wannabes talking up their own shit and ignoring everyone else. But Twitter is the true king of social sites, because people who don’t even know each other share stuff and try to help out. And, that is awesome. That’s the very definition of being social.

It was almost getting to be that time for another butt smooching post, being the end of the month and all, and I was going to have to assumed the butt smooching position because I got some nice sales figures on Amazon, including 6 sales of Sandy Morrison and the Pack of Pussies thanks in large part to that guest post offered to me by Matt Staggs. (Who offered it on Twitter out of the blue without me even asking, by the way.) But now my editor has some money to take care of thing, and with the $50 I’d sent her from last month’s royalties, she’s made $398 for editing Roll the Bones. So I only need to send her another hundred dollars or so to consider her properly paid. And I will send her the funds, just as soon as I’ve earned them in sales.

But, we wouldn’t be so close to our goal without Twitter. And that’s why this month’s butt smooching post is dedicated to you awesome folks making all those tweets. Hell, some of you may never even read this post and know how much you did for us with your signal boosts. But I wanted to get this out on my blog so if you do pass through, you can see this and know how grateful I am for your help.

I want to get back to book sales and repeat something I’ve already said on Twitter. I’m a complete stranger to a lot of people, and yet I still make sales every month. Every month, I get a few new readers from my promotions on Twitter, and some of these even result in reviews, either on Goodreads or Amazon. The thing is, we’re in a global recession, and people are hurting for cash. Fiction books, and in particular genre fiction, are now considered luxury items, and people are having to trim fat from their budget. A lot of people trim it by getting only famous authors they already know. This is understandable, not wanting to risk hard-earned cash on unknown authors.

AND YET, many of you folks still buy my books. You do it even if you don’t know me, and you do it even if times are tight. Now maybe I help that out buy keeping my prices reasonable and by offering you a fair ratio of hourly entertainment to dollars invested. But I’m still a nobody indie, and I shouldn’t be making this many sales every month, especially considering how lousy I am at promotions.

So to you buyers, I extend my heartfelt appreciation for you taking a risk on me. This goes doubly for those of you who take the time to leave a rating or a review on Goodreads and Amazon. Yes, even the lady whose entire one-star Goodreads review of Peter the Wolf was “Awful, awful, awful book.” That’s still a review and a rating. It totally counts.

And finally, to all you awesome folks on Twitter, thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I dropped all forum promotions because they just didn’t work, and I left Facebook, MySpace, and G+ for the same reason. But even though I did a right lousy job of promoting myself on Twitter, you people picked up the slack by extending the reach of the few promotions I did, and you opened your wallets and took a risk on a writer you didn’t know. No other social platform is as social or generous as you. And yes, this is quality butt smooching, but It’s still genuine, and my gratitude comes from deep in my heart. Thank you, and I can only hope to help y’all with one of your projects one day. Because you’ve done A LOT to keep me going those last few years, and I’m only able to keep putting out new projects because of y’all. For that, I owe most of Twitter a hug.

And that concludes this longer than usual butt smooching. I’m currently playing Gravity Rush on my Vita, so I expect a gushing review of it in the very near future. I’m also reading a fantastic paranormal YS story on Wattpad, Windswept by Gwen Cole, and when I finish it, I’m sure another glowing review will be forthcoming for her too. I may have something to bitch about in the coming days, but right now, I’m just full of the love of you fine folks on Twitter.

Twitter branding, and a “contest”

So, in the wee early morning hours over on Twitter, I cracked 100,000 tweets. This is something of an accomplishment not just for the volume of my tweeting, but also for my continued desire to stay on the network. I haven’t wanted to stay with any forum longer than a year, and many communities make me feel like an outsider within a few short months. But I love twitter and never get tired of it or the people I follow. But this is because I’m really picky about who I follow.

I really hate following authors of a certain type. These are the people who talk about how we should all band together and support each other, but when you look through their tweets, you can’t find RTs for anyone else. If there is a RT, it’s a review for one of their books. So when they say, support the writers, they really just mean “support me.” This is a huge turn off for me. These people usually out themselves because the instant I follow them, they send a direct message like “Thanks for the follow! BUY MY BOOK!” And these people usually have a self-help book on how to publish for profit that includes all the usual rah-rah writing advice.

As much as I hate their methods, I have to admit, I’m not having much luck in the “branding” game. When people mention me they often say I’m a great art supporter, or I’m always a good social sharer. But it’s more rare for someone to say that they read my book and think others should try them out. My reputation is based more on my good deeds than it is on my creative efforts.

I’ve realized that I need help with branding, so to that end, I’ve started a Goodreads event going on until the end of this month, cheekily called The everyone’s a winner “contest.” The premise is simple enough: I’m willing to give out copies of any of my books for a limited time to people on Goodreads, and all I’m asking is that they add the books to their to-read shelves. No review or rating obligation is made by taking a book, but by having people add my books to their shelves, they also give me a little promotion via the Goodreads updates on their home page and through the email updates. If some of the people who take books also post reviews, that’s even better, and it’s hopefully a step in the right direction.

I only have 240 friends, and of the friends I’ve invited, only a few have responded so far. I’d like to make the same offer to y’all on my blog, so if any of you wanted to get a free copy of any book I’ve written, now’s the time to look over my back catalog and choose one. I want to state again that simply agreeing to pick up a copy does not obligate you to make a review. But if you finish reading the book, it would really help me out if you would leave a review or a rating.

Now that I’ve broken 100,000 tweets on Twitter, I’m going to be trying to promote my own stuff more often. I don’t know if it will help me gain new readers, but I do need to do a better job of letting people know that I have books for sale. After all, being known as a great sharer of tweet doesn’t pay nearly as much as being known as a great writer.

Fifty Shades of Ranting (Warning: LONG RANT)

Let’s talk about 50 Shades of Grey. No, don’t smile in preparation of another scathing review, because I’m ready to have a nice long rant about how full of shit some of you critics are, and I don’t care if you think you’ve got a great argument for why the books shouldn’t be published. Yes, I know it’s a Twilight fan-fiction that got a face-lift and went mainstream. Yes, I know it’s got BDSM themes, which is why I won’t be reading the books. Even the merest hint of these themes starts to eat at my nerves, and I can’t explore these ideas without remembering how much of my life belonged to other people who told me how to act, what to think, and when to think it.

But where I’m coming from is a place of anger after reading one review after another by women who have the same exact complaints that they had about Twilight. In fact, some of you seem to be buying the book because “Holy fuck, a book based on Twilight? I can shit all over someone else using the same arguments I was making ten years ago! How awesome is that?” Actually, it’s lame as fuck that you can carry a grudge this long, and it’s bordering on pathetic.

First of all, let me address the “badly written” fan club. We have yet to see a book hit the top of the best seller’s list that used the Queen’s bloody English, and no one is going to give the best selling writers any awards for their sterling prose being timeless, or even well-phrased. This kind of complaint is sour grapes, both from writers whose books will NEVER sell as well, and from avid readers whose favorite book heads to a factory undersold, remaindered, and forgotten. Boo-fucking-hoo, and get over yourselves. If you really think your book, or your favorite author’s book, is well written, then get out there and hustle that book with a POSITIVE message about the merits of the work itself without attacking someone on the best sellers list. If your message is “This book is better that that book,” you’re whining, and people will rightfully ignore the work you’re tying to pimp. (Probably while buying the book you’re spitting on, even if it’s just to see if they should be spitting too.)

And don’t hand me shit about this being a valid reason to go on the attack, because jealousy of success is never valid. As a self-published author, I’ve seen other self-published folks pick on established writers and say, “My writing is better than this author’s.” (IE, some wannabes hit on Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas to boost their own horror, a theme I once jokingly riffed on in a bad review of a Mamatas story, Sensation.) I’ve seen established authors advise that this approach does not work for making sales or finding new readers, and I agree with them. But man, some of those same published authors write a vampire book, and suddenly bitches just can’t resist saying, “my vampires are the real deal, unlike some posers. They don’t sparkle.” Well aren’t you just precious?

Setting aside fan-fiction—including my own—only one set of vampires in the world sparkle. No one else does it, so this bullshit of claiming it’s a trend is getting tired. No, there’s not an industry of sparkling vampires in teen literature, although there are a lot of teenage vampire stories. That’s because vampires are a popular trope. Which is what you wanted, isn’t it? For your tropes to become accepted and go mainstream? So if that’s what you wanted, why the fuck are you bitching all the time now? Those teens may graduate from the lighter stuff to your darker work if you’ll just be patient and stop dissing what they’re reading now. But if you don’t shut the fuck up, you’ll turn them off forever by coming across as bitter about someone else’s success. Which you are, by the way, and everyone can see it.

If you tell self-published people not to take this route, why in the fuck is it okay for you to go on the attack for this one exception? Is it because you’re jealous of the success of the pretty sparkles? YES, IT IS. I’ll say it again; it’s sour grapes, and you’ve got to let this grudge go. It’s getting so ugly that once an admitted fan-fiction of Twilight has become a cultural zeitgeist, some of you are queuing up your same tired pseudo-intellectual complaints based solely on this fact. That’s a sad grudge, and you need to move on.

Next, let me address the “poor examples of womanhood” crowd, because this group is the saddest, most deluded group of critics out there. I normally hate talking about feminism because I don’t feel right defining what is and isn’t feminism. But it’s been my understanding from my early teens that feminism fights to ensure that all women have a safe space to define themselves. This includes their sexuality, even if they choose to be a submissive in a BDSM relationship.

Feminism is supposed to tell us that it’s okay to be a tough businesswoman and never be a mother or a wife. Feminism also says it’s okay for a woman to choose to be a wife and a mother. AND, they can do both of these and still be allowed to have a career. They can be a soldier, and they can do anything a man can.

BUT feminism is also about breaking down gender roles so that a man can say, “Honey, I want to stay at home and raise the kids while you’re in the boardroom.” Feminism is supposed to make it okay for a boy to play with dolls without anyone beating him up. It’s supposed to allow girls to play with guns, or to take up “boyish” activities like playing video games without anyone looking down on them. Feminism is supposed to allow girls to explore their developing sexualities without someone telling them “God, you’re such a slut.”

Is all this true? “Well yes, Zoe, but the writer of 50 Shades of Grey is doing it wrong because—” STOP. If a woman writes a book that she considers sexually exciting to her, and other women buy it and consider it sexually exciting as well, then the real definition of feminism is, you let them enjoy their little bit of kink and keep your mouths shut. It’s fine if the kink kind of weirds you out, because it freaks me out so badly, I couldn’t even tie my ex-girlfriend up when she requested it. The closest we could come to bondage was her tying her own wrists together with slip knots and holding the ends of the ropes to make the “cuffs” tighter. I couldn’t do it myself. I couldn’t even fathom taking away someone’s freedom for the purpose of a fantasy because I remember losing my sense of self-control, and it upsets me to revisit those feelings even in a fictional setting.

But if you claim to be a feminist who wants to break down these roles of gender, and then you can still tell women who like 50 Shades of Grey “You’re doing feminism wrong,” then ladies, I’m sorry to break this to you: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. You are in fact holding up a certain role and enforcing it on other women as the right way for them to act, which means you’re not fighting patriarchy. You’re enforcing it and not realizing how you’ve allowed patriarchy to move the goalposts off of your field of debate and shift it back onto theirs. If you really mean that all women are equal in feminism, you need to bite your lip and stop criticizing other women for liking this book series. (Or for liking Twilight.)

Next, let me address the “co-dependency is evil” crowd, and this will take the longest and head to some personal places for me. But I have to go there because a lot of you are married women who are co-dependent, and you’re some straight up hypocrites for casting judgments on fictional forms co-dependency used as a method of conflict. Maybe these aren’t the perfect relationships you want to see, but nobody writes a perfectly happy relationship in fiction because that shit would be boring as fuck. Conflict is the heart of storytelling, and while you can claim that you didn’t like the way a conflict was handled, you can’t claim it’s “unhealthy” because it’s completely fictitious.

This “co-dependency is evil” claim is the same charge you leveled at Twilight, and you made up shit that didn’t happen in the book to support your claims. One of the things I see over and over is people saying, “Bella does everything Edward says.” Uh, no, she doesn’t. In fact, a great deal of the conflict in their story is that Edward tries to tell Bella what to do, and she ignores him. Edward says, “I don’t think you should be around Jacob,” so Bella…goes to see Jacob anyway. And this happens both before and after this point in the series. To make your claims, you have to ignore what the author actually wrote in order to come up with a “hidden agenda” that only exists in your deluded interpretations.

(Or you claim that Edward hurt Bella, and he was mean to her by leaving, and “that’s not what a healthy relationship is about.” Bullshit. We all know the saying, “You only hurt the ones you love,” and it’s true in all relationships, even healthy relationships. And again, this story needs to have a conflict, and the author chose to do it this way for her series. If Bella and Edward had been perfectly happy for four books straight, no one would have a reason to read that, would they? No. So let’s move on.)

But let’s set that aside, and I’ll talk about my co-dependency using themes from 50 Shades of Grey. Women are saying that because Christian pursued Anastasia, he was exploiting her. Okay, so let me talk about me and hubby. We met on a trans support forum, and he took an interest in me because I’d just posted a story retelling Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. (That’s right, some of my earliest work was fan-fic. What a shock.) In my version, the old friend arrives to find his best friend’s family has been cursed by a demon. The brother’s sibling was a pre-op trans who claimed that she tried to conjure a demon to change herself, and she blames herself for the decline of her father and brother. So in the end she castrates herself to commit suicide. Hubby read that and wrote to me to make sure I was not going to kill myself, and we started exchanging friendly emails.

Back up. What was hubby doing there on a trans support forum? He was running a search for a song lyric about Madison Ave, and ended up on our site, which was called Madison Ave. The moderator and site owner, also named Madison, was running a mirror of the webcomic Venus Envy, and hubby was reading that and lurking in the forum, learning about us. Hubby lurks in all kinds of forums, and ours was just a new place for him to learn. An atheist, he has lurked on Rapture Ready and on many other religious sites. He studies people and their behavior to try and understand them, and when he approached me, it was to try and understand my suffering as much as it was to talk about my early writing.

We were emailing each other for months, exchanging recipes and jokes when the tone of our messages began to change. Then he was flirting with me more and more often. He asked for a photo of me, and I decided to let him see me. Hubby liked what he saw, and he began to actively pursue me, even though I was not sure I wanted a man in my life, particularly before I had surgery and felt right “down there.” This kind of courtship moved to video chats, and then to arranged dates, where we would both watch the same movie, or we would eat meals together. He would have dinner while I ate lunch, but we had our web-cameras on, and we did this almost every day.

I couldn’t believe this man could really love me, because who would want a broken and ugly thing like me? I had so many insecurities about my appearance, about my bad teeth, about how he might react to me having a penis instead of a vagina. What if we couldn’t have sex? Would he still be able to love me if we couldn’t be intimate?

Hubby waved down all of my concerns, and while this was somewhat comforting, it was also unnerving. I’d been in a ton of relationships with women who insisted they were comfortable with who I was, and most left me saying things like “I’m leaving you for a real man.” I made those women so uncomfortable with our sexuality being decidedly lesbian that they had to hurt me to make themselves feel better. So here’s hubby, making the same promises that he can love me no matter what, and I couldn’t quite believe him, even if I had come to love him, and even though I’d become co-dependent on him for emotional support.

I told hubby I couldn’t see him without fixing my teeth, so he paid for me to have oral surgery and get dentures. He paid for a round trip ticket to Italy, so that I could come see him and still have a way to get home if I didn’t feel right with him. He pursued me relentlessly, even in the face of my constant rejections. Is that unhealthy? No, I didn’t think so, and still don’t. It was simply one part of our evolving relationship.

I can’t say with authority whether Christian’s pursuit of Anastasia is healthy or unhealthy, because, again, I can’t read the books. But I do know that this is a story which a woman feels is exciting enough to her to write and promote, and which other women also find exciting enough to buy and read. Again, this gets right back to the principles of feminism. We should all be allowed a safe space to decide what kind of partnerships we have. So if some women decide that they want to be controlled, shouldn’t we respect that they made that choice?

Let me get back to me and hubby. Because of our distance, I felt I maintained some control in our relationship. I was afraid of closing the distance not because I thought hubby would take over my life. I was afraid he’d see me as broken neurotic fake woman and cast me aside after I’d given him my heart. But that didn’t happen. Instead, I only validated his beliefs that we were meant to be together. He even started to do something unthinkable and convinced me that there was nothing broken about me. He convinced me to promote my writing and myself, and if I seem to have great self-esteem in my appearance now, it’s only because hubby convinced me to stop thinking I was ugly and broken.

When hubby and I are together, he smacks my butt and clings to me. He talks about how I’m his trophy wife, and he loves the way other men look at me and wonder what I’m doing with an ogre like him. These things are kind of cute the way he does them because he offsets his “playful sexism” with his other roles in our lives. He does almost all the cooking, and even when I try to do the dishes, he moves me aside and says he can do it because he likes cleaning for me. He handles most of the shopping, though he calls home to ask what I feel like eating, and he won’t let me turn the question back over to him. I have to phone ahead and ask him what he wants as a preemptive strike if I want to be surprised for once.

So for all he does for me, I do the laundry and the dusting, and we split up the other house duties. We’re codependent, and we’re happy about it. We don’t have to be together 24/7, but when we are together, we orbit each other, and become aware of one another’s movements. If I hold out my hand, I know hubby will take it. We hate being apart even for the few hours he’s at work, and when hubby goes on week-long business trips, both of us feel lost without each other. We don’t sleep at night, and we both tend to drink a little more.

Hubby often says he can’t remember what single life was like before I came along. I remember, and I remember that I was miserable. So, this “co-dependency is evil” ideal? It doesn’t sit well with me. And as I said before this long ass confession, many of the women criticizing co-dependency in fiction are themselves in co-dependent relationships with their spouses. Which will lead some of you to say that there’s a right and wrong kind of co-dependency, and that these writers are depicting the wrong kind, the unhealthy kind. That leads me to say, respectfully, “you’re full of shit, ladies.” Because again, if you only want to celebrate the kind of relationships that you approve of, you’re only two steps away from supporting patriarchy all over again. You have to allow other women to enjoy their fantasies of the “wrong kind” of relationship, or you’re doing feminism wrong by defining what women are and aren’t allowed to think.

And finally, let me address all of you complaining “why is this book so successful?” Because this is a double whammy that comes back on you twice. First while many women are buying the book and praising it, they wouldn’t know the series exists without your constant bitching and moaning about “this horrible series.” You’ve brought it to their attention, and you’ve provoked their curiosity with your hate. It was your hate that made Twilight a success too, and ten years on, people are STILL buying Twilight based on your inability to stop complaining. Fandoms are lazy these days and can’t sustain praise the way you haters sustain your constant online diatribes. So the series audience grows because of you, not the fandom.

Secondly, there’s a whole faction of people who are buying the books knowing you hate the idea, but you want to read it and give your full educated opinion about how terrible the writing is, and about how destructive the moral values are inside. Well, by buying the books, you are contributing to their rising success, and to the spread of those same heinous moral values. You can be sure the author isn’t reading your reviews and boo-hooing over you. No, she’s laughing like a loon as her bank account explodes with your support of her story.

Do you think it matters to her that 50,000 of her 100,000 buyers hated her guts? No. But it should reach through your supposedly vastly superior intellects that by picking up the series, reading it, and reviewing it, you’re doing more for the author than the vast majority of her fans would. You’re doing all the heavy lifting for her promotions by generating a zeitgeist level of awareness for her books, and for the topic of so-called unhealthy BDSM relationships. So, how smart are you feeling now?

You can keep on going with your complaints and ignore what I’m saying to you. You can come up with some weak ass excuse for why you still need to diss books like 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight, but by doing so, you are undermining the same feminist values you claim to support, and you are helping the author to reach new readers when your supposed aim was to discourage the spread of this series. Do you want to make these series die? Then close your mouths, stop talking about them, and get on with living your lives. Otherwise, you’re just contributing to the same problem that you’re bemoaning.

Book review: King’s Justice

I’m putting King’s Justice down 160 pages in, or roughly at halfway point in the book, and I can’t recall when I’ve felt more cheated by a sequel. I loved the first book in this series, King Maker, but even then, I’d noted that the book spent more time with the villains than it did with the heroes. This felt fitting to me in the first book, because Arthurian legends aren’t so much about King Arthur as they are about his kingdom. Nevertheless, I assumed that with the street gangs in King’s Indianapolis hood having fallen apart, the second book would be more about King and his crew of “knights.”

No, instead, we’re introduced to a group of gang bangers so similar that even if one is fae and the other is a human haunted by his childhood encounter with the lady of the lake, there’s virtually no difference in their methods of running gangs. Both men strive to look hard in everything they do, and as a result, neither man has any personality, nor do they give readers any reason to ride shotgun with them.

I think that if this were an gangland urban fantasy without trying to cling to Arthurian legend, it might have worked. If I were rating this as a standalone novel with no connection to King Arthur, my expectations would be vastly different. But this second book in an Arthurian series is a bait and switch, and the heroes have not had a role in this story at all. They’re an afterthought. Everyone is an afterthought, and I’ve struggled to make it this far due to a wandering, head hopping narration and a lack of direction for any character, good or bad. More and more new characters are piled on, and I just don’t care about any of them.

Another problem is the depiction of all women in this book. I realize that the author is trying to show how these gangstas and hustlers think, but given the amount of head hopping already going on, I would have liked to see something more substantial in the way of character development for the ladies returning from the first book. But even when they are given time to develop, it’s in repetitive ways that seem to reinforce that all women are just sneaky hos looking for a way up the food chain.

My breaking point finally came when a gang lieutenant is given The Ring, allowing him to turn invisible and beat a larger man with impunity. Cribbing The Hobbit in the middle of what was supposed to be a retelling of King Arthur’s legend was one plot device too far, and I only made it another five pages before I decided to drop the story. Even the return of Dred (Mordred) couldn’t keep me locked in this dull pattern of self-destructive posturing.

Given how much I gushed over the first book, I really wanted this to go somewhere, and it never did. This story loses focus so badly that even though I bought the third book, King’s War, I’m not going to bother reading it either. With apologies to the author, whom I have great respect for due to his much better writing in The Devil’s Marionette and King Maker, I give King’s Justice 1 star. Again, I feel like the victim of a bait and switch. I was told to expect a story of the Knights of Indianapolis, and instead and forced to ride with a gang of unmemorable and unlikable knaves instead.

Who are you callin’ evil, buddy?

Today, I’m going to talk about vampires, and about why I don’t read vampire hunter stories where the vampire hunters are seen as infallible and fighting an eternal war against “pure evil.”

First of all, vampire hunters usually have similar reasons for wanting to kill vampires. A sibling or parent was murdered by one, and thus, the hunter-to-be was exposed to the truth of the existence of an ancient race of blood drinkers. None of these hunters ever asks, “Why is it that we don’t see these creatures more often?” (Or if they do, the answer doesn’t make any sense. More on that in a tic.) Indeed, in almost every valiant vampire hunter story, normal humans have never heard of vampires despite the “monsters” leaving behind trails of bodies with tell-tale bite marks.

The reason we don’t know about them, even in this nonsensical context, is because vampires are an endangered species. They are vastly outnumbered by humans, and their fictional weaknesses make them all too easy to kill if they’re exposed to the general population. But, this hiding habit doesn’t make sense if the vampires then get up every night and go find some family to kill, leaving behind only one survivor, and usually leaving a huge gory orgy of evidence behind that STILL doesn’t tip off the police about their existence.

Think about a vampire bite wound. It is an orgy of evidence. It’s a lot of saliva left around a bite mark with a distinctly human shape, and even if you accept the idea that nobody among our pathologists noticed the same recurring bite marks for the last two hundred years of our developing criminal sciences, the arrival of DNA testing would have made this kind of plot incomprehensibly stupid in a modern setting. Yet the trope persists that nobody knows jack shit about a race feeding from our populations, ever. It makes no sense, and writers who keep falling back on it without examining the how and why of this race being kept a secret are lazy. Vampires may be cheap pop culture art, but that doesn’t mean every vampire writer should be praised for rattling of a carbon copy of the Van Helsing legend with a new hunter and a slightly different vampire. Pastiche should only get you so far as an artist before someone rightly points out that you’re just a copycat ripping off the work of better and more talented artists.

Something else that doesn’t make sense is the vampire depicted as a monstrous feeding machine who never hunts discreetly. Vampires are often described as being hundreds of years old, yet extra time does not grant them extra wisdom. They remain constantly aggressive and animalistic, like a young male human hunter. It’s no wonder that most of these kinds of ultra-violent vampires are written by men, because this kind of killer is simply an extension of a violent male fantasy about power. The vampire exists to give the writer an outlet for violent desires that they wouldn’t express in real life, and the vampire hunter’s actions “absolve” the writer of the fantasy.

This is kind of like the socially acceptable form of the hack story where a writer has a character molest or rape children with graphically explicit details, but then concludes the story by having one of the victim’s parents kill the rapist in a moment of gory denouement. Most publishers hate this kind of rapist fantasy and don’t want to publish it. But sit around a forum of editors and agents, and you learn how many guys send in this stuff to express their pedophile urges, and then “absolve” themselves by killing their “Gary Stu.” (Which they will obviously deny has any resemblance to themselves.)

The tropes of vampire and vampire killer are the same concept, but one which readers are willing to embrace because violence of this type is a-okay in any context. Even if it doesn’t make sense, and even if the level of atrocities contradicts the world setting. Sexual fantasies in any context are considered icky porn, but you can get as ridiculously violent and gory as you like in your vampire fantasy, and you’ll still get praised for your “no-holds barred” style. (Provided you can write sentences coherently, of course. There are limits to an editor’s patience, and bad grammar is only one of those limits. I digress.)

But set all that aside, because I’m going to send your thoughts in a different direction. If we readers know and accept that vampires are an endangered species, then we have to eventually realize that vampire hunters are the evil people, not the vampires.

You’re shaking your head and saying “bullshit,” so let me exchange the word vampire for shark. In fact, we’ll look at Martin Brody from the book Jaws. In later years, Peter Benchley came to regret making Jaws because it created unrealistic fears of sharks, and he and his wife became speakers for shark preservation based on his realization that shark attacks are rare, and are not the result of humans being hunted. Rather, the sharks mistake us for other prey.

In the story, Brody is looking for one shark responsible for the deaths of several victims in Amity. But let us suppose that instead of seeking out just one killer shark, the hero decided that all sharks were evil and had to be wiped out to save the human race from this dire threat. Then, it’s not the shark who is a monster. It’s the human who develops a life-long prejudice about a predator who poses no risk to anyone not in a coastal city, town, or village. It’s the crazed human hunter who develops a plan to hound another species into extinction, even though the animal they’re obsessing over poses no risk of wiping out our surplus populations.

This example still works if you move onto land and use bears, wolves, cougars, coyotes, dingoes, or any four-legged hunter who might prey upon a human because starvation pushed them to desperation. In any case where an animal kills and eats a human, humans respond by killing the animal responsible. Why? Because we “can’t risk” a single predator getting a taste for our blood, even though our populations vastly outnumber theirs.

Humans will blindly accept that a predator killing a deer or an elk as a part of the “circle of life,” but we don’t want anything to keep our populations in check. (Not even diseases, really.) So even as we push out every other species on the planet with our constant expansion, we are never evil for what we do. Meanwhile, a single predator who eats even one of us must be killed, because it threatens our place at the absolute top of the food chain. Deep in our hearts, we all fear being food to something bigger and meaner than us. So when we see something displaying the ability to hunt and kill us, we kill the “sinning” animal.

BUT, we do not push for the total elimination of furry four-legged hunters, because we also recognize that predators serve a purpose in keeping other animal populations in check. If there were no predators to keep deer in check, their population growth could lead to vast areas defoliated and stripped of vegetation. This in turn can lead to famine, and to pestilence as a result of lowered immune systems through malnutrition. So we accept that when a wolf eats Bambi, it had to happen for the balance of nature to be preserved.

So, why is it that this same concept is never explored in vampire fiction? Why are vampire hunters never more closely examined for their desire to wipe out all vampires? If we accept that everything created serves an ecological purpose, then a vampire human who hunts normal humans is meant to keep our rising populations in check. It is not evil for them to exist, nor is it evil for them to need to eat to survive. The only thing that makes them evil is our perspective, being their food.

To a cow heading for the slaughterhouse, humans are some evil motherfuckers. To a chicken killed inhumanely by strangling machine, humans are evil. To any pig hung by its back legs and dangled squealing for its life before its throat is slashed, humans are evil. But to the human eating the meat of these animals, it’s just the way things are.

And sure, we could kill our food animals more humanely. Sure, we could let them live longer before we consumed them, allowing them to roam free-range to give them a better quality of life. But these concessions to our food are expensive, and hey, we’re hungry for a bacon cheeseburger with a side of chicken nuggets now, and it doesn’t matter whether the animals feel fear or not, because they’re just food. There’s nothing evil about us killing our food, is there? Circle of life, man. Balance of nature, and all that.

So, why is a vampire evil for feeling the same way about us as its food source? Why is a vampire evil for not extending us empathy or mercy? Because we outnumber them, and because we’re so vain, we think this whole planet, indeed this whole cosmos, was made solely for us. So if anything threatens our place as the most lethal killers in the world, we’re going to hunt them down and kill them with extreme prejudice.

If that isn’t evil, I don’t know what is.

I have a guest post! Oh, and a ramble about inclusion…

Today, I have…a guest post on Suvudu about writing trans characters and YA fiction! Yeah! How the hell did I pull that off? Well, I read a post by Matt Staggs about Tiamat on the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, and I retweeted it for him and then replied how I loved that show and thought it was a great Saturday morning cartoon. So he asked if I wanted a guest post on my book. Funny how things work out like that sometimes. (^_^)

I should leave you with just one thing to read so you don’t feel burdened, but yesterday, I started reading a blog post over hubby’s shoulder. Specifically this blog post talking about the comedy Community, and how Abed Nadir was an important character to her because he moves like her, and gives her someone to identify with because she has autism.

This article had me nodding my head right away and shouting, “That’s why I write! Because that’s what I want too!” It also had me thinking about how I only had one character that I felt that way about in my whole childhood while watching Robotech, and later on I stopped feeling that way because Yellow Dancer, AKA: Lt. Lance Belmont, AKA: Lancer, was not really gender-variant because he wanted to be. Rather, he was in disguise because it kept him alive and working as a freedom fighter at a time when the humans were turning on each other and aiding the Invid.

But the thing is, at the time that I first saw the show, this was the first time I’d seen anyone depicted as gender-variant for any reason, and briefly, I felt a connection to the show that I hadn’t had before. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the first two story arcs of Robotech, and I loved the soap opera nature of every episode as much as I loved the giant robots. I loved that the wars had consequences, and that characters I’d grown to love had died in the course of the series. Few kids’ shows have ever touched on death in war as a topic, and I doubt few ever will again.

But that brings me back to the recognition that I’ve never seen a show with a trans character who was a part of the cast, and whose transsexuality was just one facet of their character, not the way that Abed Nadir’s undiagnosed Asperger’s is portrayed in Community. There’s a lot of people who could come up with quick answers that if I wanted to see more stories with characters like me, I should just write some. Well I have, but this misses the point of the problem.

The thing with Abed is, someone who does not have the condition set out to make a sympathetic character who was a part of the main cast. So Abed and his issues are front and center even when the story isn’t specifically about him. And, as Julia points out in her post, it’s electrifying to finally find a character who makes someone go, “Oh my gosh, that’s me too!” I’ve read several books and short stories that gave me this feeling, always from indie authors, but I’ve never had this happen watching a TV show.

Gays have any number of shows where a prominent character is gay. The writers of many of these shows aren’t gay, but they made an effort to write a sympathetic gay character and make them a part of the show. And that is something I’d like to see done in any US show, be it a comedy or a paranormal show. Hell, I’d even watch a cop show if they gave me a character that didn’t come off as a walking cliché, and I HATE cop shows. I just want a trans character in the US mainstream culture written by someone who isn’t trans that makes me feel excited to watch because at long last, there’s someone in the regular cast who I identify with.

And yes, I realize that it’s a long shot finding this in a US TV show right now, when the vast majority of shows are written by men, and when diversity in writing staffs are at an all-time low. Which is one reason I usually don’t bring this up. But Julia’s post about Community reminded of what it feels like to have a special connection to a character.

And, oddly enough, that’s why I got so excited about Teen Wolf. Which may sound odd, but there’s a scene in episode two when Stiles tells Scott that he has to draw back from others and be careful because of his newly acquired lycanthropy, and Scott lashes out and says, “This is finally my chance to have a normal life! I just want to be freaking normal!” And from that moment, I was hooked on Scott, because that’s all I’ve wanted my whole life.

Which brings me to Abed for my close. Here’s a character who demystifies autism and makes it approachable and understandable. He shows up in episode after episode, and people see he’s not really so strange. It normalizes him, and in doing so, it makes autism okay in people’s minds without beating them over the head about tolerance. It moves people past mere tolerance of autism and into acceptance, which is way more important. Tolerance is saying, “I don’t like you or what’s wrong with you, but I won’t hurt you for being this way.” But it also means they won’t bother making an effort to learn more, or to make others with the same condition feel comfortable.

I can’t ever feel normal, not when I see stories about a trans child in Germany institutionalized because her father doesn’t approve of her gender, and the courts agree and ignore EU human rights laws to lock her away. I can’t feel normal when CeCe McDonald is attacked by people trying to kill her, and then is imprisoned in a men’s facility for three years for defending her life. I can’t feel normal when the only show to feature trans characters is a half assed slapstick skit comedy about men cross-dressing to take women’s jobs. I can’t feel normal when every documentary or reality show about us is focused so tightly on our genitals or our awkward transitions, and whether or not we’re having “the surgery.” Some of us don’t get or even want the surgery, and people shouldn’t obsess over what’s in our pants. And right now, that’s the only message the media puts out: “Trannies: What’s in their panties?!?! SO WEIRD!!!” FEH!

I want to feel normal, and to have a freaking normal life. It’s not good enough that I write a story about someone like me. I want someone who isn’t trans to write a character who, like Abed, convinces me that someone out there gets us, and I want to feel like a part of a show’s fan community because someone shares my problems, my hopes, and my condition.

It’s a tall order, but I want to hope that I will see such a character in my lifetime, and not just because it would help other people see us as normal. I want it because some kid growing up feeling alone and confused about themselves could watch the same show and realize, Oh wow, there’s nothing wrong with me. I AM normal. I want someone in TV Land to give our kids something I could never have: a place to belong in their fantasy world.

Is that so much to ask? Characters like Abed Nadir make me believe it is not.

Me and my muse…

Not really getting any writing done this week, but even though I just wrote about my doubts about writing, it’s not depression keeping the words from flowing. I mean, I am depressed, but this has more to do with comparing myself to others than it does with my self-doubts and typical loathing opinion of my hackery. In any case, these feelings aren’t the source of the word blockade.

No, I’m not writing this week because I got in a minor spat with my muse about the werewolf story, and she’s stopped talking to me. All I said was that the middle needed some form of tension before the villains show up, and bam, she was cold just like that. I can’t even talk her into a new episode of All Maid Up at this point, and I had no problems with the directions she wanted to go in this season.

Some people may think I’m joking, or at the very least exaggerating when I talk about my muse. I even know writers who insisted in past blog posts that there’s no such thing as a muse, and that it’s all part of us. They say that even if there’s no spark of inspiration, I should have butt in chair every day, cranking out words even if the words suck. Well I don’t roll that way, and considering that I’ve out written most pros on my good days (I get gusts of up to 15K in one day. Yeah, smoke on that, bitches!), I don’t feel I need to take advice about how I write. I also don’t agree that the muse is simply another part of me, because when she’s not talking, what I come up with is pure shit. Really, I have whole trunk novels where I attempted to write without my muse, and those books are awful. Like, I won’t even show them to hubby.

At times, I’ve had spats with my muse because the stories she wanted to explore won’t make money in decent amounts. The topics she wants to explore make normal people squeamish, to say the least, and so sometimes I begin pushing for something a bit more mainstream. This werewolf book, being a YA with gay characters, was her attempt to appease me with something less squicky than her prior proposals. And I don’t think it’s a bad story. I just think that the middle needs some conflict to keep it interesting. Every scene happens a little too easily, in my opinion, and there’s not much for the main character to feel worried over. The narrator’s boyfriend is descended from an African wolf who consumed moon rocks, which means he’s smaller than traditional werewolves, doesn’t have blurring super speed, and thus is not very threatening. So, feeling the story needed a little something something to make it more exciting, I suggested one minor change to the muse’s plans, and she went all super-diva on me and walked off.

I have no idea how long she’ll be gone this time. She’s had short temper tantrums that only lasted a week or two, and then there was that time she walked out for two years. I’m sure that I can eventually lure her back out and get back to work, but in the meantime, all I can do is apologize to those of you waiting to see what happens to Ginger after that really tense last episode of All Maid Up. I’d love to tell you, really. But my writing partner is pissed at me for questioning her genius, and for now, all I can do is sit at my desk with Word open, waiting for her to forgive me for my slight.

And on a final note, sometimes I envy mainstream writers who just push out the same book with new characters according to a tried and true formula. I may hate that safe shit myself, but it does pay the bills with regular sales, and using a formula probably never means having a long fight with an inner voice whose suddenly decided that she’s too good for me. (9_9)