Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 54

Writing Wednesday: 13 Brainstorming Exercises

Here are some useful brainstorming exercises to help you with your novel and to get your mind thinking in different directions.

Choose a movie you love, then think of a different, equally happy ending. How far back do you have to go? Then think of another one ending, this time a sad one.

Find two characters from two existing books/TV shows/movies and write a scene where they meet or take on an adventure together.

Think of a favorite villain. Give that villain a different backstory.

Make a list of ten reasons why a romantic couple might meet and hate each other at first. Write only the last one.

Imagine our world with one invention/discovery that did not happen or an inventor/scientist/artist who did not live.

Think of a moment in history that might have gone the other way and write either the moment when that change took place or this year's election if that change had taken place.

Watch only the first ten minutes of a series TV show you know well. Turn off the TV and write the rest of the episode. Then watch.

Read the last chapter of a book. Then sit down and invent the first chapter out of your own head.

Write down the first sentence of a well-known novel. Take it in a completely different direction.

Choose a favorite classic and write a list of 10 things that are rooted in history and would make no sense in a modern version. Then sketch out a modern retelling without those parts.

Imagine three well-known figures from different time periods meeting in a bar in purgatory. What do they know about each other? What do they hate? What do they say?

Who is the first person you will meet in heaven? What will you say to that person and what will s/he say to you? Who is the tenth person you will meet in heaven? What will you do on the one year anniversary of your arrival in heaven?

Think of a book or movie you hate. What would make it better? Write the better version.

Lee Child's brilliant answer to important writing question

What question?

Go here to find out:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/a-simple-way-to-create-suspense/?smid=tw-share

Excerpt:

So writers are taught to focus on ingredients and their combination.
They’re told they should create attractive, sympathetic characters, so
that readers will care about them deeply, and then to plunge those
characters into situations of continuing peril, the descent into which
is the mixing and stirring, and the duration and horrors of which are
the timing and temperature.

But it’s really much simpler than that. “How do you bake a cake?” has
the wrong structure. It’s too indirect. The right structure and the
right question is: “How do you make your family hungry?”

Holiday Book Recs

For middle grade:
Paige by Page by Laura Lee Gulledge
Ordinary Magic by Caitlen Rubino-Bradway
Goblin Secrets by William Alexander
Liar and Spy by Rebecca Stead
The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
See You at Harry's by Jo Knowles

For young adults:
The Maze Runner by James Dashner
Legend by Marie Lu
Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
White Cat by Holly Black
The Diviners by Libba Bray
Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler
Rival by Sara Bennett Wealer
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
Grave Mercy by Robin Lafevers
13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson
The Book of Blood and Shadow by Robin Wasserman
I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga
Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Blackwood by Gwenda Bond
Seraphina by Rachel Hartman
Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson
Lips Touch by Laini Taylor
Ms. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
Everyday by David Levithan
Vessel by Sarah Beth Durst
For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund
Back When You Were Easier to Love by Emily Wing Smith
Ashfall by Mike Mullin
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
The Silence of Murder by Dand Mackall
Waiting by Carol Lynch Williams
Fair Coin by EC Myers
The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen
Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake
Catching Jordan by Miranda Kennealy

For adults:
A Different Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce
Cold Magic by Kate Elliott (or anything else)
Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis
Banner of the Damned by Sherwood Smith
Your Brain at Work by David Rock
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
What Angels Fear by C. S. Harris
The Killing Moon by N.K. Jemisin
Heroes Adrift by Moira J. Moore
Younger Next Year by Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge
No Limits by Chrris Wellington
Blue Skies from Pain by Stina Leicht
The Lock Artist by Steve Hamilton
Walking the Perfect Square by Reed Farrel Coleman
The Righteous by Michael Wallace
The Book of Mormon Girl by Joanna Brooks
Austenland, Midnight in Austenland or The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale
Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowall

On Depression

It is interesting, having been someone who suffered from a long bout of depression, to see someone very close to me suffering from it as well. Interesting in a bad way, not a good way. Here are some things that I think are important to remember:

1. If someone tells you they are depressed, do not give them a list of reasons why they should be happy. Do not try to convince them to "snap out of it." Do not try to tell them that they are wrong to be depressed, that they sould praise God for all their blessings, that there is nothing really, seriously wrong with their life. Instead, listen and make yourself someone who "understands."

2. Someone who is depressed has probably thought through all of these things already and is at a loss as to why they continue to be depressed, even so. They probably have spent a downward-thinking cycle, telling themselves that they must be a terrible person, that they can't even be happy about happy things, that they can't see their own blessings. It is not helpful to contribute to this cycle.

3. If someone is depressed, also do not tell them that you also have been lonely, sad, or that you were picked on in school, that you had no friends, and that you just "kept at it" and had success "being who you are." Unless you were also depressed and thinking about ending your life, you may take this as a chance to learn about depression and not assume that you already understand what it is like.

4. People who are depressed may say things that other people say, like, I have no friends. Or, I'm not good at anything. Or, I'm fat and ugly. Or, everyone is mean to me. BUT (and here is the key): their sense of reality and the reality that others perceive is not the same. This is one of the main symptoms of having a mental illness. So instead of trying to talk them out of the depression, take this as a very serious sign that something is wrong.

5. Imagine for a moment what it is like to be depressed. Your mind is ill. It is unreliable. The very organ that most people use to help them sort out the world, to tell them what to do, to give them information to help them make decisions--isn't working. Think about how frightening that would be. You can't rely on any of the signals you normally rely on. You don't know anything. Everything seems wrong, but when you try to make it right, it doesn't work.

6. It would be great if someone who is depressed could rely on the opinions of others around. But the problem is that, as with everyone else, depressed people tend to get positive feedback (in a strange way) from those who are as depressed and unreasonable as they are. So they often stop listening to the people who were once closest to them, who are giving them the best, truest information they know how.

7. Friends and family really do tend to become fatigued dealing with depression. They become depressed trying to help. And sometimes, the unrelenting horror can be enough that they withdraw from the person who needs their support the most. Sometimes this simply has to happen to allow others to keep up their mental health, as well. But it means that a depressed person may actually be losing friends because of the depression. And talking about problems to others can sometimes make things worse in this way.

Friday Tri: Tis the Season

Many Holiday traditions focus around rich, decadent food, but there
are good reasons for this, even beyond the obvious ones, like the fact
that we humans are built to enjoy food because well, if we didn’t enjoy
food, we’d probably have died off a long time ago. It’s hard work to get
food, after all, and we’d likely have given up on it if we didn’t have a
strong drive to eat and derive enjoyment from said eating.

In tropical climates, there is not as much seasonal change and less
need to “store up fat” for winter. I suspect that traditions of Holiday
food there are very different than here in the north where I live.
Europe is a dark place in the winter, and it may seem like the sun and
growing season will never return.

In the years before we had easy transportation of food from other
climates, it was important for most people in this climate to put on a
little weight after the Harvest and in the early part of winter, when
food from the harvest was still plentiful and had not yet spoiled.
Putting on ten pounds at Christmas time was a survival mechanism, to
help get through winter months until spring, when the earliest crops
could be harvested and eaten.

We think of peasants in the Middle Ages spending every minute of
their lives doing hard labor, but it isn’t true, especially during the
winter. Most people who worked on a farm did much less work over the
winter holidays. They still had to wake up to do milking and there were
other jobs to be done that didn’t have to do with planting, like fixing
equipment that had been broken during the summer season or sewing
clothes, but peasants also spent a lot of time sleeping, conserving
energy so they didn’t lost any more weight than they naturally did as
they transitioned into the lean months before food was readily available
again.

In these harsh conditions, it makes sense that people ate as much as
they possibly could. Meat, any kind of fatty foods, sweets, were in some
sense good for them.There are both historical and cultural reasons that
this tradition has remained.

But since we no longer live in a time where hunger is constantly
looming overhead, I suspect our Holiday habits will change. I don’t know
if most people gain weight during the season, but it may be that those
who are trying hardest not to gain weight are most likely to do so. Some
ideas I have if you are concerned about weight over the holidays:

1. Let yourself have the one thing that you care about the most.
Think about what treat you love the most and indulge in that one freely,
without recriminations. You may be surprised to discover that you don’t
want the others as much.

2. Train yourself to notice the sensation of fullness and stop when
you are actually full. When I was growing up, my mother was always
telling me to clean my plate. Well, that didn’t teach me to pay
attention to my body signaling whether I wanted more or not. And that in
turns leads to over-eating and then feeling bad and feeling sick and
painfully gorged. I don’t like that feeling and most people don’t.

3. Eat slowly. I’m not saying you have to eat tiny bits or chew for
hours. Just enjoy the conversation and other things around you.

4. Don’t go to holiday meals starving. Don’t feel obliged to eat a
salad beforehand to counteract the bad food, but don’t starve yourself
all day, either. That will only make you more likely to eat too much,
too fast, and end up wishing you hadn’t.

Have a Happy Holiday Season. Don’t try to lose weight, and don’t make
yourself miserable. Regular good eating habits are pretty much going to
work now as they always do. Trust yourself and if you gain a little
weight, what’s New Years for?

Real Life Motherhood and My History With American Political Feminism

I remember being a happy feminist in college. Feminism then meant that you stood up for women in trouble, that you talked about problematic male/female power dynamics in traditional classic novels, that you discussed whether or not the metaphoric use of the word “rape” did harm to the cause of women, and you argued that more powerful women was a good thing for men, too.

Then I went to grad school. And the world became immensely more complicated. Where before, I had been able to easily distinguish between men who openly supported women's causes and those who openly stated that they thought women should stay at home and raise babies, now there were large numbers of men around me who INSISTED that they were all for women's rights. I was at Princeton, mind you, which when I went in the 90s had only been open to female undergraduate students for about

ten years. That means that a bunch of the profs there were really still used to the old way of doing things. They were honestly so blind to their prejudices that they were dangerous people. They claimed to want to hire full-time female profs, but were only waiting for the day when women were doing work “at the level of men.” Because poor women, they had been cut out of opportunities for a long time and they just didn't have the support they needed to do “important research.”

I watched the untenured assistant profs (most of them women) teach a lot of the classes and then one by one, leave the university. One of them had a baby and followed her husband to Harvard. The male profs shrugged their shoulders and said, well, she didn't want to be tenured here. Not our fault. One wrote a really nasty letter to the university about how all her work on female writers had been deemed “not up to our standards” and she was ignored. One of them felt shunted off into teaching about GDR literature, a class students said they wanted and none of the tenured profs wanted to teach. Then she went up for tenure and was told her work wasn't on important enough literature because it was GDR.

I had come to the department wanting to study women's literature, though I didn't have a specific time period in mind yet. I ended up being very interested in two periods, one was the late eighteenth-century when female novelists absolutely dominated, in almost all of Europe. In America this didn't happen until the nineteenth century. I was especially interested in Sophie von La Roche, who wrote a LOT of books about women which sold well to women and who had been entirely forgotten by history, except for the first novel she wrote, which Goethe “oh so kindly” offered to edit for her. The novel, Die Geschichte des Fraulein von Sternhemin's, is a really interesting book that has a double mother-daughter plot structure where there is a lot of mirroring going on. At the time, Goethe went on and on about how much he had had to “help” her “fix” the novel, because of errors in it. Yes, there were errors, but almost no one saw how brilliant this novel is. I wanted to write about female Bildungsromane (novels of development) and how motherhood and mirroring and gender issues are so important in them.

Well, guess what? I was told if I wanted to talk about Bildungsromane in the eighteenth century, I couldn't do it without talking about Goethe. So I had to rewrite my ENTIRE dissertation so that it could also be about Goethe. The profs involved in this (I was told I couldn't have a female assistant prof as my advisor in the kindest terms—it was for my benefit because I wouldn't have the credentials necessary to get a job if I had a lowly assistant prof) were all supposedly trying to “help me” write a better dissertation. I cried and screamed and told them I was leaving. And then they acted like I was an emotional female wreck (which at that point, I probably was—talk about gas-lighting) and convinced me to come back, do the rewrite so I could finish the damn dissertation and defend it.

I tried to explain at my defense why gender studies mattered to me. The entire defense was about Goethe's novel (which I argued had a shitload of weird gender stuff going on it) and they patronized me enormously and finally passed me (as a courtesy to my advisor). I was the ONLY woman who had ever had a baby while in grad school there, and was clearly not their normal sort of student. Women grad students either gave up the idea of family to devote themselves to the work or well, there wasn't any or. There were women who had babies, but they were married to the male grad students. I was this liminal inbetween that no one knew how to deal with.

Then I went off to work for nothing at the university I had started at, while my husband got his degree and he and I worked child-care around our two schedules. Ironically, I ended up getting turned down for a full-time position by this university as well, though I have never been able to quite figure out why, since they hired a woman who seemed less threatening on the one hand and also more dedicated to academia (since I was trying to publish fiction). I gave up academia and turned to full-time writing.

But while I had been at Princeton, I had taken some awesome classes outside my department (classes I didn't get any credit for there) by women who were doing interesting work. One was Elaine Showalter, from whom I took a class on American nineteenth-century literature, including white and black women writers. I wrote a paper on Louisa May Alcott's really interesting “hidden” work, published under a pseudonym. (I highly recommend this, if all you've read of Alcott is her Little Women series.) Anyway, out of this class came an understanding about the really difficult relationship between American political feminism (Suffrage) and the Abolition Movement. Women were all for getting rid of slavery in America, but not so much about equal rights for black and white women. When it came down to it, there was at least a portion of the abolition movement that was territorial and about keeping white men away from black women and stopping miscegenation. There was also enormous jealousy between white women writers and black women writers.

I also took a class from April Alliston, who was writing really interesting articles about the role of women in literature from the eighteenth century in Europe that was along the lines of my work. She was one of the few profs that I felt comfortable bringing my knitting to while she lectured. I don't know why this mattered to me particularly, but I had the sense in her class that women didn't have to posture and be super women in order to be interesting. I had a good dose of French Feminism at some point during grad school also, and began to wonder about what seemed like American Political Feminism's insistence that men and women were not different (a point I vacillate on) and that if only women had equality and were allowed everything men were allowed, all would be well. What about “feminine” values like motherhood, softness, the indescribable, ineffable—qualities that were often attached to biological femininity? What if American Political Feminism won and these qualities were no longer valued at all? Was that a good thing or not a good thing?

In grad school, I remember a Mormon friend of mine, a mother of four whose husband was a grad student, telling me why she didn't consider herself a feminist. For one thing, she said that feminists didn't want her. She was “settling” for a life as an underling. They didn't think being a mother for someone with her education was allowed. She “owed” it to the movement to do more than that, to give back and help more women gain equality. And then she said that in her mind, feminism had done a lot to make it easier for men to stop taking responsibility for being good husbands and fathers. Men expected women to earn as much money as they did in a marriage, but to continue doing all the housework. They expected women to pay a lot of the bills and to use “their” money for kids and family things. While they used their own money for toys.

Now, as a mother of five children, three of them teenager daughters, I have felt this same judgmental feminist eye on my decision not to seek further career opportunities in academia. I'm a writer, but I'm also the one who is in charge of keeping the house running. That means I do traditionally female things like laundry and dishes, making dinners, shopping, and so on. (I'm not much for housework, sadly for our house). I have also been known to do plenty of traditionally male things like mowing the lawn, using electric power tools, fixing electric wiring, painting, and cutting up firewood. I make the choices I make because it works for me and my family. Sometimes they are traditional because we are falling back on experience. I learned how to cook from my mother; my husband did not. I did laundry as one of my chores as a teen; my husband did not. He is more meticulous in general about tasks, so when that is important, he tends to do them.

Are we perpetuating gender stereotypes? Am I hindering the women's movement because I choose a marriage where my husband is the month-to-month wage earner (despite the fact that I brought more money into our marriage for the first 5-10 years)? Do I bear some of the burden for men, who according to this study are less likely to see women's work as valuable in the workplace:

www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/963828/"traditional"_marriages_affect_men's_workplace_attitudes,_study_finds

I suppose you can argue that facts are facts, but as Mark Twain says, there are three kinds of lies, lies, damned lies, and statistics. This study seems to be aimed at making women who are not “toeing the feminist line” feel guilty that it is their fault. I suspect there are many different conclusions a study like this could be used as evidence for, and I'm not sure it means that any woman who chooses to stay home with children is a traitor to her sisters across the country.

And then there are stories like this about Katy Perry:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/12/04/katy_perry_says_she_s_not_a_feminist_when_are_we_going_to_stop_asking_that.htm

Sure, I get it. We're supposed to laugh at Katy Perry and how stupid she is for not identifying herself as a feminist. But does anyone else see what is going on here? How we are shaming powerful, successful women because they aren't doing what the American Political Feminist movement thinks that they should do to be successful? If feminism is really about choice and not about shoring up a system of patriarchy, then wouldn't we be less involved in tearing other women down and more about building them up?

American Political Feminism ultimately can't have people questioning its agenda. It can't allow French Feminists or black women or a lot of other investigations about the history and the goals of the organization to be publicized. Sophie von La Roche wanted there to be a utopian world where men and women were free to be who they were, but every time she tried to describe it, it got swallowed up into the patriarchy again, and the novel has a strange, unresolved ending that hints at something, but it isn't described because by then, she had tried describing three different utopias, all failures, and she decided using words wasn't working. It had to be gestured at, not politicized. Goethe's novel on the other hand, sort of gives up on utopia and just throws Wilhelm Meister back into the traditional bourgeois world because, well, he is a white male of the upper middle class and is actually going to do just fine in it.

So that's why I don't unreservedly call myself a feminist. That's why I say that being feminist and being pro-woman are not the same thing. That's why strong female characters to me are not always feminist ones. And that's why I don't always talk about this, because sometimes talking about it just ends up spiraling back into the either/or, man/woman, male/female, gay/straight, cis-gendered/trans-gendered, world of patriarchy.

Writing Wednesday: Don't Tell Me What Happens in Book Three

I have often found myself in the situation of a writer telling me that my critique can't be right because of what happens in book three. The part of the book that I am suggesting a change in can't be changed, because the whole rest of the novel depends on it. Say I am only reading chapter one, and in chapter one, the main character is completely unsympathetic and kills a child. The scene is graphically described and turns my stomach, and even in an adult publishing world, this is going to be a hard sell. But even if the rest of the novel is written superbly, I suspect that getting readers to do anything other than close the book after that description is unlikely.

But, but, says the writer. This is an important moment in the protagonist's development. On page 85, he sees someone else kill a child and at that moment, sees the child's pain and begins to change. And then, on page 352, the protagonist turns around and becomes a champion of children, a superhero who protects all children everywhere. And then, in book two, he meets his nemesis who kills children by the dozen. And in book three, there is a triumphant moment where he turns his nemesis to good and together they become champions of children. So that moment in chapter one is really important. It establishes what the rest of the series is all about.

Or, say that I argue that chapter one is not the right place for a ten page long explanation of the history of the animated snowmen from ten thousand years ago. At the beginning of the first chapter, I want to get to know a couple of characters or maybe even just one, and I want to care deeply about something moving forward, a goal or a threat to be warded off. I don't want to have to spend a lot of time thinking carefully about the history of a kingdom whose people I do not know.

But, but, says the writer. If I don't put the history of animated snowmen in here then the appearance of the snowmen in chapter five will make no sense. And the whole climax where the army of animated snowmen attack won't be set up with enough gravitas. And also the the lost king who has been frozen by the animated snowman a thousand years ago and returns a la King Arthur when he is revived by the woman in white will not seem to come out of the blue.

Or I want you to change the section in chapter one where two characters we never meet again in the novel are caught in a torrid embrace and declare undying love to each other, after which they are killed dramatically by a masked man, who will later be the villain for the rest of the novel. If the characters I am reading about die at the end of chapter one, I say, there is no reason for me to keep reading. I feel cheated by the author and sure that any promises I feel are offered at the beginning of the next chapter are bound to be broken by the end of the novel. Everyone I start to care about will die and nothing will matter or be explained.

But, but, says the writer. If I don't set up the villain as truly evil from the beginning, readers won't be truly afraid of her. And in order to understand why the protagonist is on a mission to find who killed his parents, I have to show them being killed in chapter one (or the prologue). And in addition, in book two, the protagonist has to kill the villain's parents and there is this cool moment of mirroring. And in book three, the heroine's mother is rescued by the protagonist from the evil villain, but her father has already been killed. When she weeps in his arms, it will make no sense unless the villain has already been established as a parent killer for both of them from the first.

No.

Just, no.

No one is ever going to get to book three if you don't make book one absolutely riveting, compelling, heart-wrenching and appealing. No one will get to book three if you don't make it a rip-roaring adventure, with an appealing voice and a main character people love. Write book one first. If you are talking about book three, you've lost focus. Book one is the one that matters. You can't sell the whole trilogy until you sell book one, and focusing on making a good trilogy is taking your attention away from making a good book. One good book is better than a mediocre series. You're missing the trees for the forest. Sometimes--a lot of times--you end up changing what you thought would happen in later books because of what needs to happen in book one. So focus on that and you might end up being able to write the rest of the trilogy someday.

Monday Book Recs: The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner

This was an interesting read into the past of the fantasy genre. I don't do it often, but it was a useful way of reminding myself of the touchstones for many readers.

One of the things I noticed was the lack of really specific characters. These were everyday kids. They are resourceful and plucky. But they don't have a lot of backstory. This is useful for getting readers to relate easily to the characters, and for them to be more transparent, if that makes sense. I've heard critics of Twilight argue that Bella Swan works marvelously for readers in that way, that she is less specific and therefore readers can insert themselves more easily into her point of view. I actually think that is less true for Bella than for older characters in children's novels, but this is not necessarily an effect of bad writing. It simply has its own virtues and vices.

Another very clear element of this fantasy was the loving depiction of the physical world of this part of England, the mines below ground, and the rills and fields above ground. For many fantasies, the LAND is a character in itself, and the LAND must be saved. There is a political component to this that perhaps comes from the early environmental movements of the 60s and 70s, and it persists today in much science fiction and fantasy, the sense that the LAND is dying in dystopians but also that the LAND is a place where people want to be, that it has its own narrative.

The villains are villainous and the heroes heroic here. There are many races of magical people who are part of the fight on one side or the other. I didn't find this boring, though, because the magical people were portrayed in an interesting, distinct way. I think this is an important lesson to learn for writers. There's nothing wrong with telling stories about elves or dwarves (or vampires and werewolves). No matter how “old” or “tired” these types are, they will always reappear when someone does a good job of telling a story about them. It's not originality that matters so much as good storytelling and making the old figures feel important in a new way, in a new world.

Friday Tri: When You Hate Your Workouts

So a lot of people ask me how I keep up the enthusiasm for working out day after day, week after week, year after year. The answer to this is that I don't. At the end of every season, I spend several weeks wondering if I am finished. I am not sure I ever want to go back to racing. I am just SO TIRED! I do a few workouts and I really, really hate them. Sometimes I *gasp* skip workouts entirely.

I actually think this is an important and necessary part of the process. If you hate working out, that doesn't mean you are bad. It doesn't mean that you are always going to hate working out. It also doesn't mean that you should just give up, that you aren't like those crazy people who enjoy going to the gym, and this isn't for you.

Mostly, if you are hating your workout, you are hating it because you are either a) bored or b) tired. Or possibly a combination of both of those. No, really, those are pretty much the only two choices I have seen.

If you are bored, you need to figure out how to get un-bored. My mother used to tell me that only I could choose to be bored. No matter what I was doing, it was my job to figure out what was interesting, and I couldn't blame anyone else for being bored. I will try not to be as judgmental here, but my mother is mostly right. If you're bored with your workout, think about what you need to do to fix it. Do you need to find a class? A trainer? A different gym? Do you need to find a friend to train with? Do you need new workout equipment? Do you need to read a book about training to get re-invigorated? Do you need to get a new flavor of Gatorade? Do you need to set up a system of rewards for goals you achieve?

Then do it.

If you are tired, you need to give yourself some time. I am not saying you give up completely. I don't think that's the answer. A lot of people who are starting out are going to be tired pretty much all the time. Quitting isn't the answer. But first of all, give yourself a break. You deserve to be tired. You may need to send around a facebook post reminding people that you are tired all the time now. You may need to sit down more often, to use the stairs less. You may feel like you deserve to use the handicapped parking (though of course you won't, right?). You will probably watch more television in the evenings.

If you are tired all the time, you are also going to be tempted to eat easy, calorie-dense food that may not be super healthy. A lot of people who are working out for the first time are also trying to lose an insane amount of weight at the same time (a la The Biggest Loser). I actually don't think this is a great idea. I think it's really hard to get into shape and drastically cut calories. I think you are going to end up messed up mentally. But that's just me. I may be wrong. I would suggest doing moderate calorie cutting and still allowing yourself to have some small “treats” as rewards for your hard work in the evenings when you are going to get the crazy munchies because your metabolism is hyped up. I think there is good scientific evidence to suggest that being moderately overweight but in shape is superior to being thin and not in shape.

However, I do know that there are people who will feel not motivated to keep getting into shape unless they see some quick results early on. I would recommend for these people that they simply choose different results markers than simply the number on the scale. You can choose instead to try to drop fat percentages and use a different scale. Or you can (and I like this the best) choose to ignore the shame of the scale for a bit and simply let your body tell you how it is improving. You'll feel tired the first week and will probably not see a lot of improvement then, since you are going to spending a lot of metabolic energy just recovering. But after that, you should start to see yourself be able to go longer, or go faster—not both at once. Give yourself lots of positive feedback and ask others around you to do it, too. Post your workouts and let the praise flow in. Don't just give up because you are tired. Do something to stop being tired. Ultimately, that is the real point of exercise, that you are going to be less tired most of the time, doing your regular life stuff. But it's going to take a while to get there. Be patient. It will happen.

Sexism in Historical Fantasy

It is one thing to do meticulous research on the real roles of men and women, blacks and whites, slaves and free in different historical periods and then write fantasy that is based on that research. I think this is interesting fantasy, even when some of our current ideas of men and women leak back into the past as is inevitable, because we are, after all, incapable of seeing the historical world in any other way. (I'd call George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones an interesting example of this kind of fantasy.)

It is something else when we accept a rather loose history as the background of the "standard" medieval fantasy where, of course, only the male roles matter. Kings rule and queens are window dressing in the background. Princes go off on quests and princesses are just useful as damsels in distress, not in revolution or changing the world. Everyone is white and straight, and we don't discover that Popes are actually women in disguise, that the evil hunchback is not actually a hunchback at all, and that the most successful and longest-living and most ruthless monarch a country has ever known was a beautiful woman with red hair.

If you want to use "historical accuracy" as the excuse for sexism or racism or any -ism in your work, please make me believe you have done some actual historical research beyond simply looking up a few facts on Wikipedia. Read some actual accounts of the past by those who lived it. Journals are available from many historical time periods if you do rigorous research and actually go to the countries involved and ask at museums. The idea that women simply sat around knitting and waiting to be rescued or that only straight white people ever did anything of interest or value is not historical at all. It's our current mindset superimposed over history, which is far messier than the history you're going to get in your first grade class, where the teacher is only interested in impressing on six year-olds that there was a past and that people the six year- old has never met existed in that past.

A third choice is to use history as a lens to make clear that there are cycles in the past and that the way in which one group is viewed today is just a reworking of the way another group was used in the past. When I was studying German literature of the late seventeenth century, I was astonished to discover the pseudo-science of gender, in which much was made of the fact that women have smaller skulls and a generally smaller body frame and smaller brain sizes. There were some very interesting generalizations made about women's capacities then (obviously ridiculous even in our currently sexist society). What was most fascinating was the way in which these same pseudo-scientific points were re-invented by the Nazis in the twentieth century as proof that blacks, Gypsies or other "undesirables" were not as superior as Aryans. And seeing the same pseudo-science in America, quickly covered up directly afterward to make sure that no one saw that Americans were just as capable of Nazism as the Germans were.

Or look at the way in which reading novels was ridiculed and lamented in the eighteenth century as something that would "ruin" a young girl's mind and cause innumerable brain defects. Compare those to complaints in the present-day about video games or watching television. Or look at the way that people thought reading was terrible then, as compared to our present day attempt to get people to read more. Or look at the way that reading was feminized then and the way it is feminized now. Look at the way women writers in Germany were treated during that time period and the way that they were treated in America not much later. Look at the way that male writers felt about themselves and their "maleness" as opposed to other careers.

History is fascinating, and it isn't what you think you have a grasp on. It illuminates our world in so many ways. History isn't the sexist monolith we think it is because our current form of patriarchy uses it as a crutch to justify its own power. Go, do your research, but do it with an open mind and do it with delight at the real richness of our many pasts.