Magen Cubed's Blog, page 49

Death to self-love and other radical concepts

I am so over self-love.

No, wait. Let me rephrase that.

I'm over pompous consumer-driven concepts of self-love as shopping for shoes and dressing in sequins. To love yourself, you need to purchase frilly things and roll around on big beds and feel free. Take yourself on a date in high heels. Oh, you're so frivolous. You're magic. You're fanciful and capricious.

I am so over this.

Every day I see lifestyle bloggers and frou-frou gurus selling a bill of goods to women across the world. Buzz-words wrapped in advertisements for new dresses and uncomfortable shoes. Love yourself. Treat yourself. You're special. You deserve it. Just dress like this and eat like this and buy these things that I buy. You too will have perfect hair and an intelligent boyfriend that respects you and gives enthusiastic oral sex if you follow these five hundred easy steps.

You too will be a precious unique snowflake. You too will be happy. You just need to buy more crap you don't need.

You just need to dress like Me, your resident vapid lifestyle blogger. You can trust Me. I'm glamorous and quirky. I know what's best for you. I trawl for self-help books and magazine articles on the best new ways to love Myself, so I can tell you how to love yourself. I'm all about finding the Next Big Thing. I'm all about being It right now. You just need to do what I do, and you'll be fine. Just until self-loathing and body issues come back next year, of course. In which case I'll go right back to telling you how to starve into a Size 00 and how to dumb yourself down to make a man stay. It'll be fine.

Here's a montage privileged white women in designer shoes. They enjoy salads and shopping. Look how happy they are. You can relate to that. You can relate to Me. Remember, I know what's best for you. Here's a video of me laughing and loving life and booking tickets to Paris.

I know what you're thinking:  I'm jealous of these people. You must think, Gosh, Magen's just mad because she's not glamorous and quirky and everybody cares what she's wearing. I wish that were true, but mostly these people just make me want to burn things down. I wish I could be happy that people are finding ways to love themselves, but most of these gurus are just poachers, feeding off generations of self-esteem issues. This is the reason why.

Self-love is not a commodity. It is not sold in boutiques. It does not come in bottles with handcrafted antiqued paper tags, with the cute little hole-punches and hand-tied ribbons to assure you that it was purchased from Etsy.com. Self-love is something that you find within yourself. It is there when you look in the mirror in the morning, and no matter how much it hurts, you say "I'm worth it."

I deserve to be here. I deserve to be treated with dignity. I deserve to make decisions for myself and my body. I deserve to be loved.

You have scars from car accidents or C-sections. You have knobby elbows or poor vision. You can't fit into those Size 00 jeans or maybe you can't gain weight no matter how hard you try. You can't dance or sing. Maybe your boyfriend hurt you or your friends hurt you or your parents hurt you. And it hurts, it does. It hurts so much because you are tired and you are flawed and maybe sometimes you can't say it anymore because you're not sure if it's true. But it is true. It's in your bones; it's in your blood and the boot-straps you lace up every morning to get through the day. It's in the dirt and the sunlight that built you up.

You are worth loving.

You are worth the stuff that makes you.

Everything else is just noise.

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My boy builds coffins

Casey was born David Casey Way, the third in a line of David Ways that had worked at the Berming and Sons Bank since it opened in 1949. With his mother's bright eyes, freckled cheeks and full mouth, wide whenever he smiled, Christine had felt that he wasn't a David Way III, insisting her only son be given his own name. His father had agreed, and so he was simply Casey instead, after Christine's great uncle Casey Barton of Charleston, South Carolina. Christine stayed home with her baby while David carved out a comfortable living as a housing loan officer as his father had been before him, affording them the quaint white house on 6621 Mooreland Street. Casey grew up there, behind manicured shrubs and pristine white shutters, two cars in the long driveway and a white picket fence.

That's how Casey Way came into the world. You might remember him from the first chapter of my novel, Flesh Trap. I hope you do. You're going to be hearing his name a lot from now on.

In my world he popped up fully-formed, long wrists and fingers, a resolute silhouette smoking a cigarette against dirty street-light. There was a box-cutter in his pocket and blood on his shirtsleeve. He could taste iron in his sinuses but he didn't think about that, didn't want to close his eyes at night to find a head filled with Venus Flytraps and empty skulls. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him. That was in April of 2010.

It's January 31st, 2011. Since then Casey Way has filled up six notebooks and stretched himself across two separate drafts. One was pretty good; the other was thrown out months back, rewritten at least four times. I've chased him down through short stories and half-scribbled notes, along seven interconnected chapters in an upcoming serial and chapbook project. I've sat up at night and worried about him, banged my head against walls and fretted over  every written line while he sat on the sofa, reading books or watching The History Channel. Maybe he smoked a few cigarettes or tended to the flytraps as I wondered where he might end up. If he might die or lose his way, or never wake up from the nightmares that have nipped at his heels since he was thirteen-years-old, and he began seeing his dead father's face behind his eyes.

You might say I've spent a lot of time with Casey these last few months. Too much time. You'd probably be right.

Last night I wrote the last line of the second longhand draft. I closed the sixth notebook and felt I'd done something good. I felt relieved. I felt drained. I felt excited. Most of all, I felt like Casey could go to bed now, because he didn't have to stay up watching me to make sure I got all the words right. It's going to be several more months of typing and retyping, cutting and pasting, writing and rewriting before I have something truly polished and cohesive to show for myself. But I'm okay with that. In fact, I'm thrilled.

Flesh Trap is the first novel I have ever finished. I've started at least five in my life, and have written approximately 400 short stories of various lengths. You won't see ever the bulk of these. Most of them have disappeared into notebooks or hard-drive crashes, written under other names for different reasons, never to be brought up again. There were a few good ones, too, and those have been published. I see now that this was all practice.

This was a short story idea that turned into something bigger. Something uglier, something more painful and frightening than I had pictured it being when I scribbled out the first few lines. It's turned into a story I really care about, tackling themes I really enjoy exploring, full of characters that I truly love. That doesn't happen to me very often.

And now I'm going to work on it until it becomes something other people can care about, too.

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She's so unusual

So a friend and former coworker of mine ended up with a copy of Ain't No Grave recently. "It's so creepy," she says, "I didn't know what was going to happen." Then she got to the end of the story.

Magen Toole is a freelance writer and fiction author based in Fort Worth, Texas. She likes dinosaurs and black holes, and when she grows up she wants to play the tambourine in a psychedelic revival band.

"But," she says, "that author's bio! It's so silly! Dinosaurs and tambourines? Nobody's going to take you seriously!"

"Well," I say, "that's kind of the point."

I spent the first year or so that I was publishing trying to be taken seriously. I was working up delicate introspective blog posts because they were en vogue with other female writers and bloggers, wispy personal stories that made me seem sensitive and intellectual. I tried to freelance for some different publishers, and puffed myself to seem as professional as possible. Three different managing editors told me to change my bio. The first told me it wasn't professional enough, so I changed it. The second told me it wasn't personal enough, and I changed it. The third told me that my Fun Fact anecdote wasn't clever or amusing enough to suit their site, and that I needed to fix that right away.

Somewhere around that point, I gave up on revisions and went to publish articles elsewhere. Since then, readers have known me as that girl who likes dinosaurs and black holes and Star Trek and writing stuff. No editor has asked me to change my bio since.

Don't get me wrong: I take my writing seriously. I take seeking out publications that suit my work seriously. I write and rewrite and retool until I'm blue in the face, to come up with something that I feel tells a good, solid story. But behind the scenes? I like to wear fake mustaches*. I sometimes dress in men's clothing for a laugh. I have a tendency to cut my own hair in fits of poor decision-making. I watch bad television and read comic books. I wear silly hats. I tell a lot of jokes. I'm almost dogmatically honest. Yes, Magen Toole is my real name, no matter how dumb it sounds. Anybody who knows me personally knows that, well, I don't take myself very seriously. I'm starting to think that's okay.

I can't pass myself off as a Scribe or a Word-Smith. I don't make magical worlds for you to inhabit. I'm not a warrior for anybody's personal truth. There are no bodies buried in my backyard, I don't have a Satanic altar in my basement, and I'm not very interesting at parties. Chances are I wasn't born under a bad sign (although I do like the Cream cover) to write things that quake you to your fettered core. And, I will not lie, when I read author bios proclaiming any of these things, I dog-ear them to read over later because they're good for a laugh.

If the work doesn't stand up on its own merit, no matter how cool or clever I  seem in my author bio, it's not worth reading. My mustaches or bad television shouldn't keep you from enjoying a story. I'm too lousy at lying to come up with a persona any more interesting than the one I was born with. Maybe if I worked in my tap-dancing or brushed up on my Swedish I could come up with somebody better than this, but for now, I'm all I've got.

(*Many of my creative influences enjoy wearing fake mustaches as well. I dare you to pry that false handlebar off of Misha Collins or Bianca Casady…)

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Shameless self-promotion

Oh, it must be Wednesday, then.

My copy of A Means to An End arrived in the mail the other day, straight from the publisher. It's rather nice, actually. It features my short story, Ain't No Grave, which I hear is pretty good. My mother and my chiropractor are both excited about it, at least, which is always a good sign. Maybe you should pick up a copy?

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How I learned to stop worrying and love the bottom

Getting fired is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we'd quit treading water and do something with our lives.

Tyler Durden, Fight Club

So I lost my job in November. Anybody who knows me personally (or at least follows my personal blog)  knows what a vicious roller-coaster this has made of my life. Anybody who has to compete in the modern American job market knows this. Every interview is like a new cage that you stretch and squeeze yourself into, taking a deep breath and puffing your chest out. You're surrounded by fake-smiling HR managers and department heads who really don't give a crap about your personal strengths or where you see yourself in ten years, and you're dancing for your life against the fifteen people outside who want your job. They may have a sadder story than you, or a better resume, or bigger boobs. In any case, the odds are against you every time.

Being fired for no good reason, by people who don't value their employees, well, it's hard. It makes you feel worthless. Hopeless. Hapless. You're lazy, you're inadequate, you have no future. You should have done more, been more, worked harder or smiled wider or jumped through whatever hoop your boss dangled in front of you in order to keep the awful job you had. Because it was a job, and a terrible job is better than no job. Because you look around and you see people  working and moving forward, and you feel like you've already lost the race.

Then I woke up one day, and realized it wasn't a race.

Then I was walking through a used bookstore one afternoon and saw a reprint of Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk sitting on a shelf next to some discount Sylvia Plath. Then I remembered I'd never finished reading it, so I picked it up.

But this isn't a post about Fight Club. I'm not going to tell you what I thought it was about. I'm not going to tell you how it compares to the movie. (It's my favorite movie, by the way.) I'm not going to tell you about the state of post-modern man, or the plight of the male narrative in our deconstructionist society.  Because halfway through it, dog-earring passages about chemical burn kisses and human butt-wipe and men with holes in the meat of their cheeks, I remembered what being unemployed has taught me.

Nobody can tell you what you're worth.

Not your boss, not your dad, not your teacher or your congressman. You are  worth more than the sum of your resume or your college credit hours, your car or the name sewn into the back of your jeans.  You're an individual and you have the right to be here on the planet you were born on. If the people around you don't see it, then you don't need them. Find people that do.

You can't function at a job where people don't respect you.

You deserve better than to work for people that degrade you. No matter how badly you need a job, it's not worth harassment or discrimination of any kind. You can't get ahead working for people that don't value employees and don't respect their labor rights.

Nobody owns you.

Getting fired made me stop and take a hard look at my life and all the things in it.  I realized I was doing a lot of things just to be nice and blend in. Cute shoes, nice skirts, haircuts that I didn't really like. I felt fake. I wanted to punch holes in my face and throw out my high-heels. I took up shadowboxing and got rid of every obnoxious thing I owned. I like wearing black tuxedo jackets and combat boots. I don't care what Cosmopolitan thinks I should be wearing. I like writing weird things. This is who I am.

It's your life.

If the guy down the street doesn't like it, that's his problem. Do the things that make you happy, in your own way, at your own speed.  If you don't care about how you live, nobody will.

It can always be worse.

Okay, so your car died and you have no job. You don't live in a hovel without clean water or food. You have a home and people who care about you. You have rights and protection.  This is the First World, so quit crying. And when you're back on your feet, go find a way to send a few dollars to people who don't have the luxuries you do.

No, I'm not touting personal enlightenment. I'm just trying to survive every day, like everybody else these days. It isn't the end of the world, just another step in it. No matter what happens, I'll make it, you'll make it, and we just have to hang in there until we do.

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I don't wanna grow up

I like to think a person's childhood idols say a lot about them. Then again that could just be the Freudian in me talking, so who knows. (I tend to be more of a Jungian but hey, they partied together. It's all good.) It's still fun to pay tribute to the past, and maybe start a list of people to cosplay as in the future.

People I Wanted to Be When I Grew Up
Catwoman

I know I also say I disliked DC Comics as a kid. This, however, is largely untrue. I disliked DC Comics heroes as a kid. Their villains, however, were some of the best. While I always preferred Batman's B-Roster of enemies  (guys like Clay Face, Mr. Freeze and Killer Croc), Catwoman was my favorite, especially the film version brought about by Tim Burton and Michelle Pfieffer. She was the perfect mix of manipulative and unstable, highly sexualized but always in control of the situation. She'd been crapped on her entire life, and she was going to go out and destroy some things until she felt better about it. That was the greatest thing my five-year-old self had ever heard of. Many Halloween costumes followed.

Ellen Ripley

The greatest action hero of all time. Why? Because the part of Ripley was originally written for a man, and Sigourney Weaver showed up and owned it for four movies. If that doesn't make Ellen Ripley the most capable woman in movie history, I don't know what would. As a kid the Alien series was one of my favorites, and Ripley only got better with age.

Storm

The mutant goddess of weather, and one of the strongest and most elegant and fully-developed members of the X-Men family tree. She was always one of my favorites to follow and draw, having spent quite a few afternoons sketching Storm fanart as a bored eleven-year-old. She also had one of the most fascinating love-lives in all of Marvel Comics. Dracula? Forge? Cable? Black Panther? You get it, girl.

Poison Ivy

Because, hey, I like Batman villains, okay? Not counting Batman and Robin (I loved the costumes and I loved Uma Thurman, but, c'mon), she's just a fun, cool, interesting character, taking the elemental bad-guy gimmick to extremes that I can appreciate. Also, she was originally based on Bettie Page, which I can appreciate as well. Besides being an environmentally-conscious criminal  (killing people to save the planet? I can get behind that brand of evil), she's a feminist, helping to steer best friend Harley Quinn from the psychotic and abusive Joker. I love that about her.

(I've always secretly wanted to cosplay as Poison Ivy. Maybe one day I will…)

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A Means to An End now available in paperback

Yes, it's that time again. In another desperate bid to drive up book sales and make people pay attention to me, I would like to announce that my latest foray into horror anthology publication from Post Mortem-Press is available in paperback. It features my story Ain't No Grave, a quiet reflection about the state of modern marriage and a good old-fashioned apocalyptic vision of the afterlife. You should read it. I hear it's pretty good.

Here's a brief excerpt, in case you don't believe me:

Had Alice Neilson known that the dead would return, she would have never poisoned Frank's coffee on Monday morning. She would have never emptied the tiny glass dropper into the cooling pot while Frank contentedly watched the news, craning his neck and leaning back in his seat to see the television in the next room from his perch at the kitchen table. It was the same way that he did every morning, quietly eating his whole wheat toast as Alice stood at the sink, watched the crawl of morning traffic on the street beneath their apartment, and said nothing.

At eight o'clock Frank kissed Alice goodbye at the door and told her he would be home in time for dinner. She smiled, long fingers toying idly with the aged heart pendant around her neck and told Frank that she loved him. By nine the reports had begun coming in between songs and radio static during Alice's morning commute. It had been going on for days but no one noticed, starting first in the cities, when the cemeteries were too full to bury any more bodies. The crematoriums were taking the overrun of the dead in stacks in basements and zippered bags in the halls. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming, as Alice locked her car door and walked the half-block's worth of parking garage between her and Westfield Marketing, and didn't think about the dead.

It's also going to be a comic. (You should read that when it comes out, too.)

Pick up your copy today, or get the Kindle edition. It's actually cheaper. It may not as fun as a book, which can also be used as a doorstop or a paperweight, or even kindling in case you forget to pay the heating bill, but worth having nonetheless.

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God bless Kevin Smith

The official teaser trailer for Kevin Smith's indie horror movie Red State has recently hit the web. I'm not even going to lie: I'm ecstatic. All the talk so far builds this movie up to be the reverse of the devil-worship slasher exploitation movies of the 1970s,  extrapolating on the horrors of religious fanaticism of all stripes. If that's not indie horror at its finest, I don't know what is.

Taking the tropes and turning them on their heads? Using horror to tell intelligent stories about the human condition? Getting together some money and a cast of great actors and making something scary without having to put up with censorship and producers and bottom-line panic? If Kevin Smith wasn't one of my favorite people before, he most certainly is now.

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Movies That Don't Work: The Green Hornet

On face value, The Green Hornet adaptation is a pretty good idea: Taking a much-needed potshot at superheroes and subverting the archetypal hero-sidekick masked vigilante model. (Hey, as much as I still love my favorite childhood superheroes, some of these guys do have it coming.) It turns an American pulp classic on its head and makes it into lighthearted satire, which both pokes fun at the standards while still celebrating their appeal. Believe me, as much as I tend to hate spoofs, I was looking forward to this movie. Since spotting The Black Beauty at Comic Con 2009, I wanted to love it.

However, the filmmakers made one big mistake: They didn't make an irreverent superhero spoof. They made The Green Hornet into an action-comedy. Now, does that make any sense to you?

The hero is a bumbling playboy idiot. The sidekick steals the show. The villain is in the throes of a mid-life crisis. The love interest is the brains of the operation, and goes out of her way to make sure nobody gets the girl at the end of the movie. All of these things are funny on their own, and if handled properly, could make for a damn entertaining movie. The Green Hornet had a great set-up for a spoof by taking all the clichés and setting them on fire, then backing over them a few times for good measure. It was supposed to be an action movie about two capable heroes with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, but ultimately this movie doesn't work on several very basic levels.

They didn't bother spoofing superheroes, as the movie builds itself up to do. They don't take on the big names like Batman or Superman, who could stand to take a few on the chin if you ask me. Instead they spoofed The Green Hornet, a pulp classic since the 1930s, that hasn't seen its hey-day since the 1960s with Van Williams and Bruce Lee. Good intentions? Maybe, but I'm afraid having some funny ideas doesn't save the filmmakers from misusing them. Action-comedies work, like 2010's awesome and hilarious RED for example (and that's not just my inner Karl Urban fangirl talking), but they have to be handled with care. Despite a great cast and a funny idea, this movie, sadly, wasn't either.

For those of you who don't know about The Green Hornet, this is the Wikipedia version:

The Green Hornet is an American pulp hero and masked vigilante – created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker with input by radio director James Jewell in 1936. Since his radio debut in the 1930s, the Green Hornet has appeared in numerous serialized dramas in a wide variety of media. The character appeared in film serials in the 1940s, a network television program in the 1960s, multiple comic book series from the 1940s on,[1] and a feature film in January 2011.

Though various incarnations sometimes change details, in most versions the Green Hornet is the alter ego of Britt Reid, a newspaper publisher by day who goes out in his masked "Green Hornet" identity at night to fight crime as a vigilante. He is accompanied by his similarly masked sidekick and confidante Kato, who drives their technologically advanced car, "Black Beauty".

That is literally the short version. I could go on for pages about the various comic books and serials about The Green Hornet and Kato's adventures. The reality is, however, while loyally followed by die-hard fans to this day, The Green Hornet is not a heavy-hitter outside of the pulp world. He doesn't have the generational appeal of the other masked vigilantes the movie was meant to take shots at. It doesn't cheapen or lessen him as a character, it just means the average nine-year-old on the street isn't going to be reading Green Hornet comics or wearing the t-shirts. Basically? The Green Hornet didn't deserve it. He wasn't due for a good old-fashioned ass-kicking. Spoofing him for a generation of people who don't get the reference doesn't make sense, and ultimately does an injustice to the source material.

While some superheroes could stand to be taken down a peg or two, The Green Hornet wasn't one of them.  This film turned Green Hornet and Kato into one-dimensional idiots, then had the viewer watch them flounder around for an hour and a half until coming to an action-packed and spectacular, yet ultimately flat and unsatisfying, conclusion. Using this property as a platform to spoof other heroes just felt clumsy, because, while the movie was an action-comedy, it really wasn't that funny. Instead of being free to really cut loose and dig at the genre, the filmmakers were bound by the limitations of the source material, confined to just poking fun at Green Hornet and Kato. Not the big name heroes and their assortment of sidekicks, the faces we all know and love. Yes, it was amusing and cheeky, but ultimately felt stunted and short-sighted.

They wanted to make a movie about heroes, and ended up just making a bad movie about The Green Hornet.  Come back in ten years when somebody decides to acquire the rights to make a serious, gritty pulp movie about a brilliant hero, his masterful partner and their cherry-sweet ride infiltrating the underworld pretending to be criminals. Now that would be worth the price of admission.

(I still love you, Seth Rogen. Just, you know, don't do it again.)

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Coming Attractions

About a year ago comix artist John David Brown got in contact with me. He drew the accompanying illustration for The Aquarium over at Fiction Circus (which is the story that always comes up in conversation, and is still one of my favorites), and dropped me a line about a possible collaboration. A script or a short story, adapted into a free-standing comic. Obviously, having been fiending over and thumbing up comic books for many years, I made a weird gleeful little noise at the prospect.

After a lot of waffling and indecision, I sat down and beat out a short story called Ain't No Grave (the Kindle edition of which is now available in A Means to An End). It's a story about relationships, death and honesty. It's also about the end of the world, so the speak, but that's really not important.

John's recently sent me some roughs and finished pages of the comic, and they're really something. What started off as a little story has turned into a great comic, thanks to John's hard-work and talent. Here's a small sample. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the finished book later on in the year.

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