Isa K.'s Blog
April 12, 2015
The Appeal of Escapist Fantasy
When I was living in West Africa (about ten years ago now) I read fashion magazines like you wouldn't believe. Consumed them. Inhaled them even. Back home in the US I found the articles in Cosmopolitan so insipid I could barely stand to look at them, but thousands of miles away, surrounded by abject poverty, living without running water or electricity, those same articles became the most interesting and exciting parts of my day.
At the same time, my normal socio-economic nonfiction reading list became repulsive to me. Reading about the consequences of globalization was too depressing when you were living in the middle of those consequences. When I moved back to New York I could go back to reading them. I could happily have exciting fantasies about all the ways I was going to save the world, but when I was in Africa I couldn't read them.
The funny thing about escapist fantasy is that where you want to escape to depends on where you are coming from. When I lived in the shallow world of Cosmopolitan and Vogue I wanted to read about the developing world. When I lived in the developing world I decompressed with fantasies of shallow consumerism.
People keep saying my books are all about realism over fantasy, but to be honest that isn't true. I mean, it's partially true I suppose. But every story is still a fantasy for me. It's just not the fantasy most other people want to escape to. It seems most other people are coming from a different direction.
For example, I tend to find stories about great love healing trauma super depressing while everyone else gushes about how romantic and inspiring they are. No matter how hard I try it's impossible for me to see things that way.
Through most of my twenties my older brother had been in and out of mental institutions, not because he was crazy but because he has Aspergers. In most cases people with Aspergers are harmless, but we grew up in a community with a lot of gang activity. The principal way my brother learned to communicate was through violence and intimidation. That's the way things work in certain parts of New York. You talk tough, you act tough, and sometimes you beat the shit out of someone to make sure people know not to fuck with you.
Unfortunately if you grow up in this kind of environment, have Aspergers and then try to move to a small liberal arts college where people do not understand threatening to rip someone's kidney's out through their nose can be a term of endearment ... things get a little crazy. With any form of autism frustrations and confusion over communication problems can trigger anger and violence ... and that's what happened. For years my brother wandered through life behaving like a complete psychopath. He attacked my parents, he attacked me, then he would run into the basement and cry. These were horrible sounds, not at all like sobbing but like someone being tortured.
Through most of my early twenties I lived in fear of the possibility that one day the police would call to tell me my brother (who could not live on his own) had finally killed one or both of our parents. It really fucked me up. My brother and I used to be so close. I kept trying to recreate that relationship with other men in my life because I missed him so much. He seemed impossibly lost. No amount of love or support from our family could bring him back or save him. He seemed to resent us at the same time he was ashamed and depressed about failing us.
It was an awful time.
I understand the appeal of "healed with love" stories. The idea that you can make things better just by being a good person and offering your love and support is comforting because it it means you have some control over the situation. If something horrible happens to someone you love, you can do something to help. You can find a way to make things better.
But most people never think this idea through to its natural conclusion: what if your love doesn't work? Well then you must work harder, you must do more to show your love, you must prove yourself. And if that doesn't work? Isn't the obvious conclusion that your love isn't good enough. That you yourself aren't good enough? If love can heal and your love isn't doing the trick then either you're not good enough or your love isn't as good as someone else's.
That to me is a super depressing thought. So I can't enjoy these fantasies. What everyone else finds romantic and inspiring I see as a reminder of how deficient and unsatisfactory I must be because I've tried to be the source of healing love and support and it didn't work.
Maybe two years ago my Mom and I had a funny conversation. "I'm so sick of putting my life on hold while I wait for your brother to get better," she said. "I'm not going to do that anymore."
And so she started taking vacations with my Dad. They started looking for a retirement community that suited them and making plans to sell their house. This is the house that my older brother and I grew up in, my brother has NEVER lived anywhere else, and does not have enough money to live on his own. Five years ago the idea of selling before my brother had gotten back on his feet would have been unthinkable. Now my parents regularly have these conversations in front of him. They leave him on his own for weeks at a time while they go on cruises.
I'm sure to most people this sounds unbelievably callous and selfish. Surely this behavior could only worsen the depression and anxiety that intensified my brother's problems. Surely he must have felt like he was being rejected or left behind.
But instead a funny thing happened: he started to get better. I mean DRAMATICALLY better. Like... night and day. Today when I talk to him he's like a completely different person. Still Autistic, still confused about the world and still a little depressed about his inability to thrive in it, but docile, kind, supportive. He has a steady office job where he is well liked and respected. He has a serious girlfriend. He is saving money and planning for the future.
The last three years have thrown the whole "healing with love" concept into a completely different light for me. When you're in trouble watching the people you care about suffer because of you can only make you feel worse and most people "heal with love" by sacrificing themselves or enduring pain for their love's behalf. My brother would feel guilty about hurting our parents, then he would get down on himself, then he would get frustrated which would eventually trigger rage which would lead to more guilt, more shame, more depression and so on and so on and so. When my mom finally said "We're going to go have fun now, bye!" it broke the cycle of guilt-shame-depression.
And the same thing held true with the guy who I based the character of Mark Dorsett on. The full year we were together the more in love we were the sicker he got. When I finally broke away and decided to just take care of myself and my own happiness, he started to get better. Maybe one day he'll be healthy enough that we can be together, but maybe not.
To me the optimistic fantasy is not the suggestion that true love can heal, it's the idea that you can love someone who is broken, be happy and not have to feel guilty about being happy while they are suffering. That your happiness actually gives the other person strength. No matter how bad things get for them, they know that you-- a person so valuable to them-- are healthy and happy and safe.
Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself which you'd rather have: The hell of watching people you love suffer and knowing that they suffer because of you. Or watching people you love thrive and knowing that they're wishing the best for you too.
So I can't really appreciate the escapist fantasy of broken people being healed by love. I'm just coming from the wrong direction.
At the same time, my normal socio-economic nonfiction reading list became repulsive to me. Reading about the consequences of globalization was too depressing when you were living in the middle of those consequences. When I moved back to New York I could go back to reading them. I could happily have exciting fantasies about all the ways I was going to save the world, but when I was in Africa I couldn't read them.
The funny thing about escapist fantasy is that where you want to escape to depends on where you are coming from. When I lived in the shallow world of Cosmopolitan and Vogue I wanted to read about the developing world. When I lived in the developing world I decompressed with fantasies of shallow consumerism.
People keep saying my books are all about realism over fantasy, but to be honest that isn't true. I mean, it's partially true I suppose. But every story is still a fantasy for me. It's just not the fantasy most other people want to escape to. It seems most other people are coming from a different direction.
For example, I tend to find stories about great love healing trauma super depressing while everyone else gushes about how romantic and inspiring they are. No matter how hard I try it's impossible for me to see things that way.
Through most of my twenties my older brother had been in and out of mental institutions, not because he was crazy but because he has Aspergers. In most cases people with Aspergers are harmless, but we grew up in a community with a lot of gang activity. The principal way my brother learned to communicate was through violence and intimidation. That's the way things work in certain parts of New York. You talk tough, you act tough, and sometimes you beat the shit out of someone to make sure people know not to fuck with you.
Unfortunately if you grow up in this kind of environment, have Aspergers and then try to move to a small liberal arts college where people do not understand threatening to rip someone's kidney's out through their nose can be a term of endearment ... things get a little crazy. With any form of autism frustrations and confusion over communication problems can trigger anger and violence ... and that's what happened. For years my brother wandered through life behaving like a complete psychopath. He attacked my parents, he attacked me, then he would run into the basement and cry. These were horrible sounds, not at all like sobbing but like someone being tortured.
Through most of my early twenties I lived in fear of the possibility that one day the police would call to tell me my brother (who could not live on his own) had finally killed one or both of our parents. It really fucked me up. My brother and I used to be so close. I kept trying to recreate that relationship with other men in my life because I missed him so much. He seemed impossibly lost. No amount of love or support from our family could bring him back or save him. He seemed to resent us at the same time he was ashamed and depressed about failing us.
It was an awful time.
I understand the appeal of "healed with love" stories. The idea that you can make things better just by being a good person and offering your love and support is comforting because it it means you have some control over the situation. If something horrible happens to someone you love, you can do something to help. You can find a way to make things better.
But most people never think this idea through to its natural conclusion: what if your love doesn't work? Well then you must work harder, you must do more to show your love, you must prove yourself. And if that doesn't work? Isn't the obvious conclusion that your love isn't good enough. That you yourself aren't good enough? If love can heal and your love isn't doing the trick then either you're not good enough or your love isn't as good as someone else's.
That to me is a super depressing thought. So I can't enjoy these fantasies. What everyone else finds romantic and inspiring I see as a reminder of how deficient and unsatisfactory I must be because I've tried to be the source of healing love and support and it didn't work.
Maybe two years ago my Mom and I had a funny conversation. "I'm so sick of putting my life on hold while I wait for your brother to get better," she said. "I'm not going to do that anymore."
And so she started taking vacations with my Dad. They started looking for a retirement community that suited them and making plans to sell their house. This is the house that my older brother and I grew up in, my brother has NEVER lived anywhere else, and does not have enough money to live on his own. Five years ago the idea of selling before my brother had gotten back on his feet would have been unthinkable. Now my parents regularly have these conversations in front of him. They leave him on his own for weeks at a time while they go on cruises.
I'm sure to most people this sounds unbelievably callous and selfish. Surely this behavior could only worsen the depression and anxiety that intensified my brother's problems. Surely he must have felt like he was being rejected or left behind.
But instead a funny thing happened: he started to get better. I mean DRAMATICALLY better. Like... night and day. Today when I talk to him he's like a completely different person. Still Autistic, still confused about the world and still a little depressed about his inability to thrive in it, but docile, kind, supportive. He has a steady office job where he is well liked and respected. He has a serious girlfriend. He is saving money and planning for the future.
The last three years have thrown the whole "healing with love" concept into a completely different light for me. When you're in trouble watching the people you care about suffer because of you can only make you feel worse and most people "heal with love" by sacrificing themselves or enduring pain for their love's behalf. My brother would feel guilty about hurting our parents, then he would get down on himself, then he would get frustrated which would eventually trigger rage which would lead to more guilt, more shame, more depression and so on and so on and so. When my mom finally said "We're going to go have fun now, bye!" it broke the cycle of guilt-shame-depression.
And the same thing held true with the guy who I based the character of Mark Dorsett on. The full year we were together the more in love we were the sicker he got. When I finally broke away and decided to just take care of myself and my own happiness, he started to get better. Maybe one day he'll be healthy enough that we can be together, but maybe not.
To me the optimistic fantasy is not the suggestion that true love can heal, it's the idea that you can love someone who is broken, be happy and not have to feel guilty about being happy while they are suffering. That your happiness actually gives the other person strength. No matter how bad things get for them, they know that you-- a person so valuable to them-- are healthy and happy and safe.
Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself which you'd rather have: The hell of watching people you love suffer and knowing that they suffer because of you. Or watching people you love thrive and knowing that they're wishing the best for you too.
So I can't really appreciate the escapist fantasy of broken people being healed by love. I'm just coming from the wrong direction.
March 30, 2015
What is Wrong With Mark Dorsett?
Well let me start by explaining why I wanted to write a book with characters who are so difficult to like. Obviously I was aware of the fact that the two MCs were going to be difficult to like ... I mean, the title of the book is I'm The Guy You Hate. Come on.
But in our genre there are a number of books with what I like to call "strawman plotlines" and I find those books and the culture that develops when they overrun a genre way more offensive than a few unlikable characters.
A strawman plotline is like a strawman argument: it's a plotline where the primary antagonist is portrayed in a way that no reader could ever sympathize with. It's more complicated than a cardboard "evil villain" because the point of a strawman plotline is not just bad character development. Strawman plotlines hand the reader something the reader wants to believe about themselves and their attitudes, then creates false scenarios of injustice that do not reflect the proper context and motivations of the real life injustices they are pretending to speak out against. The reader takes comfort in their moral outrage and feels proud of themselves for being a great person, part of a righteous cause ... even if in real life that reader's ACTUAL attitudes and behaviors contribute to the problems they claim to be so totally and 100% against.
It would have been easy to write a book in which the people torturing Mark Dorsett for being mentally ill were awful people, where the reader could tell themselves that if they encountered a Mark Dorsett in real life they would of course be on the right side. They would save him. They wouldn't bully him deeper and deeper into madness the way many of the characters in I'm The Guy You Hate do.
But that story would also be pathetically insincere. It was important to me that readers be able to sympathize with the "bad guys" in this situation, that they understood why people hate Mark and why they go out of their way to do such unbelievably cruel things to him.
One of the main themes of I'm The Guy You Hate is bullying, which has become the topic de jour with which to express fake and meaningless moral outrage. I really hate the dogpile of so called "anti-bullying" campaigns because most of them completely miss the fucking point. Our bullying problems can be traced directly back to the narratives we start force feeding our children with from birth. Rent basically ANY children's movie and watch what happens to "the bad guy" by the end. It is not enough to simply defeat the bad guy. It's not enough to prevent his evil plan. Without fail the bad guy is almost always humiliated publicly. He is taken down a few pegs or exposed in a way that the audience is encouraged to laugh at.
In the book, Jonny Ordell traces the problem with this narrative like this:
We teach people that the correct way of dealing with people who make them feel bad is to find ways to publicly humiliate them and then we wonder why we have a bullying problem? Really?
I hate anti-bullying campaigns for the same reason I hate strawman plotlines: it's self congratulatory bullshit that gives people something EASY to agree with so that they don't have to take a cold hard look at THEIR OWN FUCKING BEHAVIOR.
But what does this have to do with mental illness?
The reason why Mark gets bullied is because most people do not realize he is mentally ill. Stories like Mark's play out everyday, we just don't usually see them from the inside. We usually hear about them after Mark has committed suicide, then we flash our fake outrage and a half a dozen completely meaningless blog posts are written urging people to "get help" if they need it. We act like if we had been there, if this had been our friend OF COURSE we would have done the right thing.
I'm The Guy You Hate was designed to be a book that threw acid in the face of this idea. You would not do the right thing. You would absolutely not do the right thing. Especially if you happened to care about the person in trouble.
As much as Jonny Ordell wants to do the right thing, he ends up enabling Mark, making many of the situations in which he is trying to protect Mark much worse. He allows the situation with Mark to completely and totally destroy his self esteem and does not recognize his own resentment until he is actively participating in the bullying he is supposedly trying to stop. That's not a pretty story, but it is an HONEST story.
I made a decision while I was writing this book not to reveal the name of Mark's illness because it seemed counterproductive to do so. To begin with, though Mark's behavior was drawn not just from my personal experience but from the stories of hundreds of people I interacted with in support groups and on online crisis forums, I did not wish Mark's characterization to be treated as a representation of his disease. Mental illness manifests differently for everyone. Even the exact same disorder can look one way in one case, and a completely different way with another person.
Naming the disease would also be overlooking the actual problem that fuels the tragedy playing out in the book: people do not recognize mental illness when they see it because we only accept a few, extremely narrow depictions of mental illness in our stories. When depression doesn't look like what we've decided depression should look like we question whether or not the person should just "get over it". When autism doesn't look like what we've decided it should, we decide that an austic person is not a person at all. When OCD doesn't look like what we've decided... well you get the point.
Adding one more name to the list of acceptable mental illness isn't going to solve anything. I can't help but feel that the main reason people want to know specifically what's wrong with Mark Dorsett is because they want to pull up the Wikipedia and start figuring out which behaviors he should be forgiven for and which behaviors he should be punished and humiliated for.
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe people are just sincerely curious. So, okay, Mark Dorsett is suffering from what's called a Cluster B Personality Disorder. Depending on the doctor he could either be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder (over the years research has suggested that there's a significant gender bias in the diagnostic procedure, that BPD is not any more or less common in women just that doctors are more likely to interpret the same behaviors and thought patterns differently in men and women).
Borderline Personality Disorder is a pretty heartbreaking mental illness, a lot of therapists still refuse to treat patients diagnosed with this. It is brought on by a severe childhood trauma-- most likely sexual abuse, but not always-- and best responds to a complex and expensive form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Even among professionals who should know better, people with BPD are not afforded much compassion. They are seen as compulsive liars, manipulative, pathetic, selfish. If their self-loathing, self-destructive patterns cross over to self-injurious behavior they can open up some pretty Exorcist level stuff:
(Source)
Marsha Lineham went on to develop a key component in the treatment of Cluster B Personality disorders called "Radical Acceptance" she then devoted her life and education to studying and helping those like her, becoming the foremost expert in BPD. She only recently came out as a former patient, shocking many of her colleagues.
The irony of BPD is that because it is not linked back to a chemical or neurological cause, people with BPD ... even the WORST cases of BPD can recover and live perfectly normal, unmedicated lives. If they stay in "remission" for three years, the odds of them relapsing drop astronomically.
And that's the most heartbreaking thing about this type of mental illness: recovery is so close and so attainable but many people dealing with this illness cannot reach it simply because their actions are not recognized as mental illness by the general public. So for every one person who understands that this person needs help, there are five people who will be baited into encouraging the self-destruction along. For ever loved one who draws a line in the sand and stops enabling, there's a queue of lonely guys and girls convinced that the cure is enough love and support.
It's a really sad, frustrating and horrible thing to watch play out and what I felt was important to understand about it is that mental illness like this is not about one person being "sick". It's about how the illness affects an entire community of people, worsening or reenforcing the disorder. So that's what I really wanted to write about: how mental illness isolates, damages, and ultimately changes the people that surround it. How not recognizing what's really going on or not knowing how to deal with it can turn you into a person you hate.
Hence the title.
But in our genre there are a number of books with what I like to call "strawman plotlines" and I find those books and the culture that develops when they overrun a genre way more offensive than a few unlikable characters.
A strawman plotline is like a strawman argument: it's a plotline where the primary antagonist is portrayed in a way that no reader could ever sympathize with. It's more complicated than a cardboard "evil villain" because the point of a strawman plotline is not just bad character development. Strawman plotlines hand the reader something the reader wants to believe about themselves and their attitudes, then creates false scenarios of injustice that do not reflect the proper context and motivations of the real life injustices they are pretending to speak out against. The reader takes comfort in their moral outrage and feels proud of themselves for being a great person, part of a righteous cause ... even if in real life that reader's ACTUAL attitudes and behaviors contribute to the problems they claim to be so totally and 100% against.
It would have been easy to write a book in which the people torturing Mark Dorsett for being mentally ill were awful people, where the reader could tell themselves that if they encountered a Mark Dorsett in real life they would of course be on the right side. They would save him. They wouldn't bully him deeper and deeper into madness the way many of the characters in I'm The Guy You Hate do.
But that story would also be pathetically insincere. It was important to me that readers be able to sympathize with the "bad guys" in this situation, that they understood why people hate Mark and why they go out of their way to do such unbelievably cruel things to him.
One of the main themes of I'm The Guy You Hate is bullying, which has become the topic de jour with which to express fake and meaningless moral outrage. I really hate the dogpile of so called "anti-bullying" campaigns because most of them completely miss the fucking point. Our bullying problems can be traced directly back to the narratives we start force feeding our children with from birth. Rent basically ANY children's movie and watch what happens to "the bad guy" by the end. It is not enough to simply defeat the bad guy. It's not enough to prevent his evil plan. Without fail the bad guy is almost always humiliated publicly. He is taken down a few pegs or exposed in a way that the audience is encouraged to laugh at.
In the book, Jonny Ordell traces the problem with this narrative like this:
“Bullies don’t need a reason, Jonny.”
“See… I don’t think so. I think ... and this is just my observation, it’s all a cycle really. We have this narrative: revenge of the nerds, right? The uncool kids take revenge on the cool kids, humble them. We all indulge in their humiliation because we have an excuse: it’s righteous. They are bad people being punished—they are bullies—but people can be so insecure sometimes. So how do we know that the slights, the ostracism aren’t just imagined? What if the cool kid never really rejects the uncool kid? What if the uncool kid just assumes the cool kid will never, could never, really like him? Assumes he’s being rejected when really nothing of the kind has happened.”
We teach people that the correct way of dealing with people who make them feel bad is to find ways to publicly humiliate them and then we wonder why we have a bullying problem? Really?
I hate anti-bullying campaigns for the same reason I hate strawman plotlines: it's self congratulatory bullshit that gives people something EASY to agree with so that they don't have to take a cold hard look at THEIR OWN FUCKING BEHAVIOR.
But what does this have to do with mental illness?
The reason why Mark gets bullied is because most people do not realize he is mentally ill. Stories like Mark's play out everyday, we just don't usually see them from the inside. We usually hear about them after Mark has committed suicide, then we flash our fake outrage and a half a dozen completely meaningless blog posts are written urging people to "get help" if they need it. We act like if we had been there, if this had been our friend OF COURSE we would have done the right thing.
I'm The Guy You Hate was designed to be a book that threw acid in the face of this idea. You would not do the right thing. You would absolutely not do the right thing. Especially if you happened to care about the person in trouble.
As much as Jonny Ordell wants to do the right thing, he ends up enabling Mark, making many of the situations in which he is trying to protect Mark much worse. He allows the situation with Mark to completely and totally destroy his self esteem and does not recognize his own resentment until he is actively participating in the bullying he is supposedly trying to stop. That's not a pretty story, but it is an HONEST story.
I made a decision while I was writing this book not to reveal the name of Mark's illness because it seemed counterproductive to do so. To begin with, though Mark's behavior was drawn not just from my personal experience but from the stories of hundreds of people I interacted with in support groups and on online crisis forums, I did not wish Mark's characterization to be treated as a representation of his disease. Mental illness manifests differently for everyone. Even the exact same disorder can look one way in one case, and a completely different way with another person.
Naming the disease would also be overlooking the actual problem that fuels the tragedy playing out in the book: people do not recognize mental illness when they see it because we only accept a few, extremely narrow depictions of mental illness in our stories. When depression doesn't look like what we've decided depression should look like we question whether or not the person should just "get over it". When autism doesn't look like what we've decided it should, we decide that an austic person is not a person at all. When OCD doesn't look like what we've decided... well you get the point.
Adding one more name to the list of acceptable mental illness isn't going to solve anything. I can't help but feel that the main reason people want to know specifically what's wrong with Mark Dorsett is because they want to pull up the Wikipedia and start figuring out which behaviors he should be forgiven for and which behaviors he should be punished and humiliated for.
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe people are just sincerely curious. So, okay, Mark Dorsett is suffering from what's called a Cluster B Personality Disorder. Depending on the doctor he could either be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder (over the years research has suggested that there's a significant gender bias in the diagnostic procedure, that BPD is not any more or less common in women just that doctors are more likely to interpret the same behaviors and thought patterns differently in men and women).
Borderline Personality Disorder is a pretty heartbreaking mental illness, a lot of therapists still refuse to treat patients diagnosed with this. It is brought on by a severe childhood trauma-- most likely sexual abuse, but not always-- and best responds to a complex and expensive form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Even among professionals who should know better, people with BPD are not afforded much compassion. They are seen as compulsive liars, manipulative, pathetic, selfish. If their self-loathing, self-destructive patterns cross over to self-injurious behavior they can open up some pretty Exorcist level stuff:
Marsha Linehan arrived at the Institute of Living on March 9, 1961, at age 17, and quickly became the sole occupant of the seclusion room on the unit known as Thompson Two, for the most severely ill patients. The staff saw no alternative: The girl attacked herself habitually, burning her wrists with cigarettes, slashing her arms, her legs, her midsection, using any sharp object she could get her hands on.
The seclusion room, a small cell with a bed, a chair and a tiny, barred window, had no such weapon. Yet her urge to die only deepened. So she did the only thing that made any sense to her at the time: banged her head against the wall and, later, the floor. Hard.
(Source)
Marsha Lineham went on to develop a key component in the treatment of Cluster B Personality disorders called "Radical Acceptance" she then devoted her life and education to studying and helping those like her, becoming the foremost expert in BPD. She only recently came out as a former patient, shocking many of her colleagues.
The irony of BPD is that because it is not linked back to a chemical or neurological cause, people with BPD ... even the WORST cases of BPD can recover and live perfectly normal, unmedicated lives. If they stay in "remission" for three years, the odds of them relapsing drop astronomically.
And that's the most heartbreaking thing about this type of mental illness: recovery is so close and so attainable but many people dealing with this illness cannot reach it simply because their actions are not recognized as mental illness by the general public. So for every one person who understands that this person needs help, there are five people who will be baited into encouraging the self-destruction along. For ever loved one who draws a line in the sand and stops enabling, there's a queue of lonely guys and girls convinced that the cure is enough love and support.
It's a really sad, frustrating and horrible thing to watch play out and what I felt was important to understand about it is that mental illness like this is not about one person being "sick". It's about how the illness affects an entire community of people, worsening or reenforcing the disorder. So that's what I really wanted to write about: how mental illness isolates, damages, and ultimately changes the people that surround it. How not recognizing what's really going on or not knowing how to deal with it can turn you into a person you hate.
Hence the title.
March 24, 2015
Working With Wilde City
It's a strange story really.
I had just finished I'm The Guy You Hate and I didn't know what to do with it. On one hand I didn't want to self publish it, mostly because I just didn't have the time and energy to do it right. I didn't want to serialize it because I had already written it and playing off the energy of the audience is the best part of serialization.
But I knew I couldn't send it to my publisher.
Don't get me wrong, they're great. They have extremely high editorial standards and a very clear opinion about what they want to publish. But they also have very strong opinions about what sells and how to market books and that was the problem.
I'm The Guy You Hate is M/M, it has some erotica in it, but it is fundamentally a book about mental illness and so I knew I couldn't send it to my normal editor because I knew they would want to stick a naked, headless torso on the cover.
I felt pretty strongly that wasn't appropriate and I just didn't want to fight about it.
So I went about looking for another publisher.
This Book Scares Me
I remember really liking the site design of Wilde City Press. As most of you know, I work in technology so when someone in the M/M community manages to get out of Web 1.0 design aesthetics, I really appreciate it.
Their editorial policy sounded like a great fit, something I could totally work within the confines of. I mean, those of you who have read my books before know .... uh ... I don't exactly write stuff that's easy to categorize. I felt like I could fit into Wilde City's categories about as much as I will ever fit into any categories period.
I got a prompt response from Ethan Day acknowledging that they had received my submission and if I didn't hear back in a month to let him know. Less than 24 hours later I got another email from him because the editor they had handed my three chapter sample off to was raving about how amazing it was (^_^;;;;). Contracts were on the way.
I want to admit something here that I'm probably not supposed to on the day the book comes out, let alone ever. I'm not sure if I'm The Guy You Hate is any good. That's not false modesty. I'm not sure because I literally have not read it since I submitted it to Wilde City. When they sent back edits, I would skim to the highlighted bits, make suggested changes or appropriate compromises and move on. Usually I don't do that. Usually while I'm making those changes I end up rereading everything a few times.
But I'm The Guy You Hate is so deeply personal I'm almost afraid of it. Writing it was an amazingly positive experience, but I'm still a bit raw around the real life events that shaped the story.
I've written personal books before. I think all books are in at least some way a personal journey for the author. But not like this. Let me put it this way, half way through the first draft I knew I had a problem. I wasn't sure how likable Mark Dorsett, the main character's love interest, was. The story hinged on readers being drawn into Jonny's confusion and frustration about Mark's intentions. Does he return Jonny's feelings? Is he really a nice guy or just a jerk?
Mark needs to be at least somewhat amusing and charming. If the reader doesn't at least like him enough to feel bad for him, then nothing else in the book works.
I realized that rather than revealing Mark's mental illness slowly, as had been my original plan, I had to state it immediately up front. I had to clue the reader into the fact that Mark is not simply a jerk alienating and taking advantage of others.
So I set about writing what is now the very first scene in the finished novel. I don't usually write in Starbucks, but I think at the time I wanted to get some fresh air and a salted caramel hot chocolate. Anyway, I ended up furiously writing out that same conversation between the two main characters while sobbing hysterically in public and fighting very hard to keep anyone from noticing that I was sobbing hysterically over my keyboard.
This book scares me a little for that reason. I couldn't really read it again.
The Counterintuitive Realities of Mental Illness
I have believed for some time that the attitudes expressed in most romances encourage awful, emotionally abusive relationships when applied to real life. And when it comes to dealing with a mentally ill loved one, what most books and movies on this subject will have you believe you should do is downright dangerous.
In most cases mental illness is not a disease of just one person, but of a whole network of people. Loving someone who is sick creates so much emotional and psychological stress people can and often do pick up mentally unhealthy behaviors themselves. On top of that the way most people are taught to "help" can actually make the mentally ill person much sicker. There are some forms of mental illness where the symptoms of the disease are actually defense mechanisms protecting the sufferer from a far greater emotional trauma.
This becomes destructive when society pushes the idea that recovering from mental illness equals eliminating the outward signs that something is wrong. Sick people are put under tremendous pressure to repress, hide or lie about what is really going on in their heads. If they do manage to force a symptom to go away they are left defenseless against the original trauma without the skills they might otherwise have developed under the care of the right professional.
You guys already know, I like subverting well-worn storylines. And here I wanted to write something honest about what it's like being in love with someone who is crazy. What it's like and the tough choices you have to make to survive. Most romances that include elements of mental illness focus on the most extreme and melodramatic manifestations of these problems. ANGST ANGST ANGST followed by suicide attempts and finally the sick person being healed by the true, stable, unwavering love and support of another person.
Let me tell you it doesn't work like that.
So What Am I The Big Fish Now?
One of the weirdest parts of publishing this book was realizing the Wilde City was basically going to let me do whatever I wanted. I'm not used to this. I'm used to this genre keeping me on a very short leash. I'm used to long lectures about 'what readers want' and risk taking prose being pruned down to conform strictly to style rules. I'm used to editors asking me to use fewer trademarks, less slang, describe more ... or less.
I work well in restriction I think. It stimulates me creatively. There's security in being reigned in I think. I'm a little nervous being off one.
I'm also not used to my work actually ... being promoted. Not that I mind, you know, it's just that I've always felt that the bigger and more influential you get the more you should keep your goddamn mouth shut. And.... I am seriously not good at doing that ^_^;;;;
But then ... I'm also not sure that this book is any good either.
I had just finished I'm The Guy You Hate and I didn't know what to do with it. On one hand I didn't want to self publish it, mostly because I just didn't have the time and energy to do it right. I didn't want to serialize it because I had already written it and playing off the energy of the audience is the best part of serialization.
But I knew I couldn't send it to my publisher.
Don't get me wrong, they're great. They have extremely high editorial standards and a very clear opinion about what they want to publish. But they also have very strong opinions about what sells and how to market books and that was the problem.
I'm The Guy You Hate is M/M, it has some erotica in it, but it is fundamentally a book about mental illness and so I knew I couldn't send it to my normal editor because I knew they would want to stick a naked, headless torso on the cover.
I felt pretty strongly that wasn't appropriate and I just didn't want to fight about it.
So I went about looking for another publisher.
This Book Scares Me
I remember really liking the site design of Wilde City Press. As most of you know, I work in technology so when someone in the M/M community manages to get out of Web 1.0 design aesthetics, I really appreciate it.
Their editorial policy sounded like a great fit, something I could totally work within the confines of. I mean, those of you who have read my books before know .... uh ... I don't exactly write stuff that's easy to categorize. I felt like I could fit into Wilde City's categories about as much as I will ever fit into any categories period.
I got a prompt response from Ethan Day acknowledging that they had received my submission and if I didn't hear back in a month to let him know. Less than 24 hours later I got another email from him because the editor they had handed my three chapter sample off to was raving about how amazing it was (^_^;;;;). Contracts were on the way.
I want to admit something here that I'm probably not supposed to on the day the book comes out, let alone ever. I'm not sure if I'm The Guy You Hate is any good. That's not false modesty. I'm not sure because I literally have not read it since I submitted it to Wilde City. When they sent back edits, I would skim to the highlighted bits, make suggested changes or appropriate compromises and move on. Usually I don't do that. Usually while I'm making those changes I end up rereading everything a few times.
But I'm The Guy You Hate is so deeply personal I'm almost afraid of it. Writing it was an amazingly positive experience, but I'm still a bit raw around the real life events that shaped the story.
I've written personal books before. I think all books are in at least some way a personal journey for the author. But not like this. Let me put it this way, half way through the first draft I knew I had a problem. I wasn't sure how likable Mark Dorsett, the main character's love interest, was. The story hinged on readers being drawn into Jonny's confusion and frustration about Mark's intentions. Does he return Jonny's feelings? Is he really a nice guy or just a jerk?
Mark needs to be at least somewhat amusing and charming. If the reader doesn't at least like him enough to feel bad for him, then nothing else in the book works.
I realized that rather than revealing Mark's mental illness slowly, as had been my original plan, I had to state it immediately up front. I had to clue the reader into the fact that Mark is not simply a jerk alienating and taking advantage of others.
So I set about writing what is now the very first scene in the finished novel. I don't usually write in Starbucks, but I think at the time I wanted to get some fresh air and a salted caramel hot chocolate. Anyway, I ended up furiously writing out that same conversation between the two main characters while sobbing hysterically in public and fighting very hard to keep anyone from noticing that I was sobbing hysterically over my keyboard.
This book scares me a little for that reason. I couldn't really read it again.
The Counterintuitive Realities of Mental Illness
I have believed for some time that the attitudes expressed in most romances encourage awful, emotionally abusive relationships when applied to real life. And when it comes to dealing with a mentally ill loved one, what most books and movies on this subject will have you believe you should do is downright dangerous.
In most cases mental illness is not a disease of just one person, but of a whole network of people. Loving someone who is sick creates so much emotional and psychological stress people can and often do pick up mentally unhealthy behaviors themselves. On top of that the way most people are taught to "help" can actually make the mentally ill person much sicker. There are some forms of mental illness where the symptoms of the disease are actually defense mechanisms protecting the sufferer from a far greater emotional trauma.
This becomes destructive when society pushes the idea that recovering from mental illness equals eliminating the outward signs that something is wrong. Sick people are put under tremendous pressure to repress, hide or lie about what is really going on in their heads. If they do manage to force a symptom to go away they are left defenseless against the original trauma without the skills they might otherwise have developed under the care of the right professional.
You guys already know, I like subverting well-worn storylines. And here I wanted to write something honest about what it's like being in love with someone who is crazy. What it's like and the tough choices you have to make to survive. Most romances that include elements of mental illness focus on the most extreme and melodramatic manifestations of these problems. ANGST ANGST ANGST followed by suicide attempts and finally the sick person being healed by the true, stable, unwavering love and support of another person.
Let me tell you it doesn't work like that.
So What Am I The Big Fish Now?
One of the weirdest parts of publishing this book was realizing the Wilde City was basically going to let me do whatever I wanted. I'm not used to this. I'm used to this genre keeping me on a very short leash. I'm used to long lectures about 'what readers want' and risk taking prose being pruned down to conform strictly to style rules. I'm used to editors asking me to use fewer trademarks, less slang, describe more ... or less.
I work well in restriction I think. It stimulates me creatively. There's security in being reigned in I think. I'm a little nervous being off one.
I'm also not used to my work actually ... being promoted. Not that I mind, you know, it's just that I've always felt that the bigger and more influential you get the more you should keep your goddamn mouth shut. And.... I am seriously not good at doing that ^_^;;;;
But then ... I'm also not sure that this book is any good either.
October 21, 2014
I Have A Secret, Unlisted, By-Invitation-Only GR Community Where I Post My Reviews And Here's Why
It seems we've reached critical mass with the harassment of reviewers. It's funny because all this is happening just as I was thinking to myself that I *might* want to go back to reviewing publicly again.
The most frustrating thing for reviewers in this situation is the fact that often the accusations that are used to justify this abuse are taken at face value. When an author claims he or she is being bullied no one asks if there's any proof of the bullying beyond the intangible connections made up in the author's head.
It was my own personal experience with this fact that led to me moving my reviews off of my public activity on GR:
A couple of years ago, an author took issue with a 3-star review I posted, linked to the review on her private fan community and told her devoted fans that I was grudge reviewing popular M/M authors in order to promote myself. I am still shocked at how many people took this accusation at face value even when it was pointed out that at the time I was not an M/M author (later this would change, obviously) and therefore had nothing to promote. I sat there watching this controversy unfold, thinking to myself that if every grudge against me was taken out with 3-star reviews I would be a happy camper indeed. It was a ridiculous situation. Made doubly ridiculous by the backtracking that followed once some of the author's own fans called bullshit on the issue.
Then the problem became that as an author I had no right to review books. So it's especially funny to me that now we have authors claiming that readers have no right to review books either. Authors have a conflict of interest. Readers lack the necessary learning and experience to form an opinion. No one should review a book ever!
If the fact that mainstream media is actually giving legitimacy to this nonsense makes you want to tear out your hair in frustration, take heart. Truth is, passionate readers have been wading through this muck for years whereas the mainstream community is only getting their first tastes. In time they will see this for the whiny bullshit it is.
Anyway, even though I felt that keeping authors (even M/M authors) from reviewing M/M was basically saying M/M is a second class genre not for serious writers (after all who do you think does the book reviews in the New York Times? Elves?) I did agree that on Goodreads it is not immediately obvious when looking at a review whether the reviewer has an author account and that, yes, for some people this information might affect the weight they give the commentary. That made sense to me, so I agreed to post a disclaimer on all my future reviews disclosing my author status and linking back to a longer post explaining the controversy.
For the most part I thought the issue was resolved. That is until a second author took issue with a 5-star review (!!!) I posted.
Yes, that's right. You read that correctly. Even when you post glowing praise, if your glowing praise is not glowing enough the author you are reviewing will find a way to call you a bully.
The context of this situation was slightly different. It started with a 3-star review and a polite DNF. I was trying to do a buddy read of a mega-popular M/M epic with a good friend of mine here on Goodreads and I couldn't get through the book. It bored me. To tears. This was especially surprising since at that time the author in question was one of my favorites. But, what the hell. It happens, right?
I did not write a review of this book, but I did post a quick note explaining that I had DNFed it for the time being, where I had stopped and then some thoughts on why it just didn't seem to be working for me.
Later I read another popular work from the same author and felt a resounding "meh~" rise from my core. So I 3-starred it and posted a review outlining what I liked and didn't liked about the book.
Seems simple right?
However, much like Blythe Harris, I posted status updates while I was reading and it was obvious that the author was following along. As updates went from positive, to gradually more "LOL WTF?", the author started just popping into random threads to engage me. This wasn't trolling per se ... honestly I don't know what to call it. I don't know what he was thinking. At first he seemed to be capable of laughing at himself and not taking himself too seriously. I thought how nice that was. But slowly it started to shift. He would reply to comments I made all around Goodreads just to nitpick something I had said and then LEAVE. No other remarks, no other contributions to the discussion. It didn't matter what was being discussed the author was always there to point out some tiny way in which I was wrong.
Eventually I got sick of this and asked him to stop, which he did. I thought the drama was over until I plunked down my hard earned money for another one of his books and discovered that I loved it. I really really loved it. It is still one of my favorites to this day. So I wrote a glowing review about all the ways this book was awesome. I called it awesome! All caps were used.
However I also mentioned the two super popular books that I thought were bad. I did this because I thought it would give people reading the review the proper context with which to weight my praise. Yes, I loved this book but I hated these books that maybe you loved. So maybe that makes this book that much better or maybe that makes my taste questionable. It seemed to me to be a fair comment to include.
Shortly after I published that review the author in question started complaining loudly on Twitter and Goodreads about a mysterious reviewer who had posted a 5-star review that read like a 1-star review and whom he wished he could pay to stop reading his books. The only reason why I know about this is that AGAIN everyone took the author at his word and assumed there was malicious intent without any proof of malicious intent. The author's status update started showing up in my news feed two or three times in a row as all my friends liked it and coos of support and devotion poured in.
In retrospect I suppose I could have just ignored it. The author hadn't named me. The review hadn't been linked to specifically. There was little or no trolling risk. But-- putting aside the fact that I was hurt and frustrated because I really truly loved the book-- on some level I thought that if I didn't say something the situation would escalate. After all when the author first jumped in to correct me I thought it was great fun. I tried to make him feel welcome while still maintaining my right to speak my mind. We laughed about it. I thought "how nice he doesn't take himself so seriously." I told him he should do things like that more often.
Then he did do them more often and they became progressively more obnoxious and antagonistic.
I felt like saying nothing here would only encourage later, more blatant harassment. When you let people get away with shit they tend to try to get away with more shit later on.
So I pointed out that the updates on Twitter and GR were clearly about my review and told him to go fuck himself.
Then I created a private community on GR, invited all my friends and stopped posting reviews publicly.
I never announced that's what I had done. This is the first time I have admitted to the existence of the unlisted by invitation only community. I thought about announcing it, but I was too concerned that it would be misconstrued as a place where me and my minions talk shit and conspire against others. After all, the burden of proof is obviously on the reviewer to disprove conspiracy theories rather than the outraged author. When an author says "I'm being harassed" no one asks for documentation of the harassment-- screencaps of tweets, emails, links, links to archive.org ... we have procedures for this on the internet, for some reason we just give those with a platform a pass. I suppose we assume that because they have a platform in the first place someone must have vetted their claims. Someone must have fact checked.
Yet when you're in the moment it is easy to ascribe the worst motives to something that hurts you. It's easy to link events together and convince yourself of cause and effect where there is none. It does not surprise me that Kathleen Hale saw a string of negative reviews about the same time from a connected group of people and jumped to the conclusion that this was a pattern of harassment with a clear ring leader rather than the shockingly banal reality that people tend to be friendly with other people who share similar tastes and opinions.
But Kathleen Hale became Kathleen Hale because there was no expectation that she should document this supposed "harassment" and present it along side her "quirky" narrative. To this day there are STILL people on GR who think that I grudge review other M/M authors for my own benefit, even when there are mountains of evidence debunking it. Even when the moderators of the community where the accusation was first thrown overruled the author and publicly cleared my name. I still from time to time come across a comment like "the bitch trolls great authors."
I chose to stop reviewing publicly, because at the end of the day the real reason why I review books is because I enjoy talking about them with my friends. I can get that experience without worrying about who's holding the leash on these hyper-sensitive self-important egomaniacal nut jobs. So why bother?
By the way, I am told that the two authors in this post have since gone on to become great friends. Chew on that for a minute.
The most frustrating thing for reviewers in this situation is the fact that often the accusations that are used to justify this abuse are taken at face value. When an author claims he or she is being bullied no one asks if there's any proof of the bullying beyond the intangible connections made up in the author's head.
It was my own personal experience with this fact that led to me moving my reviews off of my public activity on GR:
A couple of years ago, an author took issue with a 3-star review I posted, linked to the review on her private fan community and told her devoted fans that I was grudge reviewing popular M/M authors in order to promote myself. I am still shocked at how many people took this accusation at face value even when it was pointed out that at the time I was not an M/M author (later this would change, obviously) and therefore had nothing to promote. I sat there watching this controversy unfold, thinking to myself that if every grudge against me was taken out with 3-star reviews I would be a happy camper indeed. It was a ridiculous situation. Made doubly ridiculous by the backtracking that followed once some of the author's own fans called bullshit on the issue.
Then the problem became that as an author I had no right to review books. So it's especially funny to me that now we have authors claiming that readers have no right to review books either. Authors have a conflict of interest. Readers lack the necessary learning and experience to form an opinion. No one should review a book ever!
If the fact that mainstream media is actually giving legitimacy to this nonsense makes you want to tear out your hair in frustration, take heart. Truth is, passionate readers have been wading through this muck for years whereas the mainstream community is only getting their first tastes. In time they will see this for the whiny bullshit it is.
Anyway, even though I felt that keeping authors (even M/M authors) from reviewing M/M was basically saying M/M is a second class genre not for serious writers (after all who do you think does the book reviews in the New York Times? Elves?) I did agree that on Goodreads it is not immediately obvious when looking at a review whether the reviewer has an author account and that, yes, for some people this information might affect the weight they give the commentary. That made sense to me, so I agreed to post a disclaimer on all my future reviews disclosing my author status and linking back to a longer post explaining the controversy.
For the most part I thought the issue was resolved. That is until a second author took issue with a 5-star review (!!!) I posted.
Yes, that's right. You read that correctly. Even when you post glowing praise, if your glowing praise is not glowing enough the author you are reviewing will find a way to call you a bully.
The context of this situation was slightly different. It started with a 3-star review and a polite DNF. I was trying to do a buddy read of a mega-popular M/M epic with a good friend of mine here on Goodreads and I couldn't get through the book. It bored me. To tears. This was especially surprising since at that time the author in question was one of my favorites. But, what the hell. It happens, right?
I did not write a review of this book, but I did post a quick note explaining that I had DNFed it for the time being, where I had stopped and then some thoughts on why it just didn't seem to be working for me.
Later I read another popular work from the same author and felt a resounding "meh~" rise from my core. So I 3-starred it and posted a review outlining what I liked and didn't liked about the book.
Seems simple right?
However, much like Blythe Harris, I posted status updates while I was reading and it was obvious that the author was following along. As updates went from positive, to gradually more "LOL WTF?", the author started just popping into random threads to engage me. This wasn't trolling per se ... honestly I don't know what to call it. I don't know what he was thinking. At first he seemed to be capable of laughing at himself and not taking himself too seriously. I thought how nice that was. But slowly it started to shift. He would reply to comments I made all around Goodreads just to nitpick something I had said and then LEAVE. No other remarks, no other contributions to the discussion. It didn't matter what was being discussed the author was always there to point out some tiny way in which I was wrong.
Eventually I got sick of this and asked him to stop, which he did. I thought the drama was over until I plunked down my hard earned money for another one of his books and discovered that I loved it. I really really loved it. It is still one of my favorites to this day. So I wrote a glowing review about all the ways this book was awesome. I called it awesome! All caps were used.
However I also mentioned the two super popular books that I thought were bad. I did this because I thought it would give people reading the review the proper context with which to weight my praise. Yes, I loved this book but I hated these books that maybe you loved. So maybe that makes this book that much better or maybe that makes my taste questionable. It seemed to me to be a fair comment to include.
Shortly after I published that review the author in question started complaining loudly on Twitter and Goodreads about a mysterious reviewer who had posted a 5-star review that read like a 1-star review and whom he wished he could pay to stop reading his books. The only reason why I know about this is that AGAIN everyone took the author at his word and assumed there was malicious intent without any proof of malicious intent. The author's status update started showing up in my news feed two or three times in a row as all my friends liked it and coos of support and devotion poured in.
In retrospect I suppose I could have just ignored it. The author hadn't named me. The review hadn't been linked to specifically. There was little or no trolling risk. But-- putting aside the fact that I was hurt and frustrated because I really truly loved the book-- on some level I thought that if I didn't say something the situation would escalate. After all when the author first jumped in to correct me I thought it was great fun. I tried to make him feel welcome while still maintaining my right to speak my mind. We laughed about it. I thought "how nice he doesn't take himself so seriously." I told him he should do things like that more often.
Then he did do them more often and they became progressively more obnoxious and antagonistic.
I felt like saying nothing here would only encourage later, more blatant harassment. When you let people get away with shit they tend to try to get away with more shit later on.
So I pointed out that the updates on Twitter and GR were clearly about my review and told him to go fuck himself.
Then I created a private community on GR, invited all my friends and stopped posting reviews publicly.
I never announced that's what I had done. This is the first time I have admitted to the existence of the unlisted by invitation only community. I thought about announcing it, but I was too concerned that it would be misconstrued as a place where me and my minions talk shit and conspire against others. After all, the burden of proof is obviously on the reviewer to disprove conspiracy theories rather than the outraged author. When an author says "I'm being harassed" no one asks for documentation of the harassment-- screencaps of tweets, emails, links, links to archive.org ... we have procedures for this on the internet, for some reason we just give those with a platform a pass. I suppose we assume that because they have a platform in the first place someone must have vetted their claims. Someone must have fact checked.
Yet when you're in the moment it is easy to ascribe the worst motives to something that hurts you. It's easy to link events together and convince yourself of cause and effect where there is none. It does not surprise me that Kathleen Hale saw a string of negative reviews about the same time from a connected group of people and jumped to the conclusion that this was a pattern of harassment with a clear ring leader rather than the shockingly banal reality that people tend to be friendly with other people who share similar tastes and opinions.
But Kathleen Hale became Kathleen Hale because there was no expectation that she should document this supposed "harassment" and present it along side her "quirky" narrative. To this day there are STILL people on GR who think that I grudge review other M/M authors for my own benefit, even when there are mountains of evidence debunking it. Even when the moderators of the community where the accusation was first thrown overruled the author and publicly cleared my name. I still from time to time come across a comment like "the bitch trolls great authors."
I chose to stop reviewing publicly, because at the end of the day the real reason why I review books is because I enjoy talking about them with my friends. I can get that experience without worrying about who's holding the leash on these hyper-sensitive self-important egomaniacal nut jobs. So why bother?
By the way, I am told that the two authors in this post have since gone on to become great friends. Chew on that for a minute.
August 27, 2014
Who Wants Daily Smut?
Lately I'm finding it hard to remember how I ever managed to finish writing a single book, let alone a couple a year.
It's like going back to the gym after taking a long break from working out regularly. All the creative muscles are atrophied. Everything seems so hard. I'm incredibly frustrated by the memory of the way things used to be and the reality of what I can do now.
Of course, having been through this before with actual workouts I know that it will all come back eventually. It's just a matter of enforcing routines, getting back into the rhythm. It's always awkward in the beginning. Your mind remembers what to do, but your body has forgotten.
The same is true for writing.
One of the things I really miss about fanfiction is the idea of writing prompts. We used to have giant festivals of porn-- anonymous kink memes-- where anyone in the community could request a situation and any author who wanted to take it on could write a short story. The M/M community has a yearly event with a similar format, except instead of a challenge people write for fun it's increasingly becoming SERIUZ BUZINESS. Coming from the tradition of kink memes it was quite a shock to see people expecting a story written under a strict deadline with nearly every creative detail dictated to me to reflect the same standard of quality as books I could develop at my own pace and had complete freedom with.
Writing prompts, to me, are not about producing good stories. They are about stretching your author-muscles, challenging yourself, experimenting, exploring ideas, being silly. They are supposed to be fun, not a vehicle to collect reviews and launch a career.
So here's the deal: I've been playing around with this idea of doing a mailing list that sends out regular writing prompts. Write a short story and submit it. Everyday the whole list gets a few smutty stories in our mailboxes to enjoy.
But would anyone else participate? I'm not going to lie, mailing lists are a lot of work. :(
That's why I've set up a little LaunchRock page. If 300 people sign up for the mailing list, I'll set it up and manage it. So if this sounds like fu to you, even if you have no interest in writing anything sign up and send it to around to anyone else you know that would like daily free porn.
The Daily Smutty
It's like going back to the gym after taking a long break from working out regularly. All the creative muscles are atrophied. Everything seems so hard. I'm incredibly frustrated by the memory of the way things used to be and the reality of what I can do now.
Of course, having been through this before with actual workouts I know that it will all come back eventually. It's just a matter of enforcing routines, getting back into the rhythm. It's always awkward in the beginning. Your mind remembers what to do, but your body has forgotten.
The same is true for writing.
One of the things I really miss about fanfiction is the idea of writing prompts. We used to have giant festivals of porn-- anonymous kink memes-- where anyone in the community could request a situation and any author who wanted to take it on could write a short story. The M/M community has a yearly event with a similar format, except instead of a challenge people write for fun it's increasingly becoming SERIUZ BUZINESS. Coming from the tradition of kink memes it was quite a shock to see people expecting a story written under a strict deadline with nearly every creative detail dictated to me to reflect the same standard of quality as books I could develop at my own pace and had complete freedom with.
Writing prompts, to me, are not about producing good stories. They are about stretching your author-muscles, challenging yourself, experimenting, exploring ideas, being silly. They are supposed to be fun, not a vehicle to collect reviews and launch a career.
So here's the deal: I've been playing around with this idea of doing a mailing list that sends out regular writing prompts. Write a short story and submit it. Everyday the whole list gets a few smutty stories in our mailboxes to enjoy.
But would anyone else participate? I'm not going to lie, mailing lists are a lot of work. :(
That's why I've set up a little LaunchRock page. If 300 people sign up for the mailing list, I'll set it up and manage it. So if this sounds like fu to you, even if you have no interest in writing anything sign up and send it to around to anyone else you know that would like daily free porn.
The Daily Smutty
January 30, 2014
Ode to Truly Awful Books
A book is a lot of different things. On the basic level it's a form of communication ... but communication of what? To whom?
One of the ways the internet has changed the landscape for authors is by bringing all kinds of different audiences together in the same space. Great for the readers, who get to compare the recommendations of a variety of different groups before making a purchase, but seriously stressful for the writers. You have to be one royal pain in the ass not to feel pressure to make everyone happy.
The Freelancers is one of those books that I find difficult to defend. It's a bit campy, a bit unrealistic, a bit melodramatic, a bit ridiculous, a bit offensive-- a bit of everything it was intended to be, but I just can't find the energy to mount any "yes, but..." responses to the inevitable criticism. I can't think of a single good reason WHY these books are the way they are ... just that it amused me to write them that way.
With most of my books I've been able to face the threat of different audiences interpreting the same details different ways (and criticizing me for it) by focusing on some overarching message I really wanted to communicate. By keeping that in mind I was able to survive the editing process, the push back from my publishers to make the book more marketable or traditional. I knew what I wanted to say, so I knew what compromises would destroy that message and what ones wouldn't.
But not with The Freelancers.
There's really no point to these books, no theme, no philosophical undertone. I write them for fun, playing around with the campy, sexist, ridiculous stylistic elements of old-school spy movies. The Freelancers to me are like B-movie books. All your criticisms of them are valid.
And yet...
Shortly after I finished the first volume (The Freelancers: The Translator) I realized I just couldn't publish it. I couldn't go through that whole process because I didn't know how to defend it. The book was terrible ... but I still kind of loved it. And yet I couldn't really put my finger on WHAT exactly I liked about it, so how could I help improve it?
Publishing it would be a shit show, trying to turn a book that was never intended to be good into something good. I wasn't willing to go through that process. It seemed too disheartening and stressful.
But still ... I had written it. I wanted to put it in the hands of people who would enjoy it.
There used to be a clear line between published and unpublished. It used to be you could throw something up on the internet for free and people would cut you some slack on it. Free stuff on the internet wasn't published. There was no expectation that your work should represent you because there was no conceivable benefit to you when you gave it away for free.
That isn't the case anymore. So I had a bit of a dilemma. How do you distribute a book ... without publishing it?
Pirate Bay of course :)
Yes, that's right. As of today I am bootlegging my own books!
You can download the torrent for The Freelancers: The Translator HERE
And the torrent for The Freelancers: The Mercenary HERE
Each torrent contains versions of the book in doc, pdf, epub and mobi.
Read at your own risk ... but trust me when I say they are awful :D :D :D Delightfully so!
One of the ways the internet has changed the landscape for authors is by bringing all kinds of different audiences together in the same space. Great for the readers, who get to compare the recommendations of a variety of different groups before making a purchase, but seriously stressful for the writers. You have to be one royal pain in the ass not to feel pressure to make everyone happy.
The Freelancers is one of those books that I find difficult to defend. It's a bit campy, a bit unrealistic, a bit melodramatic, a bit ridiculous, a bit offensive-- a bit of everything it was intended to be, but I just can't find the energy to mount any "yes, but..." responses to the inevitable criticism. I can't think of a single good reason WHY these books are the way they are ... just that it amused me to write them that way.
With most of my books I've been able to face the threat of different audiences interpreting the same details different ways (and criticizing me for it) by focusing on some overarching message I really wanted to communicate. By keeping that in mind I was able to survive the editing process, the push back from my publishers to make the book more marketable or traditional. I knew what I wanted to say, so I knew what compromises would destroy that message and what ones wouldn't.
But not with The Freelancers.
There's really no point to these books, no theme, no philosophical undertone. I write them for fun, playing around with the campy, sexist, ridiculous stylistic elements of old-school spy movies. The Freelancers to me are like B-movie books. All your criticisms of them are valid.
And yet...
Shortly after I finished the first volume (The Freelancers: The Translator) I realized I just couldn't publish it. I couldn't go through that whole process because I didn't know how to defend it. The book was terrible ... but I still kind of loved it. And yet I couldn't really put my finger on WHAT exactly I liked about it, so how could I help improve it?
Publishing it would be a shit show, trying to turn a book that was never intended to be good into something good. I wasn't willing to go through that process. It seemed too disheartening and stressful.
But still ... I had written it. I wanted to put it in the hands of people who would enjoy it.
There used to be a clear line between published and unpublished. It used to be you could throw something up on the internet for free and people would cut you some slack on it. Free stuff on the internet wasn't published. There was no expectation that your work should represent you because there was no conceivable benefit to you when you gave it away for free.
That isn't the case anymore. So I had a bit of a dilemma. How do you distribute a book ... without publishing it?
Pirate Bay of course :)
Yes, that's right. As of today I am bootlegging my own books!
You can download the torrent for The Freelancers: The Translator HERE
And the torrent for The Freelancers: The Mercenary HERE
Each torrent contains versions of the book in doc, pdf, epub and mobi.
Read at your own risk ... but trust me when I say they are awful :D :D :D Delightfully so!
June 30, 2013
Things That Are Really Hard to Do One-Handed
(Those of you that are thinking dirty thoughts upon reading the title of this post are about to feel real bad)
On Wednesday night I sprained my elbow vaulting in Parkour-- the best part of this injury is the look on people's faces when I say that ^_^
We were working on tic-tac runs and I clipped the second vault with my foot, ended up dropping four feet straight onto my elbow. Was like hitting funny bone times one million, but I had full range of motion without any pain immediately after so I'm pretty sure it's just a sprain.
Tomorrow I'm going to have it X-Rayed just to be sure. For now I'm hobbling around with one T-Rex arm enjoying how all my male colleagues are mother henning over me. It's kind of adorable :)
Oh yeah, I finally finished reworking my website.... still need to proofread the copy, still need to move the domain over, might change some of the wording to be less asshole-y ... might embrace my inner asshole instead :D Who knows!
PS - I know I owe some emails Re: free books, I'm not ignoring you I swear! Will get to them soon.
On Wednesday night I sprained my elbow vaulting in Parkour-- the best part of this injury is the look on people's faces when I say that ^_^
We were working on tic-tac runs and I clipped the second vault with my foot, ended up dropping four feet straight onto my elbow. Was like hitting funny bone times one million, but I had full range of motion without any pain immediately after so I'm pretty sure it's just a sprain.
Tomorrow I'm going to have it X-Rayed just to be sure. For now I'm hobbling around with one T-Rex arm enjoying how all my male colleagues are mother henning over me. It's kind of adorable :)
Oh yeah, I finally finished reworking my website.... still need to proofread the copy, still need to move the domain over, might change some of the wording to be less asshole-y ... might embrace my inner asshole instead :D Who knows!
PS - I know I owe some emails Re: free books, I'm not ignoring you I swear! Will get to them soon.
June 3, 2013
Coming Full Circle
Attention: Rumors of my death have been-- well, pretty much true *lol* Unfortunately, I've been writing an awful lot of code and not much of anything else (as the one or two people trying to follow Fun With Dick & Shame can tell you >.>) I have something maybe kind of cool in that regard coming up soon, but that's a subject for another blog post.This week was a strange one for me. Book Expo America was in town. Two years ago I was working in publishing running a technical services company. BEA was the best part of year both as a book lover and as a would-be entrepreneur. There's plenty of networking, parties, drinking, deals, and of course books ... OMG THE BOOKS! BEA is like freebie central: hundreds of unreleased ARCs! People can and often do come back with back-breaking bags full of new reads.
The publishing industry, on the other hand, was not always such a pleasant place. Not long after my last BEA I reached my peak frustration level and decided to close up shop. There were so many great opportunities out there to make much more money banging my head against a lot fewer walls. I felt ready to go explore other paths before work completely destroyed my love of books. For the sake of my continued happiness and sanity I decided two things: that I was done with being an entrepreneur, and that I was done working in publishing.
So what am I doing right now? Running my own business. Who ends up signing on as our first major customer? One of the Big Six publishing houses.
Being back at BEA is weird.
I mean ... it was GOOD weird! I kept running into people I knew. In an exhibit hall filled with thousands of people I couldn't go more than five feet without someone flagging me down. I ran into one person who was providing the same service to magazines that I was trying to provide publishers. Since I closed down his company has now moved into the space and it felt good to have someone go "OMG you were so right, I completely understand why you left" but even better to know that he's been able to make some more progress, that progress was possible for people who were willing to stick it out.
On the M/M side I ran into Kate McMurray and met Michael Murphy at the DSP booth. DSP is the only M/M publisher that has a booth at BEA and while they still had their disgusting free lip gloss, they also had free paperback copies of their books (!!!)
I made a promise to myself in returning to BEA: I was only doing the one day we were required to be there and I was only going to come home with one or two books .... but a table of free M/M??? I was not expecting a table of free M/M books @___@
And as is usual for BEA, the next day I looked over my haul and wondered what the odds were that I would actually bother to READ any of these. Here's what's sitting on my floor:
Little Squirrels Can Climb Tall Trees
Delsyn's Blues
Freefall
If you'd like any of these, let me know. I'll be happy to pass them along :D
March 17, 2013
White Writers; Black Characters
A couple of months ago I had a startling revelation about myself: I did not want to write black characters. It has absolutely nothing to do with them being black-- I adore a full range of black characters from Lana in Archer, to Marty in House of Lies, to the entire cast of Jackie Brown-- and everything to do with me being (mostly) white.
I say "mostly" because I'm white, both my parents are white, all of my grandparents are white, but according to my mother my great-grandfather was black. I have no idea if that's true or not, but it's always been a surprisingly difficult thing to deal with. Like most large immigrant families both my mother and my father's sides are littered with legend. My father's side of the family, they say, is descended from minor Hapsburgs, there's a knight somewhere on the family tree, another great grandfather may have stowed away on a ship to America in order to escape an arranged marriage. Any of these stories I can trot out at cocktail parties without trouble. Telling them isn't about pretending to be someone I'm not. Taking pride in them is just a normal part of taking pride in my heritage.
But my allegedly "black" great grandfather? I can't talk about him because I have no proof. Can't be proud of him because to be proud of him is to try to escape the shame of privilege all white people must carry. I want to be proud of it. I want to embrace this part of my heritage the same as I would embrace any other part but I'm terrified of not having the proof to back it up. Claiming to be one-eighth Irish isn't controversial. Claiming to be one-eighth black is a completely different story.
Like most white writers I've also become terrified of writing black characters, for much the same reason. The mere act of establishing someone's skin color is unnecessarily politicized. A black character is inevitably seen as a statement and/or judgement about the black community as a whole ... and really, to be honest, why make yourself a target when you don't have to?
So I became locked in a completely absurdist and borderline racist routine. I only wrote black characters when it was necessary, that is to say when the absence of at least one black character would be completely unrealistic. Say, for example, writing a story with an ensemble cast set in New York City, like The Condor
.
There are no black characters in The Condor
. There is one latino, one Asian, four white guys and Latrisha.
And oh ... Latrisha got me in so much trouble.
But first let's talk about The Condor itself. The Condor is a story about stereotypes and the problems that result from not looking beyond them. It is primarily about the stereotypes facing gay men and prostitutes, but there's some discussion about racial stereotypes as well. When I conceived the character of Latrisha I wasn't sure what race to make her. On one hand she had definitely been inspired by drag queen Goddess and superstar Latrice Royal ... on the other...
I was still terrified of the risks involved in writing black characters. In my head Latrisha alternated between this:
and this:
for quite a while before I finally decided that maybe I could use this problem to my advantage. The Condor is about stereotypes after all. It would be interesting to attach one or two minor "black" stereotypes to the character and use it to make a broader, more subtle point. This character is not identified anywhere in the book as black, you see her as black because you are thinking in stereotypes, just as Harry does.
The brouhaha over Rue's casting in the Hunger Games was still heavy in my mind at the time. Readers see what they want to see in a character, regardless of any description or direction you give them. The fact that so many people saw something so completely at odds with the text and then got so upset about it was interesting. I knew that some people would read Latrisha as black, some as white. I was interested in the opportunity to point something out about the way we think.
It was meant, primarily, to be a critique of stereotypes in line with the rest of the book. To reinforce what was more specifically stated at other points in other situations. It was not meant to be some sort of statement of how black people are. I was, quite frankly, deeply disturbed when people started reading it that way.
My worst fears were now fully realized. Reviews started popping up calling the book racist for the way it portrayed black people. I felt ashamed of myself and what I had done. I began scratching out Latrisha's scenes in my mental outlines of The Condor's sequel Fun With Dick & Shame, taking even more steps back from the idea of writing black characters in the future.
And then I suddenly got really mad about this situation.
Of all the characters in The Condor, Latrisha is by far the run away favorite. She is smart, she is funny, she understands the realities of prostitution and is committed to helping people. She is beautiful, glamorous, takes no bullshit from everyone and sees straight through most of the book's most deceptive and manipulative characters. But she's also no Bagger Vance. She takes advantage of Harry, ignores his trauma and even unintentionally exacerbates it.
The trouble with writing black characters is that they are not often seen as characters, but as tokens and political statements ... but that's because most white writers have become so terrified of writing black characters that we write only one and then live or die by how that characterization is received. I put in one of two small elements that I knew would "sound black" to most readers-- the name Latrisha, a passing sarcastic reference to "a weave", etc-- and suddenly every aspect was being called into question. For example, the way Latrisha speaks was considered either "too ghetto" or "too mammy" to be acceptable, but this ignored the fact that the white narrator of The Condor speaks in exactly the same style through out the book. I never thought of Latrisha's dialogue as being part of the "black stereotypes" I was including ... it was just consistent with the way loud, obnoxious drag queens of all colors tended to speak. I was frustrated by what seemed like circular reasoning: Latrisha is black because of the offensive stereotypes and the stereotypes are only offensive because Latrisha is black.
I wanted to use Latrisha to point out to people how ridiculous it is that we think some names "sound black" or how when a white girl gets hair extensions they're just hair extensions but when a black girl gets the same exact thing it's called something different. It was supposed to be a positive thing, but perhaps it was too big an issue to be addressed appropriately in the space I gave it.
Nevertheless, as I contemplated trying to escape further criticism by discontinuing the character of Latrisha I started to get really angry about the whole situation. I am not a racist person, but I had allowed myself to be bullied into behaving and writing in a very racist matter by people who were looking for a reason to get offended. The fact that I felt I needed to find an excuse to justify making a character black, that the default state should be assumed to be white ... it was all so disgusting and infuriating.
For a long time I had avoided making characters black because I was terrified of precisely this type of criticism. But in doing so I had unintentionally furthered the kind of racist white washing and anti-diversity movement that plagues publishing right now. Writers of all colors step away from writing black characters because we don't want to be criticized. Is the character too bad? Too good? Almost anything can be racist if you look at it hard enough. Readers avoid books with black MCs because they assume they will be overloaded with commentary on racism. Commentary that they especially do not want in their escapist fantasy.
All and all we are encouraging a reality that none of us actually want to live in.
So I said to myself "Fuck it. Fuck them." As a writer it's my job to be offensive and stop offering apologies. Not only is Latrisha making an appearance in Fun With Dick & Shame, but I'm instituting a new policy for myself of "gratuitous black people." Why should my default character model be white-until-proven-black? From now on if there's no specific reason to make a character white, I'm going to make him black ... no justification, no apologies, no carefully editing what he does and says to make sure it's a proper and PC-approved portrayal. No more accepting this argument that just like I can't be proud of my black great-grandfather, I can't embrace black characters because as a whitey I will never understand, never fully appreciate what the "black experience" is like.
I won't understand, but I don't think there's any reason why I have to understand. No one expects Dora the Explorer to offer a full and nuanced depiction of immigration policy in the United States. Why do we argue that it's only "okay" to write black characters if you can somehow stay true to the experience of every black person everywhere through the course of human history? Why do we insist that white people liking "black things" some how tarnishes the power and significance of those things? To the point that it's only acceptable for white readers to enjoy stories with black characters, to market stories with black characters to white readers, if the stories themselves are meant to teach and lecture readers on how they will never be able to relate to a black person as a human being, never be able to see a black person's story as a human story, as part of their history and their own experience? It's fucking ridiculous and I'm sick of pandering to it and hating myself afterwards. So I'm not going to anymore and anyone who doesn't like it can fuck off.
I say "mostly" because I'm white, both my parents are white, all of my grandparents are white, but according to my mother my great-grandfather was black. I have no idea if that's true or not, but it's always been a surprisingly difficult thing to deal with. Like most large immigrant families both my mother and my father's sides are littered with legend. My father's side of the family, they say, is descended from minor Hapsburgs, there's a knight somewhere on the family tree, another great grandfather may have stowed away on a ship to America in order to escape an arranged marriage. Any of these stories I can trot out at cocktail parties without trouble. Telling them isn't about pretending to be someone I'm not. Taking pride in them is just a normal part of taking pride in my heritage.
But my allegedly "black" great grandfather? I can't talk about him because I have no proof. Can't be proud of him because to be proud of him is to try to escape the shame of privilege all white people must carry. I want to be proud of it. I want to embrace this part of my heritage the same as I would embrace any other part but I'm terrified of not having the proof to back it up. Claiming to be one-eighth Irish isn't controversial. Claiming to be one-eighth black is a completely different story.
Like most white writers I've also become terrified of writing black characters, for much the same reason. The mere act of establishing someone's skin color is unnecessarily politicized. A black character is inevitably seen as a statement and/or judgement about the black community as a whole ... and really, to be honest, why make yourself a target when you don't have to?
So I became locked in a completely absurdist and borderline racist routine. I only wrote black characters when it was necessary, that is to say when the absence of at least one black character would be completely unrealistic. Say, for example, writing a story with an ensemble cast set in New York City, like The Condor
.
There are no black characters in The Condor
. There is one latino, one Asian, four white guys and Latrisha.
And oh ... Latrisha got me in so much trouble.
But first let's talk about The Condor itself. The Condor is a story about stereotypes and the problems that result from not looking beyond them. It is primarily about the stereotypes facing gay men and prostitutes, but there's some discussion about racial stereotypes as well. When I conceived the character of Latrisha I wasn't sure what race to make her. On one hand she had definitely been inspired by drag queen Goddess and superstar Latrice Royal ... on the other...
I was still terrified of the risks involved in writing black characters. In my head Latrisha alternated between this:
and this:
for quite a while before I finally decided that maybe I could use this problem to my advantage. The Condor is about stereotypes after all. It would be interesting to attach one or two minor "black" stereotypes to the character and use it to make a broader, more subtle point. This character is not identified anywhere in the book as black, you see her as black because you are thinking in stereotypes, just as Harry does.
The brouhaha over Rue's casting in the Hunger Games was still heavy in my mind at the time. Readers see what they want to see in a character, regardless of any description or direction you give them. The fact that so many people saw something so completely at odds with the text and then got so upset about it was interesting. I knew that some people would read Latrisha as black, some as white. I was interested in the opportunity to point something out about the way we think.
It was meant, primarily, to be a critique of stereotypes in line with the rest of the book. To reinforce what was more specifically stated at other points in other situations. It was not meant to be some sort of statement of how black people are. I was, quite frankly, deeply disturbed when people started reading it that way.
My worst fears were now fully realized. Reviews started popping up calling the book racist for the way it portrayed black people. I felt ashamed of myself and what I had done. I began scratching out Latrisha's scenes in my mental outlines of The Condor's sequel Fun With Dick & Shame, taking even more steps back from the idea of writing black characters in the future.
And then I suddenly got really mad about this situation.
Of all the characters in The Condor, Latrisha is by far the run away favorite. She is smart, she is funny, she understands the realities of prostitution and is committed to helping people. She is beautiful, glamorous, takes no bullshit from everyone and sees straight through most of the book's most deceptive and manipulative characters. But she's also no Bagger Vance. She takes advantage of Harry, ignores his trauma and even unintentionally exacerbates it.
The trouble with writing black characters is that they are not often seen as characters, but as tokens and political statements ... but that's because most white writers have become so terrified of writing black characters that we write only one and then live or die by how that characterization is received. I put in one of two small elements that I knew would "sound black" to most readers-- the name Latrisha, a passing sarcastic reference to "a weave", etc-- and suddenly every aspect was being called into question. For example, the way Latrisha speaks was considered either "too ghetto" or "too mammy" to be acceptable, but this ignored the fact that the white narrator of The Condor speaks in exactly the same style through out the book. I never thought of Latrisha's dialogue as being part of the "black stereotypes" I was including ... it was just consistent with the way loud, obnoxious drag queens of all colors tended to speak. I was frustrated by what seemed like circular reasoning: Latrisha is black because of the offensive stereotypes and the stereotypes are only offensive because Latrisha is black.
I wanted to use Latrisha to point out to people how ridiculous it is that we think some names "sound black" or how when a white girl gets hair extensions they're just hair extensions but when a black girl gets the same exact thing it's called something different. It was supposed to be a positive thing, but perhaps it was too big an issue to be addressed appropriately in the space I gave it.
Nevertheless, as I contemplated trying to escape further criticism by discontinuing the character of Latrisha I started to get really angry about the whole situation. I am not a racist person, but I had allowed myself to be bullied into behaving and writing in a very racist matter by people who were looking for a reason to get offended. The fact that I felt I needed to find an excuse to justify making a character black, that the default state should be assumed to be white ... it was all so disgusting and infuriating.
For a long time I had avoided making characters black because I was terrified of precisely this type of criticism. But in doing so I had unintentionally furthered the kind of racist white washing and anti-diversity movement that plagues publishing right now. Writers of all colors step away from writing black characters because we don't want to be criticized. Is the character too bad? Too good? Almost anything can be racist if you look at it hard enough. Readers avoid books with black MCs because they assume they will be overloaded with commentary on racism. Commentary that they especially do not want in their escapist fantasy.
All and all we are encouraging a reality that none of us actually want to live in.
So I said to myself "Fuck it. Fuck them." As a writer it's my job to be offensive and stop offering apologies. Not only is Latrisha making an appearance in Fun With Dick & Shame, but I'm instituting a new policy for myself of "gratuitous black people." Why should my default character model be white-until-proven-black? From now on if there's no specific reason to make a character white, I'm going to make him black ... no justification, no apologies, no carefully editing what he does and says to make sure it's a proper and PC-approved portrayal. No more accepting this argument that just like I can't be proud of my black great-grandfather, I can't embrace black characters because as a whitey I will never understand, never fully appreciate what the "black experience" is like.
I won't understand, but I don't think there's any reason why I have to understand. No one expects Dora the Explorer to offer a full and nuanced depiction of immigration policy in the United States. Why do we argue that it's only "okay" to write black characters if you can somehow stay true to the experience of every black person everywhere through the course of human history? Why do we insist that white people liking "black things" some how tarnishes the power and significance of those things? To the point that it's only acceptable for white readers to enjoy stories with black characters, to market stories with black characters to white readers, if the stories themselves are meant to teach and lecture readers on how they will never be able to relate to a black person as a human being, never be able to see a black person's story as a human story, as part of their history and their own experience? It's fucking ridiculous and I'm sick of pandering to it and hating myself afterwards. So I'm not going to anymore and anyone who doesn't like it can fuck off.
March 10, 2013
Why You Should Go To GayRomLit
I'm writing this from a corporate sponsored recharge room at SXSW. Techno music is blasting, free food and drink are everywhere, I've just registered for GayRomLit and omg I hope no one is sniffing the open wifi network because hahahahah I was too tired to remember entering my credit card details was a bad idea until after the fact (whoops)
Last night I hit six parties in a row, mercilessly abused my connections to gain VIP status, ran through the pouring rain, chilled with some old friends from Penguin and Publishers Weekly.
This all started on a bus, 30 hackers, 3 days, the mission: build and pitch a technical company. My team got all the way to the finals, lost to another team on our bus (the only thing that's important is that we beat San Fran!) but not before I was dubbed the "pitch master" LOL. Now we are getting major buzz here and fielding serious interest from investors and major corporations @_@
Why am I babbling about all of this? Because the real value of a conference is not in the official programming but in the action that happens when you put people with similar interests and passions in the same room. I don't even have a SXSW badge. I couldn't attend any of the official events if I wanted to (although so far I've crashed a few) and yet I'm already going home with millions of dollars in connections and publicity for both my current employer and my future career.
The main reason a lot of my friends don't want to spend the money to go to GRL is that they don't see value in the official programming. I agree the official programming looks like a total snooze fest, but again it doesn't matter. You don't go to a conference for the panels, you go for the connections. Strange, wonderful things happen when you're in the right place at the right time.
Here's a more relatable example: years ago I agreed to road trip to Katsucon with a bunch of online friends I had never met IRL before. Not only did we have a wonderful time hanging out together, we launched a massive fanfic serial that developed a huge fan following and promoted several of us to BNF status. That only happened because we were together in person.
So, if you're interested in M/M, you should definitely come to GRL. Number one: I will be there. Unlike most of the community, I'm shamelessly extroverted. If I see you alone by yourself I will definitely come up and hang out with you. So don't be afraid of not knowing anyone or not fitting in the right cliques.
Number two:I will be there (heh) a lighter schedule this year means plenty of time to organize unofficial events. I will definitely be organizing at least one Hockey Slash meetup (Chris doesn't know it yet but she will be helping) and I'll be happy to facilitate others.
Number three: There will be lots of interesting people from all areas of the industry there. Sure most of them will be trying to sell you stuff, but that doesn't matter. The thing about networking is that you never know who knows who or who is going to end up where. A lot of the most valuable network connections I've made came up in the weirdest ways. So if you're a writer or reviewer/blogger this is a great opportunity. If you have no ambitions in M/M it's STILL a great opportunity.
Number four: Reasonably sure there will be hot, naked guys there
Number five: Won't it be great to be somewhere where you don't feel like a freak for reading what you like?
Come on... you know it will be great :D
Last night I hit six parties in a row, mercilessly abused my connections to gain VIP status, ran through the pouring rain, chilled with some old friends from Penguin and Publishers Weekly.
This all started on a bus, 30 hackers, 3 days, the mission: build and pitch a technical company. My team got all the way to the finals, lost to another team on our bus (the only thing that's important is that we beat San Fran!) but not before I was dubbed the "pitch master" LOL. Now we are getting major buzz here and fielding serious interest from investors and major corporations @_@
Why am I babbling about all of this? Because the real value of a conference is not in the official programming but in the action that happens when you put people with similar interests and passions in the same room. I don't even have a SXSW badge. I couldn't attend any of the official events if I wanted to (although so far I've crashed a few) and yet I'm already going home with millions of dollars in connections and publicity for both my current employer and my future career.
The main reason a lot of my friends don't want to spend the money to go to GRL is that they don't see value in the official programming. I agree the official programming looks like a total snooze fest, but again it doesn't matter. You don't go to a conference for the panels, you go for the connections. Strange, wonderful things happen when you're in the right place at the right time.
Here's a more relatable example: years ago I agreed to road trip to Katsucon with a bunch of online friends I had never met IRL before. Not only did we have a wonderful time hanging out together, we launched a massive fanfic serial that developed a huge fan following and promoted several of us to BNF status. That only happened because we were together in person.
So, if you're interested in M/M, you should definitely come to GRL. Number one: I will be there. Unlike most of the community, I'm shamelessly extroverted. If I see you alone by yourself I will definitely come up and hang out with you. So don't be afraid of not knowing anyone or not fitting in the right cliques.
Number two:
Number three: There will be lots of interesting people from all areas of the industry there. Sure most of them will be trying to sell you stuff, but that doesn't matter. The thing about networking is that you never know who knows who or who is going to end up where. A lot of the most valuable network connections I've made came up in the weirdest ways. So if you're a writer or reviewer/blogger this is a great opportunity. If you have no ambitions in M/M it's STILL a great opportunity.
Number four: Reasonably sure there will be hot, naked guys there
Number five: Won't it be great to be somewhere where you don't feel like a freak for reading what you like?
Come on... you know it will be great :D
