Every Crooked Step Forward

It's New Years. I Make Lists.

2012-01-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

I love New Years. In fact, as I get older, I think I love New Years almost more than Christmas. I love optimism. I am an incurable optimist, and I always think something great is coming. Like, you know, some people look at the world and see that the glass is half empty. Others see the glass is half full. I’m one of those people who look at the glass and goes, “Okay, everybody get ready, because this thing is about to fill up, and I don’t want to miss it.” Sometimes, this is a good thing. Sometimes, not so much. But usually, even when it does nothing else, it reminds me that I am okay, even when nothing else is.

Example: This year, I began my first year of University after a five-year absence where something happened and it took a long time for me to recover from it. But I felt like I was ready, and more importantly, I felt like I was tired of being an uneducated smart person. Unfortunately, I failed to take into account that A) the last time I was in post-secondary education, it was college, and B) Distance education is complicated. At least three times this year, I wanted to quit. I loved it for the first three months, and after that, I felt like I hated everything about it.

I’m still in school. Presently, I don’t know if I should be. But I am, because it was something that was taken from me, and that is unfair. Also because people make a big deal about my being smart, when really, they’re just amazed I can hold a normal conversation, and dammit, if that many people are going to call me smart, I am going to make sure they’re doing it on MY terms. It is a new year, and I will continue doing all the things I did this year: I will work hard to write every day, and I will read every day. Those are the most important things. But there are a few other things which fell by the wayside, and I’d like to change that. So here goes:

1.    I will post more often, because writing every day is no fun when no one’s reading it.
2.    I will keep my house clean and stop eating like a student. Not only have I gained a lot of weight, thanks to the constant stress eating and being too lazy to cook food, which, by the way, has NEVER happened to me, but I’ve been sicker this year than ever before, and this is coming from someone who is never altogether healthy.
3.    I have always taken pride in the fact that I enjoy food without being overindulgent, and I’ve always been good about money in the same way. I have no problem spending money on things just because I want them (see: multiple trips to England), but I don’t need to leave the house with money in my pocket in case there is something I want. Stress, however, has the unique and horrible side effect of massively lowering my impulse control. I’ve been through some rough roads with depression before, but this is just ongoing stress and struggle. So I buy things I don’t need or want, hoping they will cheer me up. They don’t. I must stop doing that.

Basically, I just want to get back to Ally before Ally was a student again, and still be Ally The Student, because another thing about distance education? You think it’s going to take you next to no time, because you can customize it. But it is complicated and often takes more time than regular schooling, and I cannot live like this for four or five years.

I am taking up the Goodreads challenge again, because it was a lot of fun last year, and helped me to read more. I am also writing more, and in fact, I have a little announcement, more on that later. But another thing I have been doing while being stressed is I have been noticing that the crazy goes a bit deeper than I realized, which, of course, is to be expected and is still a surprise. But. To combat the crazy and the self-loathing that goes with it, I promise every day to do something I am proud of. This year, in fact, right now, I am doing something I always wanted to do and becoming a child sponsor. I chose the Because I Am A Girl program with Plan Canada for 3 reasons:
1.    I’m a feminist, duh.
2.    It’s not an organization which promotes religion as the answer to feeding starving children, so there’s no conversion going on here. That’s important for many reasons, firstly, I don’t think a person should have to give up the faith they may have acquired to pull them through the hardships, in order for it to, uh, not be so hard. Secondly, I’m not Christian, so I don’t like the idea of my money going to spread ideas I don’t believe myself.
3.    I like that I can direct my funding to the countries and communities with issues that matter to me. I am currently sponsoring a little girl in the Togolese Republic, where the foundation works to provide infant and mother care, education for young girls, and bringing women’s political issues to the forefront. I was a preemie baby who struggled to attend regular schooling and now, occasionally, writes about social justice. It’s a no-brainer, really.

There are of course, other reasons, but those are the main reasons. So today, I will be doing that. Dunno what will make me proud tomorrow. Maybe I’ll perfect my ham sandwich or something. (Trust me, if you’ve seen me in the kitchen, you would understand the achievement.)

Now, I must head off. I have to read Joseph Conrad for an English class, and something on sexuality for my Health class.

Oh, while we’re on the subject, can we talk about sexual education? Firstly, I don’t know how it is for anyone else, but our sexual education classes in high school always went with our phys ed classes. So for those of us who didn’t take phys ed, we missed out on all that. Talk about desexualizing the disabled.

Seriously, someone talk about that, because I’m ace, and I can’t.

Also, an asexual taking sex ed must be the world’s most annoying student. I actually considered briefly writing an email to my instructor explaining that I was having a hard time with a textbook that described lack of interest in sex among females as a serious health problem, similar to impotency in males. I am not stupid, and I understand that some people with a lack of a sex drive have serious health issues, but THESE ARE NOT THE SAME THING!

I have not written the email. What do you think?

A Bit About Singularity, Harry Potter, and Things In My Life

2011-09-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

Hello blog! I have missed you!

My apologies to this blog. Real life has been absolutely and ridiculously busy. Here are some of the highlights:

1. I am in school! I just finished my first round of exams. I did not fail. This is a good start, for me. But school is pretty much ass-kicking, in that it is both very awesome and it is also sapping me of any desire to you know, do anything besides study and eat and sleep and veg in front of the computer to watch all the television I don’t get on this side of the Atlantic. Sorry for that.

2. I am now OFFICIALLY OUT OF FIRST DRAFT HELL! So there was that one week, as there always is, where I was hating myself and OMG WORST WRITER EVER WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING?! And now I’m all *gleeface* because now I can like, actually make something. And it’s good. Really. I mean more than it just has STOPPED SUCKING, it’s actually fairly decent and good. Which I owe to the fact that

3. I have been reading a lot! A lot a lot a lot. I signed up for the Goodreads challenge at the beginning of the year. I was planning on reading 35 books, which I felt was a fairly decent number for someone whose book eating had dwindled after the whole School Thing We Don’t Talk About. Actually, it began dwindling when I started school, and reading for academic reasons, and then picked back up again, and then I got so that I felt so guilty for not writing that I didn’t read and we all know how that worked out. So, since I started university this year, I had to promise myself I was going to read more, so that the book didn’t starve. And oh my gosh I mean *really*. Actually, most of my reading has been audio books, since I’m able to squeeze in time to listen to reading everywhere, and I’ve gone all old-lady and can’t read a physical book while in a moving vehicle anymore, which is a huge change from the days when I could walk down the street with a book on my face and navigate through peripheral vision. (See? The lazy eye is good for something!) Which reminds me:

Harry Potter.

Have you seen the movie? Are you sad? I’m sad. The storyteller in me is sad because, well, you know how the New World Order is essentially that we can all go on our merry little weirdo way and always find someone like us, and that’s awesome? I love that, I really do. Like I love how I wrote one day on my twitter that I couldn’t decide between the Death Star cookie Jar or the TARDIS cookie jar. And one of my followers is like, “OMG DUDE GET THE TARDIS!” and one of my other followers is like, “I have no idea what that is.” But.

Harry Potter is public consciousness. It’s something you have an opinion on whether you actually know what you’re talking about or not. We have new words, thanks to Harry Potter, we have a new concept of magic, of fairytale and epic and YA fiction, and everyone knows what and who these people are, even if they don’t know where or how they know it. You know what I mean? And we really don’t have a whole lot of that. It kind of feels like when Michael Jackson died. I remember feeling really weird about it because saying you didn’t know Michael Jackson is like saying you didn’t know music. Because everyone had at least one song they knew that was a Michael Jackson song, or a Jackson Five song, even though they may not know that’s what it was. People will be making Harry Potter jokes and barely understanding that they started out as Harry Potter jokes. People will spoof those books and those stories and those ideas so often, that the copies will gain notoriety separate from the original. For years, if not forever, we will hold that up and say, “This is how you tell a story.” I think about Robert McKay’s “Story”, and how the whole thing is based around Casablanca, and I think about similar books about how to write that are really about Star Wars, or whatever. This is that, for us, for our generation. And I’m getting a little annoyed at the number of times someone says, “The Next Harry Potter.” Because I’ve got news for you, guys. The Next Harry Potter? Is not due for the next twenty five years. At least.

But that’s okay. I try to focus on that, on the next twenty five years, which is huge and terrifying, because whatever this next thing is, it will belong to my grandkids or something. Which is also a bit depressing, in its own way. Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not writing this to tell you that I hope, or that I think, I could bring about that Next, whatever it is. I don’t even aspire to that, not really. I don’t think anyone ever does. I get really annoyed when people sneer at JK Rowling for hiding away. I don’t think there are a whole lot of people sitting behind a computer screen who ever aspire to that kind of fame. And I honestly don’t think anyone really thinks about it. I mean, the people who sign up for reality shows and sing on talent shows have an inkling of wanting to be famous, and known. But as the love of my life has said, it’s no longer a matter of The Big Thing, but a whole bunch of Things That Are Important To Someone. We are parsed and separated, and I’m not sure that it is, as the cynics would say, a result of our technologically inclined world, and I am not even sure, as I write this, if it is necessarily a bad thing. Like I said, I revel in my own singularity, in each individual thing that I love, that other people love, and still others know nothing about. I love that I can build a world around myself, and still belong to a bigger world, almost but not quite as much as I love that I can build a world for other people to hopefully wander around in, one day. But I also love those moments when we realize we are all on the same planet, no matter how different we are. It reminds me of the day I was in a bus station in Toronto. The bus station was quite old, so instead of the invisible motion detectors on the doors, it had those little pads, like you get in some stores. What would happen is someone would set one off and a seagull or a pigeon would fly in. Then the seagull or pigeon would land, and the door would open, and the bird would get startled and fly away, missing the fact that its freedom was essentially, right in front of it’s face. Then it would fly off again, and someone else would come in and repeat the process. One day I was watching this little musical doors presentation, and a little girl came by, holding her mother’s hand. She could not have been more than three, and she ecstatically pointed to the door and yelled “Bird! Bird!” Her mother smiled indulgently, and pulled her along. Not five minutes later, an older child, belonging to a French couple, passed by where I was sitting, pointed at the doors and shrieked “Oiseaux! Oiseaux!”* as loudly as she could. Her parents held tightly to her arms, smiling, so that the little girl did not run out of the doors in her excitement. Ten minutes after that, there came an Asian family in my line of site, with another child somewhere between three and six, who pointed at the door the bird had just flown

out of, and yelled one word in a language I did not understand. And his parents laughed, and smiled, and gently but firmly guided him away from the birds. I think about that sometimes, when I need reminding that I belong to a wider world than I sometimes recognize. I’m not saying Harry Potter makes us all happy. I’m just saying, there’s not a whole lot in the world that can cut through to everyone, all at once. For that, I will thank Ms. Rowling, and I will sit patiently and wait, and not pout and not call random objects that look like YA fantasy books “The Next Harry Potter.” Because trust me, when the Next Whatever hits? We’re all going to know it, whether we like it or not.

Thanks, Jo.

*In case you’re not Canadian, it means bird.

Where I Learn Everyone Is Smarter Than Me

2011-04-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

Script Frenzy again. At this point, I’m fairly certain I run on stubbornness alone. And yet, weirdly, I’m not actually failing. A while back, I decided I would write a few Dr. Who scripts, because I’ve never written a spec script before, but also because I can watch all five seasons and call it research. I haven’t attempted to write or even read a script since this time last year, and I was very happy to switch back to novels when I did, but the psychological switch was instant. I don’t want to get too sappy, but opening Final Draft was like coming home again, like landing in Heathrow airport, like hearing in stereo. So good, in fact, I’ve considered dragging the project on after April, writing the whole series just because I can. The best part, though, is that I’m not twiddling my thumbs wasting time here, but the process is actually improving Vampires.

When I began writing novels again, one of the hardest things I had to do was simply filling up all that white space. It was, quite simply, daunting. So there are spots, right now, where my prose gets a bit. Well. I may need to have Rule Eight tattooed on my body at some point if this habit continues. (Actually, I may get Rule 8 tattooed on my body at some point, purely because it would absolutely be the nerdiest reference ever, far surpassing my amazing friend Claire, who has “I solemnly swear I am up to no good.” on her wrist. Because my friend Claire is amazing.) I would like to think, at this stage of the writing, I have cured myself, since the thing is going on for freaking ever, but it doesn’t seem that I have. I catch myself doing the same in my screenplay. Screenwriting is very helpful with the idea of omitting needless words, because at this point, I don’t need them, but the hands keep typing them and the head keeps hitting the desk as they do.

Further, my prose has been a bit, um, purple, for my taste. Since the beginning of my novel, in fact. And recently, I figured out why that was. I was trying to invent a secondary weapon with which to slay a vampire. Something you should know about. My primary weapon? Is a little ridiculous. No, it is, in fact, a whole lot of ridiculous. It’s this ridiculous thing cobbled sloppily together by inexperienced hands. No one would ever believe it could kill anything larger than a mouse. I am foolishly attached to this thing, and I am excited by the prospect of making it work in a believable way, because I am a total dork, and that’s the sort of thing that gets me all excited. But it is such a scrappy thing. All the typical standbys like an ornamental silver letter opener et al would be completely out of place. My prose, I found suddenly, was a bit like an ornamental letter opener. Pretty, and it could work, conceivably, for a vampire novel. But it wouldn’t work for mine. The love of my life, who seems to always have the answer to just about every question, talked me through it. I explained to him, these are sort of punk rock vampire hunters. They don’t know what they’re doing, but they do it. They speak in coarse voices, they’re not particularly romantic, and except for Gerard, whose story is told through memory, and Death, who is, of course a being of very little personality, there’s not a whole lot of personal reflected. So I shifted gears a bit. He says, “Just write what happens.” And he’s brilliant, because I did that, and it’s working. Punk rock prose. Oh yeah.

The other problem I am having is with dialogue. One of the things that always happens in regards to my dialogue is that either I really like it, and everyone else hates it, or I really hate it, and everyone else loves it. I was worried, when I started Script Frenzy, because Eleventh Doctor is quite new, and I didn’t know if I could get his voice right, and I didn’t want him to turn into, say, Ten, because there’s so much more material. Yet Eleven’s voice comes out at me so clearly, it’s as if the TARDIS has landed squarely in my living room and he’s popped out to say, “Hey! I’m going to talk, and you’re going to write down everything I say, okay? Okay!” I could not understand what this phenomenon was until a friend pointed out my love of audio books. This friend also happens to be brilliant, and I am very grateful to him, but he shall remain nameless or I will give him a big fat head. The point is, I’ve always been an auditory learner, and though I can’t act at all, I’ve always been a decent mimic. I know Matt Smith’s voice and Eleven’s speech patterns, so it makes it easier to write him, because I can hear it in my head. Which led to the brilliant plan of casting the vampire novel. Just in my head, of course, so I could properly mimic the speech types I want. So I can hear them. And it’s working!

So, all of that is just me saying that script frenzy is not a waste of time, so there!

DIY

2011-03-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

This is not a post about building things, except it sort of is, a little bit.

My father is a contractor/construction worker, and has been for most of his life. Growing up, he told me hilarious stories about the time he worked as a pizza delivery man, and the tricks he and his friends used to play on the university students. "University students," he would tell me, "are some of the stupidest people you have ever met in your life. They have no common sense. Everything they know comes from books. They don't exist in the real world." Gratitude, Common Sense and The Real World were the million-dollar concepts to my father. Whenever we were lectured for anything, leaving a mark on the wall, not doing our homework, fighting at the dinner table, my father's lecture was the same:

"You kids are so Ungrateful. You don't have any Common Sense. You need to wake up and realize that in The Real World, you can't act this way." Theoretically, I could have come home carrying a human head, and the lecture would have likely gone something like this:

"You are so Ungrateful! Do you think your mother and I ever chopped someone’s head off? Common Sense says you cannot just chop someone’s head off. You should know better! In The Real World, people don't do that! Smarten up!"

This explains the somewhat tumultuous relationship my father and I have, and have had since I developed what we refer to as Independent Thought. My poor mother had to play referee, but every once in a while, my Dad would say something so off the wall that even my mom had to go, "Huh?" So one day, somewhere in my angry adolescence, my father was lecturing me on the dangers of my not having a backup plan. This lecture was another oldie, and at some point, my father made the mistake of asking me if I knew how many people tried to write books, every year. Because I was ticked off at this point, and because I was a bit of a snarky kid, I responded with, "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Do you?" His next words were, "Well, I could write a book too, you know." At which point, my mother stared incredulously at my father and said, "You know you're full of it, right?"

My dad, realizing his misstep, floundered for about half a second, and then amended himself. "I'm not saying it would get published..." So of course, the snark in me responded with, "Yeah, and I could build a house, but I'm not saying it wouldn't fall down."

It's strange, the things we value in this world, and why. I value people like construction workers, because I know they're necessary, but I don't understand why a person would rather do that than do this. In fact, most of the time, I assume they only do what they're doing because they don't have any other options. Like maybe they're just not good at anything else, or maybe the money's better and they need it. It sounds harsh, but then, sometimes feel the same about this venture, and in fact, most ventures of mine. In writing classes, they warn you that if you can do anything else, you should do it, because this is a long and painful road to nothing for most of us. For me, it was this, or struggle on disability for the rest of my life (which I may do anyway). I know that I have a decent job right now, and it's a job I like, but it's not what I would choose for myself, so I don't understand people who would. It was easy to be the one to say, "I'm going to be one of that 3%, because I don't have other options." Now I have another job, I have other options, I'm not miserable, and I know this is still an integral part of my sense of self, and my goals. It's a comfort of sort, to know that, but it makes other people's decisions and choices all the more confusing to me.

I've always been a DIY of a different sort than my father. My father needs to know that he is where people expect him to be. Everything that I've ever wanted, I've wanted for myself and by myself, and those have been some pretty concrete goals. I chose my profession at four, and decided I would stay single for most of, if not all of my life, at sixteen. And because of that, and because of the disability, I'm not afraid to move slowly. I get impatient, sometimes. But I take comfort in the fact that I am not like other people. I want to do things, not just at my own pace, but in my own way, and that takes time.

I think when you're a parent, with a child with a disability, you harbour a deep-seated fear that failure is inevitable. I was lucky, because I have two parents who cope with that fear in very different ways: My father, by denying the possibility of failure, and pushing me well beyond my capacity, pushing me towards goals he feels I can actually accomplish, and my mother, by denying the rest of the world's importance and embracing the failure. On their own, neither of those are particularly good ways to parent a child with a disability, and there are a lot of ways and a lot of times the whole thing worked out really badly for everyone. Put them together, though, and I grew up in an environment that if I wanted something, it was up to me to tell my mother I would have it, and if I couldn't do something, it was up to me to tell my father to back off. Sometimes this led to disaster and shouting, but it also led to me knowing exactly what I wanted, and exactly why, and understanding that if I was going to have something, I would have to get it myself. Because the people who believed I could have it also believed I didn't need help, and the people who didn't weren't going to waste resources trying to help me do the impossible.

So here we are. Me, attempting to self publish. Earning my online degree. Being at least functionally single for the foreseeable future, but daring to dream and plan for children. In part because it's the path life has led me to, but for the most part, purely because that's how I work. On my own. I suppose people are right then, to accuse me of being a bit self-interested. I am interested in myself, not at the expense of others, but because others don’t really factor into my life much. Possibly not the most lucrative way to live, and most times I seem antisocial and hard-headed. (I'm not. Well, antisocial.) But I think certain things are hardwired into you.

Recently, I had the flu. And I remember thinking, “So this is why people have partners. It’s so they can have someone to walk the dogs, and cook food and do the dishes while they can’t stand up.” It was the first time it occurred to me that being single might be in some ways harder than being coupled. Another day, I was talking to a friend about my severe lack of a social life, where I talked about having very few friends, and she offered many solutions, how I could go out and meet new people, and what do to once I had. And after making excuse after excuse as to why I couldn’t, I realized that it wasn’t that I lacked friends. It was that I had lived too full a life, I had friends on three continents, scattered all over the country, and that didn’t even include the myriad of amazing people I had met through other people, online. I wanted more time and more space in common with those people. I am not lonely for friendship or for romance. It’s just that the world is made for people who come in pairs and sets.

Good things and bad things to everything, I suppose. There are times I take on too much, sometimes, because like my father, I forget what I'm up against. I get stagnant and sometimes I'm easily overwhelmed, because I think, like my mother, that I should just revel in the fact that I have any ambition left, and sometimes that's enough to be grateful for. But one day I'm going to have all the things I want to have, a family, a career, and a life that I earned, and the job I always dreamed of having. And when I do, I know it'll be in part because I have good people in my life, and lots of support, and a little luck. And part of it will be because I learned how to stand up to the people who loved me before I had to stand up to the people who don’t. But mostly, it'll be up to me. Because there is the world, and there is me, and when we work together, it’s awesome, but when we don’t, somebody has to look out for me.

I sort of like it that way.

Still Here. Alive and Kicking. And Screaming (a lot of screaming)

2011-03-12T22:14:00.000-08:00

*Sigh* I so wanted to be out of First Draft Hell by now. See, it’s been almost a year since I started this blog, and I thought I knew how long this particular first draft was going to be, and woo, I was wrong. This thing just keeps going and going. The fact that I know it’s crap and will have to be torn down and rewritten is highly disheartening, but the real problem is that I have to finish it before I can do that. Bleh. Curse curse curse! (I’m practicing not swearing. See?) I feel pretty bummed that it’s been a year and I don’t even have a good enough first draft yet. But, unlike when I began rewriting Hannah, it’s not because the words won’t come out, or I’m way overconfident about my ability to finish, or nervous about my ability to tell the story. I have been writing more regularly than I have in years, and it feels as amazing as it always does. But I’ve also got a lot more going on in my life than I think even I realized. Since it’s the anniversary of this blog, and I started this blog so that I could share my adventures in actually getting off my ass and getting a life, I thought I’d share. Lots of things cooking, and very exciting!

Firstly, of course, I’m still working on my Vampires. I had an idea that I assumed would take a certain number of words. And I did something I have never done before, I mean ever. I underestimated myself. No seriously, I grossly overestimate myself, generally speaking. Societal pressure meets disability culture, I am a victim of too many low expectations (blah blah blah). So usually I make some ridiculous proclamation like say, “I am going to win a Pulitzer by age 35” (not an actual proclamation). Or, oh, “I’m going to write a book in six months.” (Yes. I did say that.) This time, I made a fairly reasonable proclamation, “When I write this first draft, it’s probably going to be about 120,000 words.” And. Well, I’m not quite at 120,000 words yet. Because about a week ago I got completely freaked out, because I was nearing 100,000 words and holy god I had so far to go! Which led me to two conclusions, the first and most obvious being wow my first drafts suck, and the second being that I would of course, need to do some massive restructuring to the pacing of the story that I absolutely could not do within this draft. Which meant that I would have to finish the horrible ugly and very long draft, and then proceed to not use it. Which led me to my only logical recourse, which was basically to not look at the file for about a week.

I was not hiding under the bed. In the first place, my bed is occupied by several boxes of stuff, the primary purpose of which is to keep the dogs from taking things from around the house and hiding them under there to be destroyed later. Also, I was very, very busy with lots of other things, so technically still writing, so. Myeh. Okay, I was hiding under the bed, a bit. I’m sorry. But I actually do have a lot more work than I thought I would, because in addition to this blog, and the book, I’m working on a couple other personal projects. Namely, of course, is the actual day job, which has been, in the last few months, much more demanding than I’m used to, but is about to slow down considerably, which is nice, because more importantly, I am finally and in earnest pursuing post-secondary education.

So remember a few months ago when I had mentioned the young woman who, after reporting instances of child abuse in the special education class she was TA-ing, was fired pending an investigation of whether her autism would interfere with her teaching abilities? And how I said that when I had a moment, I would rant about it? And then I didn’t? There’s a reason for that. It’s something that goes beyond laziness, and something that I am, eventually going to have to share, but I can’t now. The fact is, the whole thing is just, well, triggering, for me. I sat down to tell my own story about my own college experience and the discrimination therein, and burst into tears all three times I tried. It’s embarrassing, not because it’s not horrible, but because it is common, and because of how naive and unprepared for it I was, and how traumatic I can still find it, six years later. The short version is that I too, after working for years towards the education and eventual career path I most desired, after years of being told that, in spite everything, I was smart, and that would make all the difference, I learned that wasn’t strictly true. And then I also had to put aside my dreams of college education, and for years, it was so upsetting to me that I could not entertain the idea of going back, nor did I particularly want to do something just for the ‘experience’ of college.

But about a year ago, I had a health scare. Not a major one, but a little one that made me think a lot about my body, and my life, and my role in it, and I began to think about my life in terms of the next three years, instead of ten years or twenty from now, and I saw that what I wanted and what I had were miles from each other, and the first step to everything seemed to be getting off public assistance and supporting myself. Since I tried college, and the hands-on approach didn’t do it for me, I looked into distance education for the first time, which is where I found Athabasca. So now I’m a full-time English/History student. I don’t know for sure, really, what it will do for me, if it’ll get me off the system. But it will make me a better writer, and come hell or high water or whatever else, that is what I will be doing. So I have hope. It’s also not nearly as traumatic.

In addition, I also seem to be embroiled in someone else’s project. My friend Paul has dreams of dominating the world via video games, or some such thing, and has asked me to assist him in the writing. I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m not a gamer by any stretch (bad hand-eye coordination keeps you away from that sort of thing, y’know). But as he keeps asking for input and I keep writing, and we keep talking about it, it looks like one of those things I may actually wind up doing, which is pretty cool. Always like taking on new things.

I feel bad, because I’m not very good at this whole blogging thing yet, I’m still at the stage where I have a hard time downshifting from talking about the stuff I want to talk about to telling the story. Not because I don’t want to tell the story, or because I don’t want to talk, but because once I start telling the story, I feel guilty if I am not eating and sleeping and breathing it as well. I’m improving from this kind of neurosis, but there could definitely be further improvement. So, I promise this year to… I promise to write more entries than I did last year. Let’s just leave it at that.

Also, I may share some of my actual writing that is not just me talking about myself. Ulp.

Maybe.

Couple other small changes to the blog that I will hopefully actually stick to:

-I am also taking part in Inkygirl’s 500 word-a-day challenge. Which I have been doing swimmingly at except for two weeks, the first of which I had the flu and the second… yeah. Hiding under the bed. You should check it out if you’re a writer, want to be a writer, or just missing Nanowrimo at the moment. You can even do 250 words a day. Seriously, that’s like 15 minutes of writing a day or something equally ridiculous. A monkey with a typewriter could do that. On its own, even, without its fifty friends or Shakespeare.

-I am also doing Script Frenzy, in spite of, nay, because of having failed every single year I do it. I may actually have time to blog in the process of that. If not, I’ll probably regularly on the boards, and I need a lot of hand-holding. You should join in.

-I am taking part in the Goodreads reading challenge for 2011. My magic number is 35. You should also do it, if you are a reader, or add me to your friends list if you’re already doing it. Seriously. I don’t have enough friends who read. My friend, she owns the bookstore in town, and she laments every day, “Why did I open a bookstore in a town that doesn’t read?”

- After reading a series of disgusting articles in which we examine the fact that although more women read more books than men, and this planet is about 50% women, yet the books being published that were written by women are around 33%, and the books being reviewed that are by women are somewhere around roughly 20%, I got a little peeved. And after reading the explanation from publishing journals and popular book reviewers that, “Women just aren’t writing the kind of things we review,” I got a little ragey. But rather than go on a full-on rant, I have decided to be a bit more productive than usual about this whole thing. In conjunction with my reading a lot this year, I have decided to review the books I’m reading, but only if they were written by women. Which means some of the books I’m reading will probably be older books that have been reviewed ages ago, in which case, sorry. Books are expensive. If it weren’t for ebooks and audiobooks, I would be even less well-read than I am now, and I’m not anywhere near as well read as I would like to be. Have I mentioned I love Audible? They’re not even paying me to say that, but I do. I should also warn you I do not yet have any sort of college degree, so my reviewing will consist of a lot of squee, omg you have got to read this!!!!, and a lot of despair. (Why am I not as good as this?!) And possibly some headdesking. (Omg how does this stuff even get published erlack?). For more constructive criticism, you may have to wait til something pisses me off. Sorry.

I think that’s pretty much it. If I could squeeze anything else in there, I probably would, but I don’t think I can. I don’t think I’m travelling this year, even. *sadface* Meanwhile, I would like to thank this blog for being an awesome place to dump things that bug me and things I like, and how tortured I am. And, if I have any regular readers at all, seriously, thank you for spending an entire year not thinking I’m horrible, and maybe occasionally thinking I’m pretty awesome. I shall do my level best to not let you down over the next twelve months!

Also, is it completely ridiculous that I find this awesome?

Babies and Books

2011-02-02T12:23:00.000-08:00

One of the most common analogies people make about the writing life is how writing a book is like having a baby. And some people claim this is true, and some people claim that it doesn’t even come close. I have been both of those people at one time or another, but the one thing I do know is that there is one, for certain way that writing a book is like having a baby: People are forever telling me how when you have a baby it’s the most painful and terrifying thing you have ever experienced in your life. And you instantly forget it. Writing a book is also painful and terrifying and long and arduous. But what you forget is not necessarily that it was painful and terrifying and long and arduous. The thing you forget is exactly how much you suck.

I am a big reader, and a big writer. I have been my whole life. One of those things always leads into, and then bleeds into, the other. But I have this problem. If you’ve never written a completed project, you may not be familiar with this problem, but if you’re on your second, third, or fifteenth big project, I’m hoping somebody out there has a similar problem and can help me. Because what happens is I write something and work at it and carve at it and shine it up until I am happy with 93% of what is written there. 93% is as high as I ever get. There is a margin of error for self-loathing, which is, I believe, the cornerstone of any artistic pursuit, and my assumption is if I am happy with 93%, at least 97% is good. It’s a somewhat optimistic assumption, but there you go. I allow myself the reasonable assumption that, when I’m done, I know 3% of it is crap. I can’t usually see it, but I know it must be there. Anyway, I’ve worked at something and made it tolerable to pretty damn good, and the thing is, this usually takes a long while, lots of hours, several long-winded conversations with people who aren’t actually there, several more long-winded conversations with the people who have to put up with me, gallons of coffee and tea, several pounds of imported chocolates and a lot of handholding.* And it becomes something I actually mostly like, and would probably love, if I wasn’t the one writing it, and that 4% of my brain wasn’t sitting there going, “omg this is probably so obvious, it’s probably not exciting enough or interesting or clever enough…” and on and on and on. But the thing is, at the start? It really effing sucks. It sucks a lot. Like this one time, my mother turned to me and says, “My God, I had such gorgeous kids. Seriously, I’m glad, because I don’t know what I would do if I ever had ugly kids.” She was joking (I think). But this feels like that. I don’t want my first drafts to exist because eeeewwww no way could I have made that!

In the middle of my first draft, I’m still reading a lot of related stuff. There’s tone and style and certain genre nuances and keeping track of what’s been done and what hasn’t been done before. So I’ve been reading stuff like The Historian and Sunshine and most recently The Passage. All of which are pretty awesome vampire books, and all of which are a lot better written than the fairly awesome idea I have in my head that is not writing itself properly dammit! And intellectually, I know those books started out crap. Because they all do, they always do, and I can write well, eventually. Urg. Eventually. But rationality gets pushed out the window, and I go all despair despair despair! Because my writing is crap, and this is what it has to look like when it gets published, and I don’t think I can get there from here.

Well, okay, that’s probably not true. Probably I can get there from here, and most likely I will, and of course, I will continue to try. But the moments of I SUCK SO HORRIBLY WHY DOESN’T IT COME OUT LIKE IT’S SUPPOSED TO WHY IS EVERYONE BETTER THAN ME???!!!!! are a needless distraction. The solution is obviously not to stop reading, because that would be a bit like drawing water from a well that’s dried up. So I sit and stew and sulk and read authors who are better than I am, who, when I’m not writing have the power to inspire me to greater heights, but who, when I am writing, remind me just how far I have to go.

It’s funny, because I had a pretty good year, last year. Even having to give up Hannah, it was a pretty good year. I made new friends, travelled farther than I have ever gone, managed to keep a blog for a length of time, that people actually read. I think, most importantly, is I realized that I am a writer like other writers. Writing, I think, is very singular, and we’re all sort of just… here. So I have this thing in my head where I know real writers procrastinate, but I’m pretty sure they procrastinate less than me. I know real writers have other non-writing lives, but I’m pretty sure theirs is busier than mine, so they have more of an excuse, and I know every person's first draft sucks a lot, but I'm pretty sure mine are probably a whole lot worse. And this year, that sort of changed, because I went looking for those real writers, and found out that we are the same. Which means, I am one of those. It’s something, as I’ve said before, that I’ve been well aware of for a long time, that it’s the storyteller in me, more than anything else, that separates me from other people. But years of being told it’s the other stuff, have left me feeling even more singular than I ought to. So this year, I have learned somehow, to lose all that stuff, and accept that I am mired into all of this, the torture, procrastination, addictive personality, and all the rest, and so is everyone else. Just the other day, I was moaning to my beloved that first drafts are so completely stupid and I feel like I’m nothing but a little kid playing in mud, is how productive I am, grumble grumble. And he responded with, “Right. Because every other writer in the universe does it differently.”

They don’t, is the thing, and I work hard to remember that, but it is hard, and it is part of the work involved, and I forget that, every single time. After I've done something I really love and am really proud of, I have to start over and write crap and play in the mud and count words every day because it’s the only kind of satisfaction to be found, that this part is almost over. And then I pick up a book and realize “holycrow, the whole universe is better than me! Despair despair despair!”

I know I’m not alone in this. I know it’s just part of the life. It reminds me of that part in The Hockey Sweater, when Roch Carrier says people on TV were these golden untouchable Gods, but hockey players were the real heroes, because they were only better at something each of the boys had done. That’s how I feel, about other authors. That’s why I hate all the lit snobbery that goes on, and the way some writers deserve to be published and some don’t, and just because millions of people read your stuff it doesn’t mean you’re any good, and you shouldn’t write about people like this and nobody wants to read about people like that and people who self-publish are just little kids who think if they slap their name on the cover of a book they’re real writers, and people who have contacts in the publishing industry have it easy and grumble grumble grumble. We’re all on the same team, here. Some of us do it well, some of us stumble along. Some of us are really good on purpose, some of us by accident. Some of us have a lot of people pulling for us, some of us just have a couple people, some are on their own for now. Some writers are not as good as other writers. But the thing is, we’re doing it. And the other thing I sometimes forget is that some people don’t even have that.

When I told my counselor about how I most often feel like I’m fooling myself, like I’m sitting around, playing in mud, she took a different approach. She smiled and said, “It’s really not a bad life, is it?” And really, it isn’t. To be able to sit around and play in the mud, to be able to hate one part of yourself with just enough vigor to know you’re better than that, and not enough to stop entirely, ever, is something handfuls of people have, and that’s it. We’re it. I’m it. Scary thought, when I’m in the middle of hating what I’ve written or reading authors a million times better than I. Also sometimes scary when I’m reading authors who are only a hundred times better than I, because sometimes even that seems unreachable, and that’s just not fair. But it's pretty awesome the rest of the time.

It’s hard to remember that too, but I’m working on it.

*Must stop here and thank the hand-holders, who I don’t think always realize how often and how close I come to dropping the whole thing, whatever the thing is at the time. They put up with my endless whining with unbelievably good humor and patience, and have pretty much learned to put up with the 4% of me that will not stop the despair and loathing, no matter how hard we all try, and manage to shake the rest of me back into gear when I need it.

** It occurs to me that if you are not Canadian, you may not even know what The Hockey Sweater is, but it’s kind of a big deal.

We Interrupt Your Regular Scheduled Novelling...

2010-11-29T10:23:00.000-08:00

Sorry I've been AWOL. Nano and Vampires have been keeping me hopping. This isn't a real post, I just wanted everyone I know to see something. My beloved Jenny, who is the sweetest thing in the world, was outraged today, which doesn't happen often. This is why:

You are about to get very angry.

I commented. You should too. Sounds like this poor woman needs some support. Possible when I have ten minutes of not-required writing time, I may rage about this later. For now, she says it a lot better than I ever could. I applaud her bravery. And that's not a word I throw around a lot, to be honest.

Back to the grindstone!

Historical Accuracy

2010-10-30T06:37:00.000-07:00

Caution for loaded language - I apologize, and promise I only used it in context

As we know, this summer, I went on a Fantastic European Tour of Awesome. And among many firsts (first time traveling outside the UK, first time I didn’t fly direct home to Canada, first time in France, first time in Italy, first time sleeping on a train…), it was the first time I travelled with someone other than myself. I took a group tour with a really cool group called Contiki, which specializes in tours for the 18-35 age group. I really do need to check how accessible it is, because all anyone ever tells me is it’s hell flying when you have mobility issues, but I’m independently mobile, and travelled with my cousin, who also walks with some difficulty, and they didn’t even check for the handicap sign when we asked them to let us on the plane early, so we seemed to have dodged any major issues. Also, a surprising number of the places we visited were accessible, though I will say this does not include the hotel room in London, in which the elevator was so tiny that three people had difficulty getting in it at the same time. But if you can go, I would highly recommend it because, in the first place, Europe is awesome, and in the second place, they’re something like $300 a day for the trip, plus your airfare and insurance. Seriously, airfare is ridiculous.

Anyway, that’s just a heads up. What I wanted to talk about was that this was the first time I wasn’t travelling by myself, because in addition to being in a group, I was in the group with my cousin, who is just a couple years younger than I am. It was her first time away from home, and for the most part, it was pretty awesome (leaving aside the absolute weird of being home and having people calling me by my first name, which only my family and my job ever use, which was creepy and unsettling). My cousin and I have a lot in common. She desperately wanted to visit the statue of The Boy in Kensington Gardens, and we both had an amazing time at the Colosseum in Rome, and did lots of shopping. She is excellent with maps, I am okay with getting lost, so all in all, we were great travel companions. However, I don’t say this to sound snobby, but my cousin is not particularly cultured. So every once in a while, stuff like this happened:

“Hey! Let’s go to the Tower of London! It’s amazing, and you’ll see the scaffold where Anne Boleyn lost her head!”
“Wow! That’s awesome. Anne Boleyn was such a whore!”
“…uh. What?”
“Sorry. I’ve seen every episode of The Tudors.”

Full disclosure: I have never seen The Tudors. It’s one of those shows where I always wanted to see it, and I never quite got around to it. Like True Blood, and Glee. I know. I hate myself too. Only now, I’m really glad I haven’t, because that’s possibly the stupidest statement I’ve ever heard anyone make about Anne Boleyn. And yes, I am well aware she had a handful and a half of lovers, and she may have been in love with her brother, and yes, I do know that if a woman in the 21st century had seven lovers and a husband and was in love with her brother, we might call her all sorts of names, and possibly have her institutionalized for the brother thing, so yeah, maybe locking her up in the Tower makes some kind of sense. And that would be wrong, of course, but the major issue here is um, Anne Boleyn didn’t live in the 21st century. She lived in a time where a woman was called a whore for oh… liking sex. She also lived in a time where she was sold to a man who could not have sons. And how did he deal with not having sons? By killing any woman he couldn’t get pregnant. Might make a woman a little desperate to have a son, wouldn’t it?

I’m not here to talk about Anne Boleyn; there are many, many people far more educated than I am who will, if you want to learn. I’m not even going to talk about the crime of rampant historical inaccuracy present in any and all historical retellings of virtually any story with something resembling a real history. That would be the sort of redundant that borders on the ridiculous. What I want to talk about is this mistaken idea that in order to make history interesting or tangible, to make it ‘accessible’, we have to ‘modernize’ it. So let’s talk about modernizing, shall we? Writing the story of the Tudors for television, if we try to make people understand the cultural implications of the day, the struggle for power, which for men, meant wealth, property, and control of human life, and for women meant doing as you’re told, doing it well, and being sold to a powerful enough man that raping or killing you might not be in someone’s best interest. That might be too much to handle. If, however, the little whore deserved it? Oh, well, now it makes sense. If she was power-mad and would stop at nothing, including, the horrors, using her presence as a hot bod to manipulate people into getting what she wanted? If she was an ungrateful little snot with too much money and too little time on her hands? Oh my God! Those Tudors were just like us! Because don’t we all know women like that!

'Gentle visitor pause awhile : where you stand death cut away the light of many days : here jewelled names were broken from the vivid thread of life : may they rest in peace while we walk the generations around their strife and courage : under their restless skies’ - Inscribed on the memorial
The problem isn’t that we sensationalize history, it’s what we consider understandable to the wider audience. It’s how we draw people in, and keep their attention. I talked about this in Mary Sue v1 and v2, but let me just repeat myself.(I do that, y’know.) Women in fiction have two roles to play. She’s either the perfect sweet girl next door who would never do anything to harm anyone (like have sex). Or a horrible conniving manipulate she-devil who uses every weapon in her arsenal (like sex) to hurt and destroy the world, and further her own agenda.* A woman looking out for her own interests has an agenda, you see. Good women don’t care about themselves! We see those archetypes in fiction, because somebody saw them in reality, but we don’t look too close at the context. We don't think about how somebody saw them in the days when women didn’t speak for themselves, and now that we do speak for ourselves, we can’t, because those archetypes are still there, and nobody’s listening to us, and seriously, how’s that for accessible context? Again, I've never seen The Tudors. For all I know, my cousin's comment was less about what went on in the show, and more about her own reaction to it. But, as I said before, nothing goes into a story without a reason, so I have doubts.

Of course, life imitates art imitates life. We are taught to believe the power we have to withhold or wield is sex, we believe that women, other women, who have power we don’t have, or use power we have and don’t use, are evil. We believe it because everybody says it’s true, because it’s right there, all through history, it’s true. We can understand it, because it has to be true, because everybody knows that it is. (And my professors thought I never paid attention in Critical Thinking!)

History’s written by the winners. But I’ll tell you something, if I’m on a losing team, I am going to lose with a thousand people cheering and promising, we’re gonna get ‘em next time!**

*seriously, why is sex evil? I mean, I’m a card-carrying asexual, but I gotta say, sexuals can be such prudes!
** In other words, I was born a Maple Leaf fan, I'll die a Maple Leaf fan.

This Is Your Brain On Writing

2010-10-25T14:14:00.000-07:00

It's the end of October, a time when my body and brain settle in for lockdown, and begin to hibernate. And I feel so good. Holycrow, you guys, I'm all blissed out and bouncy and where I am not behaving as anything approaching normal, but I am too happy and excited and optimistic These are the ways I know the writing is going good.

1. I do not have time to blog (sorry!)

2. All my foodstuffs contain instant rice, or come in some sort of fingerfood varity.

3. When I mentioned to a friend that I have begun taking vitamin D capsules to help with the Seasonal Affective Disorder, her response was as follows: "Have you been eating food? Because you said the writing is going good, and, well..."

4. I am actually telling people the writing is going good.

5. Nothing else I say to anybody makes a whole lot of sense anymore. (I have become a writing cliche, wandering around the room going, "THERE IS AN ANSWER HERE, NOW TALK TO ME, DAMMIT!" etc.)

6. I no longer wish to go out for coffee. I keep a canister of instant flavoured coffee on my kitchen counter so I don't have to go out in order to fortify myself.

7. I have seriously considered canceling my cable, because I only watch TV online, when I have time. (I have been watching a lot of Doctor Who reruns online in between pages though. Apparently, I can forgo things like food and a social life but you do NOT want to take away my David Tennant. I did not know this about myself.

8. I would rather do this than cut video from Awesome EuroAdventure of Awesome.

9. I am so blissed out from writing, I went home for thanksgiving with the fam, and did not want to strangle a single member of my family.

10. Now, when I stay up past 1AM, it's because I'm busy doing something, instead of because I can't go to bed yet.

11. I am so blissed out from writing, I am afraid to leave the house, for fear of an outburst of "OMG WHY DID I NOT SEE THAT BEFORE?!"

13. I am so blissed out from writing my counselor doesn't know what to do with all the happy.

14. I received an exceptionally kind comment from a new reader, and only just noticed it. Fail. Thank you to Emily, if you didn't get my comment on your blog. I'm not kidding when I tell you you brought me to sniffles.

Also from the trenches:

- Azrael is officially my first asexual character. Strictly speaking, It is subhuman and doesn't HAVE a sex drive, but hell, if Disney can make you believe humans fall in love with fish people when they're good looking enough, and Aces consider The Doctor asexual, and we have proven the existence of Cabbits and Mules, I say, it totally counts. (I actually had a conversation with myself over Twitter on that one. I do a lot of that.)

- Today, one of my favorite characters made me very angry. There are motives at work here that I didn't realize, and someone is playing a more active and sinister role than I have been previously aware. Must to thinking...

- I have to write sexual desire and I'm terrified. You guys! I'm gonna mess it up! Seriously, I don't think you understand, I don't get you!

Other than a bunch more shop-talk, which I could do for pages and pages that would probably bore the living crap out of everyone else, and also just be a bunch of gibberish, nothing else is going on. Thanks for indulging! (In two weeks, when I crash out of this fantastic mood, someone redirect me here, okay?)

Where I Write About (Not) Coming Out

2010-10-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

Been meaning to write a post on National Coming Out Day that is now over, but the Damn Vampires have been running me ragged. (Yay!) And my house is full of, well…

Seriously, writing is its own kind of insanity. Most of my time is spent wandering around my apartment muttering dates and times and something happens here and I don’t know what it is… and oh my GOD IT’S RIGHT THERE! Etc. I love the cue card phase. The act of holding them in my hand, knowing that they’re all there, and all I have to do is get them down (ha, because you know, that’s nothing, is it?) and being able to move and shift things without the omg disaster how am I going to fit this in this with that thing? Yay cue cards.

So. Moving on. I wanted to write a post about National Coming Out Day. I don’t actually know anything about national coming out day, and I’m Canadian, so instead, I get to blather on about what I usually blather about, which is me, in the context of coming out, which, oddly, is not actually something I’m familiar with.
As part of my very unique presentation of Cerebral Palsy, there is a rather interesting side effect. So interesting, in fact, that I don’t actually think it has anything to do with my CP, but unfortunately, one of the side effects of having a disability is that a doctor will take anything out of the ordinary and attribute it to that. Which is why I never trust anything a doctor tells me, but that’s a whole other argument. Right now, all I need you to know is I can’t lie. Like seriously, I have actually gotten hives from being even a little bit dishonest. The doctor says that’s because the vision problems in my eyes cause a small amount of face blindness, which makes it impossible for me to read deception, which means I never learned how to mimic, ergo, I never learned how to deceive. Which does nothing but add to the mistaken perception that asexuals are adhering to some kind of moral code, and has the added bonus of meaning I never actually had to come out, because I was never in anywhere in the first place.

When people ask about how I know, about how long I have known, and about when I knew (usually followed up by a lot of questions about, am I sure, and don’t I think that maybe that could change, and what would I do if it did?) I think about being fifteen. I was fifteen when most of my friends got boyfriends. I was fifteen when I received a lot of male attention, mostly due to the fact that all my friends had boyfriends, and those boys didn’t want to share. (BFF 101, boys: We know you’re a jerk when your first act as New Boyfriend is to attempt to keep any single friends busy by setting them up with someone you know, even and especially if they don’t WANT to be set up.) Fifteen was the year of sexual awakening for everyone who wasn’t me, and most of my peers noticed. It took a bit longer for me to notice, largely because nothing really has to change when you’re asexual, that’s the whole point. No rush of hormones, no tingling in your toes or anywhere else, no first blush, nothing. And I never wondered why until everyone else started asking me. Like I said, at fifteen, when I started writing Hannah with a boyfriend, there were audible sighs of relief, like I was offering some kind of comfort, reassurance for something. Meanwhile, as my best friend of the time spoke with nervous excitement about her first stirrings of sexual experience, I listened in horror, not because it sounded utterly unhygienic, not even because he was two years older and she hardly knew him, or because her mother could have walked in at any second, oh God. But because this, apparently, was the future. And one day, someone, somewhere, would expect it of me. And I understood that it was normal and natural, and apparently it felt pretty good, but all I could think was, “Why would anyone even do that?”
For early dissenters, it was easy. I would grow out of it, they said, and I believed them with horror. My mother would say, “Well, one day, I’m sure you’ll change your mind. I’m sure you’ll have a partner of some kind, some day.” And I would nod and say, “Yeah, well, I’m not saying I won’t.” Because it was easier, less argumentative, than saying, “If you know who that person will be, could you please send them far, far away because I don’t want them, please, please don’t let that happen to me.”

It was around that time when the lesbian rumors began to circulate, and the jerks who were angry I wasn’t as easy as they would have liked became concerned friends and family, pulling me aside and asking if I wanted to ‘talk’ about something. And I would have lied, if I could have, would have told them I was straight, would have pretended crushes and learned the lingo. Even would have pretended I was gay, because aside from the aforementioned boys, most people were really nice about it, like they expected it, somehow. It would have been an easy excuse. I didn’t matter enough in high school for it to hurt me, and even if I had, our high school, for a small town, was pretty gay-friendly. I could have lied. But I couldn’t lie. I didn’t know asexual was anything, then, so I just said no, and then was forced to sit through all the speculation. They didn’t know, and I didn’t know enough to argue with them. People assumed I was undesirable, because of the CP, and I didn’t argue with them, though I wanted to because the assumption hurt, but the hurt was hard to explain, under the circumstances. People assumed I was too brain damaged to understand sex, and I couldn’t explain otherwise, because simply having no desire was enough to tell sexuals I didn’t understand. People assumed I was gay, which never made any sense to me, because if I had been gay, I could have come out, and that would be that.
It doesn’t get easier. The assumptions never really stop, people just eventually know me for too long to justify voicing them. I have a friend who has known me for more than ten years, and insists she understands my sexuality, but when we meet new people, she defends me, or sexualizes me, depending on the situation. For instance, if we are out somewhere and she is flirted with, she makes it a point to flirt with me, or encourage others to flirt with me, or introduces me as her ‘friend who doesn’t date but could have anyone she wanted if she did so…’ Another friend is very understanding to the point where if she gets a boyfriend who tries to set me up, she warns him, “She doesn’t do that, seriously, don’t ask.” But if I don’t like said boyfriend, it’s because I have issues with men.

I’ve never faced the dilemma of coming out, the way many others do, because fear of getting caught in a lie has always trumped fear of being persecuted for the truth. Probably because, well, I’ve always been persecuted one way or another (though in defense of those still in the closet, for some, it may be more dangerous than others to come out.) I can only know what it is to always be out, and still, always be coming out. When the whole Prop 8 mess was going on in the states, I began to draw the parallels between being gay and being A, and while the gay and lesbian community has visibility on their side (People know bi exists, but it’s not often considered a legitimate orientation. And pansexual? Forget it.) and the aces of the world are considerably LESS likely to be murdered or tortured, unless they’re mistaken for gay, which is a whole gray area I won’t get into here, one of the main problem points, one of the things I realized during the marriage debate doesn’t so much lie in the fact that marriage is a misogynist tactic, and the patriarchy needs to clearly underline who’s male (powerful) and who’s female (dominated) in a relationship, though that is a factor. I’ve come to realize that a huge part of both the invisibility of asexuals and the oppression of homosexuals lie in the same sort of reasoning that is present in the oppression of the disabled community: Plain and simple, we are not supposed to be happy this way.

We have reached a point in society where we must acknowledge that we are biologically different from each other. Sexuality has become so important to modern society, we are forced to recognize physiological differences that we didn’t have to, before. So we do. And what happens is a whole lot of, “I can accept that you are different, and understand that. But the truth is, everyone in the whole world is aspiring to be me. So it’s okay that you’re different if you can’t help it. But if you could help it, you would be more like me.” And some people really don’t like the possibility of that not being true. So there are those of us, like me, who are out, who have been out for longer than I remember, who don’t have the horror stories to scare you about when and how and why it happened, or how I knew, or what convinced me, and still, I have to come out, every day. And I have to hope that people will believe me, and understand me, when I do, in addition to having to hope that no one will hurt me for it.

I tell people it started at fifteen, for the same reason I didn’t say anything then. Because it’s easier than having to tell the truth, and say I just knew, that I have always known. For some reason, it’s easy to understand how a twelve year old girl gets a crush on her first male teacher, and grows up to be hetero, or a ten year old boy who plays with dolls grows up to be gay*, but no one believes me when I talk about my first sex ed class. One of the things we did was role-playing. I played at being a girl who was being talked into going ‘upstairs’ with a boy. I said no. No matter what he did or said, I said no, until the boy, in frustration, put up his hand, and said, to the teacher, “She’s not even doing it right.” So the teacher came over and asked what the problem was, and I explained that I didn’t want to, that the point of the exercise was to learn to say no, and I was saying no, and what was wrong with that? Teacher responded with,
          “Well, try to be realistic. Try to be honest. How would you say no?”
          “I would say no.”
          “Well, what if he got angry.”
          “Then I would ask him to leave. I would get upset.” Teacher nodded.
          “What if it was someone you really liked, and you didn’t want him to leave, or you didn’t want him to get upset with you?” You can picture the blank look on my face. If you’ve ever seen me with a crush, if you’ve ever seen someone trying to encourage a crush, you’ve probably seen that blank look before.
          “I wouldn’t care. I would still say no.”
          “Okay, but what if you didn’t want him to leave, but you knew it was wrong.”
          “No. No, I would want him to leave.” The teacher smiled, and pulled what I’m sure she assumed was her trump card.
          “What if it was insert name of famous person who I had a huge crush on at this point in my life?” Where I blinked, stammered for a bit, then tried to pass it off as a joke, saying, “Oh, well that changes everything, doesn’t it?” Everyone laughed, and I sat there awkwardly, with the growing nervousness that I tended to associate with another missed step on the social ladder, and I realized I had no idea what these people wanted from me.

I still don’t know, is the truth. People who are scared to come out have every right to be, because you know what? It never ends. You won’t understand them any better, and most of them probably won’t understand you, though they will make it an excuse for any behavior they don’t understand. For some people, you will remain, as you are, a blip in their personal data, an uncomfortable acknowledgement that their world makes less sense to them than they want to admit, awareness that everything they do to ‘normalize’ themselves in a million different ways essentially does nothing but make them miserable, and is thankfully losing its value in the world. It’s not a nice thing to learn. They will take that out on you.

But, there is this: My mother, who spent most of my teenage years into my early twenties comforting me (herself) with the fact that I would find someone, in some way, maybe not sexually, maybe not marriage material, but someone to spend the rest of my life with, while I nodded and smiled in abject horror, was on the phone with me the other day. She mentioned someone’s wedding, and how, at this wedding, she was, of course, questioned about her own daughter’s impending dooms-marriages. My sister, who has been in a relationship for five years and no sign of marriage, and myself, terminally single. She laughed and said, “I know nothing about her. I don’t know what to do with her. She’s in love with a boy. He’s gay.” (Mother refers to the love of my life. He is actually pan.) “Other than that, who knows? Maybe his boyfriend will share.” (He does, actually, and very generously. Thank you!) Same conversation, different vein, mother says casually, “You know, before you, I never knew any of this stuff. I never understood it. But your Aunt never had interest in sex. We thought she was gay, and her marriage was just a cover. But she never seemed gay, and nothing ever happened. So now, with you, I sort of wonder. I mean, I think maybe she could be more like you. It’s funny, the things you start noticing, isn’t it?”

People won’t always see the you that you want to be, and some people can’t even see the you that is there. And it’s hard and it sucks. But even when you think it only matters to you, and you don’t matter, you still matter. You don’t owe it to anyone but yourself to be honest, but just being honest matters more than your fear lets you understand. People are always amazed at how honest I am about it, and some of them write it off as it being ‘easy’ for me. Fuck you, I say, but don’t give me rewards either. It’s easy because the alternative was harder, and that’s never a choice I want to make, that’s never something that gives me pride in who I am, that I did the easy thing. Sometimes, it’s easier to keep silent, and stay in the closet, and I’m not going to suggest that those people are weaker or less than I am. I’m just going to hope for you, that you’re okay with yourself and your world some day.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some cue cards to get back to, some vampires and a very snarky teenager clamoring for attention, and I think someone has to die today. Have to gear up for these things, you know.

*not to say either of those things lead to people being gay, or hetero, just saying people can make those assumptions, and therefore,'understand'

So It's Come To This - About The Damn Vampires

2010-09-19T12:40:00.000-07:00

So. I chose. I made a list of pros and cons for all the little niggly, squiggly, unclear, partially-clear, hungry little brain monsters wandering around kicking in doors, spray-painting on walls, and generally making a noisy mess of things in my head. It was a totally scientific process, you guys. You can tell, because there were lists! And as a result...

I am now writing a vampire novel.

*repeated headdesking*

Let me explain. I totally have an explanation. (It's not very scientific, but I swear, it makes perfect sense to me.)

So, you've heard me mention The Damn Vampires, yes? If you're someone I don't know who is just joining this blog, don't worry, you haven't missed anything. I refer to the project as The Damn Vampires, not because it doesn't have a title, it does, and like most of my projects, has from its inception. (I'm good at titles. I don't know why.) But because, from the beginning, I had no desire to write it. Which, as we've seen, is pretty much the indicator, for me. I seriously never learn, do I? But here's what happened: First step, a few years ago, was a dream. Nothing particularly odd about that. I'm a chronic insomniac, I have a lot of weird dreams. But it was one of those nightmares. I don't know if it's me, or if this is a thing among writers, but sometimes, I have nightmares I'm not in. Like, I'll have dreams about really weird and complicated and terrifying stories where I'm just kind of there, shifting perspectives, changing from this character to that, and sometimes, in these dreams, I will actually seek out the dangerous and scary stuff, just to see what the characters will do. And then I wake up and try to make it fit. This was one of those.

When I woke up, after having a dream where werewolves were being hunted by vampires in a strange unconscious dreamworld of a young woman who was, very decidedly not me, my immediate reaction was, "Hell no." First because I don't do that whole fantasy thing very well, it's like a whole other language that you have to learn pretty well before they let you in. My brother's a geek, okay? I know hell hath no fury like a purist pissed off. Secondly because vampire vs. werewolf had been done to death (this was before I had ever heard of Twilight, too.) Thirdly, Buffy had pretty much cornered the market for "Chosen One" stories, and finally, because I just completely lacked the skill for the visceral, violent tale lurking in the dream.

The excuses melted away very slowly. The first thing that happened was the story came back. This is unusual. The only nightmares ever come back, I mean the really horrible ones, are the ones that feature me. Still, I ignored it. Then, I happened to watch a documentary on sleep disorders, which put most of the plot into perspective, and let me think about how things might fit together. Still, I ignored it. Well, okay, I did a little reading, maybe. And in the reading, came across new 'theories' about vampires and werewolves I had never considered. At which point I threw up my hands. I decided, what the hell, I'll write it for Nano, get it out of my system. Since first drafts suck, I'll hate it, and leave it alone. Still, in order to write it, I'd have to kind of understand the styles. So I started reading vampire stuff, Anne Rice, Whitley Streiber, Elizabeth Kostova, and eventually, Twilight, House of Night, et al. Which, of course, led to its own problems.

I spent a lot of time on the Nano boards last year sifting through bitterness at Twilight's success to the actual problems in the story, because I wanted to understand if it was just the aforementioned wrath of purists, or something else going on. Of course, knowing Twlight is problematic is one thing, but I wanted to know what was actually generating all the scorn. And what I found, like I said, was a lot of bitterness. And a lot of distaste for how women, starting with Anne Rice, had 'ruined' vampires. I didn't finish the novel attempt then, but I did get my requisite 50,000 words, and I was totally happy because I didn't fail, and also, because now I saw how daunting a project it would be, and the type of criticism I would have to endure. And it did enough to make it hard enough to not finish. Yay. Mission accomplished.

Let me be clear here, I don't agree. In case you missed it, I have a couple posts on the Twilight phenomenon in particular, and women's place in literature in general that emphasize that I don't agree, but what's coming out of publishers these days does, and I'm a little annoyed and, if I'm honest, intimidated. I refuse to use the term 'sparkly vampires', so I'll just say, my vampires are the nasty kind. The kind that only want to seduce you so it's easier to eat you. So on the one hand, I'm a woman writing a vampire novel, which means people who are interested in vampires won't buy it. On the other hand, I'm a woman writing horrible disgusting and potentially (pleaseplease) terrifying vampires, so people who like vampires now will not get what they are expecting. And thus, I have successfully alienated two audiences.

*commences headdesking*

My last whining post got me thinking a lot about silencing, about how and why it works, and how even I, sitting here writing a blog about feminism and writing and pop culture, about what it is to be different, to be searching for yourself in realms of fiction, in places where every misfit, geek, and misunderstood outcast should have a place, and someone to look to, even I can fall prey to that. I hate myself for a lot of things, most of them inconsequential nothings I have to learn to let go of, but I really hate myself for this, and I'm not going to fall for it again.

So. I'm writing a vampire book. I'm writing a book I have no business writing for an audience that may not exist, and you want to know the kicker? It's coming out in a gush. It's coming out smooth and easy and right, like it's always meant to. I don't know how or why. I hate the twinge of 'must explain why it doesn't suck' every time I explain to people, "Well... I'm writing about vampires." I still hate it, I still don't want to write the thing, because it's looking like an ass-kicker of a story, and who knows what it'll take, how long, how much (there have been four dreams so far. lucid and ugly ones, you guys). But it's coming out almost against my will. I've spent so many months staring blankly, not knowing what to do with Hannah, and this just feels way too easy, like I must be doing something wrong.

But it doesn't feel wrong. It feels good, and I'm enjoying it, except all the little doubts. I've been getting lots of encouragement though, so maybe I've been wrong all this time, and I'm finally getting it right.

New path, same journey. Wish us luck.

Writers finish...and I don't.

2010-09-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

Hannah is not going to get finished.

I feel sad. Really really sad, and embarrassed to have failed, yet again, but I just don't know what else to do. I do this thing where I set goals for myself, and if one of the goals go unmet, I can't do any of it. It's a personal issue I need to work on. But working on it with my writing is turning my writing into something I really don't enjoy, and quite frankly, these are still my favorite characters in my favorite story, and I don't want to think of them in the way that I have been. I enjoy the writing that I do, but every time I sit down, it's a reminder of how much I haven't done. It's just the words giving me trouble, and then I torture myself, hate everything I've ever written, hate myself for writing or not writing, or anything else I can.

Writing is hard. Making time to write is hard, having the discipline to write is hard. Knowing your limits is hard, giving up is hard, knowing when to put it down 'for now' is hard, knowing how long 'for now' is, is hard too. I'm not a novelist, I haven't been for years, everything I've ever written in the years since Hannah is screenplay, and I don't want to give her up, and I want to write, and I do think that self-publishing is the answer. But I am torturing myself about writing to the extent where I don't have time to read. And if I don't have time to read, how do I write?

Coming back from vacation, I realized a few things. The first is the same thing I always realize when I go home from a trip: I am capable of pretty damn amazing things. It's hard to be anything but humble while you're looking the Mona Lisa in the eye, or eating pasta under the shadow of the Roman Coliseum or feeling how it's like my feet finally touch bottom in a deep pool every time I leave Heathrow airport to go into the city. It's tough to be anything besides grateful when you're on top of the Eiffel Tower and realize that the woman next to you is eighty years old, and has waited her whole life to stand next to you, here, and millions who will keep waiting, while your own life hasn't even really begun yet. But when it's over, and I can look back, remember getting lost in Paris and finding my way back on my own, remember climbing the huge Coliseum steps with my friends, instead of taking the lift, like I should have done, not because I was embarrassed, but because I didn't want to miss a second, and, without thinking, ordering food in a fancy restaurant, and eating it without asking for help or worrying about who might be staring... That's me. Mine to have, mine to keep, mine to value, as I will. I think about my family and people I have known, the ones who asked me, not how, but why the first time, and the second time both. How the world was created and filled with beautiful things, but there are people who live their whole lives thinking it's easier to not see them, and I am not one of those, and that's enough to make me feel powerful.

I am capable. But I also grew up in disability culture, and one of the problems I have is common to, well, probably a lot of us, since a lot of people I know have a similar problem: I do not know my own capabilities. It's either too much to handle, or not enough to motivate me. I started this project easily because I knew that I would do that to myself, and then, from day one, I've been doing that to myself anyway (I still blame Day One on Amanda Palmer, but, whatever.) So... Hannah will get done. And I will publish a book before the year is out. But I'm not sure, if those things will be related.

Vacation resets me. I want a reset. Not a do-over. The nasty, negative, "You didn't do what you said you would" voices in my head have effectively silenced the voice in my head that tells me where the stories are, but there are a couple little imps still left over from spring and a couple late bloomers. There are other voices, and that's been part of the problem. Hannah has changed from something I want to experience and enjoy and remember, into something I want to get through, to get to other things. And seeing as how I plan to write it in three novels, it's so much more daunting that way.

So, I'll keep working on it. In quiet, in private, in bits and pieces. And focus the rest of my energy... somewhere else. Don't know where else yet. Like I said, a couple things are clamouring for my attention, but this is not what I want to be writing right now, and if I don't write it, I feel guilty, so I don't write anything else, and I continue to torture myself (seriously, nobody told me writers were this neurotic! haha) So. Regroup. I'll wait a week. Maybe two. One of the many little imps in my head will come forward with gnashing teeth (no, not that one,) my family drama will settle down, and start again. I do mean to make something of myself, and do it in this way, but I may have overestimated myself (again), and not quite grasped what would be the best vessel for that.

It's upsetting, and it feels like failure, but that's me being neurotic. I write better in the fall, anyway. (This is actual fact, not an excuse. Spring for ideas, Summer for obsessive creative spurts, Fall for grit-your-teeth, down-and-dirty writing, and Winter for hacking the crap out of all the stuff I was previously too warm-and-fuzzy about to be objective towards. It's always been that way, it just seems too obsessive-compulsive to not at least try to change habits. I am foolish, it seems.) I'll find something else. There are a lot of something elses. When the ideas have hold of me, they drown out the negative voices so that I can be perfectly happy writing crap. Hannah's not doing that for me right now, but something else will. Meanwhile, I'll keep plugging away and picking it apart, and it'll come out, eventually.

And I'll keep writing this blog. I like having somewhere to talk shop, and people who'll talk back. Writing this blog is easier than writing stories, which I never even thought possible, and it helps with that need to sift through stuff, to find the balance between who they are, and who I am, and who is more important.

I took tons of pics and videos from my vacation, and I'm going to cut them together in a massive doc-style video, if I can manage it. For now, for everyone out there who has to wait, or doesn't think it's possible for them, or just because the world is beautiful and I like being able to share it, here's some shots.

See you next week for round two?

Courage.... and Other Things I Don't Have

2010-09-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

Yes, I owe this blog fun and exciting Euro-Adventures. I will get to that, promise. It’s just that this thing has been sitting on my dashboard for a while, and I wanted it out there, because it’s something that bothers me, and also something that I’d like feedback on, and something that I think other people should know too. So, FIRST, awkward and frustrated discussion. Then, Euro-Adventures!

Attention:
I am, as previously mentioned, a person with a disability.
I am also, as previously mentioned, an asexual person, with a disability.
Those two things? Are not related. And I hate having to say that, because it reminds me of how my mother has to tell people her daughter is smart right after she tells them her daughter is disabled. Because I know I have to say that, because to a large portion of the population, one thing cannot be true, if the other is. I also know that even when I say that, people will disbelieve me. So I will say again:

That I am a person with a disability who identifies as asexual is not a forgone conclusion. That I belong to both groups is incidental, and that both groups have been mistakenly thought, by people who are not part of that group, to denote a lack of maturation or inability to understand one’s social or physical development, does not mean I am, in fact, immature, or that I do not know my own body. The fact that I am asexual is not proof about the presence, or lack of a sexual desire in a person with a disability, or zir understanding of zir sexuality, or zir ability to express that desire, if indeed it does exist. The fact that I have a disability is, similarly, not proof that all, or even most, people who identify as asexual suffer from some kind of physical, mental, or chemical deficiency. My sexuality has as much and no more to do with my body chemistry and brain function as the average heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or pansexual individual. It is a part of me, as is my disability. It, like my disability, has a huge affect on my social interactions, and the average perception of me. They are not the same thing, nor are they part of one another.

I am oversimplifying again. The truth is, we don’t know what causes human sexuality to develop as it does, and there are a lot of factors. For years, we have been confirming and solidifying that the cause of homosexuality is largely genetic, and not a lifestyle choice. And now, there are studies that prove that identical twins can have different sexual orientations. It’s possible the specific place my brain has been damaged is directly related to sexual development. And it offers a very neat explanation. However, it’s also entirely possible I’m asexual because I was born asexual, like the other 600,000 or so people that we’re aware of who are also asexual, many, and I would wager most, of whom do not have brain damage to blame. And I dislike even giving credence to the notion that this could be anything other than simply, “I was born this way.” In the same way my mother knew that my intelligence could only ever be relative to the perception of where my intelligence should have been, I know that my sexuality will then seem less genuine, less the real thing.

Detour with me for a sec. As previously mentioned, Hannah is an old story. Hannah is a story I wrote one summer when I was fourteen, that I just can't let go of. It's interesting to see the ways my writing style has changed, but also, it's interesting to see that my topic of interest hasn't, really, just the way I confront it. Hannah doesn't have a disability. I've explained why Hannah doesn't have a disability; I didn't want her to. I didn't want her recognized as the self-indulgence that she was, and is. But there was a character who had a disability. Hannah's only childhood friend has a learning disability. In the earlier versions, she doesn't really get much of a mention. She's in one chapter, early on in Hannah, as a sort of juxtaposition between where Hannah is, and where she ought to be, so I wasn't explicit on the whole learning disability thing. She shows up in the second book, once or twice, when Hannah gets a boyfriend. (Hold on to that.) She's not very interesting. I feel guilty, now, at the lack of attention I paid her. Because in this version, she's very important. She's kind of integral, actually, and I'm enjoying Hannah's mucking around in her imperfect brain. I'm enjoying her there as a kind of proof that Hannah is just a kid, and I'm enjoying her for her own characterization. It's amazing to me, how easily I made the connection that she had the learning disability, another one of those things that's been there all along, but also, that I can use it to say all the things that Hannah, so desperate to be taken seriously, won't say. It is such a change, to be so fearless, now, and come right out and say it. Hey. We are everywhere. Sometimes, it's not our story. Sometimes, we have a place in your world too. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but it makes me feel better about so many things. Mostly, it makes it easier that I can't do that nearly as much as I'd like to.

I know why I made her so vapid and boring before. Firstly, I don't have a learning disability. Some things haven't changed. I didn't want to get it wrong, so I was afraid to do anything with it. But I know many people with learning disabilities, am friends with many people with learning disabilities, so I feel confident in a way I didn't when I was young, in my ability to treat this character like she is as real as someone I know, and not disappear her disability entirely. In the second book, she's not as quirky, she becomes sort of vapid and shallow and boring and kind of the media version of teenage girl, the one we’re supposed to understand is an accurate and general representation of ‘average.’ I know why that was too. It's not because I went all sexist, though there might be some sexism in there. It's because I started the second Hannah in high school. To give you an idea of what high school was like for me, I began the second book at sixteen. By sixteen I was vocally out, had to be just to dodge all the questions and comments thrown my way. I said to my very best friend, "I'm going to write another Hannah book, only this time she's our age. And she has a boyfriend." Her response was, "Good. She needs one." I said, "What? The last time we see her she's eight." So the next words out of my friend's mouth were, "Well, you need one. So it's good you're writing about that stuff." There were, of course, vapid shallow people of all sexes making these demands/accusations, but I could at least understand the boys' complaints, (mainly, ‘why can’t you be flattered, so I can get what I want?”) But with the girls, I just thought they were really that stupid.

Which brings me back to my original point. Someday, when I can get it all out, I am going to sit down and explain to you all about the many and varied forms of asexual discrimination. We're going to talk about all the courses on peer pressure they teach you in grade 6 and up, and how it feels to role-play a 'situation' and have your friends roll their eyes at you, and teachers ask you to, "really, try to be honest." while you stammered your way through it, confused, trying to figure out what was so damn funny about all this, and what these people wanted from you, and why those decisions were supposed to be so hard. when everything inside you says that is a clear not going to happen situation. We're going to discuss, at length, how often I hear the word 'unnatural' in reference to me, and how many asexuals through history have been branded pedophiles and secret perverts, and how it feels to have friends who won't touch you, not because they think you're gay or anything, just because they know everyone else does, and okay, you know, not having a boyfriend is fine for YOU, but OTHER PEOPLE would like to have the cute boy know they're available, okay? We'll talk about how it feels to love someone who believes you incapable of love, how it feels when everything you do or say is proof that you are not who you say you are, because we don't have words for love, devotion, desire, attraction, and passion that do not translate to sex to everyone but me. We'll talk about what happens when I go to the doctor's office, and how I have bisexual and gay friends who tell me I don't understand what it's like, to have people think those things about them, all the time. Not that I'm dismissing the trials of the other people on the sexuality spectrum. But we are more than just natural allies. We are fighting the same battle, and one day, I will have the words and courage to explain that in such a way that someone might even understand.

For now, the only thing I can say is this: I don't write asexual characters. It has taken me roughly twenty-three years to write characters with disabilities, and I know why that is. I know that is because I was always so afraid to be recognized, so afraid I didn't matter enough to be allowed to talk about this, that I wasn't disabled enough for my views to count, that I was 'too negative'. That is not why I don't write asexual characters. I can acknowledge the same fear, of course, I know part of it is that sometimes, the label doesn't quite fit me, though it's closer than any others, and I certainly don't want my asexual experience speaking for anyone else's. And there's the problem. I don't write asexual characters because to the wider world, we still don't exist. We are temporary asexuals if we're victims of rape (we are damaged), we are asexual if we have secret fetishes and can't have sex any other way (we are sick), or if our sexuality is so abnormal we need to hurt people to get what we want, so we bury it until it erupts and we claim another victim (we are evil). Does this line of thinking not seem familiar? Nobody speaks for us, not yet. We have no place in popular culture. In an oversexed world, we hold no interest. In every TV show or movie or book, if a character has no interest in romance, the audience is on the edge of their seat, waiting for the change. I don't write asexuals because I know, if I did, no one would believe it. I know that, because I know the number of people who still don't believe me. I know an even greater number of people who know exactly how I feel about sex and love, and still believe I am the only asexual person in the world. Being asexual isn't about doing nothing, where everyone else is doing something. I admit, I have some problems with sex. All the problems I have with sex stem from the pressure I received to be anything other than what I am. People are bored with me. I had someone say to me once, "Obviously, you're going to have someone someday. You talk all the time about not having one." I don't write asexuals because I know exactly how little people want to hear from us. I know exactly how hard it is to read and understand, and what a disappointment it is that that doesn't change. I know, because I am that disappointment. And I do feel lonely sometimes, but if I ever said that, people would start waiting for the change, all over again.

Think about this: I am a het asexual. Lots of asexuals are at varying points on the Kinsey scale, but I'm pretty comfortable with the knowledge I am more het than most. How do I know this? Because everyone I've ever been attracted to has been male. How does an asexual describe attraction, though? When I say attraction, I mean, the people I see who are pretty are both male and female, but there is something particular about pretty men. There is something internal that says ‘wow’ in a different way than when I see a beautiful woman. It is not a sexual desire kind of 'wow.' It is more a 'let me stand next to you, look at you, and commit you to memory." Or sometimes, "please be my friend and find me interesting, because I am fascinated by the fact that I find you interesting, that is special and rare."

I don't know how to explain it. I know it's different from sexuals, because of the blank looks I get, but that's all I know. When I was in college, there was a boy I liked. We had lunch together once, and he asked me out in a very sweet and vague way, and I never took him up on the offer, even though I very much liked him. It wasn't fear that made the decision. I just liked him too much to want a relationship. I liked being his friend, and his smiling at me and liking my writing and seeing me a certain way, I didn't want that way to change. When I told a friend this, she said, "but he likes you back!" and I said, "I know. But if he pursues me, I might have to do something about it. I might have to go out with him, and do the whole girlfriend thing, and then there's the whole explaining the 'no-touching', and even if he understood that, there's still the fact that we would be different.'" And she said, "that's the point." And that's when I knew I lost her, so I just said, "Not to me."

I don't write asexuals because we don't have words to explain ourselves.Nobody really wants to know anyway, they want to get to the good part at the end where we get fixed. I don't write asexuals because I don't want to feel like I’m taking something away from the thousands of other people in the world who are all differently asexual and probably more comfortable with it than I was taught to be. I don't write asexuals because we're boring, we're not wanted, and nobody even believes we exist, and selfish as it sounds, I want people to read my writing, and like it.

So, I don't write asexuals. I want to. J. M. Barrie wrote asexuals, and they called him a pedophile. I don't have that courage. In his book, Little White Bird, when Peter Pan transforms from bird, to boy, he looks at his reflection, sees he doesn't have wings and says, "I suppose I can't fly?" And as soon as he says it, it's true. The moment he doubts, it's over, and he spends much of the book looking for a way back up. I feel like that, sometimes. Everything I've ever done that people said I shouldn't have been able to do, was easy for me, because I knew other people had done it. But I'm a fraud. This is different. I know there are asexual voices in literature, but they are rare. Somebody, someday, is going to have to give us more, make us real to people. And I may be one of the only people who could do that (working on the assumption that 10% or less of the population are asexual, and 10% or fewer of those are artists) and I don't, simply because I believe I can't. Because nobody has shown me how. I don't know if that will change. For now, to the asexuals, I'm sorry. I can't. To myself, I am doing the best I can. To everyone else, it's working. Are you happy?

Maybe in another 20 years, hm?

Just A Quick One

2010-07-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Europe for about 2 weeks. When I get back, I'll have lots of pics and stories, but I'll be offline for most of it. If you're into it, you can follow my randomness on twitter. Just wanted to let everyone know, if I still have readers, that I haven't dropped the ball again, and I'll be back soon!

As always, thanks for hanging out!

Positively Infinite

2010-07-21T20:50:00.000-07:00

You'll remember, I have been meaning to write this for a while, but I wasn't sure how to start it. And then something happened. So. This is not a rage post. This is not a Hannah post. This is a post on positive thinking. (Rages and Hannah are a feature of that. You'll see.)

Every once in a while, my day-to-day and my politics collide in a way where I am forced to acknowledge that the world is not really full of shiny happy people who want to do good. Not to say I'm not aware of assholes, their existence in my life, or the fact that they have far more bearing on my life than I have on theirs, and how horribly I despair when I sit and think about that for too long. But what I mean to say is, every once in a while I am forced to acknowledge that in many ways, the world is full of shiny happy people who just want you to get out of their way and leave them alone, kthanx!

I am hopeless, in the figurative sense. I have the worst luck, the worst timing, I am hopelessly clumsy, and I rehash the million ways any undertaking will go wrong. Weirdly, though, I am also painfully optimistic. I am a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other kind of gal (hence the blog name) where the bad stuff goes down, and then you wake up the next morning, and more stuff happens. And always, always, I believe the answer is right around the next corner, even when I'm so far gone I don't even remember what the question was. I mean really, sick, stupid, masochistic, Michael J. Fox levels of optimism*. It's hardwired into me, where, despite neurosis born of years of the aforementioned crap, be it long drawn out recovery after surgery, the hellish nightmare of The College Thing, and the years of aftermath, despite all the random WTFery of stuff that could only happen to me, from bad-idea surgeries to a good decision two days too late, I remain always waiting for my next moment. It is both a gift and a curse. I keep getting hurt, purely because I don't believe it could possibly happen this time. I keep going because what else am I going to do? Because if anything can happen, it could happen to me, right?

I don't see myself as an activist. I am an optimist. I am a hopeful person, and I believe the world is generally decent, and if I talk enough, someone will get this someday. But the trouble is, a lot of people think, because I am a woman who fights, and therefore, feminist purely by default, because I am a person who wants the world to change, that I am unhappy, that I am negative. Some of this is purely sexism, but sometimes, it is genuine concern and fear of the ignorant. So let me please explain, to the friends and family who aren't as familiar with this idea as the feminists and anti-ablists I know. For those of you just learning this, I know you're not going to get it, and I'm going to get arguments, but here goes anyway.

Complacency is not happiness.

I am complacent about my disability. It is something I have to deal with. It is something that colours my decision making, though less than what most people think it does, still enough that it requires a cursory nod every time I make a plan. It is something that changes what I am capable of, and how I handle what I am not capable of. It does not make me happy. It has its good points, and there are things I am that I know come directly or indirectly from being a person with a disability, and some of those things are good things. It is not something I dwell on or waste time giving more credit than it is due, but it is still, by and large, one of the negative forces in my life. I am okay with it. We are not always friends, me and this label of mine, but we peacefully acknowledge each other's existence, and I make allowances and work around it. I did not cultivate and grow this disability. It does not give me a sense of pride or strength the way you might imagine that it does. It does not bring me joy or happiness. Just a different perspective, which I am sometimes grateful for. I am mostly okay with having a disability, and mostly, I do not think it sucks all the time. That is complacency. I am also complacent, sometimes, about my sexuality. I know there is nothing I can do about it. I know there are things in this wide world that I will never experience, or at the very least, never in the way that the rest of the world insists they experience things. I know, sometimes, that I am lonely, and that I cannot express that loneliness without people misunderstanding me. I know that I am different in some fundamental way to the rest of the world, that judgments are made on both sides, and sometimes I am at fault, and sometimes others are at fault. But I still like being asexual. I know I am often happy when I am alone. I am happy not to have to sacrifice my wants for someone else's. I am horrified when I see the emphasis placed on beauty and standards, and relieved that I have no such motivation, and don't cave to the pressures. I'm happy to be in the company of people like J. M. Barrie and Michael Jackson, who were brilliant at what they did in a way I can only dream, and seemed like decent human beings. (Someone told me Salvador Dali was too, but I've never been able to verify.) And I am also comforted that they faced similar accusations and judgments. I'm confident that my asexuality has not damaged me in any way, but the prejudice and peer pressure I have faced because of it certainly have. So the sexuality isn't necessarily a negative force in my life, but I'm not sure it's a positive one either. It just is what it is. I am comfortable with it.

My writing makes me happy. My spirituality make me happy. They are positive, driving forces which challenge and excite me and push me to change: who I am, how I think, what I want, and what I am willing to do to get it, and how much I am willing to let people in. Change is not a negative thing. Change is movement, movement is energy, and energy is used for the good of things. Sometimes, writing is hard. Sometimes, I can't get the words out right, or I can't get the words out at all, or there isn't enough story, and it dies off, or there's a question I haven't asked, a perspective I haven't considered, and everything hinges on this empty hole that I can't seem to spot, let alone fill. It's hard. But it is mine, writing, even though I do believe I was born with it, it is still mine, and when I get it right, I can take pride, not in having worked around a problem, but in having created something which changed, with the writing, which became something outside of what I know and what I think, and I can enjoy that and know that I have changed because of it. Sometimes, my chosen spiritual paths frighten me. Sometimes I am unsure. Sometimes I am weak or believe myself to be weak. But I know in my heart that I am learning. I know I've chosen right, for myself, and that I appreciate the learning, and that it changes me. And it makes me happy, and powerful, to be the force of my own change, to bear witness to my own growth, and to be more awake in the world the more I change. I have more value outside of myself, the happier I am. Pride and accomplishment, growth and change, and discovery and education changes you. And when you change and are happy, you pass on positive energy. Change is good.

Two stories. The first is what happened to kick my butt into writing this thing in the first place. I had a house guest, someone who knows me quite well, and has known me for years. We got to talking about a certain actor, and I mentioned that I was angry because he had played a blind person in a film I saw. My friend shook her head, and said she didn't understand why things like that bothered me, so I explained that of course it bothered me, blind people don't have the opportunities to play sighted. People who use wheelchairs don't get to play people who can walk. And on and on and on. So then she placates me with "Yeah, but _________ is famous, and they needed someone famous." This is a common argument which makes zero sense, and I said, "And why are there no famous blind actors again? Oh, right, because they don't get hired." (Incidentally, my favorite WTF excuse is the one that goes, 'well, we can't be sure that person can do everything the character needs to do.' Uh, writers? That means the character is badly written! That means you're being unrealistic!) So then she backpedals.

"Okay," she says, "I know. I know it's wrong and it's bad, but it's just how things are. It's not going to change. I don't understand why you let yourself get so upset about it."

Take a moment to think about that. Why would I, who have aspirations to write screenplays one day, and would like to write realistic portrayals of people with disabilities, get upset that if I do that, I will likely be the only person who has a disability working on said movie? The only person with any knowledge of my own intended audience, and a pretty unimportant person even so. I know, I'm so sensitive, aren't I?

When people say, "Why do you get so upset about...", what they really mean is, "Why do you expect people to care about..." Sometimes, people is a politically correct "me", as in, "Why should you make me care about things I don't want to. How dare you!" Sometimes, it's a more passive "me", as in, "I already know nothing I do will ever affect anything. I don't have to care about this because it won't matter if I do or not." Which, really, is a lot more negative than insisting on change. (Sometimes it's also, "I actually think you're totally wrong, and I don't want to tell you, so I'll just placate you until this goes away," but I'm not giving that one any credence here because in this instance, it's just flat out wrong. Like, one of those rare and beautiful black and white versions of wrong, where one side is right, and the other is nowhere near where right is.)

People think caring about things, being passionate about social justice, as I am, makes me negative, because I am constantly examining my own behavior, and educating others about theirs, when I can. People think finding fault with large chunks of 'how the world works' makes me perpetually nasty and bitter and angry. Certainly, a large amount of things in the world make me angry, as a woman, a person with a disability, an asexual, a pagan. Certainly, I am frustrated (not bitter, just not happy) that there are less ways the world works for me than for others. But. I am an optimist first. Passion is a good thing. I do not use this fire or frustration inside me to hurt the people I love. I do not use it to hurt other people in similar situations, furthering my own cause, and setting others back. I use it to speak. I use it to write. Blog posts and stories both, to show people that I am part of the real world. That there is a world that exists, within "the world". Where holes still need to be filled in some places, and in others, space needs to be made. Where there is a need for a different kind of "normal", a new version of "acceptable". Being an activist isn't about pointing out the flaws in the system. That's just the first part. The rest is about fixing them. You can't be an activist, without being an optimist. You cannot work every day towards change you don't believe is coming. You cannot live a happy life, believing your perspective is invalid, and just existing is enough to hope for. I am learning one of the most fundamental beliefs belonging to many Pagan groups is that life itself gives you power, and you use that power, ideally, to make the world a better place. I exist, and in recognition and gratitude of the fact that I exist, in this world full of amazing things, to my own mind, I am honor-bound to do good in it. If that means certain things must change, then certain things must change, and I must do my best to see that change. Less than a generation ago, I would have been put in an institution, and see my family on weekends if I was lucky, and never be educated. In some parts of the world, a child like me would be put in a cage, fed just enough, and never talked to or stimulated. That changed, here. Here, now, someone fought for our right to be treated as people. That I am grateful and happy and proud of that change, however it came about, does not mean we're done. And I would certainly feel like an ungrateful little brat, for resting on someone else's laurels, and saying, "Okay, we have enough now." Because I want to be there when they start treating us like people who matter. Somebody could make things better, and it's not conceit to think it might be me, it's self-preservation. I don't do this to prove to you that my life is hard, or that people don't play fair. I do this to remind you it doesn't have to be this way. We are capable of more and better, as we have been through history. That you don't believe it, well. Just shows who's the negative one, doesn't it?

The other story: When I was a kid, I saw Peter Pan. Then I read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Then I heard David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. And I began to wonder what went into the water in London, and decided I must go there and see for myself. At around ten years old, I said to my mother, "One day, I am going to live in London, England," and she said, "Okay." And after the disastrous College Thing happened, and after I had woken myself out of my shell shock, I said, "Now. I am going to London now." And I did. I got a passport and what was left of my student loan, and I went to London, for a week. I had a ball, fell in love with the city, and came home, and warned my mother, "Next time I go, it's permanent," and began to plan. It took two years of working part time and living like a monk and carefully planning, and arguing with my mother/sister/therapist/various people that I was serious, and getting my visa, and a mix up with my passport, before getting the go-ahead. Along the way, the biggest snag I hit was that the people who said, "Oh, sure," when I was ten or fifteen had a lot more to say when I was twenty-four. Much of it along the lines of, "It's well and good to have dreams, but you need to have a real life, and be serious. This isn't going to happen. People don't just do this. Get a job, settle in, focus on building your life." And for the first time, it wasn't, "you can't do this." It was, "I can't do this, so how could you?"

It wasn't permanent. I had a two year visa, and I lasted three months. Couldn't find work. But it was three months. Three months living in London. And for the first time in my life, I had done something important, not to someone else, but to me. I had done something that wasn't amazing because I had done it, but because it had been done. I am going back in the summer, for a week and a half. Because I can. Because I am careful with money, and more importantly, because it is something I knew all along I would have. You can't have one without the other. Belief doesn't mean you can sit back and things will come to you, and there's no point in working for something you don't believe you're ever going to have, because even if, by some strange twist of fate, you get what you want, you'll waste it. I advocate for change because change is coming, and I want to make sure it's change I need to see, to keep going, to keep making gains in my life and the world, for myself when I need to, for others when I can. I may not make a difference, but I gain another drop of power each time I open my mouth when someone wants me to keep quiet. And that means something to me, whether it means anything to anyone else.

I have been in writing classes where I was the only person not writing a tragedy or drama. I have been in writing classes where, if I was not writing a tragedy or drama, I was mocked. If I wrote a happy ending, it was seen as 'taking the easy way out.' I don't know where we got this idea that being unhappy meant something more than being happy, but next to The Dreaded Mary Sue, it is my least-favorite myth about writing, and art in general. I hate the glorification of Misery and Dissatisfaction almost as much as I hate the glorification of Home and Family. I suffered, for much of my formative years, from what was quite literally a crippling form of depression and social anxiety, from the time I was eleven. It was so bad, I quite honestly saw my CP as the more manageable of the two conditions. When I woke up, went on meds and into therapy at the age of seventeen, my mother stared at me, after two weeks in treatment, and said, "Where have you been?" And that was enough to keep going. I'm off meds now, but still in counseling. My happiness is hard fought and hard won, and I will not let anyone tell me it means less or is less real, just because we suffer from a peculiar sense of ourselves, where we imagine that our lives aren't supposed to be really great and we should settle for "not lousy" whenever we manage to find it. I have had a life that is not lousy. It's not enough.

When I went to London, the common question, for some reason, was not "How?" but "Why?" and my answer was, "I want to, and I can." It's as simple as that. If you're able, do it. If you're not able, find a way. If there's no way, find another way. Again, I realize I'm luckier than most. I have a nice part time job I really like, I have goals, and, as I am not hindered by many visible signs of disability, I am, sometimes, afforded more humanity than others I know. But then again, I have able-bodied friends with full time jobs who were able to get their education, and who have dreams that go unfulfilled because those dreams are for other people. I have this theory that, since I am a person with a disability, I was spared all the awful socialization that taught us that there are Things which constitute a Real Life (since it was never expected that I would have any of them anyway.) so now, I go around foolishly believing that a Real Life is what I am doing, as I am living. This is why it's so important to me that people understand that a person with a disability does not want to be treated like an "ordinary" person. Because one thing I've learned is that "ordinary people" the way that you mean it, with Jobs and Spouses and Responsibilities, can be really really unhappy. They feel ripped off, because they were told what would make them happy, and they went out and did that, and it didn't make them happy, and now what? Who wants that? I am complacent as a person with a disability, but as a person with a life, it's pretty decent, and I'm pretty happy. I'm not flat broke anymore, I belong to a group of people who listen when I talk, I tell stories about people I will never be, when I have the time and energy, I have two precious furbabies who love me. Sometimes I do cool stuff like go to Europe in the summer, or set about self-publishing a book. Those things are possible, and for the things that aren't? Yeah, that hurts. That really sucks, actually, but there's always another direction to move in. I'm not stupid, I'm not naive, and I'm not trying to be completely unaware of whatever narrow grasp of privilege I have. It's not the life I wanted at ten, it's not the life I want at twenty-five, but I'm getting there. And I will get there, at thirty, forty, or fifty, maybe, but I will. And because I know that, I can share my happiness. I can spare a drop or two of my energy telling the people in my life that if things were different, I might be capable of more, if things were different, the fact that I am capable of anything would not be such a shock. I can spare my time and energy to tell people that one day, things will be different, things will be easier, for me, and others like me, and still, we will keep working, and moving forward. Because it's not about what is or what should be. It's about what is possible. And the answer to that is always, always anything.

People spend a lot of time telling me the things I should be grateful for, because they are grateful they are not me, or they are grateful they do not have to deal with anything worse than me. The truth is, I am more grateful than I could ever appropriately express. That doesn't mean I don't deserve more. There, I think, is the crux of the matter. There's a certain level of narcissism in advocating for change, in your own life, or the world at large. There is a point at which you demand it be acknowledged that you're important, and because of that, you are owed, in that you have the right to expect the amount of effort you put into something should match the value of the result. And I have reached that point, and the people who haven't are angry because how could I possibly think I should have more than they should?

One day, I will have more, and because I do, someone will start where I finish, and have more than that. I believe it is important that that happens, and I believe that it will not happen unless I make it happen, and certainly, it will not happen in a vacuum. So I do what I can every day, paying in advance, fighting for a better life for me, and a better world for everyone else, for the same reason I fought to go to London, and the same reason I fight for this book, now. Because it's important and it will make things better, and it will make me happy. But mostly because I want to. And I can. That should be enough reason for anything.

So. I do wholeheartedly apologize to the people who feel I am negative. Clearly, nobody has convinced you what you're worth, and you have no idea what the world is capable of. My condolences to you, and the people who have to put up with you, while you are putting up with life.

*Read it. I'm not kidding. One day, my little optimist heart tells me I will be given the opportunity to thank that man, for his awesome work, his awesome writing, and his general all-round awesome. I even forgive him for converting to American, because he is made of that much awesome. In case this is that chance, thank you sir, you are appreciated.

Ally Does Product Placement

2010-07-17T20:46:00.001-07:00

I'm not getting paid for this, so you know.

Now that that's safely behind me, I can tell you I had a birthday recently. I'm twenty-six now. Yikes. One of my gifts was the Kamenstein salt & pepper grinder. Now, I'm not a home decor kind of person, when it comes to gifts. More a music, DVD, video games and books kind of gal. But I have to tell you, I'm a bit of a sucker for kitchen gadgets. As a clumsy, absent-minded, easily distracted person with no hand-eye coordination who also loves food, kitchen gadgets are awesome to me. Have a sung any love songs about my Magic Bullet yet? Seriously, guys, I know the infomercials are annoying as all hell, but they work! And my Tea Master? Oh, how do I love my Tea Master. No more leaves!

I love fresh ground pepper. I will not eat pepper, if it is not fresh ground pepper. And that kind of sucks, when you have dexterity issues. I grind the pepper, and if the grinder is of the small and cheap variety, it still takes me a few minutes, and most of the pepper winds up on my hands. I have allergies. Or on the floor, where it waits until my mother comes in to vacuum that week. If it's the big expensive kind, it's unwieldy, and too heavy for me to turn properly at all, all the pepper goes into one spot, if it even comes out. This Kamenstein grinder is amazing. It comes apart in two pieces if I need it to, it closes up on its own, and I can put it back together easily, even with my bad hands, and it will stay where I put it. Its little squeeze handle thing is way easier for my stupid hand than the typical grinder. For people for whom strength is the issue, not so much dexterity, I tried the squeeze handle with my weak hand, and the spices still came out. They were a bit less fine than with my strong hand, but it worked. The only tricky part is refilling it, which involves screwing things off and slotting things back in place, and some extra time and dexterity. But even the little plastic thing you have to slot back in place is made of soft plastic that is flexible, not hard and unforgiving plastic you have to get just right. Honestly, it's the least pain-in-the-ass grinder I've ever used, seeing as I'll only be refilling it once every couple months. I love it. I love it so much, I am sending a letter to the company.

I always have to be careful with this kind of thing, being of the more 'mild' disabilities. I know your results are obviously going to vary, depending on your individual physical situation. And I know this is a bit of a departure from the usual stuff in this blog, but I feel like something so disability-friendly should get a nod, so do check it out if you're picky like me and need your fresh ground pepper. And feel free, in the comments, to fill me in on the most user-friendly kitchen gadgets you've found.

Thanks for indulging me.

Just When I Think She's Done Surprising Me

2010-06-21T22:04:00.000-07:00

So. I've basically been sitting around the last few weeks, staring at the screen, and nothing's been happening, and that doesn't make sense, because I know this story like the back of my hand, right?

Well. Today, I was sitting in the laundromat, and I had one of Those Moments. You know those moments, right? If you're a writer or other artist, you have Those Moments at least some of the time, if you wish you were a writer or artist, those are the moments you're looking for. It's the stuff of legend, you're sitting around, because you're tired of staring at the screen, the house is a mess and you haven't eaten anything but instant mac and cheese for three days because you feel guilty every time you leave your house because you've only written three pages today, oh gods. And then something shifts, a veil lifts, a bolt of lightning strikes, the ground moves under you, and something changes inexplicably, suddenly, perfectly.

I have a hard time with scheduling writing time. Some days, it's five or six hours, some days it's thirty minutes. Too many days, it's nothing. Ten minutes or less. I'm working on fixing that. For those of you who do not understand this yet, we are not actually at the mercy of the almighty Inspiration. We need the inspiration, to find the stories at all, and there are small moments of inspiration in the writing process. And there are large earth-moving cracks of inspiration. Usually, I get the first one when the idea hits, then I have to squish it down, because some ideas are, well, stupid. And some ideas are amazing, but they're intimidating and all-encompassing, and I don't have the mental capacity or fortitude to focus on it, and it sits and stews for a few months (or on memorable occasions, a few years, coupled with a few false starts. Hello, Gerard, you blood-sucking pain in my ass). I am saying this, rather condescendingly too, because it still shocks me how many people think words will get written, if you're not writing. Seriously, I know I have time management issues. This is not because I lack inspiration. This is because I am neurotic and therefore easily distracted. I am not a morning person, so morning is when I write, because I know I am of no use to anyone besides myself. If I sleep in, usually, because I did not sleep well the previous night, or I overextended myself the previous day, I hate myself. Hating myself takes a lot of mental energy. You can see where this is going. I'm not making excuses. I'm a flawed writer who badly needs to work on self-discipline.

When I was in London, there was a guy. He was in TV, I don't know exactly what he did, some desk job, but it was in television. He worked part time as an extra. When I told him what I did with my spare time, he told me about a screenplay he really wanted to write. When I asked him what was stopping him writing it, he said time. He assured me he had it all mapped out and knew exactly what would happen, but he was waiting for the right time. When I asked how long he'd been waiting, he said ten years. I tried not to judge. I asked him how much he had written.

"Weeeelllll... you see, I haven't, really. But I know exactly how it's going to go, so once the inspiration strikes, I'll be able to jump right on it." So I said, you should make it a habit, to write every day. "Weeeelllll.... I just, I don't feel inspired to do it." I walked away trying to hide the smirk because we both knew it wasn't ever going to get done, but really, there was no need to rub it in.

Seriously, I don't know about anyone else, but my muse is a grade-A asshole. On the good days, I feel like I've got this person whispering in my ear that if I do not get this out as quickly as possible, it could blow my head off, I will explode in a shower of guts and grey matter and all the wrong words, and on the bad days I'm stranded in a desert and he's five feet away with a cup of water, yanking it an inch further away every time I take a step. The thing is though, words can actually come out whether you're inspired or not. I am not yet immune to how crap the words are, but I'm at the stage now where at least I know crap is a perfectly normal thing and I just have to suck it up and deal, or in theory, anyway. Because then there's the second kind of inspiration. Where you've spent like, two or three (or in my case, four or five) drafts on this stupid thing, and the tone's not right, and the timing's all off, but the story is there and you're doing a whole lot of telling people what's happening, instead of just having it happen and then something, some inexplicable THING happens, you ask the right question to an empty room, a typo leads you to an adjective which leads you to an idea you never would have thought up on your own, and then it all kind of fuses together.

Like my friend, I had Hannah mapped out. So there was no need to write with any real urgency. Everything has been fits and starts and me screaming at my laptop, and erasing huge chunks of pages. But the map was wrong. After all this time, I didn't imagine that could be true. Of course, the writing of Hannah is still moving at a somewhat steady pace, but a slow steady pace, so much so that I've had to extend the original deadline to the end of October. I had the brainwave yesterday, that maybe I was wrong, maybe the plot was a little thin. So I had the idea, as I had had before, that maybe I could smush all three stories together. Which caused a panic attack because, a) I tried to do that before and it didn't go down so well, b) even if the first novel comes in half the length I had planned, that still makes the book almost 500 pages, and too expensive to self-publish, and c) I hadn't planned that far ahead yet. So there I am, at the laundromat, in utter despair as only a writer can be in utter despair, and trying to sort out what I'm going to do, and telling myself I am not going to start spinning around the floor in front of innocent bystanders. You see, I have a stim. I pace. I pace a lot, particularly when I am imagining all the places I would rather be, like at my computer writing a best-seller that will make me a gazillionaire, instead of alternating between the clock, the spin cycle, and my empty notebook. I try hard not to do it in public, except at work, when I am required to stand in one place for a long time. So I stared at said notebook, and started mapping out the second Hannah book just in case, you know, as a fail-safe. And I realized something. There was a slight incongruity between *spoiler alert* Hannah as a teenager, as she is in book 2, and Hannah as a small child, as she is now. Nothing huge, she hasn't all of a sudden become a completely different person, but there's a distinct change in her motivation that I can't account for. This leads me, like a PI following a gut instinct in an old movie, to thinking, "Hm. Something happened in book one that is not there. I don't know what that is. What is that?"

That was all it took, you guys. WHAM. Hit me like a freight train. I knew exactly what happened, I knew exactly what it was I had been intimidated by in the first place. And just as I thought to myself, "How am I going to pull that off?" I knew the answer to that, too. When you write, you give characters traits and habits and personalities, and you know you're only going to use pieces. The rest is extra, stuff you use in your head, to solidify the characters so you can keep writing them, so you can get to know them. Sometimes, you don't know which extras you're going to end up using, and sometimes, in those extras, there are answers. I thought by now, after all this time, Hannah had finished surprising me in the big ways, and everything from here on out was extra. But oh boy, that last step was a doozy. It was glorious. Beautiful. CRACK!CRACK!BOOM! then all the little pieces, snapsnapsnap as if it was always meant to be exactly that, as if at fourteen, I saw a picture in front of me and fell in love with it, and suddenly, eleven years later, I just noticed the picture is a mosiac, made up of dozens of little pictures that fit with the big picture so perfectly you can't notice them, until you do. I was wrong, and it cost me time and effort and energy and blood and sweat and tears. And I don't care, because when it comes out, it's going to come out amazing. We're still moving. But it's a whole new game. For the first time since this last leg of the journey began, she is running ahead of me. I don't know where we're going. It's gorgeous.

I am not destined to be a great writer. At best, I will be a good storyteller. I am not trying to change the world, only trying to believe that I could. Most times, I think I really suck at this, that I've always sucked, and that's why it gets harder as it goes on, not easier. And that's why stuff hasn't worked out, and that's why what happened in college happened, and that's why I chose self-publishing over the traditional methods. When I get comments on this blog, or when I get to talk shop with other writers, or I help people, I sometimes think I am good at this thing that I do so compulsively, but even that, sometimes, is empty and hollow because after all this time, I had better at least be good. There are people in my life who rather foolishly think that if I am to set out, to do this job, and the job of being read, I will change the world, I will do Great Things. I will be a Great Talent. Most of the time, I believe it comes from love. Some of the time, I believe it comes from ignorance. Today, only for today, I think I just believe it.

xfingers

* to my knowledge, 'stim' is a medical term for self-stimulatory behavior. Please do let me know if is derogatory in any way.

Something More About Mary (Alternatively: The Damn Twilight Post)

2010-05-24T22:19:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a while. Hannah's going really good, so I haven't had a second to turn away from it. I scrapped the fifty or so pages I had, and restarted, I'm already further along than I was when I restarted, so, yeah, busy. Also, I've taken to writing a couple posts at once, because there has been a lot going on with everybody these days, on a lot of different fronts, and it helps to cycle through and figure out what goes where and how to make everything fit together. Anyway, sorry for the huge delay, and thanks for another great month! Onward!

The Mary Sue post has apparently gotten me a lot of attention. Colour me surprised. Apparently I have excellent timing, since there's a lot of talk going on. That is awesome, because when I reached the "Mary Sue is bull" epiphany, I got a great big, "WTF" from even the most feminist of readers. There's been some really good discussion about Mary Sue, about why it is sexist, and why it isn't sexist, why it is useless bullying, and why it isn't. There's also been a whole lot of noise, and a whole lot of excuses for bad behavior, fem-hating, and why we need to be able to call out Mary Sue. And there have been some good constructive criticism on my post, and some really pointless noise on my post too. I'm not the kind of person to keep rehashing old arguments, but Twilight turns up a hell of a lot in these conversations. I assume because it's badly written, so very hard to defend. I feel like there's some confusion about my earlier post. And I'm being hassled by certain readers (I'm glaring, so you know) to write about it again. So. You will remember the post where I said I have issues with Twilight I'd rather not discuss? And of course, I mentioned in the Mary Sue post that I had issues with Twilight, but was going to stick to just talking about Mary-Sueisms, and not picking on Twilight? Well.

The time has come to pick on Twilight. And I didn't want to have to write this, not because of Twilight's popularity, or because I would have to admit that I read the entire series, mainly as background reading while planning The Damn Vampire Novel. Or even because I feel a bit petulant about this whole thing, and I don't like being petulant. I didn't want to write it because I am sick and tired of hardcore haters. No really, I am sick and tired of hardcore haters defending their hatred more than I'm sick and tired of hardcore fans defending their love. Admitting your disappointment in Twilight is opening the floodgates to a whole lot of fem-hate and a whole lot of "all ________ are _______" talk, and, while I am about to tear holes all through Twilight, there are some things I just don't want to hear anymore because it takes away from what is actually wrong with the series. And I believe I mentioned, I am a fan of constructive discussion.

A list, then, of things I am not blaming on Twilight.

1. Bella really is a Mary Sue. Yeah. I know. I don't care. Read if you need clarification on this point, and let me just say, Bella is not the problem. Okay? I will be clarifying that later.
2. Rob Pattinson is not that good looking. And hadn't even read the books before getting that role, so where you think he has anything to do with them I will never understand. He's also mentioned his own so-so appearance several times. Which is pretty much enough to make me like him, at least a little bit.
3. Teenage girls only read those books because "omg edward is so hot!!!!"/ Teenage girls are idiots and I'm tired of listening to them go on and on about Team Edward vs Team Jacob - Wow, ageism and sexism all wrapped up in a neat little package. Do I really need to tell you what's wrong with this one?
4. Bella is not good looking enough to get the attention that she gets. Again, I'll be going over this later, but seriously, what? Are you saying Kirsten Stewart, the actress who plays Bella in a series that was written before she was cast to play in it, hi, isn't good looking enough, or are you saying that because Meyer didn't spend pages and pages extolling on her beauty like she did with Edward, Bella can't possibly be that good looking? Or maybe you're just saying, "only Sues have more than one boy, and we hate them so nyeh."
5. Bella's parents don't punish her enough - Okay, that's not a character flaw. Meyer is not a good writer but, alternatively, Bella's parents are idiots. They married too young and have no responsibility for themselves, let alone their offspring. That's pretty established, whether because Meyer actually happened to put some thought into that one, or because it mirrors her own experiences. It happens in real life too. Look it up. Also, please remember, JKR has admitted the reason HP takes place at a boarding school is the lack of adult interference. Clearly, Meyer didn't have that out, and couldn't think of a better one. Which brings us back to yes, okay, the books are badly written!
6. I could write better than that/Meyer's not a real writer - Neither am I. Neither were a lot of first timers. Just because they did better than she did, doesn't make her any less real, nor any less a writer. I know, I'm mad this slipped through the slush pile too, but seriously? There's a lot we can hold her responsible for, but it's not her fault they published the damn thing, and this happened. Somebody, somewhere should have stopped her, and nobody did.
7. I have nothing against Twilight, I'm just tired of seeing it everywhere. Oh whine whine whine. This usually comes from one of those people who likes things that are unpopular on purpose. Liking something because it's unpopular, or trashing it because it's popular, is pretty much the same as liking something because it's popular. You're still being a disingenuous ass, you just get to do so with a smattering of hipster cred. Congrats. You hang on to that.
8. Meyer has ruined vampires forever - Uh. no. Meyer's publishers have ruined vampires for the moment. Because now they've let that through, publishing companies are hungry for more sparkly vampire stories, and Meyer is, for the moment at least, done. (You are free to cheer, I won't hold it against you.) And by the way, vampires have been going the way of the unicorn since Anne Rice. Get over it, or do like you keep insinuating you can, and write something better.
9. They sparkle. That's pathetic - Okay, from a practical standpoint, Meyer was just dealing with a plot hole. It was a stupid way to deal with a plot hole, but compared to the rest of the stupidity, it was positively brilliant, in that she actually went, "hmm, I'm going to have to deal with the whole, 'vampires burn up in the sun' thing." And then, y'know. Dealt with it. Stupidly, yes, but it still counts as a tiny inkling of foresight in the direction of people might not buy this. Also, before anyone brings it up, I get that stupid sparkly vampires is just shorthand for badly written vampire novel. Uh-huh. And you know what? Mary Sue is just shorthand for badly written female character by a female author. Only stupid sparkly vampires has morphed to mean Vampire book marketed at teenage girls, which is probably inherently bad due to subject matter and intended audience. Much in the same way that Mary Sue has morphed to mean there's a girl in that fic that someone just made up! Get her out! That's pathetic and obviously about you because only sexually frustrated hetero teenage girls write fanfic!

There. If any of your complaints sound anything like that, you are as free to make them as I am to delete them from my comments because that is so not the point. Yes, I admit, I am also frustrated that the quality of adult or YA fairytales has gone down in a hurry, as I have previously mentioned. Which is why I am writing my own, and will publish it independently, since publishers seem intent on pushing this crap at us. I'm not defending it. I know it's badly written. I know it sucks. I know you're sick of it. I'm sick of it. What I am saying is the books have zero plot, and a whole lot of creepy sexist BS, and a huge following of kids who now believe the creepy sexist BS, and we ignore that because it's easier to just pick on Bella Swan. This is why Mary Sue is dangerous.

For people who still don't see Mary Sue as a misogynist tactic, let me lay it down for you. First off, you are wrong. I don't know how much clearer I can make it than to say we have a word designed to make girls who dare to believe that they are, or can be, smart, attractive, successful and impressive, feel immature and ridiculous. But I am damn sure going to try, because this is not ridiculous, it is not frivolous, it is important, and affects how women and girls view themselves and their experiences, as artists and as women, and it also affects how the artistic community views women. So here we go again.

What is wrong with Twilight, and why "Bella is a Mary Sue" is just adding to the problem.

Consider that even hardcore Twilight haters have almost nothing to say about Edward. Many times, Edward does not factor in at all. There's been talk about Edward being creepy and way beyond 'bad boy.' But it gets buried a lot of times in the "Bella's not that pretty. Why does everybody like her?" noise. So, let's just clarify. A bloodsucking monster who admits he has no soul, and every time he kisses his girlfriend, he has to fight the urge to kill her, gets more sympathy from readers than a teenage girl with low self-esteem who is used to not living up to the standards of beauty, and possibly doesn't understand that she's as appealing as she is? And what about Jacob? The perfect sweetest best friend in the world who has made it known to Bella that he's not okay with just being a friend, and is, in fact, only biding his time until she comes to her senses... Or has a child, who he can fall hopelessly in love with, and patiently wait til she is an acceptable age to have? (Which is made easier by the fact that she ages really really fast.) Because in his tribe, that's what you do. You wear women down with your affection! (There's probably some racial appropriation in there too, come to that. The whole thing gives me squickies, but like I said, I don't like to dissect marginalized groups that I'm not part of. Someone want to take over that side of the discussion for me?) He gets no mentions whatsoever, and we have Bella, who can't decide whether to fall for the Nice Guy routine, or get the bad boy because she makes him a better person, which by the way, is the same tired plot line played out on highly rated TV shows all the time. This one bad character in a sea of bad character cliches gets canonized, called names. Well gee, where do you think that comes from? Not girl-hate, surely. Not sexism.

I want you to do something for me, before we start arguing. (Oh noes! More homework!) For just a second, replace the word Mary Sue, with the word "slut." I know, for all intents and purposes, it doesn't actually mean the same, but, humor me. So now, if in your head you're thinking, "Bella is a Mary Sue," you are now thinking, "Bella is a slut." If in your head, you're thinking, "But some characters are Mary Sues. It's okay to hate them." You are now thinking, "But some characters are sluts, it's okay to hate them!" If you're thinking, "Meyer writes Mary Sues and gets published, and that makes her a bad writer, because now everybody thinks they can write a Mary Sue and Mary Sue is bad!", you are now thinking... Well, you get the idea. It's not that I believe Mary Sue is synonymous with slut, or even that I believe that a lot of people do, (though you can see the corollary, can't you, between Bella Swan getting 'unwarranted' male attention, and how much people dislike her for it?) What I'm saying is, like with the word 'slut' we assume everybody knows what Mary Sue means, and that it means the same to everyone.

When you call someone a slut, you're saying, "you are having lots and lots and lots (and lots) of really, really, really inappropriate sex. I am not, therefore, I have a right to disapprove of you. You make my sex less meaningful and important." Except for the times you're just saying, "I don't like you. I don't like what you do or how you do it, or who you are, or that you don't hate you as much as I do. You need to hate yourself in order to make up for how awful you really are." Using that word means you get to make assumptions of how much and what kind of sex is bad. How those people dress, how they act, how they might redeem themselves, and why they need to. You make assumptions that either they are fundamentally broken, or they are just selfish and stupid and nobody needed to break them to make them into the horrible people they are. Most importantly, though, you make the assumption that healthy, normal people agree with you, that everybody knows, instinctively, how much sex is bad, that there are bad reasons for sex, and what those reasons are, and how to present yourself as the kind of person who is a slut, or the kind of person who is not. When you use that word, you claim your own rules as finite, and are free to assume, then, that everyone breaking them is doing so with full knowledge of the rules. Which makes them bad people. You forget that there is no way to tell the difference between the 'slut' you disapprove of based on her actually doing things you just don't like (which really isn't your damn business, but that's just a niggly little detail, isn't it?) or the 'slut' you just dislike, as a general rule. That doesn't matter, they need to fix their behavior to your standards, or at the very least, be appropriately shamed.

Allow me to perform a little translation: When you accuse someone of writing a Mary Sue, you subscribe to similar universalities. You assume that everyone feels the way about Mary Sue that you do, that is, a Mary Sue is universally bad, and everybody agrees with you as to what way and by what degree of bad it is. There are certainly things that all Mary Sues have in common, ie, they're all women or girls, they're written by women or girls, they're not well-written, and the assumption is, they are completely unnecessary and totally unrealistic. But the good ol' Mary Sue Litmus Test, in trying to rid the world of the horrors of unrealistically cool and unique female characters, has proven that it is pretty much impossible for Mary Sue to be a universal anything. Therefore, we should play it safe and avoid anything that makes our girls and women interesting, unique, memorable, strong, independent, and, in fact, necessary to the story. You forget that sometimes, Mary Sue doesn't mean 'badly written', and the only real, solid, all-across-the-board trait of a 'Mary-Sue' is that she is female, and so is her author. Sometimes, that's enough, in both original and fanfic, to make her unnecessary, to some readers. Why write a woman if you don't have to? What kind of person would do that? (A bad, bad person.) Which is sort of like what happens in real life, to girls and women everywhere. Except we're allowed to do it when discussing fiction, because those girls aren't real, and nobody's feelings get hurt, and we have to be allowed to hate them somewhere, in some abstract way, right? Except fem-hate is not abstract. It affects a lot of people in very real ways, from the amount of opportunities an actress is afforded, if she's willing to do a nude scene, and the backlash she deals with after the fact, to the amount of books sold by a YA author who dares use a female protagonist without having a boy in there for potential readers to 'identify' with, to the recent climb in the popularity of unisex baby names, as parents decide they want people to not judge their children by the name provided on a job or loan application. I'm not going to tell you what fandoms I hail from myself, (that would be overshare) but if I read one more RPF disclaimer that uses a real-life gf as an antagonist, (I really really like her, honest. *eyeroll*) or one more slash reader who apologizes for writing a heterosexual scene, I am going to go absolutely bats.

And yes, I did actually read that cute little disclaimer on the bottom, where it promises that sometimes, some things, you can get away with, maybe. I also noticed they were a lot less thorough on when, how, or why, it was okay to 'break the rules' than on when it wasn't. Or the clear tone of, "Okay, yeah, this happens, but you're probably a novice because talented people wouldn't write fan fiction at all, would they? And talented people wouldn't put their original fiction on the Internet, because they would be able to get paid for what they do, wouldn't they? So you should stick to the rules, you n00b." (-Side note, there's a post coming about why talented people might write fanfic, blogs, and online fiction, rather than risk the publishing process.)

Face it. Your fandom is not girl- or woman-friendly. My fandom is not girl- or woman-friendly. It is assumed that fandom is composed mainly of heterosexual young girls and young women, therefore, sexism goes unchecked. But, from the assumption that we're all teenage girls (and the ageism and sexism that go along with that), that we are only in it for the pretty, that the writers who write, say, slash, should be taken more seriously, given more cred, than the ones who write about icky girls, to the prevalence, even among slash writers, to lean towards relationship roles and portrayals that are staunchly heteronormative and incredibly sexist (genderswap* fics where a male character magically grows long hair over night, as if that is just as clear a marker of femininity as breasts and a vagina**, slash pairings where it's practically canon that one character takes on the 'feminine' roles and traits and the other the more 'masculine' with annoying consistency.) ...You know the fem-hate is there, and you know, in some small part, you subscribe to it. Even I'm guilty of rolling my eyes and thinking 'teenage girl' if something's spelled poorly, or if it's poorly written. Despite the fact that, as I have mentioned, at twenty-five, and with quite a few years of practice, I can't spell. Even I'm shocked to find a straight boy who writes fan fiction, despite the fact that I stumbled upon some of my nearest and dearest, both male and female, and every sexuality in the spectrum, in that way. I'm learning, and improving. I'm trying.

Back to Twilight, then. Twilight is very obviously very poorly written. I won't go as far as to say it has no plot, because if Meyer had stuck to one novel, and done that whole star-crossed lovers thing, and let it go, probably, I would be complaining much less than I am. I do know even the first novel was problematic. I'll get to that. I know Twilight reads like a Harlequin, but I'm not going to complain about that again, because you know what? A hell of a lot of Harlequin women have PhDs. That means they are not the stereotype of bored housewife you may see them as, nor are they necessarily bad writers. And there's nothing wrong with healthy escapism. That is not my kind of escapism, but really? Who am I to judge? I'm asexual, can you imagine what would happen if I tried to impose the goals I set for myself on other people? That would be utterly ridiculous.

What happened was Meyer didn't have enough plot for the characters and world she created. It happens to me, usually at about 4 in the morning, and 70 pages in I'll realize I like the characters way more than I like writing about them. Difference is, and I don't like to toot my own horn, but I usually realize that is the point at which we put the work down. (Usually. Not always. Oh, Jack.) Meyer didn't. In fact, she kept going for four whole books! It must be said, truthfully, she turns a pretty phrase. People will be using those books to create IM handles, MSN names, and Cafe Press products for at least the next five years. But her concept of plot progression and character growth is virtually nonexistent. Her characters are wooden and they are predictable and they are cliche, and they don't even follow the flimsy rules that she herself has created for the purpose of her own story. I can acknowledge the boldness in my previous statement, that is, Mary Sue is a myth. Because there are badly written female characters, yes. But a Mary Sue is a badly written female character that does not fit into the world she inhabits, and is, therefore, not necessary. Since all of Meyers characters are ridiculous and pathetic, it's really no surprise Bella is similarly two-dimensional. And yes, she is more talented and meant to be more interesting than all the others, and clearly, we are expected to keel over this girl and worship her the same way her author does. So in that sense, I suppose, it counts as Mary Sueism. But ask yourself, honestly, if the story would be that much improved if Bella was slightly more realistic? More than likely, we would look at Bella, amongst all these other flimsy characters, and still yell Mary-Sue, because if Bella was more realistic, she would stand out amongst all of the characters that aren't realistic! I'm not saying Bella Swan is not a problem. Bad writing is still bad writing. I am saying that Bella is not the problem. And the fact that so many people find it easier to shortcut their hatred of Twilight into their hatred of its female protagonist, well, that is the problem. It comes from years of burying female protagonists into this or that type or this or that role, because people will believe those types, those roles. It comes from young writers learning from an early age that girls don't like reading about girls, because all girls are naturally jealous and possessive, and boys need to read about boys, or they'll come out backwards. It comes from sexism. And it lends to the idea that if Bella were just a different kind of girl, or, hey, not a girl at all, the story would be that much better. And it just wouldn't. (Okay, well, honestly, a high school love story featuring gay vampires would be pretty awesome, but I really don't think Meyer could pull that off either, so you understand my point.)

Meyer clearly has issues with man/woman dynamics that I'm not even going to speculate on. I don't date, I have no interest in sex, so I don't know exactly what normal and healthy is. I just know that's not it. I was confused when someone first brought to my attention the inherent sexism within the book, because like I said, Bella cooking for her father because he's an irresponsible mopey asshole doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. Then I read book two. Wherein Bella tries to kill herself because her boyfriend breaks up with her, falls in with the ultimate Nice Guy, and becomes an irresponsible adrenaline junkie who alienates her friends because none of them are worth anything to her. Then she goes off and becomes a vampire, because her mother who she loves and has protected her whole life, now has a man to do that. There's a scene in the fourth book, where Bella marvels, "Maybe I just have no imagination. I couldn't imagine I would enjoy marriage, until I actually was married. I couldn't imagine I would want a child, until I was pregnant." At that point, I literally had to put the book down for several minutes and calm down, because the message was clearly that women need to be forced into a life of domesticated bliss, but once they're there, their women-hormones take over, and everything just turns out peachy, and you know what? If I hear about how I just need to find the right guy one more fucking time, I am just going to start screaming and not stop. That's at least three rage posts right there. And you're probably going to get stuck reading them, at some point.

There's an idea that teenagers are naturally stupid. Science supports this idea, by telling us that it is our ability to be rational that develops last, when puberty sets in. Socialization teaches us that women are helpless, women need guidance, that women want to be helpers, and nurturers, that they have no desire to express any kind of selfishness, up to and including leading our own lives, being responsible for our own sense of self rather than having someone decide what we should be and do, and finding peace and success on our own. Socialization is wrong, and scientific study is imperfect, and it doesn't matter. These two things band together to form the idea that teenage girls are stupid and simple, and will follow every whim that they get in their flighty little imperfect girl-heads. And because girls are emotional, a girl's feelings should be held in even less account than an adult woman's, because science says that teenagers can't be rational, and of course, feelings is a girl thing, ergo, a girl's feelings are irrational, and not worth anything, and not real, and she must be trained to understand the difference between herself and real people, and live within those boundaries, and be an adorable little stupid, until such time where she is required to be an adult, and thus, give all her time and attention to everyone besides herself. If she dares to be involved in her life for her own sake, she is selfish, and immature. So the self-indulgence of writing in a way that validates her existence, experience, and feelings, is obviously a mark of stupidity and immaturity. She must be mocked, until she grows up, and agrees to spend her life making others happy.

Some of you will remind me at this point, that a lot of things written for or by teenage girls are ridiculous. And there are a lot of ridiculous teenage girls. And you're right. But there is a machine at work here. I talked, before, about how part of ablism is convincing us to subscribe to the ideas that we are here to educate others about disability, inspire others to greatness or kindness, or teach others to value themselves more, by reminding them they are not yet as bad as they can be (because we are). They do this by making those roles the only ones we are ever visible in. If one of us should happen to break out of those roles, the people running the machine can use that to pat themselves on the back, to remind us, you, and themselves, that the machine is working. And we are the proof. So there are scores of people with disabilities who believe that they are not meant for anything special, they really do want to be treated like everyone else (because really, who'd want to be them, if they could be anyone else?), and that if someone is an ablist asshole, it really is because they don't know any better, and we really don't have anything better to do than teach. The same principle is at work here. Teenage girls are taught what they're supposed to have, what they're supposed to expect, what they're supposed to want, and how ridiculously important stupid vapid things are supposed to be. How they're not supposed to focus on 'real' things, and they're supposed to accept and understand that the things they do like, want, or find value in, are then, stupid and unimportant, by virtue of their nature. And that's okay! They can't help it! Science says we're not meant to be smart or important.

So, we learn to not trust how we feel about things, we learn to be easily manipulated and easily fooled, and learn how easily not being manipulated and fooled can pick you off from the herd and make you *gulp* Unlikeable. Likeable is what people want, but most especially a girl, who, in order to continually to be comfortable in her own skin, would have to find people to take responsibility for her, since it is Bad to do that for herself. When we see the same goddamn thing over and over, eventually, at some point, some reach the mistaken conclusion, "yeah, okay, it can't suck that bad, if it's everywhere." Because it is the only real option we have. Then stuff like this becomes popular, as it is meant to, and people go, "God, if teenage girls weren't so stupid we wouldn't have to put up with this!" Teenage girls are not stupid. Teenage girls are people who are treated a certain way based on their age, sex, and importance in society. Same as everybody else, but different, simply because, as a society, we decide that teenagers, particularly teenage girls have no real value, and their hierarchy is separate from the real world, since they only matter amongst each other. We pass that knowledge on to them, and they use it, even within their own safe space. Thus, we get things like Mary Sue, created to keep girls and women in a certain space and mind. We get jealousy, hatred and distrust of all things girl and woman. Of all things that suggest a power, strength, and originality, we are not supposed to have. That will not get us where we apparently want to be.

There are a lot of things wrong with Twilight. It glorifies a coercive relationship that is very clearly not between equals by a long shot. It underlines the idea that the formation of a young woman's identity lies not with her independence, or her decisions about her future, and how she copes with those responsibilities, but with, more specifically, her choices about boys and men, who she chooses to be with, and why, and how she handles herself while in a relationship, out of a relationship, or even looking for a relationship. The idea that she might not be looking for a relationship is seldom acknowledged, except as a character flaw or reaction to male influence. Incidentally, this happens both in fiction, and in real life. (Trust me, I know.)

One of the characters I actually liked in the series was Leah Clearwater, the lone she-wolf in Jacob's pack. She talks about her confusion as to why she is the only woman in the pack, her pain at being spurned by the man she loves, and having to acknowledge that he loves this other woman more than her, while forced to remain in her family unit, a constant witness to the betrayal, and constantly ostracized simply because she is female, and shouldn't be there. She talks openly about fear of infertility and being unlovable, but still has the strength to stand up to the (literal) alpha males in her life. I have to wonder if Meyer was trying to make some point about sexuality and certain kinds of girls, and their ability and right to attract mates, and to expect male affection. I don't like thinking it, but with everything else wrong with the series, it wouldn't surprise me.

The books describe sex as something where it's forgiven and expected that it will hurt, something that can be dangerous to your health and life, and something in which the rights to decisions should be given to the man. It describes marriage and babies as a forgone conclusion, and parents and friends as necessary only in the absence of your real connection, that is, with a man. It is repulsively racist towards people of First Nation descent, and casually talks about grooming young children for marriage, and the fact that all women are helpless in the face of any and all male affection. It makes stalking look romantic, cool detachment look heroic, and non-consensual acts, such as Jacob kissing Bella when she clearly doesn't want him to and has no real way to fight him off, look forgivable. The fact that this is being fed, with mass success, to a group of people trained to believe it's better to want what people tell you to want, is, yes, frightening. The fact that it is badly written, is, I can admit, insulting.

I probably forgot a whole lot of things that are wrong with the series, but the one thing I do know is this: Bella Swan is a badly written character in a series of badly written novels. That Meyer wrote a character that so embodies her own sexist ideology is certainly revolting, but hardly surprising. My distaste has more to do with the ideology than with who or what Meyer modeled her after. That Bella is used as a short-hand for everything that is wrong with those books, is, in itself, sexist. That we hate her because we can, because it makes sense that we would, is sexist. That we hate her because she appeals to teenage girls is sexist. That we hate her because we know she is modeled after Meyer is also sexist. With all the problems, that Bella is a Mary Sue is the most easily understood complaint, is simply a product of how natural, understandable, and forgivable, hatred, distrust, and disbelief of women and girls in the world of fiction really is. Which translates, with horrible ease, to how naturally understandable and forgivable it is to hate, distrust, and disbelieve women and girls outside of fiction, even, and sometimes especially, among other girls and women. It is a mark of sexism, however you excuse it.

And if you still don't understand that, I urge you to reexamine your prejudices, because you are, in all likelihood, sexist. I don't want to hear how Bella Swan is proof that you have the reasons and the right to hate female characters because they are probably 'Mary Sue'. That both the badly written character and the questionably talented author are female is not the problem. Meyer, as a woman, has every damn right to write a girl character, to the best of her ability, if she chooses to do so. Yes, even if her abilities are on the 'yikes' side of questionable. Writing a woman or girl because you are a woman or girl is not some kind of weakness. It does not, on its own, denote a lack of originality. We have the right to find value in our own experiences. Even if we're absolutely useless at expressing them in the medium we'd like, or those experiences are really very harmful, and lead to some serious backward thinking. Like you, Twilight haters, I don't feel Meyer's creation deserves the attention it gets. I wish young girls and young women were not exposed to this backward thinking. I believe it is dangerous and harmful. But unlike you, I will not be part of it. You cannot fight sexism with sexism. Bad writing, and the use of cliche, is not a girl thing.

*Genderswap fics, if we are to be accurate, should really be labeled sex-swap fics, as my dear love so kindly pointed out to me. Sex and gender are not the same thing.
**There are other female body parts, btw. Just a note. There are many parts to the vulva.

AN: I don't mean to disappear anyone who isn't a young girl or woman in fandom. I just wanted to address the fact that being a girl or a young woman is not deserving of the scorn it tends to generate. If anyone has another perspective on the sexism in zir fandom, I would love to hear it.

AN2: To Riley and Claire: I went there. Are we happy now?

In Which I Try Not To Make A Point

2010-04-29T19:55:00.000-07:00

So, a few days ago, I got into a discussion with a good friend and avid reader of mine *waves* wherein we discussed her desire for a boyfriend, and where this came from, and how she might approach this from a healthy perspective. This happens a lot. People come to me for romantic advice, sometimes because they just want to be able to disregard everything I say if they don't like it, but also because a lot of the time, in order to recognize how backwards your own behavior is, you really need to find someone who you literally cannot justify it to. And I'm very good at making o.O? faces when the subject of wanting a boyfriend comes up.

For background info, I identify as an asexual aromantic, which are two imperfect terms that imperfectly define what was, for many years, utterly indefinable. They are, essentially, the lesser of two evils (the more evil is me having to explain that in my case, no means never, and no, I don't have a reason for that, beyond it's what I want. Which you would think would be absolutely fine, but has netted me a few thousand o.O? faces over time, and a lot of really disgusting, invasive questions that people actually feel the right to expect answers to.) Of the two of them, asexual is most apt, as I do not now, nor have I ever, to my knowledge, had any real desire for sex. I don't actually believe sexuality is finite, but nor do I believe, at this age and stage, that my own feelings will change. So there's always that thought in the back of my head, "yes this could change, but it probably won't." Really, it's easier keep the label that says it won't because, well, people don't take it well, to be honest, and I don't need everybody hanging on so tightly to that 'maybe.' Aromantic is an unfair term, I think. I am not aromantic. I am a total romantic sap, I just don't want that for myself. I build strong friendships, without which I would be a sour and dried up corn husk doll, and my dear love and I share a wonderful connection without which my world would be, let's say, less than what it is now. But I do not fall in romantic love, or desire whatever that next level is. My feelings have always been that being in love is when you are attracted to your best friend in the world. I'm sure in many ways, I have it wrong, and invite more romantic asexuals than I to explain this, because, as I recently uncovered, I really don't get it. So my friend and I discussed, and since neither of us could pinpoint what she wanted a boyfriend for, exactly, I advised her to think more about the kind of boy she wanted, rather than where she might find one available to her. So then I got all thinky, and went to another friend, who also wanted a boyfriend.

The conversation from there played out a bit like when my six-year-old nephew tried to explain to me what his Bakugan toys were for. He put the little toys on the cards, and when they opened, he announced we were battling. At which point, I, trying to indulge him, said, "Okay, what do I do?"
"Do? You do just like that. They battle now."
"Okay." I move to pick it up.
"No! Don't move it! They have to battle."
"Okay, so what do we do?"
"Don't do anything."
"Okay? So what are they for?"
"This is what they're for."
"Okay. But what do they do?"
"Well, they're for battling."
"Okay. But what are we doing with them?"
At which point he threw up his hands and announced, "You don't do anything with them! They just do that!" And me saying,
"I don't think I'm very good at this."
"No. You don't know how to play this, do you?" Out of the mouths of babes.

This, was kind of like that. I kept saying over and over, "What is a boyfriend for?" And my friend would list several things that a hypothetical boyfriend does, or that she believes he would do. And I would ask how it was different, when hypothetical boy does it, versus when other friends or family do. And she would be unable to explain. And there would be much head-scratching on my end. Occasionally, I would attempt to reconcile what I was hearing with what was happening in my head. I would ask what a boyfriend did differently, and she would say, "It feels different, when a boyfriend does it." and I would say, "Because you're attracted to him?" and she would say, "Not just that." And then, more head-scratching. Which culminated in the twenty-something's version of my six-year-old nephew, where she finally suggested that perhaps it was harsh of me to be all, "Pfft who needs it?" when some people did feel they needed it. At which point I began the same explanations I have given since puberty, when people started looking at me funny every time I dared say no:

I'm not all, 'pfft, who needs it?' Really. I am a very romantic person. I'm just not sure what it's for. If you have feelings for someone and you act on them, that's awesome. If there's only potentials, right and left, or not enough potentials, and you keep waiting for the potentials to show up, that's where I get confused. And part of me wants to take the easy road and just say it's socialization, that we're just led to believe that there are certain things we're supposed to have, and that's one of them. But that is just so narrow-minded and unfair, and people keep insisting there's more to it than that. So, if you're an asexual who is not currently in a relationship, but wants to be in one, could you please explain how this works? Because I keep coming up empty.

I do not want to alienate my friends, and I also don't want to be throwing psychobabble at them all the time. I know that I'm the one who's different, and I'm not asking people to prove how they feel, but I feel that I am missing something important from the equation here, and I would hate to see it giving me some prejudices of my own. I have mentioned my dislike for both of Hannah's mothers. Well... Not so much dislike. Marissa, Hannah's biomom, gets pregnant as a teenager. She is irresponsible and silly as both a teenage almost-parent, and as an adult in an established relationship with a child she is actually raising. Because that doesn't change much, I don't feel guilty about the whole teenage mom = irresponsible thing, because I think it's pretty clear that the character herself is flawed in that way, not so much her circumstances. But then, after the whole Amanda Palmer hipster racism thing, I certainly don't want to be a hypocrite.

Jane, Hannah's mom, is, by contrast, a smart and well-educated woman, moderately successful and comfortable in her own skin, but she is deeply damaged by grief, and pressured by her well-meaning friends to move on with her life, ie, find someone else, after the death of her husband. Coupling that with her overprotectiveness around Hannah, who is not quite the child she appears, and does not need her mother as much as Jane wishes she was needed, and Jane is also a very flawed character. I know these flaws are necessary, that they fit with the story, but I'm not sure Jane is weak or damaged enough to have a serious relationship with the kind of man she winds up with. And therein lies the guilt. Because, while I am not stupid enough, nor enough of a victim-blaming asshole, to believe that is only the weak and vulnerable (read: desperate) women who fall for that kind of man, I know what the rest of the world expects to see. And I need to make this fit, and I need it to work in a story, and I need it to make sense to other people. And that really sucks. Because everybody believes that women just need men, or just desperately want men, and therefore, that should be answer enough. And I don't believe that, and I'm not sure how to write like I do, and still be honest.

I can admit I'm not always a good feminist. I listen to music and watch movies that many would consider problematic. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt more often than they deserve it. I let things go because I know there are people with more of a stake in it than I, who are fighting, and quite frankly, sometimes, I've got enough to fight for, and I only have so many spoons to hand out on any given day. (Yes, I know, you'd never know it from the rage posts, would you?) Though I try to use correct language whenever I can, and accept criticism when it is warranted and constructive, I am sometimes ridiculously clueless about what is wrong about what and why. I don't want to be saying, "Teenage mothers are silly and irresponsible." My mother, and several other members of my family, were or are teenage parents. Not all of them, but many of them have done wonderful jobs, and were or are much better at being mothers than they were at being teenagers. But I am not going to take it for granted that people might make that leap, and it might be me showing up in somebody's rage post as a hypocrite, someday. (Oh, Goddess, if I ever become that important to somebody, I promise I will stay as receptive to criticism as my fragile self-esteem allows.) I don't want to say, "If a woman wasn't so desperate to be in a relationship, she would have more sense, and not pick that guy." Because that is both nonsensical, and totally not my area. Also not at all what I want to say. But I can't be sure that it won't be taken that way. So I get nervous and paralyzed, and don't write, and hate myself. And then I choose between hating myself for not writing, or hating myself for writing something that is absolute crap. Or, hating myself because I'm writing something I have absolutely no right to be writing. Far be it from me to add to the slew of 'evidence' of things that are not actually true. But. I've never claimed to be a political person. This is a recent discovery, and I make fumbling attempts to learn, and try to do what is right. Whereas, I am, as I mentioned, first and foremost, a teller of stories. If the story says we go left, then we go left.

*fretfretfret* <--- are you tired of me yet?

So, recently, I've been reading this book. I won't give you the name or author just yet, I haven't finished it and don't know if it's one I want people to read. It's one of those 'devil's spawn' books, you know the kind I mean, where there's this otherwise cherubic and adorable child, who happens to be 'evil' and the 'evil' is explained away by some kind of demon parentage. It's an older book, I think 70s or 80s, around the time that sort of thing was popular and still really scary. And while I'm reading it just for fun, I can't help but notice some things. There's a lot of religion, for one thing, which, duh, is kind of expected. But there's also a lot of cliche. The mother of this demon child is a single, younger women, who became pregnant 'young' (the book assumes we know what 'young' is) and then married an older man who is overcome with both lust, and the desire to take care of her. (These things apparently go hand in hand) And I'm really hoping he is murdered in some grisly way, but I'm pretty sure it's the mother who's going to get it. And I'm really annoyed that I know that.

The stuff I think and feel and believe worms its way in my writing. That's a huge part of the reason I have this blog. Before, I used to put it in notebooks, kind of siphon off the stuff that was just brain fodder from the stuff that was actually part of the story. Sometimes, the fodder works its way in the story. In the first installment of Hannah, I mention a story I once read in a Bruce Coville anthology, something to do with dolphins, and their immense brain power, and the effects it might have on a person, or lesser being. So in the second book, I continued on with dolphins. The third book never came to fruition, aside from a few lists and notes, my favorite of which reads simply, what to do with the damn dolphins? My more deeply held beliefs are also prominent. Hannah's mother Jane is a choice mom, which is something I hope to be myself someday. The entire concept of the character herself lies in the fact that children and their experiences and intuition is often overlooked and discounted, a feeling that, as a person with a disability, as well as an asexual, both things which many people think denote a lack of maturation, has followed me from childhood, through adolescence, to adulthood. You would think this translates to me telling you that maybe, deep down I do believe in those cliches, but I sort of feel like the opposite is true. Like Hannah's appearance, I think I sort of just assumed that if I wrote it that way, if I wrote a strong woman with one case of bad judgment, managed to be fooled by someone charming and interested in her who also happened to be an abusive asshole, people would believe it. And now, that shrewd editor is kicking in again, and it's just not enough.

In the Mary Sue post, I mentioned that a good writer can make even the most unbelievable characters make sense. So in theory, I can make this work. In theory, there was some reason my fourteen-year-old self chose that as a catalyst, and my eighteen year old self didn't see enough wrong with it to go a different way. In theory, it was more than just laziness and working with a cliche I could not have even known existed then. (I was just as O.o? about relationships as a teenager, only with a lot less experience, and therefore unable distinguish what my hormonal and insecure friends thought was normal, and what was actually me genuinely missing something other people had.) In theory, I should be able to pin this down, and spread it out like a butterfly on a cork board, so that it looks like exactly what it is, one person, in one circumstance, that, in context, makes perfect sense. Of course, said theory also depends on me being a good writer. So. We've come back to that. The truth is, like I said, the stuff we think and believe will worm its way in there, and if I'm a good writer, the stuff I think and believe will too, and people will know better. I'll maybe get some people calling me on it, but I will at least be able to explain how it is what it is.

I still really hate how tempting it is to take the easy road.

x fingers for me

Cross-Section of Self-Esteem

2010-04-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

Observe:

This is a small sample of what goes on in my head, while writing, say, the average Hannah pages. In no particular order:

1. Oh, I hope I can get more writing done today than yesterday.
2. How do I spell that again?
3. Shoot. I've mentioned this person before. What was his name again? *roots around to find it*
4. Four hours writing? pfft. Easy. I'll do five hours tomorrow *A.N: this doesn't work. don't do it!*
5. Wow. That was actually really good. Celebratory tea break!

This is a small sample of what goes on in my head, while editing, say, the last screenplay I completed.

1. What? (sometimes I throw scenes in just to hit the page requirement. Sometimes I can't decipher my own shorthand. Sometimes I don't realize how much time I have spent on useless exposition, or how little exposition I've actually written.)
2. Y'know, for a writer, I am actually crap with words.
3. Oh my God. I am capable of so much better than this!
4. THERE IS A PLOTHOLE YOU COULD DRIVE A TRUCK THROUGH 70 PAGES IN WTF WAS I THINKING?
5. ...This is still not as bad as that thing in '07. We have hope.

This, dear readers, is a small sample of what goes on before I hit the "publish post" button on this blog.

1. I'm stupid.
2. Nobody cares what I think.
3. Other people are so much better at this than I am. (In my defense, this is actually true. True, but irrelevant.)
4. I can't even spell. (Very true. Seriously. Thank Goddess I have such lovely people in my life, who can actually do this for me.)
5. It's not that I don't deserve to have an opinion. It's that it's a stupid one, and people shouldn't be forced to listen to it.

You see the problem, yes? There is a slight disconnect between what is going on in my brain, and what I think is going on in my brain. Sadly, I do not know which is accurate. It terrifies me to think I could write something really good, and hate it, just because I wrote it. Because Due Date is coming up fast, and, without a traditional publisher, editor, or marketing team, my success depends on how good I think I am, because it's up to me to convince other people. And I get really nervous when I think about that, because I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it.

Logically, I know that I have readers. People read this blog and like it, and link it in places I never expected them to. I thank you for that, by the way. I also know that self-loathing is the cornerstone to any artistic pursuit, and that part of the reason this blog is so nerve-wracking is because it is true. It isn't things wrapped up in story form that are meant to entertain, it's who I am and what I think. Seriously, you should see the anxiety-ridden nightmares after each rage post. As I discussed in my earlier posts, oftentimes, even among friends and family, who, regardless of my many and varied issues with them, are not such terrible people, generally speaking, I am seen as far too Other to have a valid opinion on anything. I am too different for my thoughts and feelings on any particular thing to have any bearing on anyone else's life. I know that is not true, but subconsciously I seem to have accepted this as truth. It does make writing difficult, as we are supposed to 'write what we know' and I certainly can't make the worlds I invite you into any more 'normal' than the one I inhabit. Perhaps this is my failing as a writer.

It has taken me years to get to this point, but honestly? I love editing and rewriting. I do. I love it because that is the point where I look at what I've done and I go, "oh hell, this sucks." And then I fix it, until it stops sucking. My dear love asked me recently, as I was whining and complaining about first drafts, as I am wont to do, (as we have clearly seen) how did I know when it was worth saving? Why continue on if it's going to be this hard? It's not something I can explain. I get through the first draft, and then I know. In the end, the finished products are mine, but the stories come from in the ether, and they are gifts. When I'm finished the first draft, I can see whether I'm going to be able to use the gift I've been given the way it's intended to be used. That's the best way I know to explain it. Hannah has been through enough incarnations, and each incarnation improves, and I know the story is there. The story is not the problem, it's my ability to write it that waxes and wanes. So I don't know, until that first draft is done, and I can see what sort of thing I'm working with. There've been scripts and novels where I get through three or so drafts and go, "I have no idea what I'm saying." And I have to put it down. Sometimes twenty or thirty, sometimes a hundred to a hundred and fifty pages in, I have to go, "Whatever this is, I'm not up for it." That sucks. Anyone who's been through that, you know. Anyone who hasn't, go pat yourself on the back for your brilliance. I am in awe of you, fortunate one.

There's a quote in one of the most amazing books on writing in my possession, Elizabeth Ayers' Writing The Wave. I'm serious, pick it up, wherever you can, and do everything this woman tells you to do. It's that good. Anyway, at one point, she quotes Michaelangelo, who said, when someone asked him if carving the statue David was hard, that it wasn't. He just carved everywhere the statue wasn't. Ayers says, as writers, we have the harder job. First, we make the marble. Then we carve it. So I always need to see what manner of marble I am working with. And Hannah has already been made in so many versions and shaped so carefully over time, and I understand it, and I know that it's worth something, so I keep going. And I can't wait til I can look at this latest incarnation and go, "That goes out, that stays in." It's exciting. Like having a baby when you get those charts like they have at a hospital, and you go, "and now its eyelids are forming, and now you can see its fingers and toes..."

A couple summers ago, I was putting the finishing touches on a script that I had been tinkering with for omgtwoyears. For Hannah, that's young, but for a screenplay, it was astronomical. And my dear love was feeling anxious and uncertain, because he had the arduous task of telling me when it sucks. It could have destroyed our relationship (this job has, in fact, destroyed relationships in the past), but after much hand-wringing, he was suitably honest, and told me where I was messing up, where I was not being enough, where I was being less than I was capable of being. And thus, he commenced in fretting, and reminding me that he actually had no idea how I do what I do, and I was obviously not required to listen to him. And I thanked him profusely, and then I got better. It's very rare to find a draft-reader who can help me to get better, as most are intent on reassuring me I don't suck. Which, come to think of it, is kind of like how, when I present my asexual, non-relationship-seeking self, people hurry to inform me, and others around me, that I absolutely could get a boyfriend, if I wanted one. In case I didn't already know that. Whatever, it's rude and unhelpful, and I have made mistakes and people have not been right for the job, but I'm fortunate now, and worry about that less. Fortunate, and doomed to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

I keep going because I can't not do it, but not because I have any particular faith in myself that it will pan out. I'm a stubborn fool. This is just how it is, just what I do, and I don't know if I can make that worth somebody else's while or not. So I really want to take a second to, again, thank any readers I happen to have, for listening, for wanting to listen, for helping me to improve, and for knowing what I talk about, when I need to be introspective and talk about The Artist's Journey for a second. I know I don't suck as much as I think I do, sometimes, but the only reason I know when I'm actually good is when somebody else says so. So, thanks. And while I have you, um.

Is there a point at which the intense self-loathing goes away? Or is this just one of those, "square your shoulders, learn to deal with it" kinda things? Because this is really getting old.

Those are These, and These are... Me.

2010-04-10T16:37:00.000-07:00

Rage Disclaimer: Come on, you know the drill. I rage, I swear.
Disclaimer 2: Post contains some seriously bad language, but I used it in context. I apologize to anyone who might be offended.

I am about to rage. And this time, I don't want to rage. Because I am about to rage about people I love. And there are people I love who read this blog and will go all, "omg, is she about to rage at me?" And yes. Yes, I probably am, and you're just going to have to learn to suck it up and deal with it.

It's a shocker, so I want to give you a minute to wrap your head around it, but um. I am a person with a disability. I know, I know. I don't sit in a wheelchair, I don't drool all over myself, when I talk you can usually understand the stuff I say, and when you talk, you very often make sense to me. I do not, in any way, resemble any of the people with disabilities that you see on TV, in the news, or in really inspiring movies where the end result is we just want to be treated like everybody else. I don't, actually, want to be treated like everybody else, because there are a lot of ways in which I am Other. I don't look 'other' in any way, I can almost pass for normal. So what is so wrong with me, and why do I think so terribly about myself? Well, frankly, it's none of your damn business what is wrong with me, and secondly, as a side note to the amazing news about my disability, having a disability is not a bad thing. It's not a good thing. It's not any kind of thing, it's just a thing that happens sometimes. And it's a thing that happened to me. So please forgive if I do not see it as a compliment when you refuse to see me as the whole person that I am, a whole person who is funny and smart and talented and spiritual and nice, and also, in fact, brain damaged.

It's bad enough when strangers don't seem to get this, or when new people don't seem to get this. There are people in my life, that I work with, that I spend time with on a peripheral basis only, who I have to take this crap from. I get it. I truly understand that it's difficult, for people who see me on the day-to-day and don't know me well, to either see the disability or not see it. Enabled* doesn't have a whole lot of gray area; your body works or it doesn't. Your brain works right, or it doesn't. That means enabled people aren't used to having to see gray areas, the same way heterosexual only goes one way, and some heteros have a real hard time with the *cough* rainbow of LGTBAQI experiences. It sucks, and it should not be my problem, but it is, and I sometimes have to suck it up and deal because, hey, part of being encumbered with a disability is you don't always have the energy to fight for all the stuff that is worth fighting for.

But these are not strangers. These are enabled people, or sometimes, shockingly, other disabled people, who know me, and know me well enough that, if they cared enough to pay attention, could understand, should, after 25 years, 10 years, etc, know what it is they're doing wrong. But they don't. I have a great many theories on why they don't, which I will expound upon in a moment, but right now, I have a couple stories to tell, if you'll just bear with me.

Story #1
So, last weekend was Easter. Holidays with the fam are usually absolutely out of control. Sometimes, in the good ways. Sometimes, in the bad. To give you an idea, I have three biological siblings. We range in age from 29 to 21. My sister C has four beautiful children, and a boyfriend. The oldest of these is Perfect Nephew #1, who is 6. The rest are babies, 3, 2 and 6 months. I also have 4 gorgeous foster siblings. The oldest is 16. The youngest is 6. My mother has a huge german shepard, and I have 2 small dogs. And on holidays, particularly holidays when I work and then have to be driven home for holiday dinner with the fam, we all hang out at my parents' huge property. Sometimes this works, but often, there are arguments. We were raised with strong opinions, and mine tend to run the opposite direction of everyone else's.

So I had brought my dogs over to the house, and, as promised, I kept them outside. Now, Tootles gets a bit nervous around other dogs, so he was peeing all over everything in the yard, including a crumpled up kiddy chair. I laughed, which netted me a 20 minute lecture from older sister (who is, by the way, 3 years older than me) about how I do not show any respect to anyone, and I am selfish and should learn to take better care of my animals. (These are highlights.) This was closely followed by my brothers, who, once they were able to ascertain who was winning the argument, quickly leaped to my sister's aide in besmerching my general character. Which was then immediately followed by my overhearing the word retarded in my brother's conversation.

I have asked them, time and time again, to refrain from using that word, for reasons which would be pretty damn clear to anyone who might read this blog, but outside of The Internets, for some reason, this is less clear. Their attitude is if they're talking about inanimate objects, abstract concepts, hypothetical people, or a group of people, or, generally people who are not me, they are allowed to use that word, and I am not allowed to complain. This is not anything that makes any kind of Earth Logic, so, this time, because I had been up at six in the morning to work, because I don't like people making fun of my dogs, because I am tired of being made to feel like an inconvenience, when compared to my sister, who has four children and therefore, needs attention, or my brother, who still lives at home, and therefore deserves extra attention, and my other brother, who is never around, and therefore never gets attention, because of all those things, I lost it.

"Okay," I said, "let's talk about respect. Let's talk about how I ask you time and time again not to use that word, let's talk about how it feels when, not only do you shamelessly use that word, but you shamelessly use that word in front of me, ten minutes after butting in on some ridiculous lecture about 'respect' as if you can fucking talk about any kind of respect for any human being besides yourself and someone you want something from. Not one of you show me five minutes of respect at any given time." Now, here's where it gets nasty. Because here is where the world stops making sense, and I start being forced to see my big, well-meaning family for the selfish abilist pigs that they are. Because as usual, as I am angry with my brother, my sister feels the need to interject. I kid you not, this is the actual conversation that follows. I wrote it down for posterity.

"Do you, like, see yourself as retarded or something? Because I don't see how that can be so disrespectful to you."

"There are, actually, a lot of people who do see me that way."

"Why?"

"I have brain damage, you moron." (edit: this is apparently ablist language. Live and learn. I will refrain from using it in future.)

"Okay, but that's not what it means."

At this point, a side note, interestingly, from the brother who made the original offense. You see how the family dynamics work, yes? Whoever is winning gets the backup (there's some patriarchal backstory to that, which I am not getting into here.) "Uh, yeah, it kind of does mean that," brother says, but does not apologize for his earlier offense. C becomes flustered.

"Okay, but we don't see you that way."

"Except for all the times you call me your 'stupid retarded sister.'"

"Okay, but I mean that as an insult, not like, as a real thing."

Okay, please let me take the opportunity to explain to the ignorant out there scratching their heads going, "y'know, she has a point." No. She does not. I would almost believe my sister's ignorance, that she truly is only saying it as an insult except A) my brain is not an insult, thanks very fucking much and B) the only time my sister refers to me as her 'stupid retarded sister' is when I am getting something she is not, or does not feel I deserve. And usually, the cause of my not deserving something is, in fact, my disability.

As in, "How do you think I feel that my stupid retarded sister gets to go to Europe, while I don't get to do anything, and never did anything with my life?"

"How do you think I feel when my stupid retarded sister goes off to college, and I'm like, stuck here in public housing because I have kids?"

"Seriously, don't you think it's odd that you live on disability and you get to have extra money to do things? I have four kids, and we don't have money. I don't think that's fair. You're supposed to only have the bare minimum. Don't you think you're being selfish? How do you think I feel that my stupid retarded sister has more money than me?"

Et cetera. But it is such a comfort that she doesn't actually mean I'm retarded. Just, y'know, that I am less than she is, that I was supposed to be the one lacking, and how bad must her life be, when mine is better? Which is fine, really. Totally acceptable. Sibling rivalry and all.

There is also C) that it is actually a real thing, that it is a real thing which essentially means you have brain damage which effects your mental faculties, cognitively and/or intellectually, and guess what? I actually have brain damage.

The actual conversation then degenerated into what my sister believes 'retarded' really means, which I cannot post here because it made me absolutely sick with rage and disgust, but various qualities were mentioned which many of my friends with disabilities share (drooling was mentioned, and the use of diapers). After she went over all the qualities of why and how I was 'normal' and 'not one of those' and therefore, had no right to be offended, and then talked about how it didn't even count because it wasn't directed at a person and how she's not even allowed to call her son a goofy kid, because apparently that is offensive (edit: apparently, this is a prison slang for pedophile.) and she was tired of it. Yes, folks, my sister was offended by the idea that she was expected to know or learn or even care about how to respect other people. And in her own family too! This, apparently, is what qualifies as a valid point in my family.

After this myriad of excuses, attention was successfully diverted from me and my rage, and I watched in growing horror while they discussed hypothetical Others, and how to treat them fairly while still managing to not change in the least. All the while a real, flesh and blood Other, who is a member of their own family, was sitting right in front of them telling them you're doing it WRONG! But apparently, only the hypothetical Others count, or maybe I don't count as Other, because... huh.

You know, I don't know. I can never figure it out. My family has a long and sickeningly proud history of racism, sexism, homophobia and ablism. They categorically and sometimes gleefully announce how and why they hate everyone who isn't like them, and all the ways they have a right to that, and are treated unfairly for it. And then expect me to believe they don't hate me. That I am the one person in the world that they can acknowledge is different, and make their peace with that. I can't figure it out. I really can't. I suppose this, then, is where the term "special" comes from. The kicker was after, when I replayed the conversation for my mother, who missed most of it, and she told me to stop thinking of myself that way, because I wasn't like that at all. That she was siding with my sister, because I was taking things way out of context.

Story #2
So, I have a lot of friends with disabilities. I went to the summer camps, the seminars, took part in the pen-pal programs, etc, all the 'specially designed for disabled people' programs that were offered. Sometimes, other people with disabilities give me just as many funny looks as enabled people give. It's understandable. I no longer wear braces**, or even glasses. When I speak, as I mentioned, I am pretty understandable. Usually. I stutter over words or drop words in the middle of sentences, and when I get angry, half-formed words tumble out of my mouth (which is the reason I write letters), but generally, I speak perfectly fine. I am independently mobile (no wheelchair, walker, crutches, etc) and cognitively and intellectually, I tend to excel, for the most part. I'm missing most of those things my father calls 'common sense', that is, I have zero short-term memory. I forget to eat. I lose track of time. I can spend hours carefully mapping out exactly what I'm going to do in a day, then be rendered completely useless for several more hours, unable to work out the logistics of how I will get around to X when I've just been interrupted because Y has come up. I constantly exhaust myself, and have to factor in naps, and then am unable to sleep because I only have so many hours of the day when I will be able to concentrate to get things done. I have zero skills with numbers. I instinctively know that some numbers go together, and how this works in my head, I will never be able to understand or explain to others. But there are days when someone hands me $150 for a $130.90 hotel charge, and I cannot make correct change without checking and double-checking on the calculator. These all count as cognitive and intellectual impairments which may or may not be brought on by the brain damage. But to my family and friends, they are only personality quirks, or in some cases, personality flaws. Because I can't possibly have cognitive or intellectual impairment. Because I'm smart.

Anyway, I can recognize my own ignorance when it comes to the disabled community. I am fortunate where others are not. But occasionally, you run up against assholes in the disabled community, who, much like the assholes in the enabled community, have ideas of who you are, based on what you are. Because you see, people are people! And some people are assholes! In this instance, I had a friend who liked to give The Excuse for virtually every flaw in his personality. He was constantly going through women, desperate for attention, specifically, female attention, because he was in a wheelchair, and therefore could not hope to keep attention, and had to always be on the lookout for the one who would marry him. He could not be expected to go to class, despite the fact that his parents paid for his college education, because it wasn't like he was ever going to get a job, he was in a wheelchair. More importantly, I could not understand his pain, his isolation, because though I too had suffered academically, socially, financially, and professionally because of my disability, I was not in a wheelchair.

The problem with this scenario, as anyone with a less-than-visible disability would be able to tell you, is that I am visibly disabled enough that it is clear that something is wrong, even when it's never quite clear what is wrong. And to a frighteningly large portion of the the enabled community, there are only two disabilities: The ones where you can't walk, or the ones where you are... I want to say developmentally disabled or intellectually impaired like I've been taught to say, but let's be honest. They don't think of it like that. They think retarded. And every person who's ever used that word to not mean that, they know it. Because everybody who uses that word to mean stupid understands why it's a worse word to use than stupid, like when you say 'fuck' and you really mean 'sex' but you want to emphasize something - some bad inherent in the word prompts you to say it that way.

Anyway, that's not the story. The story is that I knew this guy who was a complete asshole and blamed his disability on things that were really his own totally shitty opinion of himself, and the fault of the shitty people who gave him that opinion of himself, or, his own fault, because at this point, he was in his early twenties, and the fact that he wasn't doing anything to work through these demons of his was kind of nobody else's responsibility. And eventually, I got tired of the constant complaints about how this friend and that friend was supposed to understand, because zie was also in a wheelchair, and I had to explain, "Maybe, uh, that's not the problem?" Only to be told how I did not understand because I could stand on my own two feet. So, eventually, we parted ways, because I do not like negativity.

One day, I was talking to a mutual friend of ours, who is enabled. We were both on the job hunt. My situation was compounded by the fact that there are only a few places that will hire a college drop-out (Long, messy, poor-me story. Don't ask.) and most of them are not disability-friendly. So when I bemoaned the fact that it is incredibly difficult to find a job in this situation, she said, simply, "I told you job-hunting wasn't easy. You were always on me about finding a job, now you see how hard it is." At which point, I reminded her that I was not always on her to find a job, that I was always on her about complaining that she had no job. And I also mentioned that it might be slightly easier for her to find a job than it was for me, owing both to the fact that she lived in a bigger city, and that she could conceivably apply anywhere she chose to, and chose not to apply to lots of places she had deemed as not something she wanted to do even temporarily. I, of course, was much shorter of options, and in addition, was expected to let someone find me a job, and then be grateful they had. (Seriously, do not get me started on that whole job support program. Why the fuck do we need a committee for every decision we make?) She hears this, gives a long-suffering sigh, and says, "You know, you sound a lot like *asshole* today." My bad. I forgot. Asking to be acknowledged as the person you are whose experience is different from someone else is the exact same thing as asking for constant pity and sad-eyes. Because the person who I am, and my experiences, are just that pitiful, the two things are utterly interchangeable.

It is hurtful, when a portion of who you are is deemed acceptably and universally bad by the rest of the world. And of course, when you say it like that, everybody knows that's hurtful. When you say it like that, it sounds like racism, sexism, homophobia, everything most of us acknowledge as wrong, even if only to be PC. But then. Everybody knows disabled means bad, right? It means not able. Oh, the conundrum. How difficult for the enabled community, who are expected to navigate a world they are not part of and actually listen and rely on the experiences of others to explain this world to them.

This is why I still use the term 'handicapped' when referring to myself. It has an adorably ironic sport connotation, (Ironic for me, I mean. I know lots of athletic people with disabilities, and they pretty much all kick ass. I, however, lack any athletic ability whatsoever.) and what it means is that I need something extra to do what other people do, to the same extent and ability. Which I do, unashamedly. And sometimes that is built in, somewhere in me, and sometimes, it has to come from the outside. Sometimes, it has to come from you, enabled people, and that means doing what we ask of you, not doing what you think is best and then asking us to be grateful for it, lest, as the great and generous force behind virtually every positive moment in our lives, you decide not to grant it next time.

A note to the enabled people who know me: I am a person with a disability. And I am happy this way, truly. Would I be happier if I lived in a way that my body was a reflection of my personal self? I don't know. I was never given that option. I don't believe, if I were given one wish, I would waste it on something as foolish as this body of mine, which, admittedly I have no great love for. But I will admit if there was a pill that could make this go away, I would probably take it. The fact that there isn't, though, has no real bearing on my life. Does the fact that I am relatively mildly disabled contribute to my happiness? Well, not as such, though it certainly contributes to my good fortune and the opportunities I am afforded. I do not know how I would feel if I were in a wheelchair, or if I were non-verbal, or if my cognitive or intellectual abilities were less capable, or even appeared less capable, than what they are now, because I can acknowledge that I don't know how people would treat me, and some people treat me pretty lousy now. I do, however, know a lot of people who could fit in either or all of those categories. Some are happy, others are not. Some care about disability rights, some only care about themselves. But I am a disabled person, and I am also a happy and optimistic person, and I have friends who are enabled, and friends who are disabled, and it hurts me, when I see ablism, and it hurts me when people go out of their way to exclude me from 'those people.' Because sometimes I don't fit with you. And, shocker, I am a lot more comfortable with that idea than most of you seem to be.

I am one of Those People. I have friends who are Those People. That World, that you seem so quick to reassure me I am not part of? The world where every statement begins with a negative prefix, a non, dis, lacking-in, etc? That world of people who need things done for them, of people who take too long to do anything on their own, and get in everybody's way, and can't help but be inept, no one's blaming them, but god, do we have to humor them? I am part of that world. When you talk about Those People, you are talking about me. Or, you are talking about people very close to me. It's you that has a problem with that, not me. I am one of Those People who take this stuff personally because it affects the way people treat me, personally. Because if I don't speak, one of my friends and family will be able, in all honesty, to use those words, and carry around those stereotypes, because you have me, who appears to be okay with it. And because if I do speak, I am one of Those People, who only ever sees herself as Disabled, and who needs to get over that, because she has so much else going for her, if only she could ignore that part, and really, it's not as if it's that hard. Yes, I make this personal. This is the identity I have been given by the enabled, over and over again. This is how many people describe me to other people. I am the friend/sister/daughter who has Cerebral Palsy. I am the friend/sister/daughter who has a disability but is omg so smart though, you'd never know it. This is how, when I say that I am different, people think of different. This is that thing people hurry to tell me is totally unnoticeable. Regardless of how full of crap they are, or what I am actually talking about when I say I am different. That you oh-so-benevolently take it away once you have reassured yourself there is a real person in there, or whenever you need me to feel cut off from Those People, or reassure me that I am One Of You, as long as I keep my mouth shut about it and act grateful when the time comes? That is a blessing I can do without, thanks. You have given me this as an identity, you can learn to live with the consequences. Goddess knows I have to.

Please stop telling me who I am. Please stop telling me what I should be focusing on, what parts of me are worth your acknowledgment, and subsequently, which parts it's okay to pretend don't exist. Having me as a friend or family member is not a free pass to tell people how you're totes all about disability rights, obviously. Using that word is not about your accidental slip of the tongue, how you were raised, or your inability to come up with a more intelligent and accurate response. It is about your laziness. It is about your laziness not only to learn to watch your fucking mouth and show some respect, for Goddess' sake, but also, your casual disregard for me.

I wrote, in a recent blog post, about a friend of mine who is being less than supportive about this whole deal. I assume said friend knows who zie is. But really, it goes for all of you, all of you who use that word once you understand, not only what it means, but what it means to me. I am not, by nature, a social person, though I'm very friendly. I regret to say I have lost track of people, or closeness with people due to mutual disinterest, or my own genuine cluelessness. You make the choice to be in my life. This is a part of that. My body, my brain, and who I am, sometimes in spite of, sometimes because of, but always in addition to, all of that. What you are doing, when you use that word, is reminding me where we stand. How you stand on one side and I stand on the other. How it's still your world, and, though you love me and care about me and are interested in me as a person, you have no desire to venture into mine, and I have no right to expect you to. I am on my own, and I cannot expect you to 'deal' with this, because who in their right mind would, voluntarily? Which would be fine, except that I still have to live in yours. I don't have the option to opt out like you do. And the sick thing is, as much as you claim that it doesn't mean what I keep telling you it means, I'm pretty sure that there are a few of you out there who don't want to venture into my world, because, like my sister, you're not comfortable with the idea there may be some places we may need to lead you. Because that's just not how it goes, is it?

If I talk about this stuff and I'm being too sensitive because it's based on my own experience, and the people who 'love me' don't talk about it, because it's not that big a deal and I'm being too sensitive, and the people who don't know any better can't talk about it, because they don't have the experiences, when is it okay to talk about? Oh. Right. That's the point. Sorry, sometimes I miss that. You know how it is.

*Enabled - Ally's word for people who do not have disabilities. Blogosphere does not like able-bodied, as it left out people with neurological impairments and developmental disabilities, but also, I do not like the term 'temporarily able-bodied' for some reason I have yet to identify. Possibly because it's clunky. Enabled is my replacement, as I feel it encapsulates most of the problems within the community of people with disabilities, which are caused by, not the disabilities themselves, but the fact that society is built for bodies to work a certain way, and you get all kinds of nice things given to you and ascribed to you if yours does, while we have to content ourselves with whatever version of 'nice' you decide we are capable of comprehending, and often receive a cookie for your efforts.

** braces such as the ones I wore, for those of you who don't know, go on your legs, not your teeth. I wore several incarnations off and on from toddlerhood til I was about 13. It actually did take them ten years and one trial and error serial casting episode before they realized that it didn't really work for me. There was a lot of trial and error episodes in those days.

AN: If you have a squicky feeling of guilt in your stomach, wondering if this post is about you, then it probably is. If you're just really pissed at me right now for getting mad at this? That's okay, I'm probably pissed at you too.

Is that burning rubber I smell?

2010-04-10T16:06:00.000-07:00

So, I do have a rage post coming, because something happened over the weekend that I really feel the need to ~~rant~~ discuss. But I've been writing a lot over the last few days. Like, a freakish amount, seriously. Which is good because I have to take my computer into the shop again. So I'll probably do that this weekend. Because I'm working all weekend, and at least I can access my googledocs and get a little bit done. Anyway, I really just wanted to post something on the actual projects, as that is the main purpose for this blog, and I feel like I haven't done that forever. So, this is a small sampling of what I have been writing over the past three days:

Somewhere around 30 pages for Hannah. (We are finally moving! Woop!)
15 pages of Frenzy
A whole whack of prework for The Fairy Tale That Is Not Yet, But Will Be At Some Point In Future
Random lists of ideas for what I am going to do, when I am publishing under my very own independent publishing logo.
Tiny bits of POST OF RAGE - full version to follow

I also downloaded some new audiobooks, Sunshine by Robin McKinley, which, interestingly, I'd already found shortly after writing this post, debated, and was then directed to by a reader. I haven't started it yet, but I did scuttle off immediately to download it. Sadly, it is the only Robin McKinley book Audible has, so I may actually have to buy a book for realz, if zie turns out to be as good as I think zie will be. (thanks again Tacita Sempronia!) Along with that, there's another modern retelling of Peter Pan, and Captive, the second in Carrie Jones' pixie series, which is a bit of a guilty pleasure, but also, is published by Flux, which is a division of Llewellyn, which just makes me love her more. What? I read YA novels. Can't be all Deep Thinker all the time.

Hannah is, amazingly, moving now, and should definitely be ready for rewriting before the end of the month, even with the Frenzy going on. I am seriously all "ROAR! I have a mighty pen!" just now. It was such a relief to get past the first two chapters, and into the characters as I know them. I didn't expect Hannah's babyhood would be that long, or that agonizing. I'm going to cut a lot of it out, I think, it didn't turn out like I thought it would. But whatever, we're moving now. Work is slowing down a bit after next week, and while I'm pretty sure it's going to jump right back up again in a few more weeks (*shudder* wedding season...), I am taking advantage of this settling down time to dig in and really push for the next three weeks or so. Which means falling behind on Script Frenzy. Which is... expected. There's also a self-publishing course at my local college. It runs right through my vacation time, but my vacation is only for 11 days, so I think I could make it work. The completion of the course actually requires you to self-publish. And the end date? August 30th. Seriously. I cannot make this stuff up.

Frenzy is, as ever, demoralizing. But it's nice to at least be demoralized among friends, so to speak. I did miss the characters, and we are having fun together, though it's stilted fun, and it's tempered by all the other things I have to write, oh my god. I was hopeful this year that there would be some local meet-ups and such, but so far, no dice. Probably also for the best.

Anyway, important points, I am very busy, writing is no longer resembling pulling teeth, lots of new books, my summer schedule is officially BOOKED SOLID: possible summer course + Hannah completion and release [oh holy crap THAT FAST?!] + potential extra workload + trip to Europe [wee!!! more later] + new books to read + extra special auntie time with Perfect Nephew #1 (and the rest of the crew, too) = whatever you want from me this summer, too bad, you should have mentioned before now, I am officially too busy for ONE MORE THING. But I shall continue my efforts to blog, as it seems to be working out shockingly well for me. As always, dear readers, I appreciate you, even the invisible ones who refuse to comment. I understand. I used to think people would find me weird and creepy for spying on their day-to-day. But it isn't! Promise! Now, my girl and I are back to the slog.
xfingers!

One Month! (a post of lists both formal and informal)

2010-04-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

One month blog-o-versary. Wow. I've actually never been able to maintain a blog. Deeply impressive. And, because I'm all about learning new things, I have put together a list of, in no particular order, the things I have learned this month. Because I'm a huge dork.

1. I am going to HAVE to get some kind of schedule down, or I am never going to get this done. Because what I'm doing now? So not working.
2. People seem to like me better when I'm angry. Whoda thunk it?
3. I may not reach my deadline.
4. I have not yet made peace with that.
5. I have really awesome friends and family, who totally think I'm a famous writer right now. Your epic support and/or editing skills, and/or willingness to put up with my ego as it waxes and wanes has not gone unnoticed. Love you all. I will do my best to make it easier to support me, to the completion of the project, so none of us go totally insane.
6. I have really crappy negative friends, also, who couldn't care less about what I'm doing, don't want to hear about it, don't want to know about it, and don't take the time to listen when I'm talking, let alone read when I'm writing. You can pretty much fuck off. I don't ask for fawning praise or recognition, and I don't ask that you make this project a part of your life just because it's a part of mine. I do expect that if you genuinely want no part in it, that you will understand that that is hurtful, and also that means cutting you out of a substantially large part of my life. It's not my responsibility to make up for that missing space, time, or interest. It's yours.
7. There are total strangers who do, actually, care about what I think. Very cool!
8. You can talk and talk and talk, and still, some people won't get it.
9. There's a lot more to this racket than I thought there was.
10. Not commenting on people's blogs is really, really rude. And I promise never to do it again.
11. I am capable of a level of venom I never thought possible before. Oh, to grow as an artist. (Thanks again, Amanda.)
12. I am also capable of much more than I thought I was
13. Still got a long way to go, though.
14. Write Or Die works for Nano. But I really need to stop using it.
15. For some reason I will never understand, Googledocs hates contractions. wtf Google?

Lookit how smart I am becoming! Even have plans for like, the next six blog posts! For those of you who like to be warned, incoming blogs may include:
my vulnerable self-esteem
the elitism of the literary world
the previously mentioned post on positive thinking
a possibly, a follow-up to the Mary-Sue post, currently titled, in my head, The Dreaded Twilight Post I Really Don't Want To Write.
and a particular charming one where I attempt to write a scene which incorporates sexual aggression, drunkenness, and violence. Three things I have absolutely zero experience on.
And more! *cue cheesy theme music* (Hm. What kind of theme music? I wonder). Also, watch me juggle Script Frenzy and play catch-up with Hannah.

(Also, please cross fingers for me.)

And because I believe in sharing, have some awesome:
Asexy bingo card - I don't spend a lot of time on the AVEN boards, but this gave me a laugh. Count how many you've gotten, and hope the prize is NEVER HAVING TO HEAR IT AGAIN! (I counted 22.)
Hir - I use 'zir' as my gender-neutral pronoun of choice, as I'm sure you've noticed. This will still make you cry. I am not being dramatic here. Bring tissues and be prepared to hit 'replay' at least four times.
101 Reasons To Stop Writing - Despite the demoralizing intent of the content, it makes me laugh. Particularly the Demotivational posters. Also, there's a really good snark piece on the Polanski rape-apologist nonsense, if you can stomach being snarky about it yet.
BookByYou - Okay, so I know the writing is probably abysmal, but whoever came up with this idea is a freaking genius, and probably raking it in. Don't judge me. Like you never read Choose Your Own Adventure as a kid. For those of you interested, they're also coming out with same-sex romance novels within the next year. (credit for this knowledge goes to my dear love, who wrote to ask if they would, only to be told they were already working on it, but the current crop of mystery novels could serve in a pinch.)

That's pretty much it! Next month, hopefully I will finish a full draft. Thanks to everyone still following along. And if you're a lurker, it would be awesome if you de-lurked sometime next month. Watch this space!

There Is A Method To This Madness

2010-04-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

Yes, Hannah is behind.
Yes, I am doing script frenzy this year.
Yes, I have failed the last two years in a row.

Why do I do this to myself?

Actually, I have a really good reason. It's kind of like that scene in Major Pain. Y'know, the one where the guy's been shot, or something, so his friend breaks his thumb? Like that. If I fail at script frenzy, it will be because I was procrastinating. And if I'm procrastinating on my screenplay, I'm going to have to find something else to do. And there will be Hannah. And if I'm procrastinating on Hannah, I will have to find something else to do. And there will be script frenzy. And at any given moment, one of them is bound to be less painful than the other.

This method is actually surprisingly effective, or has proven so in the past, right up until one of them trumps the other one, and I've just decided, (no, really, right this second, I have to go change what my profile says) that since I'm working on Hannah, which is a very personal project from back in the day, Screnzy will be likewise. I will be doing Preston Academy, which is an internet serial I wrote (read: began) back in the days of Geocities (R.I.P) and which I've always wondered whether I should translate to TV serial or a book series. Like Hannah, I really enjoyed and got attached to the characters, and was always sad not to see them reach their full potential. When I was supposed to go to the Vancouver Film School, and couldn't get the money (don't ask. ODSP are complete overbearing assholes, and I don't want to talk about it.) it was one of the things I was mucking around with in preparation, since I've never actually done a TV series, but I wound up doing the outline for the pilot episode, and with my tendency to overwrite, two or three good episodes should fulfill, though once i get started, I could probably move all the way through a first series, as I already know them well enough (yes, I've heard it before too).

The truth is, I want to do it because I won Nano last year (squeaked by, but whatever) and it makes me feel like crap I can't get my stuff together enough to do this. I want to go back to the days when I could spend hours at the keyboard without needing a $4 on a coffee from down the street, or to make sure nothing good was on Dr. Phil, or nobody had commented on my latest blog post, youtube video, or tweet. I miss myself. All this nostalgia, I miss me when I was The Girl Who Wrote The Stories, instead of The Writer Going Nowhere Faster Than The Speed Of Light. *sigh* Poor me, right? I know.

Preston is fun. It's nothing heavy or deep, it's like, it's like a cross between Fame, Glee, and Gossip Girl (though, light on that. I am so tired of TV shows about how hard it is to be a spoiled rich kid). It's so I can goof around, take it easy, one step at a time, and I already know the story. So it'll be a change, which will make it a challenge, but , like Hannah, it'll be like coming home, only not after a long and harrowing journey, but more like after summer vacation. I can totally do both.

Right?

ScriptFrenzy

(Anybody else on there, I'm under reckless.tenacity)

In Thanks To Amanda Palmer (here we go again)

2010-03-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

Disclaimer: More Rage! More Swearing! Lots of it! Heads up!
http://pics.livejournal.com/ms_daisy_cutter/pic/00228dss
So.
The sick thing is, this is not the post I was writing. I was about to write a post about positive thinking, when I found this. Because I found this when following a link, because someone had posted a link to this blog on another site and not told me, and I just stumbled on it accidentally, and was so damn excited omg you guys! Because that is still really cool, when it happens. And then. This. and I really. I don't know what to think. And I am angry. So. I'm writing a letter. Because that is what I do when I get angry. She won't read it, and I don't care. I just want to be able to be clear. I just want the distracting rage to dissipate so that I can think like a normal human person again.

I would also like to apologize in advance for any form of RACE!FAIL I am about to commit. I am a white person living in predominantly white area. Pretty much all I know of racism is that it is wrong, and that there is a whole lot about it that I don't know about. I can, however, point you in the direction of people who say it much better, (and probably more succinctly) than I. Any corrections or additions I need to make, please feel free to mention them in the comments - I like to learn things. So. Here are people smarter and more articulate and knowledgeable explaining and extolling on this latest WTF-ery.
http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2010/03/over-edge.html
http://sparkymonster.livejournal.com/389485.html

In addition, I almost didn't post this. Because I knew it would degenerate into all the many reasons I am angry, and what the fuck is so wrong with Amanda Palmer, and not just focus on what needs to be focused on right now. And it did, a little. Stuff spins around in my head sometimes, and this is what happens to it. Feel free to help yourself to some rage, and we'll play some catch-up. 'Cause on top of THAT, there was this:
http://morethansides.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-rape-culture-amanda-palmer-and.html
and of course THIS:
http://tigerbeatdown.com/?p=889
ttp://www.myspace.com/evelynevelyn
And it's just. Exhausting. So now, you get to hear what I think. Yay.

Dear Amanda Palmer,
I would like to thank you. I would like to thank you because I hate you. I have never truly hated another human being. My hatred has always been tinged with self-pity, or a sense of despair. I never believed it was truly possible to hate someone so purely and venomously, and I never approved of hating someone you didn't know. I still don't approve. I am actually very conflicted about all this. But I understand, now, how it can happen. I hate you. I want nothing but horrible and terrible things for you. And I'm very sorry for that. I dislike what that makes me. I dislike that I feel this way. And that is why I am grateful to you, too, because, as much as it is knowledge I wish I didn't have, it is knowledge. It is knowledge that tells me that I must find a way to centre myself and calm down and not be prejudiced towards you, however you might deserve it. Because as much as I believe you know exactly the shit-pot you are stirring, I don't think many of your fans know, or know how they are helping you. And I cannot help to explain that to people if I am coming from a place of absolute hate. So, I apologize for my mindless, shrieking rage. I am doing my best. Not for your sake, but for the sake of the people who admire you, and for the sake of my own happiness and sense of myself. Because I really, really like the me that doesn't hate people, and doesn't spout mindless hate propaganda for the sake of getting attention or being 'interesting.'

Firstly, so you're aware, Amanda, you don't get to throw around words like 'metaphor' and 'irony' squeezed in with, racist or ableist or sexist statements. You certainly don't get to think that those are 'art' words, and thus, everything you say when you put those words in is about art, and therefore only has value in the most abstract terms, and should not be taken out of context to mean, oh, say, what you think about various marginalized groups or the treatment of these marginalized groups by... people like you. Who are not part of them. You just don't get to do that. Because you live in a world where you had the opportunity to do a great many things with your life, and what you chose to do is put yourself out into the world, and be seen, and admired, and most especially to be seen and admired by people who are maybe a little bit weird, and a little bit misfit. You chose to speak up in ways and about things that other people wouldn't, couldn't, or didn't. And you enjoy that. And that's okay. Having that job and liking that job, and even succeeding at that job, are not bad things. But you're not allowed to only bear the responsibility of the parts of that you like.

Please don't misunderstand me. It makes me sick to my stomach when I see a famous person who has really been screwed up, and people won't leave zir alone. Or a famous person, say, taking zir kids out for a walk who gets into trouble while protecting zir kids, and people who are not celebrities go, "Oh well, they shouldn't have got famous if they didn't want that to happen." I despise that. It's tantamount to, "She shouldn't have been wearing that in that neighborhood, it's no wonder she got raped," or, "Listen, if you don't want people to see you as your disability, you should stop expecting special treatment." That's not what I'm saying. That's not what you did. You have made a career out of getting attention by shocking and startling people with your 'honesty.' and that also turns my stomach, because it becomes clearer and clearer to me that you did that purely so that now you can say this crap and people will go, "Of course she's going to say it. She's Amanda Palmer. She's just weird. She's different. Everyone knows she's not racist." No. You know what? You're not weird. You're not special. You're not unique or edgy. And, shocker, not everybody knows or cares anything about you, except when they have to care because you add to the crap they have to put up with. You are doing the exact same thing people have been doing for centuries, when you participate, even in a small way, in the marginalization or outright hatred of a group of people who suffer at the hands of another group. So for all that you're trying to be edgy and different, you are just like everyone else. You are just a typical racist in denial.

And it's gross, because as much as I hate it, because I hate you, and now I have to spend energy thinking about this, and getting a nasty case of the rages, you have value. You have value to a good many people, and there are people who will defend the nonsense you say purely because you said it. People who are willing to forgive you because you helped them. So you're teaching them that it's okay to only think about themselves, and how they have been hurt. Which will not only continue an escalating cycle of hate, but will actually isolate those people from other people who have also felt the sting of some kind of marginalization because it's either them, or it's me. And Amanda said it's okay if it's them. You wanted people to listen to you, but you don't want the things you say to be taken at face value? What's even worse is that you have alienated your fans with this ridiculous noise, and you don't care. You have styled yourself to speak for the 'misunderstood masses', and then, carefully and methodically, pointed out which misunderstood masses you don't care about. Only, of course, when you absolutely had to. Because product placement is the devil, but asking people to buy a CD because you're totally a voice for the people... (just not those people) Now that has artistic merit.

Then I hate you again, for being ungrateful and spoiled enough that it doesn't matter. It matters to me, even when I can do small things, contribute to a discussion, or inspire someone to do the same. And it will matter to me, if I happen to hurt someone with this post, in my clueless and bumbling way. I know, Amanda, I know. You have a great deal more fans than I have readers. You have more people on either side, and I get that it's important not to compromise who you are and what you want to say for the sake of people who may not like it. I really do understand that, artist to artist. But what you have done is absolute cowardice. If you had said something like that, and then said, "Okay, my bad. Supporting the KKK is racist, and I shouldn't have said that," instead of, "Lookit who ELSE is doing it, so there!" If there had been any kind of humility, we could walk away. Shaking our heads, yes, but still. If you had said, "I'm sorry for the people who don't like it, but I truly believe it's better to support/comparable to supporting things like the KKK when you support Big Nasty Corporations," at least then, people would know where you stood. We'd still call you racist, and we'd still hate you, but we wouldn't have to listen to you, or the legions of mindless masses who follow you going, "Oh, come on, I didn't mean it that way!" Because, and here's the important thing I think you really need to understand: You don't get to decide what it means, when you say something like that because it means nothing to you. You know the power of your words. You know exactly what you're doing, and exactly how vague to be to get away with your nonsense. But it means what it means. It means what it means to people who have a stake in that kind of talk. And just because you don't, doesn't mean you get to use words like 'irony' and 'metaphor' to mean "That's not what I meant" whenever it suits you. It just means you should be listening to those people who do have a stake in it. And how you can just decide not to care about an entire group(s) of people who may care about you, either because they truly admire you, or because they have to pay for the damage you cause when you open your mouth, that, Amanda Palmer, is revolting, childish and cowardly. Especially when the exact second you decide you don't care is when you realize you may have taken things a step too far, and are forced to be something other than ARTIST, for once.

And by the way, words like 'irony' have real meanings too. Where you find the irony in giving money to a group of people who would gladly see large portions of the population meticulously, viciously, and publicly killed, I would really like to know. That's not ironic. That's not even cruel irony. Y'know what is, though? There are people in this world who spent money on you, so that you could get the stuff you have now, (and you already said you're not ashamed to take their money) so that you could have the following and the opportunities and the ability to say this shit and have people not think you're a disgusting racist. There are people in this world who thought you were worth defending. And they are now being slapped in the face with the realization that someone they looked up to and supported doesn't give a flying fuck about people like them. They cared about you, and you delight in reminding them they were suckers. If they disagree with you, it's because they're outside of you, they are not of you, and you weren't talking to them, anyway. You don't have to care about them. You have the right to hurt people, to encourage the hurt of people, and it's okay, because if the words are 'ironic' and 'metaphorical', so's the hurt. Right? You're not actually racist, (and people should know that, omg, and if they don't, it's so not your fault,) so you can give money in support of racism and that's irony. I'm sure, in your own head, it's a totally ironic support of racism. But, y'know that thing, about the tree falling in the forest? If a person who isn't racist gives money to someone who uses it to support their violent racist agenda, does the violence still hurt someone?

It's not like you don't fucking know what they are, or what they do. It's not like you don't know that people listen to you when you talk. I mean, that's the whole point, isn't it? Racism or any other kind of ism is not like your gender identity, sexuality, or sense of personal space. You don't get to self-identify. Your actions and your attitudes speak for you. And you have made a point to try and nullify your actions, not by apologizing, or attempting to do better, but by saying you have a right to say this, because people who have a problem with it don't know what it means! I'm white. I'm a person with a disability. I make fun of my disability. Because it's not a bad thing, to be in this body, not all the time. And sometimes, weird stuff happens to me, or around me, purely because I was born in this body. And sometimes, I have to find that shit funny, or I might possibly go mad. So sometimes, I forget myself. I make fun of my friends, the same way I make fun of me, because they know me, and I know them, and life is funny. I say or do things, jokingly, or unknowingly, and after, someone pulls me aside and says something like, "That was racist back there. There's stuff you don't know, there's stuff you don't understand, there's stuff that isn't yours to claim." And I feel horrible about it. Because I'm not so up on the socialization skills, and I need people to tell me some things. Sometimes, I don't get an opportunity to apologize. And when I can't apologize, I can only promise myself to do better, and keep trying. I didn't always do that, but I do now, because I had people stopping me to tell me that it is the right thing to do.

You have people asking you to do better. And some of them even believe you can. And you're saying no. Not only are you saying no, but you insult their intelligence while you're at it. Which is a bit much for someone who doesn't know the meaning of the words she uses as a get-out-of-jail-free card. The KKK is not ironic. They don't kill each other or themselves and take pictures to comment on the irony of it all. They kill other people because they hate otherness. Nothing ironic. They just hate. Because they can. And I don't care that you've never actually given money to the KKK (If you haven't, that is, I really don't want to know what you do with your ill-gotten gains) and I don't care if you didn't actually mean that other people do, or that they should. All I care about is that you said it. You said it, and you defended it after you'd said it, and now people will defend you for saying it because oh, you've just been picked on so much lately, haven't you? And then they will say it, and defend themselves, and each other, because you said it. And you're important. And agreeing with you means you're on their side. And they are one of you, and that's what they want. And it was wrong to say, not only because it's not funny, it's racist, or because it hurt people, but because the mere fact that you said something you knew was going to be hurtful, again, and you act like you don't care that it was, that that's what you meant to do, again makes me wonder if even you know what you really meant by it.

I had the unfortunate task of explaining privilege, and lack of it, to someone, a few weeks ago. She is physically disabled, and believes what she is taught to believe, that it is in her best interests to let people do things for her, and think what they will of her, regardless if what they're doing actually helps her, or if their assessment of her is accurate. So I really had to go over things with her, and at one point, she said, "Why bother explaining things to people? Why bother forcing them to think a certain way, or try to change them? They probably won't care." And I was flabbergasted. So I said that the truth is, most of them do care, but they make mistakes, they do what they're taught and what they're told to do, and they think it must be right, because otherwise, why would so many people do it? And, from my own experience, I want to know when I'm being a jackass. And most of the people I have met, who treat me this or that way because of my disability, are deeply relieved when I tell them they are doing wrong. Because then I tell them how to do right. And there are some people I know who are still stubbornly ableist in some way, and still say that I am 'different' from other people with disabilities, or that I 'think about it too much' etc. But they are fewer. Because people don't want to be that kind of asshole. For the most part.

Only now, I don't know if I believe that. And by the way, I blame you for that unwanted knowledge too. So, thanks.

In Sincerity and Anger,
Another Judgmental Person With No Sense Of Humor Who Doesn't Get You

There. I feel better now. Moving right along.

For All That They Deceive...

2010-03-21T23:23:00.000-07:00

Looks are important. I have been contemplating Hannah's appearance.

As I mentioned before, Hannah's original intention was to be frightening and jarring-looking. We crafted her to be ghostly pale, with implausibly dark hair and neon green eyes. And I literally mean neon. We coloured it with a highlighter. I'm not sure, now, why we did it that way, put that particular brand of nonsense into it, but my cousin had a flair for the dramatic, and I suppose I wanted to be able to get a clear picture, to make her as unmistakable as possible. The point is, Hannah looks the way she looks. It's not subtle, or simple, and she's certainly memorable. But. There's a plausibility factor. I have, actually, come up with an imperfect backstory to explain at least part of the mystery, but I'm not sure if it's good enough to work with at this point. There are a lot of things that were left in the ether on earlier drafts, to save time, to save space, to hurry up and get on with the good bits. It's not good enough, now, as I approach the project with a shrewd editor's eye I simply didn't have at eighteen, for version two, and certainly couldn't have dreamed of at fourteen, when it was an accomplishment just to have gotten to the end of the story. (Which, in actual fact, turned out not to be the end, or even close to it. More on that later.) Anyway, the point is, she doesn't look right. She doesn't look real. She doesn't look as if she fits into the world in which she inhabits. And I... can't decide how I feel about that.

At this point, certain aspects, like Hannah's appearance, seem utterly insurmountable. I don't think I could change her appearance, should I decide I needed to, which is another part of the reason I am self-publishing. Once, years ago, I was in a writing class where I wrote a family film about a girl with a crush on a boy she doesn't end up with, in the end. I liked the idea, that the point of the story is that sometimes, you don't get what you want, you get something better, and learn lessons about wanting the wrong thing. My writing teacher, however, said that people 'expected' to see the leading lady get her man, and I had to make it happen. I absolutely refused to change the ending, and ended up reworking the original story so that my ending fit better. The script wound up better, in the end, so I suppose I should thank him. And I now know that, popular or not, I have the ability to change the story to suit my vision for what it is and what it means, rather than change the vision itself to make it more 'readable'. I like that. The only thing is, Hannah's appearance isn't really an integral plot point, and I'm not always sure it sends a particular message, or at least, that's not what it was designed to do. And I don't want to have to change the original story to make up for my desire to see her in a certain way, and my affection for the character the way she is. (You see kids, Mary Sue isn't the problem. bad writing is bad writing.) So. I don't know.

On the other hand, Hannah's looks were not designed to say anything integral to the plot or fit with the themes of power and responsibility and family et al, that I have going in the story. But they are beginning to. Hannah's looks set her apart and make her memorable, because they are implausible, because she doesn't look real, because she looks like what she is, she looks different. People make wrong assumptions about her, based on how she looks, even as young as her infancy, because it is that unmistakable. It's funny, isn't it, what we base on looks? I don't just mean the obvious stuff, but it's funny to me, that although most of us are born into a certain look and do precious little to change it, it is acceptable to wander around believing everybody looks the way they do on purpose, and make our assumptions from there.

I have a friend who calorie-counts and exercises to excess. In the interest of full disclosure, I despise the whole notion of weight loss. If it's going to come off, it will come off, barring that you don't have some kind of food addictions or blood sugar issue or Pika, etc, which you genuinely need to see a doctor about. Having said that, this is not a judgment on the person in question, only an example of the kind of weird connections people can make. Once upon a time, she was 'overweight.' Now, when she sees an 'overweight' person, she looks down her nose at zir. She feels that she has earned this right, as someone who worked to make herself into something else. She feels she has the right to see fat and think lazy, if she wants to, because she has worked so hard. She also feels she has the right to obsess to the point of a frustrating amount of vapidity, over her appearance, because she is no longer one of those people who don't take pride in her appearance. Do you see where the connections are made? Fat people are lazy, because thin people are motivated. People who get positive reinforcement for looking a certain way have obviously achieved something to be proud of, because everyone is proud of them. Therefore, fat people also must have low self-esteem, because if they didn't have low self-esteem, they would want to be something other than what they are now. Head-scratcher, right? Here's another one: I am a thin person. Therefore, in the eyes of many, I am a picture of health, and also, fairly attractive (as in, not ugly. as in, a potential.) Yet I have had my gender and sexual identity questioned because quite frankly, I don't give a care how interested in me you are, I will not make myself available, and by the way I am thin because I had a heart condition and parts of me have almost zero muscle mass, not because I am healthy or self-disciplined, you idiot. Let us recap: If a woman or a girl is pretty it's because she wants you to like her; if she's less-than, it's because she doesn't feel that you could like her. If a woman dresses "like a boy" it's because she doesn't understand, or won't accept that she is not a boy, is not allowed to be like a boy, or is still in the state of trying to prove herself. If a woman dresses "like a girl" she is probably vapid and shallow and old-fashioned and sexist. If she looks like something that it turns out she is not, it is not because your assumptions are wrong, it is because she is putting off the wrong image.

Hannah's appearance was not designed to spark political discussions, and I didn't mean for this to turn into that in order to justify my own stubbornness. It's not going to end up as part of the plot of the book. This is actually the stuff that goes on in my head. (Scary, isn't it?) But the thing is, Hannah's appearance, implausible, impossible, and unsettling as it is meant to be, does have something to say about who she is, and why she is the way she is, in my little universe. It says that people are wrong, and that Hannah has had to understand the inherent wrongness of people from an early age. In the first book, this book, she is only eight. People are frightened of her power and her strength, but they are even moreso, because they feel they know what she would use it for. People feel that she is sinister largely based on the fact that she looks sinister, and offers no explanation for that. And that is important to the plot. So, where does that leave us?

My dearest love is a transboy (he insists I refer to him in that way, as a boy, not a man). He is a marvel, and a large part of the reason I am writing, this blog, or much of anything some days. And one day, he asked me how it was possible I understood his struggles so well. And I told him, truthfully, that I don't know much. But I know what it is to look in the mirror and be sharply aware that what people see, when they look at me, is what they have to get over to get to the real me. And that, unfair as it is, it is expected and accepted that it's my job to make sure they do see the real me. When I was fourteen, I did not understand why Hannah had the appearance she did, but I was acutely aware of the reactions it would get her, even then, even as I skated casually over them to get to the story. More than that, I felt I could skate over them, largely because, I think, they were such a part of my own life, I expected that people would know, of course people think these things, assume these things, because of how she looks. So I don't want it in there, because I'm afraid I'm wrong, I'd be hitting people over the head with things, and it makes the whole thing too simple to be real. It's not symbolic of anything, she looks weird, and that's enough to treat her like an oddity. But I want to keep it in there because that is how it happens, whether we're aware of it or not. It really is that simple.

What to do, what to do? Change it entirely, or leave it the way it is? Mute it a little and make it subtle, or heighten it and really drive it home? Advice?

Oh, Mary, Mary

2010-03-17T21:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm sorry. I was gonna hold this one off. Really, I was. But the thing is, if I don't get it out now, a whole bunch of other stuff I want to tell you about what I'm writing and why and how the journey is going is not going to make sense. I didn't want to make this post, because it involves more Twilight bashing, and also because it involves a lot of Really Unpopular Opinions About Writing. So before I alienate all of my BRAND NEW READERS (oh my gosh people are reading my stuff! oh my gosh people are commenting! holycrow people want other people to read my stuff! *squee*) I would like to say, to those of you who have added me to your blogrolls, or commented, or are just lurking around, Hello! and Thank you! It's pretty awesome that this blog is being discovered by so many people in its very, very youthful state. Possibly I don't suck at this marketing thing nearly as much as I thought I did, which is heartening. Keep the comments coming! And while I have you, how do I comment on all the awesome comments I've been getting? Because I'm really all *cherishes comments* about it, and I'd like to know how to do that, but I'm a total blogspot newbie. Help?

Now, on to the alienation.

http://www.springhole.net/quizzes/marysue.htm

For those of you who don't know, that is apparently the Universal Mary Sue Litmus test. My apologies to the person who wrote the test, but it is the most ridiculous thing you will ever do with ten minutes. And here's why. Watch me, I'm about to blow your mind:

Mary-Sue is a myth. She was invented by fanfic readers to scare - er, that is, discourage - writers from putting OCs (most particularly OCs meant to be reflections of the authors themselves) into fanfics when all the readers wanted to do was read about their favorite characters. She has morphed and mutated to basically mean any character any reviewer or commenter doesn't like. Want proof? I want you to do three things for me.

1. Run the test with a fictional character you created and have a particular attachment to.
2. Have someone you know run you through the test, as if you were a character they created.
3. Run the test through with one of the following characters, depending on which fandom you hail from, or, if you're so inclined, try all of them:
Harry Potter. Luke Skywalker. Edward Cullen. Dr. Who. Superman. (I chose boys for a reason, you'll see in a sec.)

See that? Amazing, isn't it? FYI, Hannah scores between 39-45, depending on how generous I am being, and which novel I am testing her on. I scored around 28. Probably would have got higher, but apparently, being inherently flawed like having a disability for no reason, and being asexual and getting no action at all means you are less than Ideal Character, and therefore, less Sue-ish. Aside from making me grumble, this is actually problematic, as, when I write characters with disabilities, I am basing many of the experiences and feelings on my own, so, would that make it more Sue-ish? Or does the natural bad of having a disability cancel that out? And if I want to write an extremely likeable asexual, or an asexual who has to fend off the boys/girls, is that wish fulfillment? Because, trust me, it's not something I want, but it has, on occasion, happened.

Sorry. I'm really not here to pick, on the test, or the author of the test, who I'm sure felt that zie was doing a very good thing, clearing all this up. But the thing is, a shocking number of those questions are geared specifically towards female characters. And they are amazingly stupid and inane questions, too. Like, "if your character is a girl, does she have a boy's name?", "if your character is a girl, does she have to prove she's 'just as good as the guys'?", "if your character is a girl, does she have 'rebellious princess' syndrome?" In other words, kids, if your character is a girl, she is more likely to fail this test. I pointed this out to someone once, who responded with, "It's written that way, because Mary Sues are mostly girls. There aren't that many Gary Stus." Which brings me to experiment #3.

When I tested Harry Potter, he scored about 116. When I tested Edward Cullen, he scored about 129. When I tested Luke Skywalker, I stopped halfway through from giggling. (He eventually scored an impressive 149) You get the point. This is incredible for several reasons. Firstly, almost everyone you know knows, or knows of, one of these characters. Most of the people I know, know all of them. These characters are from best-sellers and well-loved stories. Secondly, is the fact that they are all male, and many of them were written by men. Thirdly, Star Wars was written in the 70s, Harry Potter began in the 90s, Twilight in early 21st century, and apparently, the original Dr. Who was written in the 60s and holds the record for the longest-running sci-fi series of all time. (I didn't test the Doctor, but I know people who did; he scores around 102.) Which means, to those of you playing along at home, Gary Stus are everywhere AND WE LOVE THEM! In fact, they are probably a large part of the reason many of us are writing today. And, I would hope, a large part of the reason there are so many Mary Sues. Why let the boys have all the fun? Finally, and most importantly, for those of you ready to remind me, "Well, yeah, but those are good writers." I would like to say two things. Firstly, no, they are not all good writers. George Lucas has been telling the same story for 40 years. It's getting really effing old, dude, seriously. And oh, Stephanie Meyer, please do not think that because you led us all on for three books that the fourth one required absolutely no plot at all. Secondly, none of those best-selling authors had (well, actually, I don't know Dr. Who from a hole in the ground, so one of them might have) written anything major up until that point. George Lucas was a budding film student, Stephanie Meyer was raising three children, and we all know the meta-myth of J.K Rowling. They had no way of knowing, not even the capacity to dream, what they were about to unleash onto the world.

Here's the thing: I think everyone should write. I don't force writing on people, I'm not one of those "you're an artist or you're nobody." people. But I think everyone should be in the practice of telling stories. We should tell stories, early and often. We should tell stories about the people we are, the people we know, the people we wish we knew, the people we dream would exist some day, and the people we want most in the world to grow into. We shouldn't tell stories to be realistic, we should tell them to be honest. We should tell stories because they are fun, because that's what makes our lives better, because deep down inside, we believe we really are that special, that beautiful, and worth the kind of struggle worth writing about. Because even if you don't believe it, when you write it down, when you can make it work, make it fit into a story, it starts to make sense. And then you will believe it. Mostly, though, we should tell stories because we exist, and we are not alone.

There's a reason I wanted people to run themselves through the test, too. People who yell Mary-Sue at your original fiction, and even at your fanfic or RPG, want you to believe you are alone. They want you to believe no one is interested in what you have to say, or your perspective. Because everybody else thinks differently. They want you to believe, that if you tell your story, that everyone will know, instinctively, that it's you, and you will be punished severely. Because yes, beautiful, incredible, wonderful, tragic, unimaginable things can happen. But they won't happen to you. They won't happen to anyone like you, and you can't imagine yourself a better person, smarter, prettier, more likable, more lovable, more talented or stronger, either. Because you are not any of those things, and you probably never will be, and it's absolute arrogance to assume that could change. I asked, in this post, for readers to run themselves through the test because I wanted you to see that unless you have really bad friends, or incredibly low self-esteem, don't find yourself particularly well-liked, likable, talented, smart, unique, good-looking, well-mannered, good-tempered, basically, unless you or your friends find you a totally boring, generic, bland, and in some cases, downright detestable human being, you're probably going to score pretty high. You probably won't reach kill it dead, you have no magical powers, and unless your friend has a huge crush on you, zie is probably not extolling on your beauty at this moment. But, I mean, you would have to dislike yourself or distort yourself quite a bit to get a low score, and if you got a low score, you may need to get some better friends. Which means, in order for your characters to pass, you have to make them as forgettable as humanly possible, especially, as the test decrees, if your character is a girl. And, even more frightening, in order for you to be someone people want to read about, you have to make yourself as bland and forgettable as possible. If you're female. Because that, apparently, is what makes good writing.

I don't mean to generalize. Some of you probably passed the test with flying colours, and some of your characters probably did likewise. Hats off to you. Some of these points really are overused cliches. And some characters are actually really annoying. But let me tell you a little story about my girl.

I am not responding to the fact that Hannah scored poorly on the test. I'm actually really pleased. 45 is pretty much best-seller territory, as long as I use a pseudonym and choose a different title. I designed her to be a Mary-Sue. At the time, of course, I had only the vaguest notion of what a Mary-Sue is. I only remember looking at the drawing and thinking, "No. I want to make her younger, I want her to scare people, and I want to make her powerful." In this body, power is difficult to define, and even more difficult to express. I wanted her kind of powers, the powers to move things she couldn't move physically, with the power of her mind, which is sharp and clever and sarcastic. The power to get inside people, to understand why they thought the things they thought about her, and the power to recall and remember things the way she does, so she could know every important moment in her life, zero in on it like she's seeing herself under a microscope. I wanted to be different and special, like Hannah was different and special. I wanted to look the way I felt inside, odd, out of place, and a little bit someone to be wary of. And, to be honest, I didn't want to be disabled. I was at a time in my life where I was afraid to write about people with disabilities, because I live in a small town, and in many cases, I was considered "the girl with cerebral palsy." So Hannah is physically normal, but improved. Because whenever I did write based on my own experiences, it didn't matter what the disability was. I wrote about a blind person, a person in a chair, a person with canes, and still, there were sidelong glances, 'mmhmms' and amused half-smiles, softened by pity-tinged eyes. It didn't matter what else was going on, I was a person with a disability, and that's all I was. So I wrote about someone who wasn't. I wrote about power and presence that had never been ascribed to me. And I slipped by, unrecognizable. You see, it's not that nobody wants to read about someone who is supposed to be perfect, although I'm sure, it started out that way. It's that nobody wants to read about you. The internet is not kind. Your friends know you are inherently awesome, so your friends take the test, and you score high. However, strangers assume any scrap of confidence you got, any positivity in your identity, as a girl or a women, is accidental or imagined.

When Rowling was about to publish her book, she was told to change her name. She was advised that boys wouldn't read a book by a woman, even if the protagonist was a boy. Which is why her first fan letter is addressed Dear Sir. When I set out to start on The Damn Vampire Novel (sorry, I'm not ready to talk about that yet.), I asked everyone at the NaNo boards what their take on the current crop of vampire novels was, what they were doing wrong, specifically, and if it was simply vampire purists vs teenage romantic vampire lovers. I was concerned, because my vampires are a far cry from Edward Cullen, but I am no expert either. One response stood out to me. He said, essentially, that he didn't like to read vampire books written by women, because women had some weird sexual issues involving vampires he didn't like to think about, so he just steered clear of all of that, and if I had to say my vampire novel was different, it probably wasn't. And in film school, they teach you that no matter what you are writing, you should be trying to appeal to men, ages 18-35, because that's any movie's most profitable audience. It took years before I realized that's not who is watching movies. That's who is making movies.

I said, before, that a certain insidious type of ablism involves telling our stories for us, which means, in reality, that we no longer have that job. Eventually, that means someone is telling our stories to us. Thus, we believe them, subscribe to them, and the cycle continues. There's a matching kind of sexism too. Think about it. They have taken bad writing and given it characterization. They have given it a name. A girl's name. Not because they're sexist. But because that's something girls do. Girls write about girls. They write about strength that real girls don't have. They write about individuality real girls don't have. They write about girls who are comfortable with their body and their sexuality, girls who are wanted, and have the power to turn a boy down, or the ability to say yes and still maintain their sense of self. They write about girls to whom bad things happen, a lot, who still manage to be good people, in spite of that. They write about girls who overcome their surroundings. They write about girls with power, and girls who grow into women who other people aspire to be like, and girls who get the boys everybody wants to have, and girls who make people sometimes uncomfortable with their inherent awesomeness. And that is not good writing because it doesn't happen that way.

I want your Mary-Sue. I want to read fanfic with original characters again, because that's what started me writing my own, and that's what started a lot of my friends writing, period. I want to read books about girls and women like you, whoever you are, or like me. I want to know you, and I want to know that you want to know me. I love meeting new people. Because if we could call bad writing what it is, we could turn writers into good writers, and I love helping people who maybe aren't strong writers yet, but have big feelings and big dreams and good feelings about themselves, and love their characters and treat them like family and have them over for lunch every now and again. I want to write like I'm good enough to get away with writing whatever I want, and I want everyone else to do the same. I want your Mary-Sue, and I'm pretty sure you want her, too. I mean, I may be a disabled, asexual, pagan, feminist, neurosis-ridden writer. Still.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. Not completely, anyway.

Le Shame

2010-03-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

So.
Let's get honest. It's March 16th and I... well. I've written a grand total of around 10 pages. FAIL. RL stuff is kicking me in the butt, and life is getting exhausting. I have faith, though. I'm going to hit my stride somewhere in the next week, and maybe even be able to make up for some of the lost time. Or, at any rate, stop losing it. Ugh. I think I'm just getting old. RL never used to be so busy. I used to have the time to sit down and focus.

I am blaming it on the music. I am of the breed of writer who needs music to write. And the playlist I picked out isn't fitting what I'm writing. Or maybe it's because it's spring. A funny thing happens every spring. Stuff wakes up and lilacs come out and all that jazz, and I get new ideas. Lots and lots and lots of shiny, new, distracting ideas. It's very inconvenient. Also, ten years ago, I didn't have a job. Also, do you know how hard it is to self-publish? Holycrow.

So yeah. The thing is, I'm not off to a good start. I mean, I've started, so there's that. I think - I hope - that I can still make the deadline. Thinking like a businessperson is pretty heavy stuff, not something I'm used to, and I'm hoping now that I have things down a bit (did you know 10 pages on googledocs is actually 20 pages when properly formatted? Yes! Did you know the original Hannah document is 200 pages, and that's without proper formatting? Crap.), I can stop distracting myself and get down to business. I've also noticed some amazing parallels between me at fourteen, and my politics and what I was writing, and what I am writing now, and how that reflects the way I still feel. More on that later.

For now, hanging head in shame, and keeping it down to get some work done.

xfingers for me.

A Call To The Heathens. er.

2010-03-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

Sorry. We don't do heaven and hell where I'm from. ;)

Feeling blah. You know that sinking feeling you feel when you realize you may have put your faith in the wrong person? I got that. Only it's not someone I could give a good swat upside the head and tell them to smarten up. It's just I am realizing I am admiring people who maybe, not necessarily don't deserve it, but deserve it less than I thought they did. I admire people because I see parts of myself in them, watch them succeed, and feel optimistic. And then I find out that in fact, we don't share all that much, or they don't like those parts of themselves. And that makes me feel duped. And also, disappointed. And, maybe a little bit lonely. So, I'm a bit morose today, but it really has me thinking about something.

Thanks little-miss-sunshine, for your tireless efforts on my behalf. I am always happy to provide distraction. The search continues. But for now, I would like to discuss a different search, for something else entirely.

Disclaimer: If you are a Twi-hard fan, and you feel you cannot take even one more minute of Twilight-bashing today, lest it provoke in you nonsensical rage that is defensive to the point of reducing you to irrational shrieking, it might be safer for you to skip this post. If, conversely, you are just one of those bitter, jaded haters who want to watch Stephenie Meyer/Robert Pattinson/Bella Swan/Fill In Unidentified Twilight Problem, get dragged through the mud, spit on, eaten and then puked out, I must ask you to also skip this post. I don't drink that koolaid. I much prefer serious discussions and constructive criticism.

So. Part of this project is writing, but another part is publishing, and one of the things I am terrible at, is marketing myself. I get all stammery. So I've been looking up places to market my book, once it's published. And I came across this:

www.goodreads.com

Have you been here? It's awesome. I'm sure I haven't even combed all its uses yet. Chiefly, I like how it promotes self-published and POD authors, and also, how you can find books you want, and they'll find you other, completely obscure books you might like, that you have never heard of, and tell you where to get them. Now, Hannah is a sci-fi, or as sci-fi as I'm willing to get (I hate hardcore genre purists. I cannot do one genre. I am not that dedicated to one way of thinking. I'm sorry) so I got a little off topic, but where it asks you to list your favorite books, I did, and wound up looking through the list of fairytales and supernatural stories (totally counts. Hannah is a supernatural novel. nyeh.) And. Well.

As I've just stated, I am not one of those people who dump on Stephenie Meyer and the Twilight Saga (saga, really?) just because, hey, it's Sunday and I don't have anything to write. Because of that, I'm going to do my best to stay away from the GAPING PLOTHOLES and the general anti-female, anti-girl, anti-woman attitudes in the book (Be ye warned, Twilight fans, I cannot guarantee that I will never discuss my many and varied issues with the books, just that I promise not to do it now.) But I am a little annoyed with Meyer, because I feel she has taken something that is very precious to me. Here's the thing; There is nothing I love more than a good fairytale. A good fairytale for adults is really hard to find. Gregory Maguire does it, and Neil Gaiman does it (I don't read that much of him though, so I really can't say anything there.) Everything else is either published by a Harlequin imprint or... well. Or it's for young adults. And it looks, sounds, feels, tastes and smells exactly like Twilight. Which, I'm sorry, reads like a Harlequin, but without the naughty bits.

I suppose I shouldn't say that. Carrie Jones' Need reads like Twilight without all the gender-bias problems. House of Night from P.C. and Kristen Cast, reads more like Twilight if someone had gotten to Bella, and she'd met Edward after she'd been turned into a vampire (there's less anti-girl in that one too, though just as much boy-obsessive angst, wtf?), and if I read another review of a book that says, "Twilight Fans will love it!" I am going to vomit, for real. I will literally look that reviewer up and drive to zir house, just so I can throw up on the right pair of too-expensive shoes.

Yes, I know. Now, more than ever, books have to capitalize. They have to make money, they have to be six-figures. They are competing with, in no particular order, free TV, free online tv, blockbuster movies (which also come free, if you know where to go, I'm just saying) free youtube videos of a cat dancing on a rug and a baby playing a piano concerto, vapid and materialistic magazines which sell for much cheaper and offer a much quicker thrill, and of course, scores of sometimes incredibly well-written and insightful fanfic on the internet. Not only is it free, but it's a set of established characters that already has a fan base, it usually has a healthy dose of smut and some taboo for those too young to buy those books when their parents aren't looking, and it's totally legal. Goddess, if they didn't have the blessed Fear Of The Evil Mary-Sue to fall back on, (another rant, for another day.) safe to say, self-publishers would be making scores more money and big publishing houses would fall like the ancient Romans. So I get it, Idiot Publishers. You're tapped. You've got nothing else to go on, and TV and Movies has been pulling this crap for years and no one says anything.

Consider me saying something. Twilight has done all it can do. None of these new versions, whether they are well-written or even genuinely better than the original, (like the aforementioned Need, and the very well-written and innovative Blue Blood Series) will have that success. Fans will call them ripoffs, dissenters will call them wannabes. And potential readers and writers (both of which I am) will simultaneously not want to read anything that looks like a modern fairytale for fear of crushing disappointment, or not want to write it, for fear of being mocked as 'another one of those.' And we will all miss out.

Someone, for pity's sake, write me a fairytale. Seriously, I don't care if you're seventeen and got a C on your last English assignment and have to POD it. I will buy it. I am that desperate. I want to be able to love it again. One day, I dream of writing an adult fairytale of my own. Give me something to put in my cranial cauldron, so that I am able to do that. Don't let bitterness over what Meyer did to vampires, or fear that it's not like what's good right now, stop you. One day, possibly soon, Twilight will be done. And there will have to be something else. I'd love to be that someone else, myself. But I really wouldn't mind if it was another someone else. I just want something there, to be enjoyed, to be able to enjoy. I'm not jealous of JK Rowling for being so freaking rich and famous and now she thinks she can just go away OMG, she's totally just in it for the money and fame. I'm not jealous of Christopher Paolini just because he only got published so young because his mommy and daddy are in the business, I've written books way better than him and nobody reads them. And I am not jealous of Stephenie Meyer just because OMG she's a total Suethor, it's pathetic, people only read the books because 'omg edwards so hot!!!'"*

I just really want something to read.

*Italicized comments are not mine. They are lifted, sometimes directly, from conversations with other unpublished or self-published authors, all of whom sounded like they were more into sour grapes than anything resembling real criticism. What the hell? Were we not readers first? I'm just saying.

In Which I Remember Why I Hate This

2010-03-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

whew. I really didn't wanna hit the RAGE! button so close to the beginning and scare off potential readers. I feel all expunged now. Thanks for hanging in. A few quick things:

1. Firstly, does anyone know where the quote on my header comes from? It's one of my favorites, and I can't remember where I found it, or who it's by, and I looked it up and couldn't find it. I feel like an ungrateful hack leaving it at "unknown" like that. So if anyone knows, help a lady out?

2. Thank you to the amazing awesome person who went and left a comment. My first comment! From a person I don't know! OMG I'm like, a blogger now, or something. Shoot.

3. I realized, belatedly, that my post may have left out people who were disabled through accident, illness, or circumstances that arose later in life. I apologize. The situation at hand centered around people born with disabilities, and since I myself was diagnosed in early infancy, and most of the people I know from the community were similarly diagnosed shortly after birth, I sometimes lump us all together when I discuss the political and social aspects, and forget that a person who is disabled later in life may experience things drastically differently than one who has been born into it. I'm fairly confident to say I'm sure we all feel ostracized in similar ways by portrayals in the media, but I wanted to be clear I didn't mean to leave anyone out.

So. Now that's done. You know what else?

Beginnings suck. I do not like writing beginnings. They are crap. They are hard. I am a terrible writer and nobody loves me, either. hmph. Y'know what I like to write? I like endings. When I write a screenplay, I always, always know like, the last 20 minutes. So I get through the VICIOUS HELL OF WRITING THOSE FIRST 10 @#%$?! PAGES LIKE YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO, and then reward myself by writing the last half hour. I almost never even have to edit it much. Then I just muck around in the middle for like, 100 pages or so. You know what? That's really hard to do with a novel. I don't have a set page limit. Plus, I kind of like, know where we're going to end up, but, unlike with a script, I am responsible for all the detailed nuances of how we get there, and I don't know them all yet. So I have to tackle this thing head-on, and chronologically. Not everyone has to do that, as I understand, and if you have a secret for doing it the other way, I would really like for you to share it with me.

I think I know where some of the problem is, to be honest. In all of Hannah's early incarnations, I touched a little on her infancy and origins, but left most of it to be explained at a later date, and much of it glossed over and left 'in the ether' so to speak. With this new, darker version, I cannot afford, nor do I really want, to leave that up to someone else to interpret. Not that I don't know the other characters at least as well as I know her, not that I can't get inside their heads it's just... I like hers better. Hannah's respective mothers both come into the story from bad places, and early on, I don't particularly like them. And I have to make them a little bit unlikeable, which I didn't have to do the first or second time I did this. Plus, I'm not good at subtlety, and I'm worried I'm going to give too much back story right off the jump. Pretty much I'm worried that after all this time, I still suck.

I wouldn't be doing this project if I didn't think Hannah could do it. If I thought the story was a good example of what I was capable of in high school, but it was time to let it die, I would move on. There are other novels I would like to write. (Don't ask me about the damn vampire novel. Don't.) This project is one part narcissism, one part that PUBLISH HANNAH occupies slot #2 of my List Of Things To Do Before I Die. But another part of it is, I owe it to myself to be the writer I set out to be when I began the project. I owe it to fourteen-year-old me to say, "This is what you wanted, and it was possible. It is possible." And I owe it to me now to say that I maybe haven't always been as good as I am now, and hopefully, I will be better eleven years from now, but the stories can come out amazing, not just in spite of, but because they were written by me. Because I am talented, but lots of people are talented. Nobody else has my stories, and that means something. This is a story that I want to be told, and in my best moments I sometimes believe that this is a story that needs to be told, and it's mine. It's good. It really is. And that I can go 'on record' to say that is the miracle of the thing.

When I was fourteen, though, I had no idea how much I sucked. By now I'm aware enough to know my weak spots. Not that I wanted to be able to continue writing absolute crap uninterrupted, but it makes first drafts that much harder, because the general rule that first drafts always suck, you're going to hate them, and you're supposed to just know that, is clouded up by all that, "maybe if I just do this..." And I could just wring my own neck. Because after all this time, I know, in the way that I am an intelligent person with some experience, at least, with the writing part of writing that the first draft sucks, and that mine especially suck. But I still sometimes feel like it makes me a bad writer. To just see it sitting there. Being awful.

Whatever. We've begun, anyway, she and I, taking little steps, but hopefully, moving fast, as Hannah says. When I stop having to count each word to reassure me that I am moving forward, you'll be the first to know.

Well, there goes that plan.

2010-03-04T21:00:00.000-08:00

disclaimer: Swears ahoy! Rage can do that. Sorry
So. I was going to write my five pages, and tell you all about it. I was all excited, our first little steps on the final leg of the journey. And then my love sent me this:

http://trixiesfic.livejournal.com/541529.html

Let me just say, I haven't read everything linked here, but I got the gist of the situation. I apologize for not being thorough. I went essentially stupid with rage, after I realized what all of it was about, and couldn't stomach everything. I promised myself to make this blog about my literary and artistic endeavors, and not about the Brave StruggleTM or my politics or my day to day. So um, let me just, try, here, to circle this back from the complete WTFery of how this is screwed up so blatantly and wrongly that I should not even have to point out how blatantly and wrongly it is screwed up, and focus on the points of this that make sense from an artistic and literary standpoint. Because truthfully, if I focus on everything that is SO VERY WRONG with all of this, I will digress into incoherent babbling and nonsensical rage. Again. And let me say right now, I am not going to talk about the wrong inherent in the fact that these apparently fictional conjoined twins were sexually abused. Not only is that part taken off the Myspace to avoid further backlash (with the promise that the whole, sordid story will be available to those willing to pay for the CD, mind) so I wasn't able to read it, but also, I am one of the few and fortunate disabled women who has never been sexually abused or exploited, though I'm not naive enough to believe that was for lack of trying. I, unlike certain other 'artists' do not like to presume to speak for a marginalized group of which I am not part. My heart goes out to those of you who do know that hell, and were also hurt or disgusted by all of this.

So. In film school, they teach you that everything you put into a script and on the screen, everything has a purpose. If life worked out this way, it would be a lot less complicated, and we would have a lot more excuses for our bad behavior. It doesn't. Real life just is. Even if you are part of a religion that believes we are born with a set path (I am not, so, sorry for my callousness,) you cannot presume to know what that path is And certainly, you cannot presume to know for somebody else. So let me make this clear. Once, because once should be enough.

We, as members of the disabled community, do not need you to represent us, artistically or otherwise. We need to be given the opportunity to represent ourselves. We do not exist to provide you something interesting to look at, dissect, discuss, or parody. We do not exist to provide you with thinking points or talking points. We are not a theme. We are not the gun on the wall. We are not here to make a point to you about the preciousness of life, the resiliency of the human spirit, or even how fucking weird the world can be. Our lives are not made meaningful by enriching or educating you. We do not need you to make our lives meaningful. We are not unique because we were born with more apparent flaws than you. We are unique because we are people and every person is different.

The thing is, it's not cool to pretend to be disabled. It's not cool when actors do it on TV or movies. I understand, from an objective standpoint, why a severely autistic person might not be able to play a severely autistic person. But every time I see a sighted person playing a blind person, or a person in a wheelchair when I saw them just last week walking on another show, I get the rages all over. Because not only are you taking jobs away from the community of artists with disabilities, you are sending a clear message:
Nobody wants to look at you. The only way we can make this acceptable is to remind people it's not real.

We are real. We're not quirky or creative or interesting based on what our bodies or brains do or do not do, because we do not make those choices. You are not creative or especially interesting if you have red hair, even though red hair is a recessive gene and that makes it rare.

This is part of what bothers me about the whole Evelyn\Evelyn mess. That Amanda Palmer's defense seems to be, from what I can glean from the Myspace and recent response, that she just thought it was 'interesting.' It's not interesting to be a person with a disability. Further, you don't get to decide what disabled is. Her saying other people thought it was the most creative and interesting idea ever does not take away from the fact that it is wrong. Concepts can be morbid and strange and intriguing, and still not something you'd actually want to see. People can be creative and fascinating and cutting edge, and still be over-privileged assholes who don't see what they're doing wrong even when someone points it out to them. Which, um, is pretty much what happened.

And conjoined twins? Are born with disabilities. They are born without fully functioning independent bodies. They are not inherently flawed or inherently bad. But their bodies do not work the way they are 'expected' to, the way the world is made for them to work in. And no, many of them probably don't feel like people with disabilities. Guess what? Neither do I! Shocking, but I don't wake up every morning and go, "how will I ever manage brushing my teeth and flossing today, let alone going to work?" I just do what I have been doing for the past 20+ years, and make this body do what it needs to do, the best I can. There are days when I accidentally grab the door handle with the wrong hand, and then remember, "oh right, the door's not too heavy. wrong hand." There are days when I can walk the 40 or so minutes home from work, and days I just don't want to make the effort. I function. I get bitter, I get angry, I get the rages, when stuff like this comes up. I get exhausted sometimes too. And sometimes, at about 3AM, I think about how I deserve more, and how much things could be different. Who doesn't?

The bottom line: We are not a metaphor for anything. We are individual people facing unique challenges, that can either be ignored or glossed over, or blown out of proportion for the entertainment value of people who are never required to deal with us head on, the way we are forced, every day, to acknowledge and accept that we are not worthless, no, but we are most certainly worth less. And really, we should have known that.

When you pretend to be a cliche of a disability, you are not doing it to be avant-garde. You are not doing it to make a statement about us. You are not doing it because you find it 'creative' or 'interesting.' You are doing it for the freak factor. You further the idea that the best we can ask for is that it will one day be okay to be a freak, when what you could be doing, is standing next to us in support as we explain to the world that we were never freaks to begin with. I meant what I said before. What makes me different and interesting is not in my body. It may be in my brain, but not where people are looking. And it's tacky, childish stunts like this that make screenwriting professors look at people like me, and tell us to change the story, because no one would ever believe an average guy would fall in love with a woman with a mental disability. It's stunts like this, and people like you, who make it impossible for us to tell our own stories. Ours are true, but yours, well. You do know how to draw a crowd, don't you?

And if you are one of those people, I don't care how talented or interesting you think you are. I f*cking hate you.
(more to come on the actual project, promise.)

First and Foremost.

2010-03-04T12:58:00.000-08:00

There's a story I like to tell.

When I was a kid, following well into my teenage years, I used to warn people that I was odd. Before the anxiety was diagnosed, before biochemistry forced me to acknowledge my asexual status and circumstances turned me into an aromantic, and years before I had discovered alternative religions, back when, as far as we knew, the kids only made fun of me because of the Cerebral Palsy, and all that entailed, I used to say to my mother, quite frequently, "I think something is wrong in my head. I don't think it works like other people's heads work." My poor mother used to pat me on the head, and reassure me that at my age, everybody feels like an outsider.

One day, when I was seventeen or so, a family friend came to dinner. She had two sons, both a few years younger than me, and closer to my brother's ages. But the younger one and I, we sat up at the dining room table that night, as our respective mothers chitchatted about... whatever it is they chitchat about, and talked shop. It was slow and stilted in places, he was still younger than me, young enough to believe that he could be published within the year, and it would be an instant bestseller, and bonus, people would be thrilled because at the time, he was something like fourteen. I had to reign him in quite a bit, I remember. But it was nice, to get to talk on the same wavelength with someone, to be on equal footing, crossing terrain I knew well.

Our mothers watched the whole thing, eventually abandoning their talk to listen to us, until my mother turned to his, and said in an interested tone, "I never knew he wanted to be a writer." His mother smiled in the indulgent way parents of artists often do, one part proud, one part uncertain, one part jocular.
"Since he was six." She said. My mother nodded.
"Her too." She said, and then, suddenly, conspiritorally, she turned towards the mother. "They're weird, aren't they? I used to think it was just her, that she would grow out of it in time, but then she got to high school, and there's like, there's a whole group of these weird kids. They're a whole different kind of person." And his mother laughed and agreed. I remember staring at my mother, until she shifted guiltily and said, "Sorry." and I just smiled, then, and told her honestly.
"I'm just glad you finally said it."

Whenever people ask me if I feel different, I always say yes. But then I have to add an asterisk. I don't feel different, being asexual, or being physically and mentally disabled, or having suffered anxiety or insomnia, or studying pagan theology. I feel different because I'm a writer. I feel different because I feel differently. Because other things are immediately noticeable to others, they make easy assumptions. I could write a whole post on these assumptions, and their wrongness. But I won't. Because this blog is not about that.* What this blog is about is that when I was fourteen, I wrote a novel.

When I was fourteen, I wrote a novel about a little girl in a big, scary grown-up world. A world where she had to watch her strong, independent mother turn weak and scared. A world of grownups who were afraid of things they didn't understand, and kids who were just plain afraid, like kids get. And I created a little girl who could fight back, and fight hard. Five pages every morning, getting up early to squeeze in computer time before my brothers woke, and hearing my mother hush them when they tried to pout about how unfair it was, that extra half hour it took me, "Be quiet, your sister's working. This is important." And I wrote it, and I finished it, and then... then it ended.

But it always began again, and again, and again. And in between each incarnation, there were new things to write, new stories and characters, and also, real life. I got into a top film college, then had to leave it because the disability services were not prepared for me. I watched my best friend lose her heart and soul to a monster disguised as a man. I lost family members to illness and disaster, and friends to distance and growth. And I wrote. And I wrote. And then I wrote more. And always, in the background, there was Hannah. Waiting for me to finish. For years I toyed with the idea of rewriting, reworking, and getting Hannah published, but I kept putting it off. And recently, I realized that the reason I was putting it off, was because I didn't want to wait. I didn't want to trust someone else to get the job done. I wanted to self-publish. And for a long time, I wasn't ready for that. I think, I hope, I am now.

These are the things you need to know about the project:

1. I am writing five pages a day, and only five pages a day, as a throwback to my youthfully naive goals. The goal is to self-publish the first Hannah book, have it ready for distribution, by August 31st. This is as close as I can remember the original version first draft being finished. Which means nothing to anyone but me, but it's my project, so myeh. Currently, page count stands at ZERO. (pray for me.)

2. There are actually three novels involved in Project Hannah. I did, actually, complete the first version of the first one, but it never came out dark enough, at fourteen, to consider it done. I recently completed a deliciously dark screenplay titled Everywhere, which nearly cost me what's left of my lingering sanity. So yeah, I think I'm ready now. Of the other two, one was half completed, and the other was outlined. Since the original Hannah had almost no planning, beyond the odd brainstorming session, I am officially working without a net.

3. When I refer to Hannah, unless otherwise stating, I am referring to the character. No, I am not insane. Yes, in theory, I understand she is not a real person. But after 10+ years, I feel that we have a kind of relationship. So much so that a part of me wonders if by finishing this project, I will also be moving myself towards my own happy-or-otherwise ending. (Oh crap, I just gave away the ending. She doesn't die. SPOILER ALERT!) Hannah is one part my daughter, in that she is a child, and even though in later incarnations she grows, she will always be eight years old to me. But in another part, we are members of the same team. The other reason I have for self-publishing is that I feel that we began this journey together, and that's the only way I can conceive of finishing it. We do have conversations. Real ones, even. Just today, after knowing her for eleven years as I do, I learned she is a vegetarian. Isn't that amazing when that happens?**

4. I am epically disorganized, but not epically lazy. When I say this thing has taken me omgelevenyearshowamIsoold? That's not to say that I worked on it nonstop. I'm not a great writer, but I don't absolutely suck. As mentioned, my attention shifted to screenplays, there was college to try (and epically fail) and other bunnies to chase around my head. I am not so much banging my head against a brick wall. More getting reacquainted with an old friend. I just feel it's time to finish what I started.

5. Adding to 'not epically lazy', I currently have a part-time job, two furbabies to raise, travel semi-frequently, and am fiddling with other projects. Thinking of tackling script frenzy this year too. I also have a huge family that I love who sometimes make me want to tear my hair out, and some amazing friends, and some friends who bring the drama. If, on occasion, some of this spills onto this blog, you will have to forgive. I have never had a blog with a purpose before, and am more used to just shouting into the internet.

6. I am a writer inside, yes, but spelling and grammar? Oh boy. Mostly, I will be working with the aforementioned amazing friends to fix any errors. I will also be obsessively nitpicking on my own. But I will miss things. Sorry, and please feel free to correct me.

So. That's it. Me and my girl, and the next six months. Can I do in six months what I haven't managed in eleven years? Better, can I be happy with it?

*gulp*

Um. Maybe?
No. Yes. Yes, for sure. I can.
I think. Well, just watch. We'll see.***

*When I say 'this is not about that' I am simplifying. I am a person with a physical and mental disability. That fact and all that it entails worms its way into my life, and into my writing, both personal and professional. IRL, ie, NOT on the internet, I am often told I think a lot about my disability. I don't. But it's there, it occupies a space inside of my being, and so sometimes, there is a trickle-down effect and it turns up in different places where able-bodied people may feel it shouldn't, isn't warranted, or doesn't usually. If talk of HAVING a disability makes you feel uncomfortable, you are reading the wrong blog. Feel free to hit the back button, no one will judge you.

**Originally, Hannah was an experiment. My cousin and I created the physical character so that we could recreate the famous experiment where scholars sat around a table, and lent their energy to the room, focusing on their imaginary person. Supposedly, this created an actual poltergeist, a metaphysical being of pure energy, who could move things around and communicate. When we did it, the experiment never worked, and I kept her for myself. I don't see Hannah as a poltergeist, as in, I KNOW she does not occupy physical space of any kind, but after eleven years, she too is a part of my metaphysical and spiritual makeup, and takes up her own energy, inside me. That's why I feel like if I finish the project, I will move on to bigger and better things.

***When I was a kid, "We'll see" always meant, "convince me, because I want to say no, but I don't have a good enough reason yet."