Today I walked past a man waiting for the subway. He was staring intently into nothingness, a phone pressed to his ear. His feet were planted firmly on the ground, a little apart. In his free hand, he held some flowers, wrapped up in white paper. With great sincerity he announced: “I would do anything for friendship.”
That halted me. How intimate isn’t that statement? “I would do anything for friendship.” It’s spilling your heart’s content, the very essence on your soul, on the floor of a subway platform. Tossing it, randomly, at the feet of strangers. Such as me.
There’s a story there, clearly. He might have been talking to a friend. His wife. The girl he hoped would become more than a friend. or he might have been conversing with his shrink.
“I would do anything for friendship.”
Is it a beautiful statement? Or a tragic, pathetic, desperate one? I couldn’t make up my mind. But all the way home, that unknown man followed me in my head, riding my mind.
Such a simple statement, yet so unspeakably complicated.
Chess is often used as a shortcut to showing that someone is smart in novels. Like the flighty heroine or rakish hero – putting them in front of a black and white board and having them whup ass is a very convenient and simple way of showing that there’s more to this Duke of Slut than just hot buns enclosed in a pair of smexy angsty pants. He’s smart with a capital ‘S’ as well, because, eh… I guess we all know that smart people like shuffling bishops across squares. Or something.
If this sounds like sour grapes, it totes is. I suck at chess. Always have.
When I was a child, my father would sometimes play chess with me on Sunday mornings. This was for a very brief time, you see, because he soon grew tired of it. I was an impossible opponent because I simply refused to grasp the rules.
See, I liked horses. The knights were little horses. Ergo, I did everything to conquer dad’s knights and everything to preserve my own. When I had all four of them, I considered myself a winner. That whole check mate business – I couldn’t be bothered with that. I just sat down to play with the all pretty horses, ignoring the board.
Today I can’t even be bothered to care about the horses. I suppose I’m a lost cause. Please tell me I’m not the only one.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Happy Valentine’s Day if you spend it with your husband. Happy Valentine’s Day if you spend it with your Mom. Happy Valentine’s Day if you spend it with your dog. Happy Valentine’s Day if you spend it all by your lonely self. In fact, especially if you spend it on your own.
These flowers are for you. Enjoy!
You can now get a hardback leather case for your MacBook/MacBook Pro that looks brilliantly, awesomely, beautifully just like a book.
I WANT! Something horrible.
I’ve said it before – I’ve been neglecting this blog. Why? I think the problem is that I can’t find what to do with it.
It’s not that I don’t like blogging. I do. I’ve done it before with great results (that is, if you consider riling up young men with a preference for expander ear rings who like music with -core in it, a success) I think the problem is that I don’t know what I want this to be – am I to talk about writing? My writing? Writing in general? About books?
Or should I talk about me?
Here’s the thing – I’m not very focused. I’m all over the place; writing, me, books, music… I chatter. It’s who I am. I suppose I could press myself into the mold of some other writer, but guess what? I’m not some other writer. I’m me.
In Booklife, Jeff VanderMeer says that he’s seen lots of people trying to start a new blog and to turn it into their vision, only to see how slowly, it returns to the writer’s usual style. I think that’s true. Besides, either you like me or you read someone else’s blog. I have nothing to promote, no advice to dispense and no real agenda. I’m nobody. Just me.
I’m a charming, somewhat over-intellectualizing, music-loving geek who writes books with girls, ghouls and gizmos in them, and I don’t think I can pretend to be anything else. Actually, I don’t even want to be anything else.
So here’s what. I want to find out what my voice is and what I want to use this for. I’ll experiment a little. Try writing about my writing, about the fascinating facts I stumble upon while researching. Maybe I’ll post cute videos and generally chatter about musings on life, books and whatever strikes my fancy. If you want to give me feedback, like tell me I’m boring or funny or interesting, do. Otherwise, I’ll just prattle on anyway.
So grab a cup of coffee, huddle up by the fire and let’s chat!
Everybody always says be yourself, as if that is an absolute positive. But what if, deep down, you’re not really very nice?
I can think of a whole slew of people whom I think we’d all liked better if they hadn’t been themselves. Like Elizabeth Báthory. Personally, I think she’d been so much nicer if she had suppressed those murderous impulses. Also, probably ‘be yourself’ isn’t necessarily a good advice to someone who is secretly a megalomanic madman with secret aspirations to be proclaimed a god.
So before listening to advice like that, please ask yourself: if people really knew you, would they want to burn you at the stake?
I just read this really interesting post over at Dear Author. And it made me think – about men, women, sexuality, romance and double standards.
Female sexuality has, in a Western historical context, always been a problem. Traditionally, women may have been associated with home and hearth but that has in no way meant that they have been viewed as less ’sexual’ than men, or possessing less sexual drive. In fact, Western society has perpetually pictured women as a dichotomy – destined for purity, motherhood and virtue, while burdened with a sinister, bubbling undercurrent of dangerous sexuality.
Female sexuality has not been so much denied in the past as feared. Women need to hold on to modesty and virtue and not give in to their true, baser nature. Doing that would turn them into monsters, entirely driven by their needs (as illustrated by a whole sleuth of Victorian novels, especially of the Goth variety). Being the virgin and not the whore has not been seen as coming naturally to women. It has rather been seen as her battling her low nature and achieving the higher purpose she was given in Creation (insert the Hallelujah Choir here). Meanwhile, uncontrolled, aggressive female sexuality has been condemned to the point where it was used as one of the trademarks of evil – see the notion of orgies at witch sabbaths. The fact that women thus needs to be protected from their own nature is really an underlying rationalization for the traditional Western way of dealing with female sexuality.
By comparison, male sexuality is considered pretty harmless – at least unless it contaminates ‘pure’ females. Male sexuality directed at already fallen women has not been a problem at all – oh, yes it’s not been encouraged always perhaps, but it has been tolerated. Men, it seems, can exercise their sexuality without endangering either themselves or anyone else.
So why is this? Well, in a world without paternity tests, whoever controls women’s fertility, controls the offspring and therefore, the future and survival of our society. Thus, women’s fertility is a key resource in our society’s survival. As such, it needs to belong to society rather than the individual woman. It needs to be controlled, and the only way to do that is to control women’s sexuality.
Therefore, unlike male sexuality, female sexuality is subversive. It’s a barely contained revolution. It’s Madame Guillotine waiting to happen, right there in our wombs. Men, well, as long as they stick with the women we know are lost to the cause already, they cannot do that much harm. But touch our society’s future, our pure women, and we *will* have your private parts slowly grilled over a smoldering fire. Trust me.
However, dirtying a pure woman isn’t the end of a man. He isn’t ruined, he’s merely harmed the common resource base. He’s a thief. He’s done something bad. The woman on the other hand, is another matter. She’s a whore. She is something bad. She’s ‘compromised’ as a resource and cannot play the part that was intended for her. Her only use will be to direct male sexuality towards her and away from the pure women – unless the man marries her of course. Then her use to society is restored and she’s somewhat redeemed.
Seen like that, yes, female sexuality becomes a currency that does not exist independently, for women themselves. It becomes an almost magic resource base. It’s always lurking, like a monster under the bed, threatening to rise up and potentially kill us all. Sort of like Tiamat, emerging from the primordial sea, threatening our whole world with the coming of the Flood. It is not to be tinkered with, certainly not by women for their own pleasure. Geez. It’d be like handing a five-year-old a loaded gun, right, because you know women aren’t really that much smarter. At least that has been the generally acknowledged truth for ages.
Funnily, in a way, historical romances are subversive in this regard. What a romance heroine often does is tell society that ‘no, my sexuality is not a resource to be used for the good of society. It’s mine to do with what I want’ by making her own choice. In that way, she is somewhat regaining control over her own sexuality. In the past, it has been expected that she proves she can handle the gun – she mustn’t go shooting all over the place, so to speak. Romantic marksmanship has been expected in heroines. But that is changing and I’m glad for it.
Generally, to me, it’s not about the need for more promiscuous heroines, or fewer virginal ones. Both belong, as do women with sexual traumas and women who are blithely just toddering along. What I think we need to do is to broaden the scope and to problemize female sexuality to a lesser degree than we might do in romance at the moment. Because unless the genre (not individual books but the genre as a whole) can address the female experience in terms that allow a wide scope of women to enjoy the books, we (as in writers and publishers and anyone else with a stake in the genre) are shooting ourselves in the foot. In my humble opinion.
For me, as a writer of historical romance, my characters must, unless they are to be complete anachronisms, to a certain point embrace the traditional ideas of female sexuality outlined above. On the other hand, unless they are to be complete assholes, they cannot embrace them fully. Because frankly, either a man or a woman who thinks women’s value is intrinsically connected to their sexual status is pretty offensive to me as a 21st century woman. I hate reading about them, and I’d hate writing about them. Yeah, it’s a challenge, but one I’ll certainly enjoy.
So, I’ll just add “how do you handle female sexuality?” to my ‘list of things to evaluate about project’, just next to “never make villain effeminate or overweight because it’s an offensive trope.”
I don’t think I’m alone in having experienced a little snow lately, am I? Seems large parts of the world are snowed in at the moment. Right now, a few days before Christmas, it’s pretty cozy. The kids are playing around in it, making snowmen, and the neighbor’s dog gets an apoplectic fit of happiness every time he comes out and OMG, it’s SNOW out!*
I’m less enthusiastic. Besides liking the idea of having a white Christmas, the snow is just there for me. It’s not something I think about. But I did the other day – I stepped out of the door and thought: “Oh, the temperature’s dropped.” It wasn’t because I was freezing, because it actually felt warmer than the day before as the wind had stilled. No, it was the snow. I stepped on it, and I could tell from the sound and texture of it that it was colder than the day before.
That gave me pause. I never reflected on it before, but when I thought about I realized that I can mostly tell the temperature within a degree or two just from the feeling of the snow. I know the heavy, wet snow when it’s getting warmer. I know the fine, dusty feeling of newly fallen snow. And I know exactly how cold it is when you start getting those “knirp-knirp” noises when you walk.
There’s more. I know how a particular sort of white skies means snow, and lots of it. I can smell snow in the air before it falls – that sharp, clean, almost electric smell that always heralds its arrival. And I know how ice sounds when it’s safe to walk on it, and what sort of creaking means you need to watch out.
I know all of those things, and I never reflected on it. They come so naturally to me that I never even noticed them. But they’re not instinctive. I learned them. Someone from Kairo or Bangkok or even Rome wouldn’t know them.
They don’t make me unique, but they are part of the very many tiny things that make me me. Even more, they’re part of a sensorial world that I can describe and make come alive for those who don’t know them. I can write snow.
Hm. I wonder how many other things I know that I’m not aware of?
*It’s one of the nice thing about being a dog, getting all these great surprises. Like having your Mommy return to you with bags with cans of dog food AGAIN instead of having abandoned you to dying alone and unloved like you had resigned yourself to after she left twenty minutes ago.
Would anyone have anything bad to say about me? Hardly, you say, me being so sweet and inoffensive. However, there’s just no pleasing some people:
Writing this letter stems from a desperation to be heard, if not by a court of law, then by a court of public opinion. Here’s the story: There is no place in this country where we are safe from Ms. Felicia Holt’s bedfellows, no place where we are not targeted for hatred and attack. Ms. Holt says that she can make all of our problems go away merely by sprinkling some sort of magic, pink, pixie dust over everything that she considers uncivilized or grungy. Should we care that large numbers of the worst classes of meretricious, cheeky savages I’ve ever seen actually believe such pudibund things? Should we try to convince them otherwise? I don’t think so. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that one of the brain-damaged succubi in her employ has penned an extensive treatise whose thesis is that Ms. Holt would never even consider destroying our moral fiber. Contrary to what that embarrassingly emollient hagiography asserts, the virus of elitism took control of our country’s political life long ago. Now, thanks to Ms. Holt’s insinuations, that virus will continue to spread until no one can recall that with Ms. Holt so forcefully turning heretics loose against us good citizens, things are starting to come to a head. That’s why we must take a no-nonsense approach to dealing with snarky grumpy-types. The recent outrage at Ms. Felicia Holt’s recommendations may point to a brighter future. For now, however, I must leave you knowing that you don’t know how tempted I am to slap the stuffing out of her.
From this website (where you can get a random complaint generated).
Like my magic pink pixie powder doesn’t wok. Pfft. All the brain damaged succubi in my employ assure me it works perfctly. 
Last week I picked up a book by the name of Queen Victoria. Demon Hunter in which Queen Victoria slays zombies and generally kicks a**. It was a fun read, don’t get me wrong, but it also made me realize one thing.
I don’t like zombies.
Give me ghosts, vampires, shifters, fairies, angels and all manner of demons – but not zombies. They gross me out. Plus, I find them boring. It’s like watching human intestines dry.
Why?
Well, first, zombies are dead. Not the way vampires are dead, but really dead. I mean, have you smelled dead things? They smell… Dead. As in bloody gross. Sweet, cloying, rotten and… Blerk. Let’s not go there. Dead things are not appetizing – even, let me note, if you are a zombie, as apparently they prefer their prey alive.
Which brings me to the second point: zombies eat people. No romantic damnation, guys. No conversation. No sex. Just being treated like the human equivalence of a Big Mac (with surplus ketchup). Plus I bet being eaten alive hurts. All in all, human interaction with zombies tend to be short, nasty, brutish – and fairly pointless. I don’t want to read about a character devouring a sticky bun in excruciating detail, so why would I want to read about one eating, say, Bill?
Also, I can’t help but wonder – do zombies poop? I think they do and it doesn’t make me like them more. In fact, I think the very fact that I repeatedly ask myself this when watching zombie movies is the ultimate reason I don’t snack while watching them.
So even if I tried jumping on the zombie band wagon, I don’t see myself succeeding. It’s too slimy and full of old brains and I would probably just slip off anyway.