The Reality of Office Politics

(This is yet another interpretation of Murphy's Law. I think scientists need to seriously start considering Murphy's Law as the Grand Unified Theory of Everything in Nature.)

In any given office setting, no matter how well you perform your job, there will always be someone who sees only your mistakes. Events and timelines will conspire to ensure that your superiors are present when this coworker decides to draw attention to your mistakes. The situation will also be such that your defense would either seem silly in the context (as it would sound defensive and defeat the purpose) or would take up too much time and, well, see the first part of this paragraph.

Usually I can shake this off: I'm good at my job and the folks that need to know it, know it, and they know it well. I'm not perfect and welcome the opportunity to see where I can improve my performance. Also, some people will just never like you.

When I encountered this reality last week, I did shrug it away. But when it showed up again this week early in the morning before the caffiene had kicked in to shore me up after a terrible night's sleep...I let it get to me. Just enough to make me vent to Mark on the drive home.

I have a feeling I'll be over it tomorrow. Futile office politics just aren't worth the mental energy.

Undermining the Genre

I've often bemoaned Battlestar Galactica's modern-to-us medicine in the midst of far-advanced science and technology clearly evident week after week. Seems a bit ridiculous and a bit of a conceit that works against the underpinnings of the genre itself. Almost as if the show wanted to create something science fictional but grabbed at the obvious trappings instead of building a world from the ground up.

I encountered the same thing in a most unexpected source yesterday: a YellowBook commercial. We see a futuristic setting in which a woman is discovering (through an embarrasing video phonecall) that her man is cheating on her. She disconnects and starts doing a neat physically interactive search through the YellowBook to find a pawn shop. She brings in a very tricked out futuristic guitar (clearly her ex's) to the pawn shop to get her revenge and walks away with a huge smile on her face and...a stack of dollar bills? In one sense, I get that it's clearly short hand to show us that YellowBook can find what you need for both financial gains and emotional satisfaction. But it just took the wind out of their futuristic setting's sails.

I have the same problem with romance novels that, in the denouement or the big climax when the hero and heroine finally reveal to each other their love, the hero goes all possessive of the heroine and says, "Mine." It comes off as undermining the entire concept of what romance is (to me): loving another person as a person, not as a possession or object. But, given that "Mine" is often something romance heroes say of their lady loves, I think I might be in the minority of women in my interpretation of the genre (or, in my interpretation of what love is).

#1 Rule for Reading Romance

Always be prepared for any interruption during the sensual scenes.

If you are reading your book in a public place, one such scene will arrive just as someone sits down next to you or tries to engage you in conversation about the book you're reading. If you are reading at home while family is around, one such scene will be in progress when your child crawls into your lap or your significant other decides to chat you up. If you are building towards one such scene in your reading and have to set the book aside for a responsibility, you will never be able to get back to the book as quickly as you would like, sometimes even to the extreme of losing the book, leaving it behind at home when you go on a trip, and so on.

This rule is inviolable.

Armageddon Eve

God willing, this time tomorrow night a clear winner will be emerging and there will not be a trace of the shenanigans of 2000 and 2004 to muddle things for days or weeks afterwards. I'm ready to know who's going to be leading this country for the next four years and get on with making my peace on that score (a task which will be infinitely easier should my preferred candidate win).

I've kept mostly silent about politics on my blog and at work. In fact, I've only really hashed this election out with Mark, and he's been in leaning my way for a while. This is mostly because I don't seem to find myself around people who are undecided and whom I might offer information or an informed opinion that might help them. Mostly I find myself frequenting strongly opinionated blogs and in the company of firm believers of one strip or another. If there's one thing the internet's taught me, it's that "debate" is just a way to try to lord it over the other guy (sometimes with impeccable logic, sometimes not), not to actually do any sort of persuading. I've developed an ear for those who are actively seeking an opinion to educate themselves, but mostly I'm just hearing those who are already convinced and want to remain convinced.

It's allowed me to sit back and just watch the narratives fly.

Human beings tell stories to make sense of what's happening around them. This is well and good and vastly entertaining and helpful for things like empathy and, well, just dragging yourself out of bed each day. It's also good for creating something of a fever pitch over tomorrow's results. On the one hand, you have the possibility of Caribou Barbie being one seventy-two year old man's heartbeat away from the Oval Office. On the other hand, you have the possibility of welcoming our new socialist overlord on January 20th. While this has all been very entertaining, I can't say I'll miss it much. Such dramatics can be oh-so-tiring.

If you do happen to be undecided, look past the theatrics, get to your polling place, bring a coin to flip if you must, and vote. Help us get on with reality and life as usual again.

Vegas, Baby!

Everyone survived the first parental trip without the munchkin. Momma and Daddy didn't ruin a vacation by worrying and guilt-tripping. We kept our calls to two a day and half the time Drew didn't want to talk to us (he's out of the phone phase, apparently). Drew was perfectly happy to be hanging out with Gramma and Grampa instead of Momma and Daddy. He did miss us, but he never got too bent out of shape about it. And Gramma and Grampa had a blast with Drew, though they were still very happy to hand him back to us upon our return.

As for Vegas itself, it was a great trip. We even learned a few lessons:

1. Generic less drowsy dramamine is not nearly as less drowsy as the real thing. Thus I had to take a nap just two hours into our time in Vegas.

2. Spending $12 or $13 on a drink is well worth it, apparently. I've never had a drink so well mixed. In fact, I've got a new favorite drink. It's called the Vixen: Glenlivet 12, vermouth, sweet & sour, and honey. Yummy.

3. Apparently the Venetian took seriously their theme and made the hotel float on pretension. At least, that's the vibe we got at the restaurant we selected for dinner. It takes a decent sized pair to bill a restaurant as fine dining and then try to cram seating for 80 into a room barely bigger than our living room and kitchen combined. It's also remarkably crass to interpret a reservation for "as secluded a table as possible" into "here's a seat less than a foot away from another occupied table when there's only three other couples in the entire albeit cramped room." I ordered the cheapest meal on the menu. We ordered only two glasses of wine, and we declined desert. The service was great and the food was good, so we didn't stiff on the tip. But we certainly won't be recommending Valentino's to anyone. Not that they care as we and our circle are most decidedly too middle class for that establishment, apparently.

4. On the other hand, the Luxor seems designed for folks more from our walk of life who want to live it up a bit and have budgeted their vacation accordingly. Mark and I can't stop talking about the fabulous experience we had at Fusia. Sure, a meal with appetizers, entrees, desert, and drinks will set you back at least $200, but man is it worth it. Everything was delicious. The service was superb. The manager was making the rounds and chatting with everyone eating there. Sure, we had people sitting all around us, but this place had maximized their space and there was plenty of room to feel like we weren't sitting on top of our neighbors. If you are in the mood for some high quality food the next time you're in Vegas, go to Fusia. The only downside this place has is that it's closed Wednesdays and Thursdays.

5. Drew's birthdate (the 4th) is our luckiest number at the roulette table. Paid off three times, including once when I had on a whim told Mark to put a second chip on it.

6. Slots aren't nearly as much fun as I used to think. And I'm just not all that into the table games either. Guess I'll be gravitating more toward the shows on our future trips. My age. It shows.

7. The casinos are in the timeshare business. We were accosted several times in several casinos by folks wanting to give away gambling money and discounted show tickets if you'd just take a look-see at this lesser known property of theirs on the south end of the strip. These folks were awful. Anyone they saw that looked to be a married couple over 21 was a target. It got so bad that Mark and I couldn't walk around holding hands or even just side by side in certain areas.

So, a great trip, no trauma to be seen on the part of either the 'rents or the kid, and tips for future such trips. When can we do it again? :)

If Only I Could Fit This in Attractive, Cutesy Print on a Door Hanging

Dear Solicitor/Salesman/Proselytizer:

I am sorry that your vocation requires you to schlep around in this Arizona heat, but you will not find anything more than a polite dismissal at this house. If ever I should wish to partake of your services, product, or faith, I will find you and inquire further.

To forestall any follow-up concerns: If you do not have a website with which I can easily find your company or church, then I will likely never be interested in your services, product, or faith. If you have a spectacular deal on your service or product that is only available for the duration of your visit to this house, then you should not be upset that my potentially choosing to purchase your service or product at a later date will result in more money for you.

Sincerely,
The Family Residence

From the School of "Consider the Audience"

Via John Scalzi, I read Orscon Scott Card's latest screed against gay marriage. It should be noted that I have never read any of OSC's books, and that the manner in which I hear his name these days goes something like this: "Great writer, pity about the politics." (With varying degrees for "great" and "pity" and all manner of descriptors for "politics.") Through all of the mentions of the politics, though, it never sunk in that OSC is LDS. Boy howdy, it's sunk in now.

From the portion of his rant in which he decries the deplorable state of marriage today (admittedly as created by heterosexuals themselves):

Men routinely discard wives and children to follow the nearly universal male biological desire for diversity in mating. Adultery is now openly expected of men, even if faithful wives deplore it.

While there was much in the way of head-scratchery and eye-rolling and whatnot in the text, I actually did a double-take at this point. Didya see how it's all apologetic about male infidelity? Kinda excusing it whilst railing against it? I suppose that's the sort of comment one can expect in a cultural niche still rooting out the last vestiges of its once widely accepted and encouraged practice of polygamy.

Then OSC really ramps up the rhetoric and gives a foamy take on "them's fightin' words" that is so over the top that it makes me wonder if perhaps he's writing for an audience of Mormon separatists living on a stretch of land in Montana. I skimmed over it mostly because the rant had gone on just a tick too long for me to keep my "This wrong-headedness is so wrong as to be laughable" attitude. But I paid enough attention to catch this gem:

Biological imperatives trump laws.

Another double-take. Particularly as that previous quote was still fresh in my mind. I asked myself, "Did I really just read someone lay down the groundwork to re-establish polygamy? Even as he decried adultery as destructive of marriage, a sacred union between one man and one woman?" But as I considered the whole further, it strikes me more as another apologist stance toward polygamy itself. As in, yeah, sure, we can't do it anymore by our own church's teachings, but, hey, it wasn't really all that wrong in the first place; can't fight biological desires/imperatives.

Good thing OSC offered a quick parenthetical dismissing all of the current research demonstrating that sexual preference has a rather significant basis in genetics.

This logic, 'tis all twisty. I think I'll stop trying to follow it now.

Gary Stu Transcendent and the Question of Fiction Categories

Based on anecdotal evidence¹, the vast majority of Americans, when they do manage to pick up a book, read for the pleasures of escapism, to live vicariously another life. But they are looking for a specific set of qualities in that other life: power, success, confidence, vast intelligence, admired by all, attractive to the opposite sex², and single-handedly saving the day (or playing the most substantial role in a set of people saving the day). There is a character that serves this purpose in spades: Mary Sue, assuming she's written "well." When written poorly, the Mary Sue experience is best described by Teresa Nielsen Hayden as follows:

A Mary Sue story is the literary equivalent of opening a package that you thought would be the new jacket you ordered on eBay, only it turns out to contain a poorly-constructed fairy princess costume made of some lurid and sleazy material. It’s tailored to fit a human-size Barbie doll, not you; and when you hold it up to the light, you can see the picked-out stitchmarks where someone else’s name used to be embroidered across the bodice. The dress has been used but not cleaned, and appears to have last been worn during a rather sloppy romantic interlude.

In order to write Mary Sue well, the serial numbers must be filed off just enough to serve a large chunk of the American book-buying population. The physical description of the character, while sufficient to make members of the opposite sex swoon, must be generic enough to be Everyman. The character's job or hobbies must be whatever popular culture considers vogue. The homelife must be supportive or, if there are problems, they must not be the character's fault, and the character must be doing everything humanly possible to resolve the problems. The conflict must always be external: Big Bads mucking things up for the hero. It is essential that the character not really be a character at all, but a flexible outfit that the reader can easily don and move around in without any chafing from rough seams or itchy tags.

In essence, to write a Mary Sue story well, one must transcend the entire purpose of the phenomenon and write not self-insertion stories, but reader-insertion: a choose-your-own-adventure story without the use of the 2nd person voice and conventions of choosing options. This is not exactly easy because human creatures are inherently selfish. We go right to the most cliched of Mary Sue stories when we first start writing: we are seeking that escapism, that world in which, by golly, we are the most important being. Our minds make us the heroes of our own life stories, so naturally we create stories that indulge that. And every slushpile and fanfiction archive groans under the weight of those smelly, used fairy princess costumes.

But we mock and deride Mary Sue. We laugh at her, at the obvious and often grotesque display of someone else's particular ego indulgences. For those of us who don't read for escapism (or at least, not solely for that), and for those of us who write for a story that doesn't serve only to launch ourselves out of our own daily grind and disappointing experiences, we find her in popular culture and roll our eyes. I'm beginning to think we shouldn't. We may be lumping the successful character suit with those soiled fairy princess outfits. The former serves a purpose that millions of Americans pay good money to experience. The latter is the amatuer conflating the experience with the purpose. It's important to sift through those lurid, well-worn costumes. Teresa gets at this herself:

(Someday, not today, I’ll tell the story of how, years ago, Joanna Russ and I used Star Trek fanfic as a sort of Rosetta Stone to decipher recurrent themes and motifs in fantasy and SF written by women. It’s often easier to see underlying patterns and mechanisms in amateur fiction than in slicker commercial work. This started when Joanna identified and described some recurrent narrative motifs she’d spotted in the Trek slash of the day, of which the inverse relationship between incidence of explicit sex and liebestod denouements was the most obvious and least important. There was much more to it. She laid out her entire description; and I, considering it, said “Which is not to say that The Left Hand of Darkness is a specimen of Star Trek slash fiction.” Joanna’s jaw dropped, and we stared at each other in wild surmise. The patterns not only fitted; they explained some otherwise inexplicable plot twists in that novel. We were on to something. And—hey! What about thus-and-such story by Zenna Henderson? And that one by Leigh Brackett? And so forth and so on, ever onward. For the next few weeks we were stoned on literary theory and the codebreaker’s buzz of seeing a seemingly knotty puzzle resolve into plaintext.)

There's a lot of festering humanity in Mary Sue stories. A treasure trove of psychological profiles and cultural trends. This is why they fail as written works, though. They are not stories with characters and conflict and arcs and resolution (genre fiction). They are not clever essays on language and human nature (literature). They are not plot routines for a character suit (popular fiction). They are little more than journals, generally of use only to the author for purposes of entertainment.

At this point, I almost feel compelled to apologize for every snide remark I ever made about Jack Ryan, popular fiction's most successful character suit, Gary Stu Transcendant. I held him in contempt because I decided to hold my reading needs as superior to those of others, while also discounting the purpose behind him. People need that safe haven to shed their existence and don someone else's and experience the euphoric rush of winning big against impossible odds. Some people prefer to fold that need in with other things. Some people don't want that need at all because they'd rather take all the lumps of their own life head-on.

So that is how I shall endeavor to look at book categories and Mary Sue stories. Popular fiction is not trying to tell a story, it's trying to provide the reader with a vicarious experience of another life. This is something that can happen in genre fiction, but is more often than not not the primary purpose. And literature attempts to examine language and humanity, often without the use of a story. Neither method of fiction is better than the other, they only serve different functions. However, within each function, you have a broad range of authorial ability to serve those functions, and some categories are more predisposed to publish the lesser examples than others. For example, a chafing Gary Stu suit is still likely to make a lot more money than a poorly realized genre story or a failed language experiment.

What brought on all of this philosophical musing? The experience of picking up what I expected to be a good space opera (genre fiction) and instead discovering I was being presented with a character suit and asked to dance around in it as the plot moved along. Yet this author is very popular and even escapes from the genre ghetto every now and then to the "validity" of the bestseller lists. This was a thing that made me go, "Hmmm." And, thus, a blog post was born.

---

1. What, you were expecting something more empirical? From a blog?
2. This is a reflection of the fact that the majority of Americans if not are then at least choose to identify as heterosexual.

Not Dead Yet

The saga of my health is more frustrating than it is entertaining, but, hey, I don't want to neglect my blog. So here's an update on the exciting Medical Maladies of Kellie Hazell.

I did end up going to the doctor on Friday. I knew it was going to be a rough time when Drew refused to settle down at any point before my doctor actually came in. The roughness increased when I realized that my doctor was frazzled for reasons of her own and "interviewed" me and listened to my complaints by skimming through (out loud, at least, so I could try to interject more info) my history on the joint issues and the various reports from the orthopedic specialist and my physical therapist. Each time I took breath to interrupt her assertively and make her listen that I didn't think it was bursitis again (a diagnosis I think she might have made before she even opened the exam room door), Drew would act out and I would have to address him instead and the moment was gone.

The only really aware thing my doctor did was to forego a steroid injection in my shoulder as when they tried that with my hip back in January, my symptoms escalated to severe piriformis syndrome and a mildly numb leg. She gave me oral steroids instead and the same NSAID from the previous merry-go-round adventure in January. By that point, I was indifferent to the process and figured it'd be best to try out her preferred treatment and be able to rule out anything obvious. That was Friday night.

Saturday, I woke to worse joint pain than before and horrendously tightening muscles. I put up with it through the day, taking it easy as much as I could. On Sunday, I went looking for all sorts of information on the particular steroid I had been prescribed to examine all those fun side effects. Sure enough severe muscle tightening and joint pain were listed as major side effects. So I groaned a bit, but decided to troop through (as I had also discovered Sunday morning after delaying the next dose a couple of hours that going cold-turkey was going to give me severe headaches and other unpleasantness).

Then, last night, the right hip and shoulder pain (which had been non-existant before Friday) grew to levels almost too uncomfortable for sleep, and this morning became so severe that in order to just sit and work at the desk, I had to take the pain med. The pain med cut away the worst of the pain while leaving behind swelling in my knee that prevents me from straightening my leg and gives a nice tingling sensation below the knee. Oh, and have I mentioned the occasional shortness of breath and mild dizziness? So, yeah, going back to the doctor this afternoon. My doctor is out, though, so I'll have the benefit of starting fresh with someone new at the clinic. And I'll be leaving Drew to hang out in the pool with my mom so he doesn't distract the process.

I was trying to figure out what book I wanted to bring with me, as going anywhere by myself during the weekday is something of a novelty and a book would be useful. As much as I want to read anything by Robert Charles Wilson, the only book I have on hand is Blind Lake, which begins in the POV of a character who has snorted coke just to be polite over the course of a mostly anonymous one-night stand. I'm all for flawed, interesting characters and kicking someone to their lowest spots to watch them struggle to get beyond it, but I just don't have the patience for it right now. So I remembered I had Karin Lowachee's first book Warchild, and I thought that would be the perfect engaging read without presenting me with such a difficult POV right of the bat. Then I scanned the first few pages and saw they are in 2nd person POV (the "you went down a hall and someone shouted at you" variety). I went back to the TBR pile and snagged Kevin J. Anderson's Hidden Empire, which I had picked up when it was on sale for $2.99 (same way I picked up Terry Goodkind's Wizard's First Rule). This is what I get for being a good reader and trying to cut through the TBR pile instead of buying new shiny books. I have nothing of reliable bubble gum (perhaps with surprising staying power) material on hand.

And, of course, it goes without saying that writing hasn't really been happening lately. Hard thing to do when your left arm has a tendency to go numb when kept in the typing position. No, my life has been reduced to a giddy anticipation for shopping in the brand new super grocery store that just opened this morning. I wish I were kidding, but I actually had moments of night-before-Christmas-squee last night while putting together a shopping list. I fear I have not kept my distance from the suburban mom mask. It has absorbed me. Beyond that, one of the highlights of the past few days has been listening to the audio commentaries of Psych Season 2 and anticipating the 3rd season beginning on Friday.

The glamour of my life: revel in it.

Finding the Tell

Satire is a tricky thing sometimes. It can be so subtle that otherwise intelligent people can't find the clue for the right reading and go a bit kookoo thinking that what they're reading (or watching) is meant to be serious.

I first encountered this phenonmenon with the movie True Lies. I was around 16 when I saw it, and watched the first fifteen or twenty minutes through a standard action movie with amusing sidekick moments filter. Thus I was a bit perplexed by Charlton Heston's over the top, eyepatched spy boss character. However, once Ahnold chases (on horseback) the Big Bad (on a motorcycle) up to the roof of a building, I was beginning to suspect that there was an eye wink I had missed. Then when the Governator tries to get his horse to jump from one rooftop to the next in pursuit of the badguy, I finally got the joke. True Lies is no standard action movie with big stunts and crazy special effects. It's a satire of same, designed specifically to show the rediculousness of the genre. I started paying attention to the feedback of the movie and realized that critics bemoaning the film's lack of believability so did not Get It.

Looking back on that experience, I realized that the first tell that the movie is satire can be found in the title: True Lies. The second was the parenthetical "perfect Arabic" in the subtitle explaining Arnold had escaped a guard's attention by claiming to be lost while desperately seeking a Water Closet. I was young, though, and not accustomed to a big-budget product being something other than its obvious packaging. But I was hooked on this concept ever since watching that movie, particularly when it comes to satirizing action movies, a mainstream flogging of the Gary Stu phenomenon that puts even the most inane self-insertion fanfiction to shame. (Don't get me started on the Jack Ryan movies, let alone the books.)

Some movies are going to be obvious, moving from satire into baldfaced parody (see all the Austin Powers movies). Some will, like True Lies provide early tells but front as the Real Deal. Finding those first few tells is vital (for Shoot 'Em Up, it was the protagonist killing a bad guy with a carrot to the jugular; for Wanted, it was the fact that a society of weavers--no shit, weavers--had formed a fraternity of assassins) for the best experience of the movie or book.

Then there are a subset of books and movies that are so exaggerated that you think it must be satire, that you've found tell after tell--only to realize that it's likely meant in all seriousness. For example, I'm still unsure about Independence Day as action satire because there are just enough moments in which the movie takes itself seriously to confuse the issue. Sometimes, over the course of a first exposure, you can determine without a doubt that you are not reading satire but Serious Genre Fiction. This was my experience with Ghost by John Ringo. I went into that book not knowing anything about the author or his previous books. I laughed my way through the first third of the first act, thinking it was superb satire to the pain of parody at points of a particular mindset. But when all the other characters played straight-faced along with the protagonist's thinking, I realized I wasn't reading satire, and I stopped laughing. (But I kept reading, mostly due to a "deer-in-headlights" way. See this review for more on this topic.)

On-line essays are a real bear in the satire navigation department. With a book or a movie, you have a lot of extraneous information to provide supporting evidence of a tell or non-tell. In a blog post or comment, all you have are words. No soundtrack or scenery, no cover art or genre placement. Just words. So when someone goes on a tear about an issue, using heightened rhetoric and overstretched arguments and logical two-steps, it's hard to tell if it's real or satire. In these cases, reading becomes an exercise in finding the tell of truth rather than the tell of satire.

For example, the comment by John C Wingate in this round-up of opinions about the most recent gender bias in SF kerfuffle (you'll need to scroll down to the 7th commenter) had some very astute readers considering his words in a satirical light at first, only to headdesk when they realized, to Wright, truer words were never written. My satire radar is not very sophisticated when it comes to on-line essays and rants, so I read it at face-value only seeing their comments about potential satire afterward. Then I went back to see if I could find the tell of truth.

I thought it might be this:

For example, my writer-wife, L. Jagi Lamplighter, has not sold the same number of novels to date as have I. She took some years off to raise our children. I am also older than she, and started writing earlier. Likewise, if even a few woman authors take off a few years to tend to other duties, the statistical impact will be disproportionate. What can one do? Ask my very feminine and maternal wife, or women like her, not to like babies? Good luck with that.

That word "duties" made my AP English Rhetoric and Comp Spidey Sense tingle. It's hard for a feminist of any stripe to use such a word to describe child-rearing and housekeeping, even in jest. I thought "duties" would be a bit much for even the most subtle piece of satirical genius. But then that whole "not to like babies" bit is so over the top with rhetoric (and rife with the logical fallacy that, if women won't taking care of the babies, no one will), that I decided the piece could still be read as masterful satire at that point.

I settled on this as the tell:

There used to be a color barrier in baseball. But when Jackie Robinson broke that barrier, suddenly the managers of ball clubs found that they could no longer afford, could no longer financially afford, to exclude the pool of talent presented by the black athletes. A team who called upon a wider talent pool than its competition could, in the long run, outperform a team who restricted their talents to "whites-only."

So, I submit that there is a natural force in the free market, a profit motive, that makes prejudice of any kind too expensive to maintain in the long run. Talent will always prevail, eventually, because truly talented people never give up.

Because the example, if used and applied correctly--particularly in a stunning piece of satire--would then posit that, because we already have some women writers in the field, this prejudice (should it ever have existed) is already gone. We've broken the gender barrier. We've had our Brown v Board of Education moment and everything's now just a matter of talent. But he kind of skips that to go right for a "prejudice can't last in the free-market, because talent will out" mashup of logic that indicates to me he realized to so baldly state that any imbalance occurs because women just aren't as talented is impolitic, and changes his tactics to "well, dearies, iffin there is a problem, just be meek and humble and trust in the power of capitalism to set you free." That bit could be good satire, as well, but of a different sort than the one the original thread of logic was building on.

There comes a point, however, when faced with something so exaggerated yet genuine, that the piece becomes funny again. I couldn't get there with Ghost, but I got there with Wright's comments. The starving children in China homage ("In a world where women are stoned to death for wearing fingernail polish, complaints about lesser offenses sound shallow.") is particularly priceless.

(By the way, if you want some current numbers on gender representations in nearly every aspect of the SF field, look here.)

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, The Children's Media Edition

Now that I work at home--and part-time at that--I've been exposed to a great deal more children's television and movies and books than previously. And when one is not all that interested in the story or the moving pictures, one will start to look at patterns and subtle details and subtext and other such things. I have therefore compiled a list of "Things That Make You Go 'Hmmm'" from my many many viewings and readings of children's media. I'll start with the merely interesting/surprising and finish with the mind-numbing, what-were-they-thinking.

1. Joss Whedon had a hand in writing Toy Story. I did a double-take when his name caught my eye in the intro credits (scroll down to #11).

2. Joseph Mallozzi of Stargate fame wrote an episode of Little Bear, but I can't find it in his IMDB page. Another moment of catching the name in the opening credits.

3. I was reading in a recent issue of Parents magazine that TV-watching has been "linked to" a host of Bad Things, including eating disorders, drug use, smoking, and "sexual risks." My first thought after reading that was, "So has high school."

4. There's an episode of The Backyardigans--a show I usually love because it brings singing and dancing into great stroy-spinning in imaginative play--that triggers my subtext alarms. It features the two female members of the backyard group as mermaids, singing about how they are protecting their garden from intruders. Maybe it's just that Springsteen song that makes my mind wander in directions likely not intended, but still.

5. For the crowning WTF moment, though, I must make mention of a book. I will not name the book nor the author. We got this book as a present back before Drew was even born, I think, and I'm pretty sure that whoever gave us the book didn't read beyond the first page or two. Because it starts out very sweet and quickly descends into very scary. The story is about a mother with her newborn baby boy, cataloging his traits before she recites a sweet poem while he's fast asleep. Next the boy has grown into a toddler, and the mother catalogs his Terrible Twos but still steals into his room when he's asleep, holds him and recites her poem. Then the boy turns six. At this point, when Mark and I were reading this to a very young Drew for the first time, we exchanged worried glances. Sure enough, the mother sneaks into her older kid's room to scoop him up into a hug while he sleeps and recite this poem. This continues until the kid is grown up and moved out of the house and the mother--I wish I were kidding--straps a ladder to the top of her car, drives across town, sneaks into that boy's room (on the second floor, hence the ladder), snuggles him into her arms and recites the poem.

Mark and I were horrified at this point, but that deer-in-headlights thing forced us to keep going. Could it get worse?

Well, the next page shows how the mother is too old, near death, so the son picks her up and either recites the poem or just tells her he loves her or something. It would've been sweet were it not for the dreadful episode of stalking her grown son. But, Mark and I think we may have hit the worst and the book will finish well. Then the last page is the son, after his mother's death (obliquely referenced), going to his newborn daughter's room, taking her into his arms and repeating the poem.

Mark and I, round-eyed, slack-jawed, stared at each other over Drew's head. "The cycle repeats!" one of us whispered. We don't have the heart to "lose" this book as it was a gift from a relative, and I feel the need to keep it as evidence that, no shit, a whole list of people didn't find anything in the least bit chilling or creepy or stalker-ific about this book.

This list does not include the standard fare of icky themes I'm finding in a lot of movies and books, but that's another post all together and might be reliant on oversensitivity on my part--I'm still sorting it out. Anyway, I hope this brief look at some of the fascinating things I see on a regular basis has been entertaining.

Go. Read Little Brother Now. If You're Curious As To Why, Read This Post First

I just finished Cory Doctorow's YA novel Little Brother. I already knew by page 91 that this book was Important--the rest was just gravy. The only negative thing I have to say about it is that there's a wee bit of theme-bludgeoning, but it's not the horrid, grafted-on, authorial voice intrusions that Battlestar Galactica often perpetrates. Instead it's fully organic to the plot and characters--it makes sense for Marcus to be spouting off about these ideas and to espouse them in the first place (with the possible exception of the RIAA swipe, but I'll spot Doctorow that in a heartbeat).

As for the book's positives...where to start? I can't fully appreciate a lot of them as they are computer geek, hacker-oriented. (My geek badge is of the scientific branch, specifically the biochemical division. The codes I'm interested in hacking are pertain to the central dogma: DNA, RNA, and protein.) But there's a ton on living in a fear-focused society, dealing with homeland security's antiterroism measures, and moving on after a terrorist attack that resonated so well, I finally hacked another level of my brain and realized my own post 9/11 stupidities.

There's a subtheme winding its way through this novel that is sufficient in and of itself to make this book required reading for every single American who thought even for a second that privacy wasn't as important as the post 9/11 security measures. I was one such person. Hell, I even defended the measures at a grad student party in the months following the attack. The only extenuating circumstance I can call to my defense is that there were specific people there to whom I wanted to rub in their faces that I had nothing to hide--not because they did have something to hide, but because they thought I did. However, most of my outgassing at that party was fueled fully by fear and a sense of the familiar from my life as a military dependent in Germany at the downfall of the Iron Curtain. The latter is fodder for an entirely different blog post and completely unrelated to Little Brother. The former, however, was a role played by Drew, the main character's father.

He swallowed every annoying, inconvenient, and invasive DHS measure as a patriotic duty to be endured in order to Find the Bad Guys. He swallowed it because he had lived in fear for several days that the terrorist attack in the book had killed his son. Most of America reacted in the same way in the days and weeks and months and even years after 9/11. We were all terrified because the attacks involved two things the majority of us know and see on a regular basis: planes and prominent/important buildings. This wasn't a bombing or biological warfare or some other scary yet distanced from our daily lives attack on our country. This was a frightening twist on elements as common to the majority of Americans as televisions and phones. There was no easy way for our brains to process the attacks as something separate. No quick-fix of "boy, that couldn't happen every day" so we could digest what had happened and figure out a rational method of dealing with it. No, it warped distressingly familiar fixtures and triggered that intense fight-or-flight, a constant pain of "please, make it stop, make us safe." So we swallowed every single thing the government threw at us to prevent it from happening again. We hand-delivered our freedoms and privacy in exchange for the laudunum of assurances that it would make us safer.

At that grad student party, I clashed with two fairly conservative Republicans about this issue, advocating the security measures, brushing aside their concerns that the government wouldn't be so willing to return the rights and privileges we were ceding them. I probably offered just about every variety of argument the pro-DHS and DHS folks themselves used in Little Brother to justify making San Francisco a police state. I doubt I'm the only one, and I doubt I'm the only one who would see the parallels and find them chilling and sobering. I think I shook off the last of my 9/11 fear while reading this book.

Indeed, I finally realized that the overwhelming bit of my 9/11 fear was brought on by accepting the blissful state of an arrogant America, secure in freedoms and peace from domestic harm, surrounded by the false comfort that we export such things, so we are untouchable. We police the world, stop the bad things from happening to others. It is very alluring, the concept that we're so cool, nothing can hurt us, nothing can bring us down. 9/11 showed us that it's an allusion, and most of us would rather pull the wool back over our eyes as fast as possible. Who wants to live with the knowledge that we're all vulnerable to anything? There are no free passes when it comes to living in this world. And, what's even worse, the predators aren't going to helpfully expose themselves by twirling a mustache and going, "Mwa-ha-ha!" Even more distressing, most predators approach the hunt as if they are prey trying to protect their own damn selves. Evil is as seductive a lie as invincibility.

Doctorow doesn't try to completely idolize main character, though. Marcus has to face up to the unintended consequences in his fight to bring down DHS, to the point where the book even ends with Marcus actually accepting the fact that what he did was terrorism. This isn't explored as fully as it could be as DHS is portrayed in very negative terms and not given any sympathetic moments to the point where its shown to be an evil machine (see the last comment in the graf above as to why I think this is a problem). But it's hinted at often enough that I came away from the book understanding the Doctorow doesn't seem to be advocating anarchy and electronic terrorism as means to maintaining privacy and freedoms. Rather, the theme seems to be more that an open discourse, a friendly environment for debate and dissent must be maintained. I can get behind that.

It's telling that Marcus quotes a particular passage from the Declaration of Independence on several occasions. (It's also ironic, given that Doctorow, I believe, is Canadian.)

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Government should fear its people, not the other way around. That seems to be the central tenet of this book. Not a bad concept for the youth of America to be exposed to right about now.

Go. Read Little Brother now. Pass it on.

They Don't Make It Easy

Last night's episode of BSG was the best in a while, and it's still unpacking itself in my head. But I had to keep ignoring a couple of worldbuilding elements that threatened to leech all enjoyment of the ep. It is so very hard for me to take their 20th century medicine in stride. An FTL-capable society has such bad medical tech that one of a wounded soldier's first concerns is whether or not he can keep his leg? As I tried to set that aside, a brand new worldbuilding WTF moment hit: A society whose religion is based on Greek mythology has no concept of a river one must traverse to get to the afterlife until Baltar babbles about the One True God as ferryman? Really?

Changing My Approach

Towards the end of Battlestar Gallactica's third season, I started to really not like the show. I had always griped about the brain-numbing dichotomy between the technology and medicine the show employs and also bemoaned the theme-bludgeoning. But toward the end of seaons three, it felt like characters I thought I understood suddenly started doing things solely for the sake of conflict and plot, acting out required roles to keep the story going forward rather than actually being themselves. I notices this first in that episode where Tyrol leads a workers strike. I just didn't believe that Tyrol, Adama, or Roslyn would've handled that situation in that fashion. It seemed to contradict the people we had been getting to know. By the time Starbuck died and we all knew that wasn't going to be real, I was really annoyed with the show. Then came the Trial of Baltar and Four Cylons Revealed Musical.

Gah.

By the end of the third season, I knew I didn't like the show, and I was starting to figure out why. The overall impression I got from BSG by then was of a show throwing everything but the kitchen sink at me to keep ratcheting up the conflict. There didn't seem to be a pattern or method to the plot hurling and character twists. Big huge sweeping arcs of drama were tossed my way and discarded for the next shiny thing that caught the show's eye. So what about the cylon baby? Now we've got TWO, and no one seems to care anymore. The cylons have a plan, you say? All we determined it to be was annihilation of the human race, but the Plan was implied to be something more than that. But that dwindled into nothing by the time we got the four new models (which the other models aren't even supposed to think about), and suddenly the cylons are squabbling over equal rights for Toasters and killing each other because said Toaster aren't doing their job in the Big Plan that seems to be nothing more than killing humans. Then there's the whole God thing which seems more and more like it's really just the fanatic ravings of Caprica Six in Baltar's Head (and where the hell is Imprisoned Caprica Six's Gaius in Her Head?).

This show feels more and more like one of my first drafts from a few years ago when I understood that I needed to build tension and conflict on each page but didn't understand how to keep tension and conflict linked from one part of the story to the next, so I kept throwing new plot twists and challenges at the book without figuring out how the story I started might twist and turn on its own. Recognizing the "I don't know what I'm doing" technique just made me cranky everytime I sat down to watch the show because I know from experience that the odds are not good that this show is going to resolve in any logical fashion, let alone a satisfying one.

But then something happened as I watched the first few episodes of season 4. I can't remember what it was that triggered the click, but I finally realized that this show isn't SF or even a space opera so much that it's a soap opera set in space. And we're talking Days of Our Lives type stuff with Marlena getting possessed and Stefano mind-wiping and controlling people and aliens arriving in Salem. No wonder it feels like kitchen-sinking. That's not to say that soap operas are inferior shows, it's just that soap operas are not for me. They are often plot-heavy to get the characters into greater and greater scales of conflict and tension in ways that resemble the random insanity of life. This is not bad, but it is not what I'm looking for in my narratives at the moment.

This realization means that I need to go back through the whole show from the very first episode and watch it as if it were a soap opera and not anything else. I have a feeling I'll like it a whole lot more that way if only because I've changed my expectations of the show. And I might be able to figure out if the show is intentionally modelling itself off of soap operas for some clever purpose or if it's just a soap opera in space, which means I might enjoy it more watching it from that set of expectations, but I won't enjoy it as much as I could had it not been just a soap opera in space. Regardless, I'll see if looking at the thing like it's a soap opera enhances my viewing experience tonight.

Note to Self: Watch a soap opera if only to look at that genre of story-telling and make sure I understand it as well as I claim above

Recent Gender Idiocies I Have Read

In the gender debate, I think the crux of the problem is that women are far less likely to be treated as people than men are. That is, society is more likely to have the following culturally ingrained and resistant to change: women are women first, not people while men are people first, men secondarily. (Where "women" and "men" means thought of in terms of their gender traits above all else.) It's a working hypothesis, one that I'm refining as I move about in the world and observe how others are treated and how I am treated.

So when I read items as linked below, I hold my hypothesis against theirs and get a few mind-boggling disparities.

The Open-Source Boob Project. How it all began: "This should be a better world," a friend of mine said. "A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, 'Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts,' and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful." I think it's odd that in pining for a world where sex is not shameful and degrading, someone thought a request to fondle would be an appropriate way to express esthetic appreciation of another's bod. Really, it strikes me more as a wish to bypass emotional intimacy and go straight to physical, which is hard to do without making physical intimacy objectifying, which is degrading.

A Rapist's View of the World: Joss Whedon and Firefly. Hard to know where to start with this one. It helps (for reading comprehension purposes alone) to know that the author considers any heterosexual intercouse to be rape because society has so conditioned women into thinking that their bodies belong to men and not themselves that they can never consent. I've heard about radical feminism and usually discounted the fear of it because it always came in the context of men calling the proponents "feminazis" which is not a good way to critique anything unless it involves actual genocide. However, wow. It's probably one of the most insulting things I've heard that by the very nature of my gender, I cannot think for myself in a sexual context unless I acheive the enlightenment of lesbianism. And that's saying something considering the next link.

Respectful Insolence Links to Someone Else's Misogyny. I can't even bring myself to link directly to the culprit in question or even directly state the man's real or fake name. He lives to run all over the internet with his fanbase and lay the smack down. I'd rather not boost my stats that way. While what this guy says is extremely misogynistic, it mostly boils down to a logical error, a conflation of correlation and causation mixed in with the refusal to discuss what lies at the heart of the trends he opines (see my introduction to this entire post above).

Note to Self: Gender Issues will outlast the cockroaches.

Bath & Body Works Disses My Olfactory Preferences Yet Again

Several years ago, I discovered a scent at B&B Works called Fresh Ginger Lime. Loved it. Couldn't get enough of it. Used it all the time. But within a year of proclaiming this scent my favorite scent, B&B discontinued it. With the help of their semi-annual sales and my mom-in-law, I snagged up a stock of lotion and body wash to last me for a while. But it wasn't the same--I haven't used the stock all that much because I know that once it's gone, it's gone.

I don't have that luxury with the other two discontinuations of my fave products. For several years, B&B sold the Pure Simplicity Oat line of face care products, and I stocked up as much as I could afford because the stuff worked wonders for my skin. Then I realized it was getting harder and harder to find the products so I could stock up. Last year, they vanished all together, and I changed stores and discovered Origins fabulous line of skin care products, though it sets me back a bigger amount (at least it also correspondingly works better).

And, just yesterday, I went to the store to buy more Fresh Vanilla lotion as I just ran out of my last stocked bottle despite having a three-fourths full bottle of shower gel. After wandering through the store and not finding that scent, I confirmed what my sinking stomach was already telling me: they discontinued the scent--well over a year ago, even. So I can't find the last dregs of the scent anymore, they're all gone.

I went to check on-line for any last gasp products in Fresh Vanilla--only to discover that they're discontinuing my favorite summer scent (after Fresh Ginger Lime, of course): Pink Grapefruit.

Sigh. I think it's time to use up every last bit of my B&B stocks and give them up as a store where my olfactory (and skin care!) preferences are either no longer represented or in an unsupportable minority. I'm really going to miss pampering myself regularly with Fresh Vanilla, though. That scent was about the most comforting I had ever found: it got me through the last months of my pregnancy and through the long weeks of my c-section wound recovery. It was the scent I reached for every time I needed to settle myself and relax.

WGA Strike

Just in case you aren't aware, the screenwriters of America are on strike. I could try to sum up the reasons for it, but, really, just watch this lovely YouTube video brought to you by the folks who write for the Daily Show. If you already know about the strike, then you've likely seen this. I know I've seen it linked to in about five different places today alone. I've watched it most of those times. It's funny. It's informative. It puts things into a great perspective. As someone who gets her news from the Daily Show, I can only hope the matter gets resolved soon.



One thing I'm curious about (and wondering why the corporations pushing against the writers aren't talking about) is how profit from DVD sales and internet downloads breaks down to pay the production costs. I mean, asking for 2.5% of the profits to go back to the writers sounds ridiculously low. But if 95% of the profits has to go back into production costs, then maybe, just maybe, I might understand reluctance to part with that 2.5%. Of course, then I would also wonder about their business model.

It would be very amusing if, during the court battles Viacom and other coporations are bringing against YouTube, their language to justify yanking residuals from writings is used against them to tank their piracy case. I wonder what whether the lawyers involved are sweating this possibility. That might be what gets this strike resolved.

Convenient Lacks

I had meant to post this a good two weeks ago, but I got distracted halfway through composing, then decided I wanted to answer the Global Warming Debate with my response, then I realized that I just wanted a quick sketch of my reactions to this article. So here's the post, at long last.

Via Holly Lisle, I read this interesting article about inaccuracies in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Given that this article comes from an organization "dedicated to sound public policy based on sound science" that strives to separate reality from rhetoric, I found the following three things very interesting.

1) The author chastises Gore's rep for saying "[Global Warming is] a complex issue" but not referencing all of the scientific papers on which they based their 90-minute video on the movie's website on the page devoted to the science behind the movie. The author of the article then proceeds to only reference one of the two articles the site referenced and doesn't bother to back up its refutations that cannot be found in that one source. If you're going to accuse someone of sloppy scientific arguments, it's best not to make their same mistake. Especially for this loaded topic, it makes you look really bad.

2) Many times the article explains that the environmental impacts the movie attributes to global warming are actually caused by some other way in which humans have destroyed a part of the local environment. The fact that the article mentions those impacts at all is a mark in the author's favor, but the fact that those impacts are left to stand as refutations of Gore rather than exhortations (or even just links, dammit) for policies (or even just their opinions on policies) that can stop such damage makes me wonder about what I'm reading.

3) Several of the inaccuracies listed after the first nine that were upheld by a British court are just repeats. For example, Error #7 is that the movie claims Hurricane Katrina is manmade, and Error #11 is that the movie claims that Hurricane Caterina is manmade. (By the way, for an institute that claims to eschew politics and rhetoric, the explanation of Error #7 is remarkably political, and also wrong. Wrong in the sense that the Democrats didn't cause Hurricane Katrina. The author is clearly trying to say that the Democrats were responsible for the levees breaking and inflates the rhetoric severely in doing so.) Also, Error #28 is that the movie blames global warming for the spread of tropical diseases and Error #29 is that the movie blames global warming for the spread of West Nile. Conflating the number of errors with cheap word tricks or refuting a point in such a way that all similar points of that nature are clearly covered by that refutation (i.e. if someone consistently misspelled words that a spell-check would have caught, I wouldn't say, "I found 22 misspelled words in this document." I would say "This document was not spellchecked." I think the latter is more damning, actually.) again makes me think you have an axe to grind rather than a cogent scientific argument to make.

It's too bad, really. I get so steamed with all this talk about global warming because, looking at the matter from a geological perspective, I think we've got a lot more data to collect before we go blaming anyone other than nature for causing it. In the meantime, science has already shown without a doubt how much damage we our doing to our environment on a more micro scale that may or may not stretch to a macro scale in the future if left unchecked. Why is it OK to dismiss smog and acid rain and local water pollution in favor of fear-mongering over water world? We've got enough environmental problems that we know for sure we've brought upon the world ourselves. Let's get back to those, please, and start where we can actually prove we can make a difference. Seriously, I'm beginning to suspect that global warming was a concept invented by Big Oil and such specifically because it distracts from the reality of the problems in our backyards that they've already been shown to be causing.

By the way, I'm getting really sick of these car commercials from, IIRC, Mercedes and Lexus that show these super environmentally friendly, alternative fueled cars, with the voiceover something along the lines of "Ready for the world, when the world is ready." Idiots, we're clearly ready for it, unless by "ready" you mean that you need a certain demographic willing to drop 1,000,000 for that car so as to make the car profitable. But I have a feeling "ready" means something more along the lines of "when Big Oil isn't going to crush us for daring to mass produce cars that don't require their product."

The Consumerization of the Reader

I've never been interested in reading or writing media tie-in novels or the Harlequin contemporary romances, but I never understood why. I just shied away from the displays in the stores and shrugged away calls for submissions to those lines. But as I burrow deeper and deeper into various writing communities, I'm coming across a lot of people who read and write tie-in novels and category romances. And I've read a couple of the romances, trying to see if I could spot the "difference" I gave those books in my attitude. I really couldn't.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I figured out why the entire concept of tie-in novels and Harlequin's categories rubbed me the wrong way. Those books don't make me feel like a reader, they make me feel like a consumer. Coming from someone who easily spends $500 a year on books (one year I'm going to terrify myself and track the number; there's a very good reason why Mark handles the vast bulk of our finances), this might seem like spliting a microhair.

As a reader, I pick up a book because I'm interested in the story. (Well, OK, so I also pick up books to research the market and the industry; but always the bottom line of that research is to compare the story I read vs the data point that brought the book to my attention.) While publishing is a business out to make its profit just like all the others, whenever they push a product, they don't appeal to me as a consumer, they appeal to me as a reader: blurbs, cover copy, artwork, newsletters with excerpts or anecdotes from authors. Hell, even the Borders Rewards newsletters don't just stop short of giving me a coupon and laundry-listing the titles to be released. They often have interviews and excerpts and company exclusives (songs or "deleted scenes", etc).

How (according to my perception) are tie-in novels and category romances different? The tie-in novels feature cover art that has the medium it's based upon front and center. It makes sense to do this in order to get the established fan base of that product in another medium to buy the book. Hence I feel like a consumer: you like this TV show then buy this book and continue with the characters. The focus is not about informing me of the story, it's about moving product through brand recognition. "Buy me! Yes, there will be more of the tangled Starbuck and Apollo angst that you enjoyed in last season's episodes within these pages!"

With Harlequin's books, it's the way they are packaged and sold that kills the illusion of the barrier between reader and consumer. They are on a rack, in categories, sometimes with remarkably similar titles. And they cycle through to a new title every month (or less). I see that display, and I don't hear the siren call of books calling to me with entertaining stories. Instead, I hear: "Buy me! You are a middle class woman with time and money to spend and you are always jonesing for stories about men and women navigating their way to Happily Ever After! And come back in a few weeks and BUY MORE! We know you read approximately 9 books a year! Wait, don't pass us by! Come over here and bow down to the statistics of your demographic! We can show you our research! In pie-chart form!"

Now, I don't harbor any illusions that the other books on the shelves are any different. The team that got that book from manuscript pages to the product in front of me are trying to maximize the chances that I will buy that book instead of the one next to it. But, unless the author is a Big Name, they have only the story to recommend, so all of the decisions they made regarding that book are focused on bringing out the interesting elements of that story to give me a package that says: "Buy me! I will entertain you with a great story!"

Here's the thing, though. The folks behind tie-in novels and Harlequin's category romances know full well that consumers will ditch a product that doesn't deliver. And success in one medium is not going to translate into another without delivering the goods that is expected from that other medium (as well as the added tangle of not detracting from the enjoyment of the original show or movie). And even the most voracious of readers won't buy books if they've been consistently disappointed. So the stories have to deliver in those cases just as much as they do for any other book. You might argue that they have to deliver more because of their differences from the sea of single titles around them.

However, in a world where not a day goes buy that someone doesn't make me feel like a stat to move from "THEM" to "US", I appreciate a product that doesn't do anything overtly to make me feel like anything other than a reader wanting to be entertained by a good story. As I learn more about the publishing industry (hopefully from the perspective of a published author one day soon), I may come to see all books as treating me like a consumer over a reader. It would be nice, though, if instead I got over my "I'm a purty snowflake with unique reading tastes" knee-jerk reaction to tie-ins and category romances.

Things You Shouldn't Do Near Writers, Part the Many

While it might decrease the fodder for our novels, I'm beginning to think writers should wear some sort of identifying mark on their foreheads to keep people from acting in ways that are just begging to be put into their next novel. Lots of folks don't like finding themselves doing something stupid in print, even if the names have been changed to protect the idiotic.

For example, my mother was recently in the hospital (she's out now; fun with ulcers!), and I had to take her something outside of visiting hours. I went through the emergency entrance, and was promptly required to sign in (I'm pretty sure she checked my ID, but can't remember). I got a badge that said "VISITOR" and the day's date, but, while there was a space for it and the lady knew exactly where I was going because I had told her, not my destination. I then proceeded to wander through the guts of the ER nurses station, trying to navigate my way into the main hospital and patient rooms. A kind nurse pointed me in the right direction. I passed another nurse on my way through the halls, and then walked right by two more nurses at a station in the patient area who didn't appear busy. I passed one more nurse deep in the patient hall before arriving at my mother's room. I smiled pleasantly at everyone and looked them in the eye, giving each one of them a chance to stop and confirm what I was doing there where I wasn't supposed to be. I'm not a mystery or thriller writer, but even I couldn't help but think of all the ways such a system could be manipulated for an antagonist's nefarious purposes.

My next example is much more bold as the person in question knew for a certainty that I was a writer. But it's also a trickier situation. I'm pretty sure he tried to proposition me for an affair. Why am I not certain? Well, I'm seven years removed from the meat market, so I could be rusty on interpreting "interested male" signals that aren't coming from Mark. And it's not like he said anything conclusive. But he did go out of his way to engage me in a conversation (we were in a large group setting and he had no reason to chat with me in particular over the several folks around him). Also, when I shook his hand in greeting, he slid his index finger up to the pulsepoint of my wrist. He also had that lean-in-close, keep eye contact, and smile with 1000 watts thing going throughout our conversation, which I kept centered on our respective families, just in case I was being hit on.

Let's say he was trying to start something. This just makes the writer in me go friggin' nuts, all because of one question: why? What sort of married person solicits another for an affair? Is he from an open marriage? Is he a compulsive adulterer? Was he bored? It was a convention-type setting were most folks were from out of town, so maybe he just didn't want to be lonely in the hotel that night? Maybe it was a sting operation, and I would've ended up on some warped Dateline special with my face all blurred and my voice distorted as part of an expose on the state of marriage in the US.

Going in the Mary Sue/Glittery HooHa direction, maybe I'm just that hot and fascinating that he couldn't resist. Or maybe we knew each other back in high school or something and I never noticed him then and he's always had a crush on me.

OK, I can't stop laughing at those last two. I stopped writing wish fulfillment stories in college. Hell, when it didn't take long to recognize that Denise in HD was quite clearly me, I tried to kill her off right away. Tried, but she separated herself enough from me and got very insistent that the story needed her. I don't quite believer her, which is yet another reason why I've set that novel aside in a nice deep, dark drawer.

Anyway, people, you've got to be aware how much a writer will put you under a microscope to figure out what makes you tick, why you did something. We'll engage in armchair psychoanalysis before you can blink. We'll also scrutinize just about any venue and event for a means of exploitation, for an opportunity to really jump start the conflict and make a story of the situation. Be careful what you do around us unless you don't mind seeing how we take the truth of what we see and dig for interpretations you might not like.