idiosyncreant | Entries tagged with w/v construct

~~so that can't be a recipe for disaster, especially since it's a Deep Thought, Dude kind of thing~~

But I was talking to my sister, after she asked about why guys hate it when guys are girly (like in media, see what I was watching earlier) and also, why do girls like it?

(she is an analytical chick)

and it led through many topics which led me through thinking about many of the horror stories of misogyny and abuse and reactions to it, that I've read lately

(seriously. Twitter. Tumblr. I joined for stupid posts from friends about the daily mundane or pretty pictures and yet all my friends care about causes because they are smart wonderful people and HORRIBLE REAL LIFE OVERLOAD)

aaaanyway, it made me wonder if Second Lead Syndrome -- perhaps more generally understandable as "nice guy" syndrome -- is at heart a feminist concept. Despite problematic treatments where the end game guy is at the beginning a chauvinistic hater jerk, as if that ever is fixed up by Tru Wuv, sorry I'm a realist when I'm not actually watching the dramas

BUT
It's an interesting women's story element. That just because the other guy is kind, and cheerful, considerate, not pushy, doesn't mean you have to reward him with your love as his spouse.

I think one reason I find love stories aimed for guys less interesting is that they're more single minded--either it worked out or it didn't. (I don't get the appeal of the latter.) Am I wrong?

Where as dramas, manga, chick lit is often about choices between viable options.

I can see love triangles as a good thing, in that light. Though I avoid them in my own writing, so far...

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Found Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on the library's DVD shelf!

Got it out to encourage this behavior. ;)

Also, it has bonus features.

In other news, my little novel is still running circles around me, but it's starting to feel twice as exciting, even while I painfully retrace my steps.

The leading man's tongue is getting sharper, the leading girl's making him mad without knowing it, and when we get to the actual plot, I have my PTSD books here to help be really break them.

You know. The usual.

I looked up the Prohibition, of all things, to find out where it started today. Splitting the United States up for an alternate history landscape was a really bright idea, but probably not playing to my strengths. I'd like to proactively thank Wikipedia for making this possible...

What did you look up on Wiki today?

via

aliettedb

Fanboy by Alexander Chee

an article on being bi-cultural, especially of mixed-race, and then about comics as bearing significance to society.

I lived as a juvenile legal alien in a very foreign culture for long enough to know exactly what he's talking about with hearing both sides of a divide mock each other with the same kind of rhetoric. And I hear it everywhere.
Democrats, Republicans. Christians, Muslims. Westerners, Orientals.
Men, women.

I also know I cannot really wrap my mind around that experience, only sympathize with it.

I love him for making a point about a woman being suddenly not in a major role after marrying.
(The older married women I know are the most dangerous to their enemies, though in general they pick their battles and their weapons so it's not on the global radar. Which is why there are more mature women mentors in my fiction than old men, come to think of it. I grew up in churches, I know who the scary people are.)

I was thinking the other day about how heist-stories and bands-of-adventurers tend to have a multi-cultural make-up, traditionally. Wondered if that's partly because even we stop being able to differentiate too many white men from each other. Then realized even with white-only European narratives, having a Frenchman, two Celts, a Scot or a Pole was because there is a sense of those differing backgrounds bringing different perspectives to bear.

The idea that all historical periods in all countries previous to this were more in the dark about diversity than ours is also stupid, by the way.
It may be partly true, but so is everything else anyone else believes.
Not to say there haven't been good things coming out of a conscious effort to erase prejudices--which may indeed be mostly new.

Just sayin'.

Because it is the most personal thing I can be talking about to confess about my doubt on a manuscript, and because I started this blog as a kind of "professional writer" journal, I often forget how little I share about myself. And refer to things I think everyone knows, which just confuses things.

I have this problem in real life, too, where people will ask, "Wait, you sing?" or "You write books, huh?" and I'll think We've known each other how many years and this hasn't come up?

So.

Anything you want to ask me about myself? I will answer anything, as honestly as I think I can be and remain amusing. ;)

( and here's an overview on me that I was going to cut erratically but have now decided is prime boredom, so it's all cut )

At the same time, I really don't want to be posting in a vacuum.

My name is Bethany, I am a contralto who spent her teen years in non-Tokyo Japan, and I write YA fantasy.
I am turning 25 this year and have a track-record of being asked out by mentally-handicapped gentleman.

Really, my short version there is so much more interesting... ^_^

If I talk for more than a few sentences about my time in Japan, the jonesing to see my town again comes flooding in.

Living in Japan is the first thing I loved so much I was heartbroken when it was over. In fact, so far the only thing.

So full of things strange and beautiful--so incandescent with an alien mind.

Today's subject that got me going was looking up a map like this:

The darkened area in the middle is where the castle used to be--note how wonky the roads go before they get there, for the most part. That was on purpose--to prevent invasion. Though heaven knows the mountains circling the area were enough to challenge people needing to get OUT and there wasn't much to invade...

So anyway.
I'd like to go knock back a few sushi to soothe my sorrows, but I live a half-hour from even Reasor's sushi.
I'll just write my novel and hope someday I have an advance good for some sushi as well as taxes...

Current Music: Layla (Unplugged) Eric Clapton

I gave a good friend a copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves to read today, so that has it's themes on my mind.

Other gals have been posting about self-image and redeeming moments of seeing past baggage, which has fed into my own reflection about how I feel about myself now as opposed to even a couple of years ago.

I read a bit of Jennifer Crusie's Bet Me, which involves a voluptuous heroine whose skin-and-bone mother has delivered years of lies, and goes back and forth as the hero tells her No, she's gorgeous, she drives him crazy.

Anyway. For a while I've wanted to share these Alanis Morissette lyrics as having a weird depth of Wild Woman message to them, and I think it's that day.

For hearing all my doubts so selectively and
For continuing my numbing relentlessly
For helping you and, myself, not even considering
For beating myself up and over-functioning

To whom do I owe the biggest apology?
No one's been crueler than I've been to me

For letting you decide if I indeed was desirable
For letting my self-love being so embarrassingly conditional
For denying myself to somehow make us compatible
For trying to fit a rectangle into a hole

To whom do I owe the biggest apology?
No one's been crueler than I've been to me
... the rest of the lyrics here

Sorry to Myself by Alanis Morissette

Are you honoring yourself today?

Current Music: Drought - Vienna Teng

While thinking (because of a story) about what natural death is, and age, I had a Theory.

Just like time is much faster on the Internet (things that happened over a week ago Ancient News, things that happened some months ago near Extinct), I think there's a corresponding rise and fall of empires, dynasties.

And the forums I've been trying to get into feel like dying civilizations. Hence, the "trying".
( Where This Came From )

It's a fascinating world and the Internet is just like it, only less mature...

***
The story, by the way, seems to be a lot about death and a little about true love, both subjects I'm not licensed in, but who pays attention to that? :

Ryuu only noticed the high school girls enough to think they were hiding from someone. It was midday, their uniforms stood out. No one but he and Sada used the grimy stairs. There was also a furtive look to the way they were talking with each other.

Sada must have noticed something else.

( Read more... )

This story is being written to two songs primarily: Puddle of Mudd's Blurry and Peter Bradley Adams' Lay Your Head Down.
It makes more sense as I get further in...

Current Music: Lay Your Head Down ~ Peter Bradley Adams

More Writing Philosophy from Unusual Sources

I think I'm condensing a few different statements into one idea (so I can't find the quote) but in Michael Shurtleff's Audition, he talks about when you're working with a partner who isn't working with you.

This, he says, is valuable, because the harder you have to fight to get across, the stronger the impression.

For me, this immediately clicked into writing terms. The harder the character is fighting toward or away from something, the higher the tension and drama and...ROMANCE.
(again, not in terms of love romance, but narrative romance.)

This made me go back to work on a story in the Aolon book, because of all the stories I've written, that one is tight with that fighting tension.

Maevidh's mother was angry—she could still feel it in her chest, though she had even left the city. She gritted her teeth.

I Need to Remember...

Maevidh is heir to a witch-queen. She has grown up fighting her mother--they are in each others' minds.*
She has grown up fighting physically, because they are warrior-witches.

At the start of the story, she's fighting off a soldier who claims he volunteered to be her guard, when she suspects he is a spy for her mother or someone else. She is also going to break a treaty with an empire they fought for 60 years only a few decades ago. Agents of the diplomat she both loves and hates are on the hunt for her, and even if she succeeds, she can look forward to being anathematized. Of course, she also fights herself.

It may verge into melodrama at points, but that can be fixed with a little pruning.
The idea that the more distance there is, the harder a character will fight to get closer has clarified why this story interests me every time I look at it, though the sentences hurt. She's surrounded by people she's fighting.

In the other stories of this book, this is true as well, though not to the same extent. Not just their enemies, but the ones they want to love, and they are fighting.

I need to think about this, and try to approach stories that way again. ...Without the labyrinthine grammar.

*I think i'll need to punch up this element of horror, but I'm pretty proud of the idea as it is...

This is Balthier, my latest spinning project. He and Maevidh may have a bit in common, really...

m_stiefvater has a great post on why reading YA is in no way a "teens only" domain: The Relevance of YA to Non-Teens

(Maggie's book Shiver, sequel to Lament, debuted at #9 on the NYT Bestseller List this week, fyi.)

She pretty much sums up why I avoid most "normal" (adult-geared) fiction, and embrace even good picture books in my reading diet. And articulates it better than I have been able to so far.

...I mean, the "why" besides the obvious fetish for toy cars and Wonka-type worlds.

Speaking of bright colors...
I'm writing a synopsis for Poisson today. I like writing them, even though they tend to emerge at a snail's pace.

One of the short-list agents requires them, and there's another who may. So. I'm not quite ready to ship pieces of my heart into the wide world just yet.

Also colorful, look at what I got in my Ravelry "Folklore and Fairytales" group swap:

The roving and book are both more awesome than they look. You'll hear more from me later...

My mother wears glasses. I have a fuzzy memory of realizing she looked different, and kind of strange to me, without them on at a very young age. I wasn't tiny, though, since I was becoming observant of that kind of thing

But apparently not too observant.

I assumed until a few days ago that she saw just fine while she was wearing her glasses.

Now, recently she had to update her prescription, so I knew that she didn't always see wonderfully even when the glasses were on.
My dad (and brother) don't like her to drive at night. Another clue.

It had never once occurred to me, though, when I found dishes that were still a little dirty, or places that were terribly dusty, getting annoyed they never got cleaned, that she might not be able to...see them.

...Am I blind or what?

I don't think I have much to contribute to the current debate on white-washing of covers or movies or Blog Against Racism Week.
But here's a collection of books I picked up because the person on the cover is *not* white.

Amusingly, Un Lun Dun's heroine is, as far as I can tell, Anglo--the cover fooled me. And I picked it up for that reason. So I'm telling on myself here...

(Above is fantasy, below is YA.)

Current Mood: drained

I'm sad about a few things right now...
genuinely sad in little ways, not depressed.
It's odd to be used to mild depression and have to think, to recognize sadness. We don't respect sadness as a culture. That's twisted.

I am sad.
A professor with a huge influence over me, and my best friends, and my mother and people who never heard his name died the other day.
He has thrown off a lot of suffering in body, but also took with him a brilliant mind, sparklingly clear and acute to the end.
We miss him.

I am sad.
My friend Justice, who is tiny but still a person, and one I love very much, is not going to be with me every day anymore. A more convenient babysitter has come up. I may be needed to fill in, it may be it stops working out.
But I know enough of saying goodbye to not deny that I will miss him.

I am sad:
I have discovered a wound, and though it is old, I am feeling the hurt for myself back then. I am stitching my scar-coat with honest tears that don't burn so much if I don't try to push them back.

And I am allowed to be sad.
You are, too.

And, I am *not* sorry if I am embarrassing you. You're allowed to be embarrassed as much as sad. And I will not feel guilty for it.
If, however, you need some other way to relate to me, I wrote a much less maudlin poem the other day open for critique:
My Almost-Functional Steam Engine Mind

Current Mood: unashamedly hurting
Current Location: "fairy tale price" not give me the warm fuzzies, Disney.
Current Music: She Don't Want the World - 3 Doors DOwn

If you are smart, you will go read this post on being the Other:

I Didn't Dream of Dragons

And then you will read at least the first few comments.

A profoundly sad, mind-opening essay on trying to write your own world when all you've read is White stories.

{I wonder if we still feel this in America, what it was like to have all you could read (of any good) being English stories?
But that's not the point.}

Read this. It is something we need to understand.

I've always been a bit distanced by descriptions of "post-novel ennui" per The Gilded Harp and Elizabeth Bear's blogging. For her, once finished with a novel draft, there is nothing left. She needs to wait to be full again, to let the next thing simmer.

I just realized what mine looks like. That makes me think it is, indeed a state for other writers to watch for in their process, too.
I fiddle.
A little of this project. A gush of new ideas, none really ready to be started. (I always let ideas sit in a journal for some time before starting on them. How long depends on how long it takes me to being Jones-ing for the actual writing of it.) A little of writing on that one.

Then after a while, a week or so maybe, I am struck with the need to write This Certain Project. Sometimes it needs a little pre-writing work still. Other times that's something I've been fiddling through and have almost finished.

Anyway, the past fortnight I've written the openings for two stories, prodded at a couple more, and done A Lot of spinning. And rolling over cool word combinations in my head. Like titles for the cool colored skeins I'm working on. Not kidding--I rolled into bed saying the phrase "Ice Dreams" over and over to myself.
The idea of most chagrin right now is My Vamp Rendition.
I didn't want to write a vampire story.
Vampires are so over, they squick, the cool ones are all cliches, et cetera, et cetera.

I have a dreadful feeling this will The Certain Project I will latch onto.
I'd much rather it was The Return of Mr. Birch.
Time to go read more Pride and Prejudice...

My Boss to Me, yesterday: There is hope for America! Slim chance, but there is hope!

Me, inside my own head, as I am "discreet": Sorry. There really isn't.

Obama, Palin, Elvis, The Return of Arthur (yeah, that's for England, I know), it doesn't matter. The problems are all the way through the system and it will not be remedied by anything but...well. Not good intentions.
History doesn't work that way. There is hope for every person and community (not town, understand, but human community group) and there is a lot still that can be managed in the shadow of a great economic civilization's demise.
But that's what we have here. The economic civilization of the good ole US of A is probably over.

If you're thinking this came out of nowhere for me, book-blogger and fantasy scribbler...well, I've been stewing a long time. I think about stuff like this all the time, I just haven't blogged it yet.

I am looking forward, somewhat to see what culture develops to be the Titan in the world next. It probably won't run on jets and diesel trucks. Will it build a spider's web of trains and tunnels? Will there be ballooning? I don't know.

But the future is coming, and the future isn't America. Not like we think of it, at least.

Calm disagreements and discussion are welcome, but note *priggish tone creeps in* there was no finger-pointing in my post or polemic/hysteria/sensationalism. Go and do likewise.

Current Mood: fatalistic

Cat Note:
Yesterday, Bagheera-My-Work-Cat and I were coming downstairs after I disappointed him over something (I filled his foodbowl! What more could he want? I think he finds me emotionally absent...but kid, I have to work. Would I rather pet him that tweak that Publisher document yet again? Wouldn't I?)
Anyway, tangent indulged: we were coming downstairs and our footsteps were in sync.
It was so bizarre.
His legs are three inches long and he has four of them. How come they matched up, even if he was double-time?

Global Nomad Note:
On a totally separate subject, I have moved around a lot. Still averaging under 3 years to a place. I occasionally have flashes of insight into the wreckage of my lifestyle because of this. My most recent one was to think: Hmm. I could buy an umbrella. To have one. That's something people have so they can use it.

I had an umbrella, like...four years ago. In Japan they sell what amounts to disposable umbrellas in every convenience store because monsoon season isn't traumatic there, but it is not joke, either. water, mighty, gushing from the sky kind of weather. Non-stop. For weeks.
But anyway. Sometimes I realize I don't have something really kind of basic in my life because I left it behind in whichever move it was.
So I bought a desk a few weeks ago. I was all nervous and everything.
And sometime soon, I'm going to lay hands on an umbrella.

Self-Discovery Note:
And apparently I lisp slightly. My mom mentioned it today, and I was a bit confounded. I'd never noticed.
That might of been part of that thing where my aunts and uncles would say to me "Stop talking like a baby." Really, one aunt, and someone else who picked up on it, I think.
Though I was probably not even 8 years old. That's kinda mean, if you know what I'm saying--I WAS a baby. I didn't have any idea what they were talking about. And it may be part of why I talk below my natural speaking tone a lot of the time...

I'm probably really not traumatized.
I mean, not by the "talking like a baby thing". The umbrella factor is still a problem. Some day I'm going to wake up and find that I haven't had a bed in 5 years, or something. Worse: a BOOK.

Boring Writer Notes:

( Cut for Your Sanity and Eyesight--look away from the screen for 15 seconds, that's a duck )

Really... My littlest brother is playing my Lord of the Rings fan-music. This would be more surreal if someone hadn't REQUESTED one of the songs during a visit a little while ago.
I'm two 9 year-old-boys favorite band. Awesome Points: 100!
If we're talking for a MG writer...

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: my Mithrandir song, playing for who knows what reason in the living room

I was thinking about the resurgence of the Gothic themes (in urban fantasy particularly) is interesting, and how children's literature has gone back even closer to it's forebears in terms of Gothic plotting and setting (Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos, Lemony Snickett, Flora Segunda).

The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, both could fit right into that reading list...what's more, right into the cover art:

(Okay, thinking about Flora Segunda makes me thrilled with the Dandies in Kilts idea all over again. Some people are so imaginative...)

Which made me realize the only big difference is the sense of madcap humor, the self-deprecation in it. In popular literature now that's kind of the unique thing to our era, don't you think? The Gothic novels were very self-serious (except for Northanger Abbey--that book deserves so much more admiration). The sarcasm of Urban Fantasy is overplayed, but really one of it's great draws.

I might cross-post this to

urbanfantasyfan as a book-thinky post. To try and encourage them to be interesting...
But as hardly anyone ever answers there, tell me:

Is Self-Deprecation Humor a unique asset to our "post-modern" literature?

You may blame this speculation on reading Coyote Dreams and Heart of Stone (

mizkit) successively in less than 42 hours, and much less open-brain-space.

Current Mood: book-stoned
Current Location: work/sneaking off work
Current Music: Into the Sun - Lifehouse

One of the things about the existential economy of the internet is that the currency is not only intangible, it's redistribution of wealth is fairly arbitrary.

Only if you are really subscriber-rich (think Boing-Boing, a niche blogger like Miss Snark was) is your referral sure to make a difference to the referee.

There's always the Black Swan affect, though, like with the Numa Numa video on YouTube that became a phenomenon. And so we strive...

I told you I wanted to image blog, right?
Well, for starters, here's something that's bugging me:

This is a new permanent fixture of our keyboard. A mic-ing contraption that protrudes over the ivories I rarely deign to tickle and now will have more reason to neglect. Except I'm appalled at how slow my fingers have gotten (a problem that doesn't translate in your favor to a slow typing reflex) and have determined to work on a Ludovico Einaudi song (Le Onde) until I don't feel like a waste of opposable thumbs.

From a distance, this bent-pipe and foam-padded contraption has a certain urban grunge appeal, I'll admit. When trying to play an instrumental piece, though, it has a certain suicide-pact appeal...

Now I must go back and link the life out my text for the sake of the people...
Oh. Don't forget Dr. Horrible! Here's the First Act, up for a limited time only!

Current Mood: nerdy

One of those hazy "the real world as spec fic" realizations came to me yesterday. It had something to do with the way icon-making is an internet swap-meet (appropriately derivative and grass-roots), and the way Cory Doctorow talked about the unweildiness of copyright laws as they stand being applied to the Internet and electric media. The inciting thing I think was seeing a welcome to fellow bloggers to link back to an announcement about a new magazine.

Thesis:
The Internet's Natural Economy is Existential

Rather than demand a currency, trade seems to be done in name-credit, high reader numbers forming a particular sort of wealth, a relativistic commodity.
Acknowledging the icon maker, linking back to the inspiration, exchanging funny YouTube videos becomes the accepted form of currency.

This is something that young people who have been initiated into MySpace, the IM culture, and forum politics navigate differently, more aptly than others don't.
I know of a guy, a teacher, who has great stuff to say and started to blog, but who I've never seen comment on someone else's. His missing a key part of being in the blogging world. He gets comments because he has loyal students (like me) who never get comments back but are too emo over their own lack of comments to stiff someone else.

What this means I don't know.

What do you say? Arguments? Further Evidence?

Personally, I've been wanting to use more images in my blogging, because I love some of the arts blogs that have three pretty photos in each post...

There may be more in the wings on this, I'd really love to dialogue about it.

I've started a poetry journal, since I seem to be pursuing a career as a poet (funny how these things can creep up on you).

If you want to see it, friend

gossamer_spun

I'll love to have critique, since I'm not doing too well finding people who WILL critique my poetry, even where critique is the norm.
[Now I shall know who my true friends are, won't I? ha-haha-haha!]

And Now:

Essays on the Wild Woman—The Ugly Duckling and La Mariposa

( Woman-Talk )

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idiosyncreant

BethanyPowell.com

June 2022

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Ever Bethany

do we make it out alive?

Entries tagged with w/v construct

Okay, it's late and I'm posting about k-drama again

Ah, I love the smell of research in the morning!

some thoughts to chew on

it's not for lack of other post ideas I'm doing this...

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On Perspective, A Worn Hobby Horse of Mine

Just a little Word

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To all my Writer and Reader friends...

thought private thoughts, and gave himself blood

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3 Bizarre Things

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Economy of the Internet--comment currency & link IOUs

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June 2022

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