What to read?
Lately I’ve been reading Raymond Chandler. His work is exciting and well-written, with prose that is often more fun than the meaning, like a present where you can entertain yourself for half an hour with the ribbon and the wrapping paper before you even get to the contents. He’s been an inspiration for many scifi/fantasy authors, and (important for a person with little money and less shelf space) you can find lots of it in the library.
A lot of stuff I’m ’supposed’ to like has been disappointing, especially erotica. In some cases I end up feeling like I’m a better writer than 99% of the folks writing erotica. It’s nice to go swim in a pool that’s big enough that my fiction is nothing but a modestly interesting backwater and whereever I swim I have plenty to learn.
However, it’s only a matter of time before I run out of Chandler.
So where should I go swim next?
Author Chat: Mari Ness, August 27-29
The next Circlet Press author chat will be hosted by author Mari Ness. She is the author of the story “Cinder Feet”, forthcoming in the Circlet anthology Like a Thorn. Her other publictions have appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Hub Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of New Erotica 2 and 3. Her cats would like to take this opportunity to inform you that she does not, in fact, feed them enough tuna. Join us (and the cats) at Circlet Press’s Livejournal community.
Pi-con
This weekend I went to Pi-con, a small sf con near Springfield, MA but just over the border in Connecticut. It was a pleasant little con with three tracks of programming, a dealers’ room, and lots of pretty young things dressed in home-made steampunk outfits. I only regret that since I wasn’t a hotel guest I couldn’t get in the pool. As per usual, I was wading through some fairly crippling headaches and medications for most of the day, but I managed to keep from wobblinpag or speaking in tongues. I think.
The first panel was Gender and sf/f. I was thinking about gender from the point of view of having just edited a book of transgender sf erotica. The other presenters were thinking primarily of how women are treated in sf/fantasy, and also of the treatment of women in TV shows (not always sf/fantasy). I was a bit handicapped on the grounds that I don’t watch TV. Having figured out the dynamic, I mostly stayed out of the way. However, I did bring up the treatment of men in M/M romance written by women and had some fun watching one of the other folks try to explain how that was different from how men treat women in fiction.
The panel on horses and other animals suffered for being up against the guest of honor reading and had fewer audience members than panelists, but was still kind of fun. One of the audience members grew up in Holland after WW2 so remembers when people still used horses for agriculture and transportation on a daily basis.
The main feature of the panel on tools for writers was to illustrate how a panel is less interesting if the moderator doesn’t do enough traffic cop organization to keep one person from talking the whole time. Especially, I think, if you’re going to do most of the talking in a panel about how to write, you should have some credits to your name other than a novel you’ve been working on for six years but haven’t finished. Throwing an application that provides charts and diagrams to keep track of your characters and plot items seems a poor substitute for finishing the project already. Do writers have some innate talent that enables them to convert ideas into structured text, and can software substitute if you don’t have it?
I had an erotic reading scheduled, splitting an hour with Raven Kaldera, who I haven’t seen in ages, certainly not since he transitioned. As we were getting settled a gentleman sat down in the front of the row to demand of me who was reading and what was to be read, since he couldn’t find anything about it in the program. Since the program listed the participants (me and Raven), and at a con readings are usually from the writers’ own works, I’m not sure why he was confused. Let me describe this man for you. As a right-thinking person you believe you are, you do your best not to stereotype people when you first meet them. However, you’re not as successful at this as you like to think you are, and you fail hopelessly when faced with this man. He’s the sort of man who looks like he doesn’t have any friends and is hoping you’ll be the one he deserves, especially if he decides you meet his standards for feminine attractiveness. You start hoping that you are not attractive. I gave a short introduction and started reading from The Memorial Garden. I picked a nice juicy bit, which is to say not a het bit. Not at all. The man left. I was relieved, even though the remaining audience was small. I am pleased to note for the future that I possess the spell of banishing creepy straight men. The audience grew a bit when I was reading, and those who remained were extremely enthusiastic. Raven read from a story in the Circlet pub “Like a Sacred Desire” which is either out now or will be out soon.
I finished off the night as the moderator of the first half of the BDSM panel. Yes, indeed, the topic is so popular that they have two hours of it and divided the panelists into two batches. I did a lot of active moderation for the first half, then opened the panel up to let other people be the top. The first half was much more fun. I’ll keep that in mind.
And then it was time for a two-hour ride back to Boston.
Crack! Part 2
Last month I wrote about whip practice in the park. A month later, post car accident and all sorts of excitement we went back. I’ve now got enough muscle in my right arm that I can crack for a much longer time before I get sore. The downside is that I can now crack long enough to give myself blisters. My skin tends not to toughen up, so I put in an order for golf gloves as some of the other participants suggested. Also, my strength is greater than my control over the lash, and my arm hasn’t learned how little force I need to get a decent bang out of the whip. The upshot:
The welts faded a bunch before I got pix. From my point of view, some of them hurt enough to give me pause, though that was less the pain than the buzz of endorphins making me dizzy. In any case, no whip welt on the planet can hurt as much as a migraine, and I’ve never got an endorphin rush from one of those.
I still have work to do before the signal whip is all the way broke in, and I’m already thinking of picking up an inexpensive 6′ 8-plait bull for a different feel and–this is important–louder noises. The folks using 12′ and longer whips got some really nice echoes coming back from the water.
Next Circlet Press Author Chat: Zachary Jernigan, Aug 14-15
Zachary Jernigan, the host of Circlet’s next author chat, wrote “Only For Myself: Japan, 2043,” the kick-off story for my collection Up for Grabs. He has another story forthcoming in Wired Hard 4, which will be available in about a month. Zachary’s work has a touch of the strange that will remind you of the first time you got excited about science fiction. Be sure to join us at Circlet Press’s LJ Community.
Not. Hot.
So now that I can type, I can complain.
I picked up a copy of Chaos Magic from Torquere Press, my publisher. I did so because I wanted something to read, and also because reading it vaguely qualifies as ‘research.’ There’s plenty about this book that lands it in the same marketing category as my writing. It’s considered (urban) fantasy, M/M, and fairly high up on the Torquere pepper scale. Supposedly people who like one book will like the other.
I hated it.
One obvious reason is that I’m a prose snob. Given the choice between reading something smutty with bad prose and something with no heat but rich, descriptive sentences full of moods, colors, and nuanced feelings, I’ll take the Patricia McKillip. Chaos Magic is weak in the prose department. Most paragraphs are two sentences long and the transitions between them are jumpy. Even the most intense sex and s/m is disposed of so fast that I kept going back looking for the parts I must have missed, but which aren’t there. Where I would prefer to read (and try to write) playful words with their own passion and texture, the author here has created joyless, starved words that deliver their burdens of plot and get out of the way as fast as possible before they mistakenly attract any attention from the reader.
But the real suck sink was that one of the characters was a domestic abuse survivor.
The more M/M fiction (particularly that written by W) I read, the more I run into this. I suspect that it’s even more common than I’ve noticed, and that it’s a subset of the famous fanfic hurt/comfort genre. The Fs who write M/M seem to like it because it makes stoic heroes vulnerable without any work on the part of the writer. Let’s be clear–I’m not immune from the dubious pleasures of h/c fiction. But the abuse survivor motif leaves me cold. Part of it is the annoying similarities of all the characters. Every one of them is a sub/bottom type who likes to be swept away by a stronger man, but who tried to satisfy that need with someone who turns out to have issues. The abusers mouth the same threats. Even the dialogue is suspicously similar, as if all the authors are cribbing from the same abuse survivor workbook.
And there we have one of the biggest problems. They’re clearly cribbing because they don’t know what they’re talking about.
M/M romance fiction with abuse survivor characters reads like anal sex fiction written by people who have never have any. There are lots of tipoffs for naive anal sex writing. The author fixates on the 1-2-3 finger stretch to get a character ready for their first fuck but don’t realize that if the warmup takes too long the character will be too sore for the main event; they obsess about whether or not it hurts but doesn’t grasp the feeling of needing it so desperately that you will do it even if you have only spit for lube; they know nothing of the primal sounds that come out of the mouth of someone getting assfucked.
Authors have no idea what domestic abuse is like. If they did, they wouldn’t write about it. They don’t grasp how a personality changes under the influence of abuse and what does or doesn’t change when the abuse goes away. They write about explosive emotional experiences (break-downs, fights) experienced by survivors and overlook the day-to-day grind of pervasive, monotonous guilt and confusion. They believe that the surivor’s next relationship will understand what he experienced before and what he feels presently, and that someone who loves him can somehow help him recover. Like alcoholism, no one ever recovers from abuse.
The really puzzling thing for me is that it seems obvious why people would find anal sex hot to write about, even if they are completely clueless about it. Learning more about it leads to more rewarding writing. But abuse can only represent some twisted sort of wish fullfilment for people who know nothing about it. I’m married to an abuse survivor, so you can trust me on this.
[Folks reading this on LJ may not realize, but it's reposted from my main blog site. It's possible to automatically resend stuff to LJ so my friends over there can read it, but no way to fold the comments in both places back together to the same place.]
Crash Updates
I saw a hand doctor today, and he said I could take the splint off. Since nothing hurts, I’m typing for the first time in over a week. This is a huge thing because I need my fingers to think.
Here’s what happened with the accident:
We were traveling westbound on Massachusetts Avenue, a few feet behind where the red car is in this picture. The cross street to the north is Blake. A driver on Blake wanted to cross both westbound lanes of Mass Avenue and turn left (east). The traffic in the right lane was stopped, and someone in that lane stopped and let her through. Instead of easing out into the right lane and waiting for the left to clear, she punched the gas in hopes that if she ran fast enough through the raindrops, she wouldn’t get wet. On the positive side, given all that’s about to happen, you can see the fire station at the interection of Blake and Mass Ave.
I was a passenger in my car. Unlike my spouse, who was driving, I could see her coming and realized that she was committed and that there was nothing we could do and started screaming my head off. I do not remember screaming. I remember a really loud, really horrible impact, and suddenly I had an airbag in my face. Airbags do not smell nice; I could have gone my whole life without smelling the insides of one and been happy. The stupid bitch had gotten just in front of us, and we hit her so hard that the make of her left front tire is readable from the impression in our front bumper (Dunlop). She claims to have been traveling 30 mph; since neither of us saw the other there are no skid marks on the ground to show you.
I was ok but too stunned to climb over the shifter, so I was stuck until the helpful firemen and first responders unhooked the cars. When they started the cars up and started moving us apart, I was struck with the feeling that my car was screaming. I started to cry, but I quickly discovered that I could not draw a breath because of how badly my chest hurt, so I was stuck with a really stuffy nose and the world’s worst case of hiccups. Furthermore, my ring finger hurt and it was starting to swell. With a fracture (albeit a finger) and some seriously messed-up ribs, I ended up on a board in an ambulance headed for Mt. Auburn Hospital. All along the way the spouse and I gathered lots of ferverent thanks from EMTs who were glad to hear that we were wearing out seatbelts.
I lucked out in the emergency room. The nurses, who have a lot of practice at these things, were able to remove my rings without cutting them off. Also, once the staff got organized, they left me take some of my own pain relievers that I carry along in case I get a migraine while away from home. I actually carry better drugs as a matter of course than the emergency room is willing to hand out. And then I spent the evening staring up at the doorway under which my stretcher was plunked, with a break for a CT of my neck, x-rays, and an ekg. My spouse had a big bruise on his shin from an unfriendly encounter with the steering column. Given the traffic of seriously mangled people in the ER, he declined to be admitted and walked all the way to Harvard Square for some otc pain relievers. I was released with a confirmed broken finger and a bunch of negative tests, a testimony to exactly how much more soft tissue injuries hurt than broken bones.
So a week on I’m pretty well sore still. The worst of it is the migraines. I’d been getting ahead of those, but most days I’m swimming in drugs to keep them tolerable. The other driver admitted 100% fault, so I expect to throw a lawyer at her, turn her upside-down, and see what comes out when we shake.
Delaney quote?
I heard that Samuel Delany once proposed a sentence that meant two different things depending on whether it was in a Scifi story or not. The sentence was “He turned on his left side.”
Can anyone give me a citation? Or an indication that this is apocryphal?
TY.
‘Nuff Said
RIP Jettt, valiant Toyota, sacrificed her life for passengers, 7/29/2009.
One broken finger (must 2finger type), haven’t had a serious cry yet cause ribs hurt too much. Flesh heals. Metal dies.
More Good News: Up for Grabs reviewed by Rainbow Reviews!
If I get any more good news tonight, I may explode. Rainbow reviews has published this lovely take on Up for Grabs, a short story collection I edited.
