Things I have been getting from the comic book

This could end up being pretty hard to convey. It may not even be necessary—I mean, the writing is my journey, so these things are for me. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that they won’t be good for anyone else.

Remember, starting out I was recently in love with a band, obsessing over a music video, and feeling somewhat depressed about both the sorry state of the world and the persistence of my having to walk it alone. Put that way, it sounds pretty pathetic, but I started writing, as I do.

And I really needed it. I needed to work my way back into writing, and there is always a certain amount of fear with that for me, which I think is a big part of the procrastination. This was low risk, though. At the time, I was sure that I would never try and sell it to anyone or make a dime off of it, so there were no career or aspirational fears, and I was sure I would not put it online, though maybe if friends asked to read it I would let them. (Now I am pretty sure I will put it online, but I don’t know where, and I’ll worry about that when I’m done. And it will be scary, but I’ll do it anyway.)

The first issue that came up—besides some struggling with the action scenes, which I will cover later—was realizing how dark the material was. The odds were so insurmountable, and death was so much a factor, that it felt like the only way you could possibly have any kind of a happy ending was to go all Last Battle, Narnia-style. The problem is that the Narnia series has religious symbolism throughout, so when you have a mega-religious ending, it makes sense. In this case, it wouldn’t.

A lot of writers I like will stay fairly positive with their long fiction, but get really dark in short stories. I have been darker in short form, but this was turning long—much longer than I expected. I initially thought it would maybe be about 120 pages, because that would be a standard script. I’m at 309 now, and I’m guessing it will end up at around 360. I guess it’s a trilogy.

Okay, things were looking dark, but part of why I was drawn to the material was that the world is dark and it was hurting me, so it made sense to sort through that darkness and see what I could find.

The first thing I found was that there was a lot of love there. That includes romantic love, and that’s important, but there was so much more, with familial love, and friendship, and friendships that become family, so that no matter how many people you lose you are not alone, if you will let yourself not be alone.

In my Black History Month reading, I read Black Like Me, and I think I have already mentioned that he talks about the one thing that really gets you through all the hate and persecution and oppression is the small kindnesses that you show each other. It resonated because at some point in the writing a tradition of gift-giving had started, where they were always looking for ways to help each other. I haven’t actually written the scene where it’s explained yet, and I thought it was going to be Otis who says it, but maybe it will have to be Mitch or Jacob, but the point will be that it is a horrible life, and those remembrances are the things that make it better.

You do write things that are true, and you don’t necessarily know that you know them until you write them. I have three favorite things there.

One happens when Natalia is comforting Latron after another death, where the two people he has been the closest two have died within a few weeks of each other. He is a teenage boy, possibly with some anger issues, and certainly some tendencies to be macho, and she says she want’s to hug him, but she’s not sure if he would like that. He does want it, but what if he just gets attached to her, and then she dies too?

“That’s why you need to love as many people as you can.”

And then she and Deanna and Grace all hold him, but the moment does not become too maudling because the other guys are all standing around awkwardly. Then Deanna tells Latron that being male will make his life harder and stupider, which is equally true.

The other scene that kind of surprised me also comes out of comforting Latron. It’s the night before the big push, and he is looking at an old War Memorial and feeling that they will all be dead and forgotten, and Gerard gets the idea to take some spray paint and create their own memorial on an empty wall. Initially it is just them, but every one else joins in, until the wall is covered.

I think the idea actually came from “Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back”. There’s a line in there, “It’s not about all the friends you make, but the graffiti they write on your graves.” The song has a totally different tone from the scene, though there is a transition.

In the start there was a feeling that I had of these internal primal screams where you just want to yell out the name of the person you have lost, especially with Mikey and Ray. You feel like you can’t yell it, because once you unleash that pain who knows where it will go and what it will do, but keeping it in is no good either. Spraying the names becomes a release. It is based in mourning but it becomes celebration, and everyone feels kind of euphoric.

The after effect of that release is that everyone sits around talking and sharing memories. The barriers are down, and they can talk now, and it doesn’t hurt anymore, at least not the same way. It is art, and it is communal, and it is healing.

The other thing came fairly recently, and it has not spawned a scene, but it sort of covers the entire thing. I was thinking about first aid, actually, and emergency preparedness and what to do in certain situations, and the thought clearly came to me, you can’t fix death. The immediate follow up thought was, you don’t need to.

You know, just accomplishing something, and achieving a goal, would feel good anyway, but there’s been a lot more to it than that.

The gift inside the writing

Okay, trying this again.

I have written that I think that working on this project is making me a better writer, and that is true, but when I wrote that post, I had intended to write about the way this has been helping me emotionally.

What I found was that to do that, I need to go over what writing does, and I don’t have a direct path for that—it is going to be lots of little stories that put together I believe add up to something. Because of that, I’m afraid that this post is going to be more of a shaggy dog post than usual, but there should be at least one point in here by the time it’s done.

Remember my schoolmate who could not complete thoughts, and I thought he should try journal writing? So these are some things that have come from people who write more.

This is from Alan Moore. I read it when I was researching comic books:

"One word balloon in From Hell completely hijacked my life… A character says something like, 'The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind'. After I wrote that, I realised I'd accidentally made a true statement, and now I'd have to rearrange my entire life around it. The only thing that seemed to really be appropriate was to become a magician."

I disagree with his statement and his conclusion, but it totally makes sense that he would state a belief that he had not fully crystallized in the process of writing.

There was a similar quote from Gerard Way, which I could not find again, about “The Kids From Yesterday”. There is a line in there: “You only hear the music when your heart begins to break.” If I remember correctly, what he said is that they realized it was true and it had not been said before. Now, you could spend a lot of time arguing about what that means exactly, and in what ways it is true. The greater point I am trying to make here is that when you are writing, things come out that you didn’t know were there.

Now let me go to something that I had a friend, who is also an English teacher, wrote up for a newsletter:

“It was my first year teaching the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, and we were well in to the book and had already gone through class period after class period trying to move beyond summary and identification of themes and into discovering how the author uses language and images to create an intended effect.  It was at this point when a quiet student in the back slowly raised his hand, then put his hand back on his lap, only the raise it again with a little more courage the second time.  He had noticed that the end table next to one of the characters’ bed was made of drift wood and wondered if it connected to the death earlier in the book which happened on the shore of the ocean. All the other hands in the room went down as every student looked back at their book with silent respect, wondering both why they hadn’t noticed it and what this could mean about the character.  After a fascinating and rather lengthy discussion on the motif of the ocean, another student, more brazen than the first, raised her hand and challenged the entire discussion.  “Did Amy Tan really do all of this on purpose or are we simply overanalyzing?”

We discussed that question that day but I still think about it frequently. The conclusion that I have comfortably settled on is that, as readers, finding connections between things is important and even if Amy Tan, or any good writer, did not intentionally create the connection, because of the nature of being a good thinker, she had been unconsciously creating connections between everything in her life and mind as a matter of routine and this manifested itself in her writing.”

(A Student of the Scriptures by Jennifer Wecker, November 2011 Aloha 1st Ward Relief Society newsletter)

Let’s get back to that letter writer I mentioned yesterday, wanting to stress that not everyone could be a great writer, defined as someone who could make other fall in love with the English language and get hooked on reading. Actually, I’m going to link to that:
http://blog.oregonlive.com/myoregon/2012/09/letters_a_writers_lifetime_int.html 

A writer's lifetime

I applaud letter writer Dick Bohrer's dedication to helping people learn to write ("How to teach writing," Aug. 28). To a degree, he's correct: Great teachers can help aspiring writers find their way using tools such as structure, constructive editing and rhetorical techniques. With effort, poor writers can become proficient, and average writers can become confident enough to express themselves with charm and grace.

The picture darkens, however, when one speaks of becoming a good -- much less great -- writer, one who writes from the soul, who takes a reader on an original journey and who burrows deep into his or her own fears and suffering to return with resonant truths about the human condition. That, unfortunately, takes a lifetime, even for writers of innate talent. And some, despite years of admirable work, may, sadly, never get there.

With the right teacher and willingness, most of us can learn to write, and we are indebted to professionals such as Mr. Bohrer. Very few of us, though, will ever be able to say we write well, to be one of those authors who leads us to love literature.

That can't be taught using recipes. It must be earned.

STEVE PATTERSON
Southeast Portland  

Possibly correct, but I am going to make a few contradictory points. One, there is considerable room for disagreement on what makes a great writer. Joyce and Fitzgerald and Hemingway work for some, but not me. I’m sure there are people who don’t love Austen, and it would be wrong for me to call them wrong, even if I kind of secretly think it. And some of them arrive at it sooner than you would expect. It is not just the polishing of the writing style, but also who the writer and the reader are. Most people would not consider Rowling a great writer, but she’s turned lots of people on to reading, and there are messages and truths in her books, despite being fiction.

In addition, there is something great about a person being able to shore up their memory, or express love, or discover themselves, or do any of those countless things that are accessible to everyone by writing. Teaching writing, and having good techniques for doing so, has a far broader importance than producing the next Twain.

One of the things I remember from Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” is that when she would tell her coworkers that she was an undercover writer, they weren’t necessarily surprised or impressed, because they were all writers. Maybe it was just that they kept a journal, but it was a very normal thing for those around her to be recording their lives. Okay, she was a professional; they weren’t, but they still had something there. I love that.

So, that is my roundabout way of saying that writing brings things out of you, and it is valuable. Next time I will see if I can with more clarity express what this writing has done for me. If I have not yet made this clear, it does not always come out right the first time.

Braaaaiiiinnnnssss

This is going to be pretty random. It will serve an important function because I need to take a break from writing about writing the comic, maybe to actually get it done or something, and I find my desire to write about politics is becoming stronger.

It actually works together though. Where I was getting stuck on writing about writing was trying to explain how the writing helps with clarity and happiness—how much there is inside the writing. I had several stories, and also there was a recent article about how teaching writing has been neglected in schools, but is really important and is starting to become a point of emphasis again.

The article drew some interesting comments including one about how they can only maybe get most of the kids to be good writers, because very few people can be great writers. I think they were missing the point on multiple levels, but one of those points was being missed in a way that is pessimistic about human potential.

I saw something opposite going on last night with President Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention. He gave details, he explained things, and people ate it up! They loved it! Sure there are people who are complaining that the speech was too long, but there seem to be more people who thought that was just fine.

Personally, I was surprised to see some of the reaction to certain points that he made, because they are things that I thought would be well-known among the politically active, and if you are attending a political convention you probably are active, but maybe it was just nice to hear, or they were thinking about people watching at home, or they had missed some things. There’s a lot of information out there right now. It would be easy to miss some.

The point is, in a time that is characterized by the misleading blurb, it was nice to see details not only given, but appreciated. The RNC was built around a line taken out of context, and it was easy to do because a complex statement was being made, and there is this idea that only sound bites matter. Wrong. You may need to change your approach, and you certainly need to pick when to go for detail and when to short and sweet, but people don’t have to be dumb and that may be the most hopeful thing out of last night for me.

(I realize I am asking the universe to flood me with stupidity now, but I’m just going to take this moment.)

Actually, for me, that was not the most amazing thing to me about President Clinton’s speech. Julie and Maria and I were out running errands, so we came home and found Mom watching it, and she turned to me and said “I think I want to register Democrat.”

Until recently, I was the only registered Democrat in the household. (Maria recently had to redo her registration after a signature question from one ballot, so she changed it then.) Everyone else has been voting pretty liberal, but they had never bothered changing their registrations, and I was the only person in the family who started out as a Democrat. (Always the rebel.) Mom usually votes with us, but then she feels guilty about it. I think she crossed some sort of internal barrier last night. Thank you President Clinton.

For now, as long as we are being random, I want to get back to that zombie dream. I was telling a friend about it, and she was surprised because she knows about my aversion to zombies and wondered if there was some self-loathing going on. I didn’t think so.

What happened was a bunch of zombies (mostly familiar faces, including me) were confined in this basement. We were still pretty self-aware and undecayed, but probably were going to be losing that. There was food, and some were getting really into the squishiness of the food, where you could see how a transition to brains would come easily to them. One of the other zombies attacked me (wanting to eat my brains), and I fended her off by choking, but it was clear to me that things were just going to get worse in there, so I seem to have led an escape.

In the parking lot, everyone was wandering off to try and lay low and blend so we could stay free, and it was here where I felt my knee become disjointed, which felt really gross. (For zombies, “walk it off” has a whole different meaning.) Anyway, some zombie guy with long blond hair was apparently stealing a motorcycle to get away, and he called after me and advised that if I wanted to stay inconspicuous I better not smoke or drink, because I would never be able to pull off those behaviors. I’m not saying he didn’t have a point, but really what he wanted was to team up, and that’s pretty much where it ended, though I believe I was going to go with him. For one thing, motorcycle!

Looking back at the dream, besides relief to have all components of my knee joint fully functional and in place, there is concern that I might have done the wrong thing. If we really were going to be deteriorating more, and start with the brain-eating, then for the good of society we probably should have stayed confined. Right there, though, that thought involves some rationality and altruism that is unlikely from someone turning into a zombie. Clearly I can’t be trusted in a zombie apocalypse, but who can?

I guess there is really just one overriding thought for the entire post: A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

The next obvious question

It seems reasonable to wonder, having spent so much time on studying and writing and appreciating comic books, if I am going to go back. I already said I would read more, but will I write more?

My initial thought was that there wasn’t really a place for me. I feel like what I am writing has a very female energy. There is a lot of action, but the action is not as important as the relationships, and there is a lot of talking. Then I remembered that as I was starting this all of my conversations were happening with women who were fans of comics. Yes, the adolescent boy factor is important, but it is only one factor. So I had to rethink that issue.

I still suspect the answer is “no”, because to me it makes more sense for the field to be led by more visually inclined people. I am somewhat visual, but I really am more verbal. So many times I will look at the art and see the sheer joy of the artwork, where it is just a celebration of form and color, and I can’t offer that. The story does matter, and the words, but it is the pictures that lead.

Where I can totally see getting involved is if an artist needed help. If they had a vision of the kind of world they wanted to portray, but were not sure what to do with it, I could totally work with that. I think this is backwards to how it normally goes, but still, I think it could work.

Of course, I have been wrong before, and I find that in my next round of comic book study, I really want to know more about the mechanics of it, like how the artist and the writer collaborate, and what software they use, and how long things take, and a lot of other information that technically should be useless to me, but I find myself very curious about.

Also, I started wondering how much material I actually have. In Final Draft, I am currently at 289 pages. For a movie, that would be 289 minutes of screen time, but I wanted to know about how many comic pages it would be.

My first thought was to just pick a couple of pages and draw them. I thought about how frustrating my stick figures would be, or if I tried to do better than stick figures, how that would be even more frustrating, and so I discounted that idea, but I keep coming back to it. I may end up still doing it, merely as an experiment. Oh, but it will be ugly.

For the original question, what I did instead was took one of the comic books I bought—in this case, Infinite Crisis Crossover JLA World Without a Justice League (123 Feb 06) and opened up a new Final Draft file and started typing. One page in Final Draft took me through the first two pages and into the first panel of the 3rd page. Let’s say it is basically 2:1, and what is really scary is that particular issue is only about 20 pages. (I may have accidentally counted some ad space. There were a lot of ads.)

So, I guess if I was going to do this, I could be super-prolific—my power is not shutting up. But I’m not going to do it. I think.

But why a comic book?

One thing I should be hitting on in other posts is how much of what you write seems inevitable and foreordained. It’s not really that you are just making things up, but you are trying to make them “right”. There are directions you could go where they would not fit. Sometimes it makes obvious sense, and sometimes it is not obvious, but you can figure it out, and sometimes I suppose it could be a complete and total mystery, though nothing comes to mind for that yet.

In picking a storytelling form, there are things that feel right and not right. “Cara” was always going to be a novel, and “Jade Mask” was always going to be a screenplay. That’s just how they felt. Sometimes it is more obvious than others. With “Between the Lines” and “Out of Step”, there are dance sequences. Trying to describe them in writing out the screenplay is hard enough, trying to get the reader to get the whole feel of it in a novel would be kind of weird. It could happen, but you have something that is visual, and auditory when you add in the music, so maybe that makes more sense filmed.

Sometimes it is less obvious. There was something I tried writing as an essay once, and it wasn’t working, because that form required more specifics, and I was trying to convey a feeling, and a more universal feeling, and then suddenly it was a poem and that worked. When I first started writing “Hungry” I struggled, and so I stopped writing it is as a screenplay and wrote it as a short story, and that worked, and then I was able to go back and write it as a screenplay.

To some extent, if it is more mental it makes sense to go with a book, and if it is more action-oriented go with a screenplay, but people come up with some really interesting things sometimes by ignoring that. Probably they could also come up with some colossal failures that way, but hey, maybe it’s the risk that gives you that rush.

Working from “Danger Days”, that material may be inherently suited for comic book form, because they’re coming out with a comic book from it, so maybe that is just the way it is. That being said, there are some specific benefits that I am getting from working with a different form, and that is working out well.

One thing that I was liking about the form starting out is that it gives you some extra freedom. Narration in a movie often feels lazy, but there are places in comics where it can totally work. In books you have to describe everything to have it be seen, but in comics you can actually show it. Together, you have more ways of conveying the point. I like that.

In my case, I also have to deal with the reality that I do not expect for this to be drawn. I will put it out there to be read, but there will not be artwork with it. Also, people who read it because they like me, rather than being fans of the band, will not be coming in with helpful background knowledge. Combining those issues. I have to do a good job of clarifying and describing in the writing.

This is where I think this project is going to be really useful. When we were studying plays in high school, one thing that was hammered into me is that the play is neutral. What I mean by that is that how the inflections are done, and what the sets and actors look like, and various details like that are blank, and then things can be decided by the director and the actors.  I got it in my head that this is how you have to write a play, and I brought that mindset into writing screenplays.

One conflict I ran into on my collaboration was that my collaborator was totally the opposite. Of course, she came from a novel-writing background, so she was used to putting in details, but she put everything in there from small facial gestures to colors and fabric types for clothing.

I felt like she totally overdid it, but at the same time I was underdoing it. One thing to remember is that the director and actor and set designer and costumer are all free to make their own changes, and from everything I have heard they totally will. However, you need to at least create a picture so there is something there to capture their interest.

Previously I would write dialogue and action, and I believe I did them well, but there was a bare minimum of description—only what was absolutely necessary for rooms and objects, and nothing on how people looked or how they felt.

I guess what I am saying is that even though I am writing this as a comic book, and what I write in the future I expect to be primarily screenplays, I will write the screenplays more like I have written the comic book.

The world is ugly

I think I need to add a little to yesterday’s post. I think it was important to lose the assumption, but at the same time, that could be a temporary thing too. Maybe I just wanted it too much and needed to get over that.

Just as an update, and everything I am about to write is true, though don’t take it to seriously, an inmate friend of Aaron’s tried really hard to be my pen pal, upon learning of that, another friend offered me the recently homeless veteran she is helping get back on is feet, and I may have been hit on by a comic book store owner, so obviously I do have options, and I am just too picky. I can live with this.

The screenplay that I have in mind to write next is about someone who has given up on love and then is pursued, and yes, I totally see the irony, but there was a strong idea that came, and I think I can develop it. Whether it ends up being sweet or bitterly satirical is something I don’t know yet, and then there was the idea to for for zombies instead, and the other night I dreamt that I was a zombie, so who knows, and actually I think I had a love interest in that dream, though I was kind of preoccupied with my leg becoming disjointed. But I digress.

Anyway, there was something else bringing me down, and it’s not like it had never been an issue before, but it was getting much worse. A lot of it goes back to February, crystalizing around the Trayvon Martin shooting.

I had been starting to read quite a bit about ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), and was pretty uncomfortable with them. The Stand Your Ground law was the type of legislation they were sponsoring, along with many other things that did not bode well, and now there was a dead teenager whose killer appeared to be getting away with it. (That’s still up in the air, but it didn’t look good.)

ALEC is just one part of a huge issue with corporate interests overtaking public interests, and with the poor economy and increasingly negative political discourse, things weren’t looking very good. I looked into the possibility of boycotting the Koch brothers, and it didn’t look like there was any way of making a dent. I had not heard of Sheldon Adelson at that time, but yeah, he’s not really making his money from anything that I do. It was feeling very difficult to make any sort of positive difference.

Okay, from a religious point of view, I do expect things to get very dark and scary, and a lot of my interest in emergency preparedness comes from that. I want to feel able to handle situations, and I want to be able to be helpful to others.

The good news is that I totally know what to do during an earthquake, and we probably do have one coming at some point. I know how to suppress fires and search buildings and render first aid and do all sorts of useful things. What I was finding was that I was not sure how to function in a world where the only thing that mattered was money. I was feeling a very oppressive atmosphere and I did not know what to do about it.

I know some of it is the sense of no control. The last time I renewed my CPR/First Aid certification, I remember thinking at one point that along with my desire to handle things, I had to know that there were situations where my skills would not matter. If you’re decapitated, I will not be able to help you. If I’m the one knocked unconscious, I hope someone else is there and knows what to do. There are things you have to just let go.

Fortunately, things came to ahead right around the time of General Conference, and as the issues of being an old maid in a bad world weighed me down, I did find some answers. One was that I needed to be better about scripture study. I have had very good periods, and I have learned a lot, but sometimes that makes it easier to be casual and not worry about skipping. I need the inspiration though. I need the renewal, because I may be taking multiple beatings, spiritually speaking. I can’t prevent the hard times from coming, but I can prepare to recover, time and time again.

The other point was that I need to get over disliking people. I have always held that we need to love everyone, but liking is a gift. This is fine, except I have taken a sort of perverse pleasure in disliking those who annoy me. I don’t have to like you and I don’t. Ha!

The truth is, when you are feeling like that, you are not feeling particularly loving. It might have worked a while ago, but it would hold me back now, and so I need to let that go. When I see those people now, I mentally say “I am just going to love you.” I don’t believe it with everyone yet, but I had no illusions about it being easy.

Those were very decent answers to have, and things to work on, but the story was still necessary too, and that’s what we will go over next.

What was wrong with me

Maria has been very resistant to my love for My Chemical Romance, at least partially because I could not stop talking about them. I addressed this somewhat in the Geed/Nerd/Dork post. I have better control over it now. I may mention them once or twice a day still, but I’ll try and make it fit the conversation.

Anyway, at one point I was talking about them, and irritated her, and she turned to me and said, “You only like them because you’re depressed. You should let me hook you up with some Smashing Pumpkins or Morissey.” I replied, “That would make sense if I wanted to wallow in it. I’m listening to this band because they make me feel better.”

I had her there. Also, it was kind of a lie, because even if I did want to wallow in depression, I would not really choose the Pumpkins or Morissey to listen to. They are depressing, but I don’t like them. And I feel bad saying that, because they have both been influential for My Chem, but we covered all that in the Musical Chemistry post. Some bands just strike a chord, and other bands don’t, and sometimes someone is the right band at the right time.

As it is, there was one thing that had been consciously weighing on me, and one thing that was under the surface that needed to come out. The unrealized bit came up as I was trying to understand why I couldn’t just leave Jane dead, and I realized that historically, I pretty much always let couples get together. There was the one where the neurologist fell for the boxer with the aneurysm, and that ended pretty badly—I don’t know what happened there. I never really wrote it out though, so it almost doesn’t count.

I was thinking about why that factor was so important to me, and how romantic love was so important to me though still consistently absent, and it hit me that I am not getting married.

Now, I decided years ago that it was fine if I did not get married. I would still have a rich, full life, and that has been true so far, and there is no reason to think that it will not stay true. Despite that, I still had always thought that it would happen—eventually there would be someone. In that moment, it struck me that there was no reason to believe this.

I had sort of been coming to see that, and I had certainly been realizing that even if I do get married it will not be like I had always envisioned, because I would be getting such a late start. I hadn’t really dealt with it though.

I am very grateful that I had made that other realization, about life still being worthwhile, long ago, because that softened the blow, but it still stung. I had the series on marriage not that long ago, so you can read back on that, but there were things I was looking forward to, and I had to stop.

It didn’t affect the writing too much. I do still have a tendency to prioritize happy romantic relationships. I thought about the specific issue with Jane living, and had to think, okay, do you just always give your characters what you don’t get? Get your satisfaction vicariously through fiction? That didn’t seem right, but that didn’t seem to be the case either.

My concern was that in letting her come back it was making things false, and then as I was writing it, it did not feel that way. Ultimately I think the reason that it’s okay that Jane lives that time is because she still dies later, and so many other people die, including people who love and are loved. It’s rough out there in the post-apocalyptic dystopian future. That will lead into the other thing that was wrong with me.

Sing

In going back to how this all started, I have a basic timeline. In February I blogged about annoying love songs, and the ones I really liked, and Lisa S gave me her alternative list, which I included in the blog, which is why people who are searching on “alternative love songs” keep ending up at that post, although it is not what they are actually searching for. I hope they still find the two lists worth checking out.

In exploring Lisa’s songs, and falling hard for “Saturday Night” by the Misfits, I started playing it all the time in rotation with “I’m Not Okay” by My Chemical Romance, and somehow that led to listening to other songs of theirs a lot.

I say listening, but the way I was doing this was bringing up the videos on Youtube while I was working. I was not watching the videos—I was just listening to the songs while I was working on other things. Clearly this is less practical than using Spotify or Pandora or something, but I will get there.

Anyway, I was not seeing the videos, but I would sometimes notice comments on the video as I was navigating. On “Sing” I would notice a lot of expressions of dismay about Gerard dying, and how sad it was, and then someone replied that hey, it wasn’t just Gerard. Well, the lead singer getting a disproportionate amount of attention is nothing new, but it made me curious about the video.

Remember that at this point I was really in love with their music, and still in the early heady stages of it, and this is roughly how fully watching the video for the first time went.

Gerard dying is sad, but I was expecting that.
Aw, Mikey. Well, brothers, yeah, okay.
Frank, don’t be a hero! Too late.
Wait, only Ray makes it out? Oh.

I can see why the director was getting hate mail, but Gerard is listed as a director too, and I’m assuming the band was okay with it, but yeah, it was rough. I still flinch.

The issue is that I couldn’t get over it. I kept thinking back to it. Once upon a time, I would watch things where characters you liked died, and I would not understand why, if you are making something up, you would choose to go that route. As I matured, I got that. Sometimes it’s just necessary—the mega-happy ending doesn’t feel true. However, I still couldn’t let this one go.

The last time I had been affected this way and provided an alternative outcome to something was back in fourth or sixth grade when I read Les Miserables. Frankly, I was too young for the material, but I was fine with most of it except I just couldn’t bear that Enjolras had died. It’s not that I wasn’t sad about Fantine and Gavroche and Eponine, but they were bearable and Enjolras was not. My workaround was actually really weak, involving a trap door into a river.

So, now having seen the video, it was eating away at me and I could not bear the deaths of the Killjoys. I did come up with one solution, and it felt like it worked because it involved the sacrifice of someone else, so there was a price, and it was not too easy. Then I couldn’t leave that person dead either, and I was like, What is wrong with me? And there were answers.

Now I get it

It is time now to start shifting into writing about the graphic novel, still awkward since I have not finished it yet. There are a few posts that I can definitely safely do before having it completed and posted, though I hope the long weekend sees some progress.

Also, it is an election year, and now that the convention is past, all of the coffers can be unloosed (previously only funds raised for the primary could be spent), so I am expecting an inundation of ugly, ugly ads that will make me curse the names of Koch and Adelson and raise my generally low blood pressure. There may end up being some political posts, is all I’m saying.

Speaking of awkward, when I was writing earlier about this project, I believe I expressed some embarrassment about feeling a need to create fan fiction with no commercial value. The need was there, so I was going to do it anyway, and I was going to do a good job of it, but it seemed so pointless.

I justified it as needing to get it out of my system, but also as a way to get back into writing. I had not done any screenplay writing since October or November of 2010. This way I could get back into the habit, and if I was rusty or weird it didn’t matter, because it was not going anywhere. Now I think there is more to it.

I got on Facebook in late 2008, shortly after coming back from Australia.  I had been blogging since late 2005. What you may not know is that about a year before that I had started on a writing project that had been poking at me for quite a while.

I called the document “Everything”, because it really was. I went over my faith, my fears, my family, and other things that did not begin with F. I had the feeling it would end up being about 200 pages, and it ended up being almost exactly that, except one page is a table of contents, which I added on about halfway through, when I realized I would never be able to find anything.

I have said before that writing is therapeutic for me, and cathartic, and little bits of writing here and there were helpful, but this spoke to a need for me to feel unified. It was about whom I was, and was I even being the person I wanted to be, and a lot of it was about seeing myself clearly and working out junk.  Mainly, though, I just felt it was something I needed to do.

Obviously, it took a while, and I could not even tell you how long. I have some dates scattered here and there for some parts, but it was spread out. What I do know is that within a few days of finishing I had the dream that became Jade Mask. That was my first screenplay, and over the next two years or so, I wrote six screenplays and a television pilot and workup. And of course, then things changed around and I fell badly off track.

I have documented the ups and downs of that whole time period, and getting back into it now and how writing to Aaron has helped and the blogging has helped, but getting back into the creative writing side has its own needs, and maybe one of the biggest needs is to work through the emotional static so the reception can be clearer.

One reason I mentioned the timelines for starting the blog and starting Facebook is that there was something I did with the blog before going to Australia that felt very important, and that was going over my romantic history. Romantic history implies something it wasn’t, because generally it was only what I felt, with no follow through or reciprocation. Anyway, that was an important part of “Everything”, and then it felt very important to blog it, and I felt like I needed to finish it before we left on the trip.

I believe the reason I felt like I needed to get it done then was because soon I would be connecting with these people again through Facebook, and while I knew there was a chance some people could stumble upon the blog before, if I had been in touch with people when I was writing it, the pressure would have felt too great. Recently I went through it again, though that was more about my emotional state than individuals.

The point I am trying to make is that there is a cycle to our periods of growth. I remember a friend expressing frustration once that she thought she was done with something, and here it was again, but that is so normal. Even if you face your problems and weaknesses head one right away, you can still only deal with them at the current level of your maturity and experience and knowledge. Yes, those things should grow during the struggle, and that may be more noticeable growth, but the life continues and your horizons expand, and you deepen, and suddenly you find there are corners you have not explored.  You make peace with an issue to the level of your ability, and then you have more ability and it’s time for another round. If you think that’s frustrating, try repeating things over and over again without the growth.

Anyway, what I am getting too is that “Danger Days” is the new “Everything”. It’s different in that it is fictional, and yet all of me is coming out, and I am working through things, and I suspect it’s going to unleash another sustained period of productivity. And so I am impatient that I am still not done, and yet I am also cherishing this time and this new round of growth.

Wicked

Not only did Julie, Maria, and I recently go see “Jersey Boys”, but we also saw “Wicked” when it was in town. We may have been the only three people in the theater who did not enjoy it. (My sisters did like Jersey Boys.)

Seriously, the crowd was laughing and clapping and oohing and having a great time. I know a lot of my snobbier acquaintances complain about how Portland audiences are too easy, and give unearned standing ovations, so that could be a factor, or the problem could be me. Well, us, in this case. Towards the end, my sisters needed to go to the bathroom, and they just didn’t come back. I stuck it out, but did notwait for all the curtain calls, because I am evil. (But I am not “Wicked”.)

There are a few reasons it did not work for me. I didn’t mind the steampunk angle. It is a little played out by now, but it is a look that fits in well with Oz, and I didn’t mind that.

What probably would have made everything better is if the music had been great. I remember Maria watching the “Hairspray” DVD, and I was working something so I only caught bits of it, but that music totally got under my skin, and I ended up listening to various songs over and over. There was nothing like that in “Wicked”. “Defying Gravity” got close, but did not make it.

What really got me though was the way it assassinated the characters of everyone you knew and loved from Oz. Okay, I did not just see the movie—I have also read several of the books by L. Frank Baum, so it is a little close to my heart. I don’t mind the idea of giving the Wicked Witch more of a backstory, and developing her character, but couldn’t it have been done without doing dirt to everyone else?

I should have agreed with the messages of equality and justice, but they were too clumsy and heavy-handed, and again, unnecessary character assassination. Yes, if you humanize someone who has a bad end, it can make that end unsatisfactory, so they turned that around, but it was not worth it.

I think the real problem is that Gregory Maguire is a nasty little man, and it came through in the novel, and infected the musical, which needed better music, dialogue, and performance.

The reason I am mentioning this now is to go into the counterpoint to yesterday’s post. The hangups of the writer manifest in the writing, but also the hangups of the reader manifest in the reading.

I noticed this early on (though I did not understand it), when I started reading Bantam Classics. They always included a helpful foreword with literary analysis, and I always disagreed with whatever the analyst was saying. No, that is not it at all. If Mister Rochester is now safe for Jane because he has been castrated, why is it that now he can have children? Look, if he says he was in love with Priscilla and not Xenobia, I believe him. He never acted like he was in love with Xenobia. And going back to Jane Eyre, no, he would not have to have syphilis himself and risk infecting Jane because Bertha was cheating on him after the marriage and she could have contracted it after he had stopped sleeping with her.

Actually, Jane Eyre is a good bridge to the other part of this: parallel fiction. Sometimes readers have such strong reactions to novels that they need to write other novels explaining that everything was wrong.  Therefore, you have books where Maxim De Winter actually truly did love Rebecca, and killed himself to be with her again, and Bertha Mason was a spirited girl driven mad by her husband’s harshness and racial prejudice, and Grendel was not nearly as much of a monster as the people he ate, and Lolita was truly the seducer and controller in the relationship with Humbert Humbert, because you know how sophisticated 12 year old girls are.

I get loving work and being inspired by it, but it seems odd to be when the inspiration seems to be to discount everything that happened. Well, maybe they actually hated the original works, and felt the need to correct them. It seems disrespectful though.

Of course, the obvious point is that even when you enjoy a novel, you may not be enjoying it in the way the author intended. I guess it’s just a chance we have to take. But when you read something and you feel affection for the author, like you could be best friends, it’s not impossible. There could totally be compatibility, or it could all be a delusion.

The fun part of all of this is a lot of my writing about writing makes me feel like my current project is crazy, or at least ill-advised. I think it’s not though, so I will see if I can make a case for that tomorrow.

Bad Writing

You can have a relatively good grasp on the English language, and still write poorly. This may mean you are a bad person.

Okay, that’s a little too harsh. I am thinking about other creative writing I have read. Personality comes through in expository writing also, but interesting things come out in fiction.

In writing about fan fiction specifically, I think I have mentioned (besides the obsession with sex, though apparently that makes it specifically “slash” fiction) that there is often too much emphasis on how special the protagonist is.

When it’s written by a teenager, that makes perfect sense. That’s a time in life when you are trying to establish your identity and find your strengths, and your direction in life, and if that ends up playing out with a bit of popular culture that resonates with the writer, that’s fine. It’s normal. One hopes that at some point the writers will develop an understanding of their unique worth, developing their talents and working through weaknesses, and learn that each person is special, and they don’t need to be more special than anyone else, but that’s a lot of maturity and it takes time. It takes time to develop writing skills too, though, so it works out.

Sadly, this maturity does not always happen. I am thinking of writing I have read. It was not fan-fiction. It was also not published. It was just stuff that people wrote to be creative, and maybe they had thoughts of doing things with it somewhere down the road, but it was not very good. I may or may not be related to these people.

The one writer only had three short pieces. One was an essay, and the other two were short fiction about a rabbit. The fiction showed a lack of judgment regarding puns and repetitions, going far too long with one list, and not being funny, even though they were totally supposed to be funny. All of them displayed some resentment, and some concern over specialness, which was unfortunate for an adult male. Those things totally made sense if you knew the person, because that’s how he was in life.

The other had a few short stories and some poems. I remember my initial impression was just being shocked at some of the content, because I thought we had the same morals, and yet her characters did not act in a way reflecting that.

What strikes me more looking back is how often things changed. When the singer got into drugs, first it was shady maneuvering on the part of the bad boy, and then it was totally an accident, that he never intended, and he wasn’t so shady and the other love interest wasn’t so good, and then she was a burnout and then she was not and there was just no consistency. The other story was like that too, where the father was bewitched, or just evil, and the heroine was strong and plucky, but just really needed to rely on the hero. 

Again, when you know the writer, that makes perfect sense. She has no core, and so she floats around a lot, trying to find what works in the moment, and I know that now, and I figured it out long after reading her writing, but I hadn’t realized how far back it went. When I was a teenage girl and she was a young adult, I didn’t know it, but it was there.

Some of it I relate to. I totally get the paradox of the desire to have a strong heroine, and yet the allure of a rescue. At some point though, you realize that you can’t always have it both ways. Having the heroine rush into the burning building, and get people out, but then what? She goes back in and gets smoke inhalation? She almost made it out, but not quite? If the need for a rescue means she did something stupid, I don’t want it. You just can’t have it both ways all the time, and independence and competence are good.

To be fair, part of that for me was realizing that no one is coming to rescue me, and I just better be strong and independent on my own.  And it’s not that it never makes sense for the hero to swoop in on a white horse—sometimes it does. Unfortunately, this particular person has never moved beyond wanting other people to fix things for her, and most of the time it is stuff that it is not even possible for someone else to fix.

Even reading her recent poetry, there is no center. Things go back and forth, and they follow a pattern of kind of how things should be, but it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work in the same way she doesn’t work.

I know all of this sounds very harsh, and well, it is kind of a fraught relationship, but my point is that personality and character and opinion bleeds into your writing in ways that you are not even aware of. It is a very personal thing to share your writing, because hey, that’s me there, and yet the urge is there to share. Of course, the readers are bringing their own selves into it also, with interesting results there too, so hey, that’s just human relationships, with the regular set of human complications, which I will probably write about tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, there is a moral to this story, that I absolutely want to share, and it’s not just for writers. You can’t get away from yourself, so you better be someone that you can live with.

Literacy Matters

I really love getting comments on my blog posts, and generally my policy is to publish all non-spam comments. I got one today that I am not publishing, though, and the reasons for that kind of fit into something that I have been thinking about, so it all works well.

The post comment was on my “Donald Trump is a Big Fat Idiot” post, and it said something to the effect that I spent all these words saying that he was right, and then I say that the it will not really be used by members of Congress because they already have health care and this will affect the uncovered more, but millionaires will be forced to join, and my post is shameful propaganda, or something like that. It was not as coherent as it could have been, which was a big part of my decision not to publish.

I mean, obviously I disagreed, but normally I will still publish the comment and then I will write a response. With a recent post I would probably still have done that, but that was from July 2nd. The biggest issue, though, was that the demonstrated lack of reading comprehension made me feel that my efforts to clarify would be wasted. There are ways in which the Affordable Care Act affects everyone, including members of Congress and millionaires, but not the way a lot of people think, and there could be some room for explanation there. If you can read that post and think I am saying that the quote is correct, any further explanation is clearly useless.

There are a lot of stupid ideas out there, with many sad reasons, but I have been thinking about how important language is in the processing of information. Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said that “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” That probably is true, but there is more to that. I’m just going to tell a bunch of stories here.

One thing I remember from my class at the Missionary Training Center is that we had one elder who was native Lao. He was very immature, and did not seem too bright (I know, not uncommon with 19-year old boys, but even for that), but as we progressed in our study of Laotian, he really seemed to become smarter. Once in the mission field, you spend a certain amount of hours doing community service, and one thing we did for a while was tutoring a little Lao girl in Laotian. That school found that when you give ESL students instruction in their native language, they do better across the boards.

What it taught me is that when you don’t get firmly grounded in one language, it is hard to get grounded in anything. I saw this with other Lao teenagers. Often then would speak in English to their parents, and be answered in Lao, and it worked for basic family communication, but there were a lot of things that were hard for them to express, especially with emotional or spiritual issues.

The other thing that reinforced that is something that President Houck said. They had a son who was deaf, and President Houck never really had any major callings while this son was growing up. He felt like he could do more, and he wondered why he wasn’t asked, but it came to him that right now the important thing was signing to his son so this his son understood everything that was going on.

I had read an article around that time about a deaf girl who had missed out on lots of things in church, so that it was a surprise to her when she was in high school to learn that she would see her dead grandfather again. His service kept his son better-informed and progressing, and later on he ended up being one of the missionaries who opened up the British Sign Language mission. President Houck obviously became a mission president, and had been a stake president before that, and I’m sure has served in lots of ways, but at that time the most important service he could give was to  his son.

So many people, especially as budget issues become worse, talk about focusing education so that it basically prepares people for the workforce, but there is a lot to be said for preparing people for life. That involves the study of language, and rhetoric, and civics and art and all sorts of other things, but I am focusing on the language because that’s kind of my thing, and it is also the building block to everything else. Even just the ability to understand your emotions, we do that through language.

That brings me to my last story. My senior year in college there was a guy in my seminar who could not form coherent thoughts about the material, or lots of things, actually. You could see that he felt he understood the information, and he probably did feel some clicks of understanding as he read, but then when he needed to talk about it the words would not come. He ended up dropping out of school.

I had recommended he try journal writing, just to build up habits of finding words and building thoughts, and I hope he took that, or something else worked out, because it wasn’t that he was dumb. He just couldn’t express himself. And that is a tragedy.

http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2012/07/normal-0-donald-trump-is-big-fat-idiot.html

Good reasons to not write about sex

Perhaps the best reason not to write about sex is that it is really hard to do so without sounding either vulgar or idiotic. At one extreme we have quivering distaffs, thrusting manhoods, and bursting chausses, and at the other end, nothing I’m going to repeat.

Certainly it is common for people to have difficulty talking about it, but one of my clear memories of high school is in health class one guy just looking at me because he could not believe what I had just said. It was not that I had said anything really dirty, but that I could talk about it without being embarrassed. I think I owe a lot of this to my mother.

Now, in all fairness, her early attempts to educate me were somewhat plagued by the difficulty of speaking clearly about sex. When I asked how babies were made, she told me that the man plants a seed in the woman, which is true, but I was fairly literal minded and thought that you had to buy the seeds. My sisters later found this hilarious, and wanted to know if I thought they were tomato or corn seeds. No, I knew they were baby seeds. I even understood where they were planted, but I was really mistaken on the rest.

For technical details, those came from the book “Where Did I Come From”, borrowed from the same neighbor who had all the comic books. Later augmented by health class, all of my mechanical understanding came from there.

Where my mother did really well was in not being embarrassed about sex, or finding it dirty, or trying to change the subject. Yes, I believed it was something for married couples, and still do, but there was never any stigma attached to it. Even if you don’t find sex dirty and bad, acting really embarrassed about it can convey that impression, so being able to be comfortable with the topic is helpful, even if talking about it all the time would be going off the rails in a different direction.

Now, I know that one reason sex is often written about clumsily is that it is done by bad writers, but I also know that there are better writers who have taken it on, and that’s the other disturbing thing that I need to hit on, and it is the tendency to make things nasty. I am going to mention two books by name, and I recommend neither. (And I have only read parts of one, and about the other.)

One example would be The Story of O, by Anne Desclos, where a woman consents to bondage to please her lover, and ends up being passed around, then loving his brother, and being degraded more and more by the brother until finally she asks for permission to die and receives it.

The other is Lost Girls, a pornographic graphic novel by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. In this, Wendy from Peter Pan, Alice from Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz meet up, and their back stories include incest, attempted rape, runaways prostituting themselves and being brutally beaten, and more child abuse.

Oddly, this material seems to work for some relationships. Desclos wrote her novel to impress her lover (successfully), and Moore and Gebbie became engaged during their collaboration. Maybe it doesn’t work to write about a happy husband and wife enjoying a good sexual relationship, because that would feel too much like voyeurism, and I can see how it would, but the directions they do go should not be turn-ons either.

I have tried not to focus too much on the morality of erotic content, because not everyone weighs that equally, and I think there are valid reasons beyond morality for why this sort of content can be harmful.

One key part of my religious beliefs is that none of the commandments are random, but that they are based on what will work towards our happiness and betterment. It may not be possible to write erotically and not tend towards degradation. After all, it is only words, not sex, so it will not have that satisfaction, and perhaps like a drug where you are building tolerance, you keep needing to take it to another level to get the same rush. That would not be a good direction to go. Honestly, I don’t know. We are right around the limits of my knowledge, and I think I already know too much.

One common complaint about the rating system is that sex and nudity is treated as more offensive than violence, when they are beautiful things and violence is bad. That totally makes sense, only I know that for me, sexual images stay with me more than violence. That makes sense too. I have more interesting in physical intimacy than in violence, and that’s probably healthy—there are just too many ways that it can turn unhealthy.

So that’s why I don’t generally watch R-rated movies, or premium cable shows, and why I basically try and be careful what I take into my mind. I want to be healthy emotionally and mentally. I don’t want to get twisted ideas about human relationships (at least not any more than I already do). I want it to be easy to feel inspiration and to live a good life. If that sounds odd to you, at least consider it, because I have found it very valuable.

Hurts so good?

Getting back to that one woman’s comments on why she loved 50 Shades of Grey, there were two key points that speak to today’s topic. One is that while some people were condemning the reading of titillating material as something that triggers lustful thoughts, especially when your desire is only supposed to be to your husband, her desire for her husband was doing just fine. I know that some women are reading passages in the book and then sexing up their significant others with whom they are in a loving and committed relationship.

Well, how can you criticize that, right? They aren’t sleeping around or cheating, they are just injecting some extra fire into the existing framework. Still, I suspect there might be a problem, and her other point may help me get there. This was that NotEdward was into the bondage because he had been abused, and that NotBella’s love was part of what healed him, making it a beautiful thing.

(Although if I understand correctly, the healing was that they no longer needed a contract, but they were still going to do the same things. If I am wrong about that, I can live with it. Even just reading the summary for the one book was amazingly tedious.)

My concern here is twofold. The darker part is that I don’t think giving into your deepest impulses is necessarily healing. Let me just say, I can see where people are coming from when they are interested in bondage. In what I have already freely shared about myself, I have serious trust issues where I kind of expect people I love and people who love me (if they can) to hurt me, and I often would really like someone else to just take over. On a day like today, what I really want is for someone to take over all home maintenance responsibilities for me, but yes, I can see the allure of having someone take control in other areas. Apparently most of the time NotBella did not have to do much, and didn’t really have the option to do much, what with being tied up and all.

Here’s the thing though—even merely in the realm of home maintenance responsibility, I can see where giving up my share could be harmful. As tempting as it is sometimes to not want to be the grown-up, ultimately we know there is value in adult responsibilities.

Also, even when a fantasy is understandable, it may clearly be something that would not really be desirable. Romance novels will do some interesting things to make the scenarios not rape, but with a lot of those overtones. I think part of it is just the dominance theme, but also I think it comes from an attempt to have the sex happen but to not have the heroine be slutty. Well, if you think she would be slutty for willingly sleeping with the guy, then don’t have her sleep with him, or write her as a slut, but trying to have it both ways is dishonest in a way that I think is really harmful.

I think I may have just lost coherence, but the point I am trying to get at is that if you want your lover to hurt you, and that works it, it may be convenient but still not good, safe word or not. Maybe it would be better to learn that you don’t deserve to be hurt, and there are people who don’t want to hurt you, and to kind of progress in that direction instead of just enabling each other’s dark sides.

This is a point where people will be offended, because if both parties are satisfied with it, who has a right to judge? First off, I am not judging any specific relationships. I generally do not know details of anyone’s relationships, and that’s just fine. Also, I think of it this way. If someone has an eating disorder, and you are worried about that, that’s not really judging—you just want them to be healthier, and you are worried they are hurting themselves. That’s where I’m coming from, but we get weird about sex.

Wanting people to be healthier leads to the second concern. Often with some things, the issue is not so much that it is terribly bad, but that it keeps you from something better. A woman totally can read about NotEdward and NotBella, and then use that buzz on her husband, and they will probably both enjoy that, but could there be something better if the foreplay occurred with the husband instead of with the book.

I remember a psychologist friend once telling me about a colleague. I can’t remember if the colleague was specifically a sex therapist or just a marriage counselor who had sex come up a lot, but either way 90% of the sexual issues were communication. More recently there was an excellent blog post that was making the rounds about a gay man who is married to a woman and they have a great relationship and are very happy with each other, and they have a great sex life. The can’t rely on raw lust to get there, though, so they have to communicate and think about what they want and what the other one wants, and it ends up working out really well.

This reminded me of an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, where Ray and Deborah tried playing a game called Sensuopoly, and Ray thought that he was great with the sex, but that she wanted more romance, but actually she did need different things in the bedroom, but she had a really hard time telling him, because it was embarrassing. Yes, but not as embarrassing as finding out that you’ve been doing it wrong for all those years. I thought it was really well-handled, and a good point.

Anyway, so yes, I will not be reading 50 Shades of Gray, and it does have something to do with my religious beliefs, but there’s more to it than that, and I hope I did not come off as sanctimonious or anything like that. I will try and lighten up a little in the next post, but I can't guarantee it.

Between Consenting Adults

I'm on the road, so I have content, but won't be posting as regularly.

Years and years ago I was watching an episode of "Politically Incorrect", with Bill Maher. It was not something I watched habitually, but I remember one of the guests was Kathy Griffin. I did watch "Suddenly Susan", regularly (think of my tastes what you will), and so I was familiar with her, but as someone who did not play the most serious character.

I was very impressed with her because as the topic was going around of possibly hypocritical politicians visiting strip clubs, or prostitution or something like that, and while she was certainly all for what went on between consenting adults being their business, she thought it was important to remember that a lot of those women were incest and abuse survivors.

I don’t really remember them picking up on that conversational thread, but if we take strippers, prostitutes, and porn actresses together, one thing they tend to have in common is starting very young. Certainly, just by virtue of the age issue, statutory rape would be quite common, but often there has been something going on there that is worse.

Maybe they have been abused by a male relative, or maybe they don’t have a male relative, and some predator noticed that vacuum and started grooming them for the trade, but it’s not usually a simple matter of taking an aptitude test and deciding that’s your best career option.

I don’t think I actually know anyone who has worked as a prostitute, but I do know someone who has worked in the porn industry and a surprising number of my schoolmates have worked as strippers, at least for a while. It may be easier to focus on that area specifically, but I’m just going to say that despite varying degrees of legality and commitment, all three of these fields are basically about turning a body into a commodity. Getting a list of a centerfold’s turn-ons does not mean you know her or care about her as a person. I assume the underage aspects are more common with the prostitution because the other two being legal means some regulation, and I know it is not a coincidence. The deliberately seek the young and damaged, because it is hard to get an adult woman with a healthy self-image to sell herself. It's why tobacco companies say they don't target kids, but they do. You have to get them before they know better.

Abuse may not always be a factor. I remember an Emerald article back in my college days about different ways that students earned money, like selling plasma or working at the grocery store, and one of the featured students became a dancer at Jiggles after doing well at Amateur Night. My sisters know a guy who dances at Silverado, and he seems pretty well adjusted. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m just saying that a lot of the girls there got there because their self-worth was whittled away, and what they are doing is probably not building it back up.

From the point of view of a bunch of guys celebrating a bachelor party by getting drunk and watching women gyrate it may seem harmless, and they could even feel good about tipping well. However, what if you knew that the girl you were watching was up there because that was the natural destination that started with molestation when she was a young girl, and included an abusive boyfriend, and that she really felt like this was the only value she had? Do you feel a little bad now? Will tipping bigger bills fix it?

I’ve said I don’t know any prostitutes, but there is a face that haunts me of a girl who worked Blackstone in Fresno while I was on my mission. She looked about fourteen, but they tend to look older, so I am afraid she might have been twelve. All I wanted to do was feed her, and get her off the streets, but I was told it was too dangerous to try and help them because that tended to get them beaten by their pimps. Convince me that it’s a victimless crime.

Maybe this is where women do have some superiority, because they do consume less here, or at least they have historically. The last I knew, about 90% of prostitution customers are male, there are more male magazines, and there are less strip clubs for female customers, where they often have touring groups instead. As far as I know, there is no female equivalent of The Beaver Lodge.

How the internet has changed things up, I have no idea. Obviously e-readers have made some things more accessible with less embarrassment, hence the amazing sales rate of 50 Shades of Grey, though people are buying the hard copy of the book at a fast pace as well. In this case, there are no minors, or really any participants besides the author and the reader, so have we found something where there actually is no harm and no foul? Well, more on that next time.

Let's Talk About Sex

This is where I am worried the most about offending, because I am going to be criticizing some things that are very popular right now, and criticizing their popularity. Obviously, I am referring to “Magic Mike” and “50 Shades of Grey”. I have not seen the movie or read the book, and I’m not going to, though I have read about them both, and for what I am going to write, it is not so much about their specific content as themes and trends. So, that’s where I’m coming from.

Some of my more interesting reading came from a friend on Facebook who posted a link to a blog “I will not be reading 50 Shades of Gray”. I thought that was interesting, because I have been surprised at some of the people who have been reading it. I clicked on the post, and, well, it’s not that her points were bad so much as they were made in such a self-righteous, supercilious manner that it was pulling the wrong reaction from me—you know, like those anti-smoking commercials that make me want to start.

I was fairly solitary in my feelings. Of course, it being a Christian woman site, there were many supportive comments, with people sharing how they felt the same way, or had just decided that they needed to give up television to avoid bad influences, or how they felt sorry for those other women who were reading it.

One of the dissenting comments was especially interesting. She criticized the judging, which is also in the Bible as something not to do, that since the girl is still a virgin upon graduating from college she is clearly moral, the guy suffered horrific abuse and this was his healing process, besides which he was a total romantic, always opening doors and offering jackets, and finally, this was completely different from porn and her desire for her husband was doing just fine.

There is so much wrong there, it is hard to know where to start. One thought is that even if you managed to make it untouched through college graduation, but then shortly thereafter you essentially signed a prostitution agreement (a kinky one), regardless of how attracted you are to the john/pimp, it just seems possible that maybe the reason for your continuing virginity is not really strict morality.

Also, I am not sure that opening doors is such an important part of chivalry that it outweighs spanking for all offenses. Likewise, the concern for nutrition could be seen as very caring, but putting it into the contract (even with room for negotiation), moves it from caring to control freak, in my opinion.

The other two things are really important, and their own topics, dealing with how a relationship should function, and what is porn, and what makes it bad.

The commenter’s point (and I am doing some extrapolating, but not as much as you might think) was that the purpose of pornography, which is pictures of actual people, is to cause men to have an unrealistic image of a woman, which would come between a husband and a wife, and the reading and being turned on does not do that.

Actually, I thought the specific purpose of visual porn was simply arousal also, and maybe getting a false ideal of how a woman should look is one side effect, but that could certainly be an issue with written content as well. I know of at least one woman reading Twilight and wondering why her husband could not be more like Edward, and it totally seems like the same thing could happen with NotEdward, and that the more sexual nature of the content would not lessen the likelihood of that.

This is not a particularly new argument. I remember years ago having a discussion with a friend who had just been house-sitting, and a mutual acquaintance was gossiping with her about how the couple who owned the house was splitting up, and he was so awful because he had porn. My friend was surprised by this, and mentioned it, because she had noticed a large erotica section of the wife’s in the library, and it seemed a little hypocritical. Well her friend was shocked, because the two are totally different.

I think we have two ideas that lead to this concept. One is that words are classier than visuals, and the other is that women are classier than men. Therefore, 50 Shades of Grey is classier than Playgirl, but both are classier than Playboy. I am not convinced that this is true.

I notice men being stupid pigs just as often as any other woman, but I also notice men being smart and loyal and classy, and I see women being stupid and mean and crude, and really, there is no inherent moral high ground for either gender. Men have a longer history of subjugating women, because they have a longer history of being in power (much bigger topic there), so that probably does make some things feel different, but ultimately if it is demeaning for a man to stuff dollar bills into the g-string of a women, then it is demeaning with the genders reversed. I am totally equal opportunity in that way.

I guess my first point here is that “mommy porn” is not superior to any other kind of porn, and the Chippendales are not superior to, hmm, I guess the closest equivalent would be Stars Cabaret (I admit I am out of my element here). I suspect women are less likely to put up with poor hygiene and needle tracks, so there may be some improvement there, and that is probably its own post, but the point is, stripping is stripping.

And, the point I was going to make before I got sidetracked there is that if Magic Mike is superior to show girls, it is not because of inherent moral superiority, but it probably did have a better script and choreography, based on what I have heard.

I think that’s already getting to be a fairly long post, so I think I will break for today, and separate the remaining content into two separate posts, both related to the topic of consenting adults, and I have no idea which one should come first. I told you organization was a problem.

Adult Content, part 2

I saw this coming, but I am having a hard time writing about sex.

No, it’s not especially awkward, but there is so much content there that organization is kind of an issue, and also, I will be criticizing some things that are quite popular right now, and while my intention is not to offend anyone, I totally could, so I am trying to do a really good job with the material, which seems like it may necessitate more time. Obviously, it is time for more hedging.

So, I thought what I could do today is write a little more about how I am handling this type of material in the graphic novel. I am kind of reluctant to write about it before it is finished, because then I am giving out spoilers, and then no one will feel a need to read it. I know, initially I had thought no one would ever read it, and now I feel like I will post it somewhere, and so now just as I decide that people can read it, I take away their motivation. Well, I’ve said before that I am not always logical. So I guess I am posting this today, writing a few days’ worth of sex content, and then going on vacation to Idaho. Seems like a plan.

So, for the sex itself, there actually is a sex scene. Well, that’s not true. There is a lead-in to a scene where you know two of the characters will be having sex. I felt this was necessary, because they are two fairly star-crossed lovers. After six years of separation due to a global crisis and communications breakdown they are reunited, and then are dealing with severe injuries, impending death, presumed death, and emotional trauma that leads to a communication breakdown, and then they do die and on their last night on earth they have no privacy whatsoever. So, I did not want anyone to be reading that and thinking that after all of that and even getting married that they were still never able to consummate the relationship. I’m not a cruel person. Personally, as the author I can see where they would have had other opportunities too, and taken advantage of them, but at least that one time it is clear that they did manage a physical relationship.

For swearing, the tricky thing is yes, I don’t do it, but I often have characters who totally would. I actually have included two minor swear words and one major but interrupted one. Oddly, they are all spoken by Mikey. It’s just how it worked out.

I think I covered how the violence is handled pretty well in writing about that one. It occurs to me that in writing about violence, it was very much about it in entertainment, where writing about the profanity was more about life, and the sex is going to go back and forth. This is probably because violence is more discouraged as a part of actual life, where it can result in arrest, and that is not so much true of the other areas.

That being said, I only made passing mention of gore in that post, because most of what I wrote about violence applied to gore. You can be violent without being gory, and that could be irresponsibly choosing to show violence as consequence free, or it could be a matter of choosing a different focus in the depictions. I do have a gory scene.

Like so many things, it did not come about intentionally. There is a character who has a tendency to revive. In thinking about how to make a permanent death for him, my initial thought was that you would have to destroy the cerebral cortex, and then I realized that made no sense, and obviously it would be the brainstem that you would need to destroy.

Well that’s all well and good, until you think about how, with limited tools in a field setting you would make that happen, and it gets kind of difficult. Suddenly the scene involved decapitation, and sawing and slicing and attempting to squish and finally burning which just happens to also involve destroying the remnants of some happy memories, and it was kind of brutal. It would not have to be drawn explicitly, and it shouldn’t be. The point of the scene is not about reveling in grossness. The point is frustration and desperation and just when it seemed like things were kind of getting better, being proved wrong once more. It’s not cool, so it shouldn’t look cool.

That being said, I have always had an aversion to zombies, because with the decaying flesh and the brain eating and the infectious nature, it is just ugly and gross. After writing that scene, I started to think, well, maybe I could do something with zombies. There would have to be some point to it, but there usually is—just because I don’t like zombie movies doesn’t mean I don’t acknowledge their often trenchant social commentary.

I was thinking that the next thing I worked on would be a romantic comedy, but maybe it will be zombies. Or both. Then you have the perfect date movie because there’s something for everyone.

Profanity

My sisters and I recently went to see Jersey Boys. At one point I nearly walked out due to the heavy profanity. This is unusual for me, but it was flying fast and loose and really served no purpose except to make you remember that people in New Jersey swear. Well, they were using it for cheap laughs, and they were getting it.

I have heard that Deb on Dexter uses some creative and hilarious profanity. Mamet is known for being profane and brilliant. This was not. It was repetitive and pedestrian, and they did not deserve the laughs they were getting. The funny thing is that in the second half, when Bob was telling Frankie that he didn’t want to perform anymore, they did slip in a use of the F-word that actually was really funny, but it was standing alone, so there was contrast, and it was an unexpected direction, and it just worked.

I want to be clear that while I personally don’t swear, I am around it all the time (family, friends, public transportation). I am usually not bothered by it, and I have never called out anyone who was not a relative for using bad language. It was unusual for me to be bothered at the show, but they were overdoing it, especially in that section, and again, it was so pointless.

I had a Drama teacher in junior high who gave us a great assignment, where we had to go through and edit a play for language. It really made you think about how words were used, and what their value was. Watching Top Gun after that, I saw that you could remove most of the language easily, with very few words even needing replacements. On the other hand, The Princess Bride has one swear word, when Inigo is confronting the Duke, and I don’t think any other phrasing would have the same impact.

Part of it may be that “strong” language gains its strength from its rarity, so overusing it dilutes its power. There is a poem by Jacques Prevert, Barbara, that again has only one “strong” word in it, but it’s a big one. I guess it would come closest to the F.word in English, but there is an added aspect of stupidity to the awfulness, and he uses it to let you know exactly how he feels about the war after contrasting some scenes before and after the war, just in case you had any doubts where he was going. It is effective. If he had used it several times, or if he used it in every poem, it would not mean that much.

I’ve never hid being a word nerd. I get invigorated by good word use, where emotions are captured and pictures are created, and even by the simple transmission of knowledge, which is so simple that we take it for granted, but which is vital. So, I like it when words are used well.

I suppose one thing that I don’t like about swearing is that because it is a shortcut to punching up your language, it probably keeps some people from actually learning how to speak well and effectively. They stop at swearing. Also, I think it adds to a general coarseness in society that is beneficial to noone. That is not even touching on the aspect that you take a name for something that is sacred or important or beautiful, and use it as if it is common and filthy. Or maybe that does touch on it, because you are chipping away at respect for things, which leads to chipping away at respect for each other, and maybe that’s how we all got so course.

(Also, “bitch” is really overused. Other people have written about this, and how it is such an easy way to denigrate a woman, especially relating to any time that a woman is being assertive or in authority, and there is no real equivalent for men in terms of how it is used, and they’re right. That would be a whole different topic though, and I’m not going there right now.)

That being said, I can see how swearing it can be valuable for some people. It starts (like so many things) with a story about My Chemical Romance, posted on one of their videos on Youtube.

A girl wrote that she used to cut herself and she was at an MCR concert in front, and Gerard saw her arms and he took her hand and told her to never do that again; she was too beautiful for that and if anyone ever made her feel like she wasn’t, she should tell them to, well, I think it was F off, maybe F themselves, but something like that.

So, I had heard something similar at a different concert, where it was Tonic (opening for Goo Goo Dolls, I think), and before singing “If you could only see”, where the lead singer instructed all of us to say that to anyone who did not treat us like gold, and I could not have been less impressed, but this was different.

You see, I had a friend who did cut herself for a while, while she was in a bad place in her life, due mainly to an abusive boyfriend, and it felt like the cutting was the only pain she could control. I was not spending a lot of time with her then, and I did not know what was going on, so I admit that my feelings are messed up on this one. She says I could not have made a difference, and she might be right based on other people who did know, but I still feel a lot of guilt for it. With that in mind, there is no vile thing that she could have said to him that I would not have applauded. I would have been in favor of anything she could say that would have helped break his hold on her and helped her see how worthless and evil he was.

If profanity can function as a shortcut to power, there might be people who really need that shortcut. I’m not going to fault anyone for that. Being able to value yourself is so key, and sometimes that will require making waves, and if that’s how you can manage it, go for it.

It doesn’t make casual usage sound any better. Also, it would not have been helpful for me. When I have tried swearing, I just feel cheap—not I am ashamed because I have been a bad girl, but just hey, you know better than that. At the same time, for all of my faults, finding my voice hasn’t exactly been a problem. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t resonate for me.

I guess what I am saying is do what you need to do, but also think about what you are doing. Examine that life because it does have worth.

Violence and Gore

I mentioned that I am covering these topics at least partly because in my writing all of them come up, and while in a way violence is the easiest to treat, it is also the one that I have the least satisfactory resolution for in my own writing.

Set in the post-apocalyptic dystopian future, the heroes are constantly under fire, and while most of them do end up dead, they also end up killing quite a few themselves, and yet I have portrayed them as good people.

True, most of the killings are in self-defense, though several happen on a rescue mission where they technically are taking offensive action, but for the purpose of rescuing comrades, so there is that, but I guess what I was thinking is that even if every killing is justified, it seems that killing should take an emotional and spiritual toll, where you would eventually build up some hardness and callousness. At least, I think it would take a lot of conscious effort to fight that.

For this particular piece, I end up not doing too much with it because the good thing about this harsh lifestyle is that no one spends too long in it really, generally ending up dead before they have had a chance to get too hardened. (Obviously, it’s a really upbeat story.)

I am pretty much okay without dealing with the issue in depth, because I think you can raise questions in fiction that you don’t answer, but just leave them as food for thought. (This is much less satisfying in non-fiction.) The questions are raised. There is an early scene and a later scene that both kind of address it, and you are left with is a feeling of discomfort: this is not good, but there better choices are missing.

That is probably the right attitude to have about violence. Sometimes it is necessary, but you should never love it. One thing that makes the killing easier in this story, and a lot of others, is that the bad guys are mostly faceless and identical drones. When I saw Star Wars, I initially assumed that the storm troopers were robots. They looked mechanical, but that was because the of the body armor which dehumanized them and made them indistinguishable from each other.

In this case, my interpretation of the Draculoids was influenced largely by my reading of A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier (but not for Kony—lots of bad guys use kids). Anyway, something they did to keep the children as soldiers is that they were constantly on drugs and when they were not out fighting they would watch violent films. There is still a human there, but harder to get to.

I figured it would be the same way with the Draculoids. For one thing, it gives them a motivation, and also I figure that if they are constantly high they are going to be worse shots, and that makes it more plausible that the good guys keep surviving their engagements, because normally you would expect the casualty rates to be evened out a little more. As it is, the Draculoid deaths definitely outnumber the Killjoy deaths.

It is also different in that the Killjoy losses hurt and are mourned, and the Draculoids are really just cannon fodder for the people who are over them. So your bad situation comes because you have people against you who don’t value human life, and will greatly abuse human life to get what they want, but it also leaves people who do care as killers, or dead, or eventually both.

As you can see, there is not an easy solution to maintaining your humanity while living in a war zone, but what we have picked up along the way is that violent images do make it easier for people to be violent (also drugs, but no real groundbreaking news here), and also what I am hoping you will just agree on, is that human life is important and valuing it is important.
So, how to do you create a fun, action-packed, adrenaline-crazed tale without being part of the problem?

There were some extras on the Austin Powers Blue-Ray that would totally not have worked in the movie, as they would have slowed and dragged it down horribly, but that were still pretty funny. You saw the reactions to the deaths of two of the evil henchman. One scene was the wife and stepson of the guy who got steamrollered, and then the friends of the one who got his head eaten by ill-tempered mutant sea bass. The ridiculous nature of the deaths took away from the solemnity a little, but the point was that henchmen could have friends and families too.

So, I have to think about these people, and I shouldn’t be taking too much pleasure in their deaths. It’s disturbing that we have gone from where it was just heroes shooting lots of bad guys, which was bad enough, to where a new term was invented, “torture porn”, for a genre that delights in how creatively and gruesomely various people can be killed. It’s a normal progression though. Killing one guy is no longer a big deal, so you kill more, but you can’t keep upping that past a certain point without making the film too long, so just make the deaths worse, and then they need to keep getting worse. Make it squishier! More entrails! It’s not a good direction to go.

We often use the word “gratuitous” with violence and sex and language, and generally we use it meaning that it’s just there for the sake of being there. It comes from “gratis” though, meaning free. Here you go: violence at no cost! There is a price, though, and so ignoring what the actual price would be is something that is paid for in desensitization.

I’m saying this as someone who loves a good action scene, which perhaps is why I am having such a difficult time arriving at a point. The difference is that in the movies you can have the enemy be orcs or destructive aliens, where you just want to kill them all as quickly as possible, and it is no crime. That doesn’t happen in real life.

In films without the fantasy or science fiction element you can have the villains be Nazis or drug dealers or something else awful and clear the conscience that way, but then they are still people. They look like people, they bleed like people, and they probably still love their mothers, even if they are really bad people.

Actually, it’s not that in these films that you don’t care about death—you just don’t care about the bad guys dying. You want the hero to live, and maybe his love interest. Hopefully you care when his minority sidekick dies. Possibly the whole thing was set off by the death of family members. In that scenario, it’s only bad if it happens to us. Actually, there is a lot of that going around financially, and some of it does become life and death.

I guess ultimately I am just against mass killings. It’s not really that controversial a position stated that way. I’m also against recreational killing, even if it’s fake. And I’m against narcissism and selfishness. I can’t really tell you any rules I have for writing violence. It is more than I have this ethos behind it, and so that affects how things are treated. And I find that I don’t write throwaway characters. Even if they only have a small part in the story, they have an existence beyond what is seen, and they are a real fictional person, so that has to be taken into account.

Now I need to get back to the story. I killed off six last night, but there are a lot more to go. (And two of them really hurt, but now I am feeling bad about the other four.)

Adult Content

Homer: “Well if kids are so innocent, why is everything bad named after them? Acting CHILDish, KIDnapping, CHILD abuse…”
Bart: “What about ADULTery?”
Homer: “Not until you’re older, son.”

It is unfortunate that so many of the words we use to connote maturity have some sort of negative meaning. It makes sense in that we view children as uncorrupted, and part of getting older generally involves becoming more corrupt, and better able to conceal it, but it’s not a good thing.

Writing about the misogyny, on one level I feel like good people wouldn’t do it. Now, if it is the norm, and people don’t think very much, it’s easy to go along with something without being an ill-intentioned person, but a big part of maturity is thinking about long-range consequences and ramifications and the motivations for things.

I have been thinking about this not just because of what I have been reading, but also because of what I have been writing, and also because of things I have read about what other people are reading and viewing.

So this is going to be tricky, because there is certainly room for self-consciousness as I criticize things that are very popular, and I may come off as judgmental though I promise I am just going for analytical. I don’t intend to alienate anyone, but these are things that I not only believe, but believe are important.

It will also be tricky to discuss these things in a mature and reasonable manner. For example, writing about swear words, filling the post with references to the F-word and B-word seems a little ridiculous, but filling it with the actual words in wrong in a whole different direction. As for writing about sex without either sounding stupid or being vulgar, well, it will be a challenge.

Basically, I will have posts about all of the things that will get you a Mature or Restricted rating, depending on the type of media: language, violence, and sex. I think I can manage just one on each topic, but I can’t make any promises.

Technically, there is a fourth, which is mature themes, because some things don’t necessarily involve any of the main three, but are still just kind of heavy. It probably makes sense, but I am amazed at what kids miss. Like in “Up”, there were people who thought it would not be for kids because some of the content is so sad, and yes, it is really sad for an adult, but it doesn’t seem to hit kids the same way.

And of course, I am still amazed by the things I saw on the networks during primetime when I was a kid. I am still scarred by The Dirty Dozen, The Green Berets, Hang ‘Em High, and either For a Fistful of Dollars or A Few Dollars More (I get them mixed up.)

At the same time, I was fine with watching a scary, illiterate hag torment Mary on Little House on the Prairie, and I am way more upset watching “Sylvia” now then I was then, because now I see how young she looks. It’s hard to tell how things will affect a kid. Also, Michael Landon was twisted.