yuki_onna

Two of these things I’ve mentioned on Twitter, but not during the high traffic hours, and one is brand new. I will tell you them properly now!

Starting Wednesday and going through February 26, I’ll be taking over Charlie Stross’s blog for the month. I’ll still post personal stuff here, but it’ll be essays and commentary over there. So if there’s an SF/futurist or writing process or genre or cultural or feminist/race/queer issues thing you’ve wanted me to take this is a great chance to tell me about it. It’s a completely different audience there, so I expect the sparks to fly at least once or twice.

Also! The Bread We Eat in Dreams has been chosen for Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2012! I’m so excited about this because I love that story, and also because I guess 2011 was just a spectacular short fiction year for me. I now have four different stories in four different Year’s Best anthologies. (The others are White Lines on a Green Field, The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland, and Silently and Very Fast.) This is unheard of for me, especially since one is a novella! I’m still amazed.

And lastly, I am over the moon to have been asked to teach at the Alpha Workshop this year–a writing workshop for teens held at the University of Pittsburgh right around Confluence time of year. (End of July.) I’ve wanted to be involved for awhile! And they asked me! I’ll be joining Tamora Pierce, Kij Johnson, and John Joseph Adams, so it should be a pretty spectacular workshop. Yay!

Now I drag myself to coffee and productivity. Autoaudiography post on the way.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

I’m still battling off my Christmas Cold, so over the weekend I decided to do a Round Robin and play an hour or two or three of every game I’d been gifted over the last couple of years and not gotten a chance to play. I mean, really–some of them I got two years ago and have been on tour too often to even crack the plastic seal. Bad gamer.

And lo, in my Lost Weekend of Xbox and Golden Grahams, I did learn something! A universal truth about human life on Planet Earth, true across time and cultures, so important that a game is nigh unto unplayable without stating this truth in the intro. What did I learn, you ask?

Girls are the worst.

It was most noticeable in Sonic Generations and Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Girls were merely absent in what I played of Epic Mickey and gender is pretty egalitarian so far in Skyrim and Dungeon Siege III–though the Great Boobs of Fantasy Art are present in force. Portal 2 takes the Metroid route, though it’s full of inexplicable fat jokes. It doesn’t escape me that of all my weekend games, Sonic and Zelda are the ones aimed at kids. (And holy cats, playing a Sonic game again made me feel like I was smoking actual crack. I think I might have discovered the viral source for ADD–we played this game as kids and thus it began, spreading out from us like a contagion.) Who of all of us need to know how terrible girls are as soon as possible, so they don’t make the mistake of having anything to do with them.

In the FMV intro to Sonic Generations, everyone is having a picnic to tell Sonic how awesome he is, because he has Protagonist Superpowers and that’s what second-tier PCs do with their spare time, I guess. One of Sonic’s friends is a girl. We know this because she is pink and because unlike all the other sidekicks who have cool action names like Knuckles and Tails, her name is…Amy. (Though honestly, both I and my husband had always read Tails as a girl in the original game–smaller, with a graceful fluffy pair of tails, a vaguely sexually suggestive name and light orange–why not? You take what you can get as far as playable girls. But it’s long been explicit in subsequent titles that Tails is a boy. I mean, he isn’t pink, so OBVIOUSLY AMIRITE.)

Amy is in love with Sonic. Sometimes she tries to kiss him. When she attempts this at the picnic, Sonic shoves his hand in her face and holds her physically away from him with a look of disgust on his face. He turns toward Tails and puts an arm around him, all the while crushing Amy’s face with his paw.

And of course, Amy continues to be the worst as the game goes on. At one point Sonic brings her the Red Ring hidden on a level, to which she responds: “Tee hee! That’s not the kind of ring I was hoping for!” She is not playable in this game and Sonic repeatedly expresses his loathing and revulsion of her. Boys rule, girls drool! And they want to get married and stuff! They like pink! So weird and yucky, little kids, don’t talk to them! And hit them in the face if they try to kiss you!

Zelda cracked me up hardcore, because I, like many of you, I think, remember the Legend of Zelda animated TV show. In which, at the end of every adventure, Link tried to get Princess Zelda to kiss him and Zelda was so not into it. Not so this time! Girls are miserable harpies now, no one wants to kiss them! Ahahaha, ew.

Link has his revenge in Skyward Sword! Link wakes up on the morning of his coming of age ritual (AGAIN) and a letter from Zelda arrives (AGAIN) reminding him that he has to fly his big bird thing in the ritual today, and that he promised to meet her on the roof beforehand. Link makes this face like OH MY GOD YOU GUYS NOTHING IS WORSE THAN A PRINCESS WHO WANTS TO HANG OUT WITH YOU.

At which point he dicks around for awhile before going to the roof and meeting up with Zelda, who is naturally concerned because Link is a lazy shit who hasn’t practiced flying his giant bird even though he has a SUPER SPECIAL ONE and has known he’d have to do this bird flying ritual test for a long time. Zelda tells her father that Link is definitely going to die because he sucks at flying. This is a valid concern! Her father goes on this weird rant about Link’s SPECIAL BIRD ZOMG and how Zelda was so jealous when Link and the bird bonded! LOLZ. He clearly means that Zelda wanted to “bond” with Link, though I prefer to think Zelda was jealous because shitty lazy Link got an AWESOME RED GIANT BIRD and she was stuck with the magical psychic aviary equivalent of a Dodge Dart.

So Zelda fusses over Link LIKE A GIRL and then kicks him off the roof to sink or swim with his bird and clock some damn sky hours, goddammit, but the special fabulous bird doesn’t show to snatch him out of his fall. At which point Zelda scores fair cool points by zooming down to rescue Link in mid-air and cradles him in her arms while trying to make sure he’s ok post-nearly-plummeting-to-his-death.

And Link gives her the Sonic look like: FUCK GIRLS ARE SO GROSS AND WEIRD EW GOD SHE’S TOUCHING ME and immediately jumps up so she won’t infect him with her girl cooties.

Ok, so they’re not into girls. That’s ok, right? Progressive, maybe?

Thing is, I would love to see a gay protagonist in a game. It’s high time for a Samus-style switch where you’re actually a boy saving a prince at the end of the game. And especially with Sonic, I think it’s fairly clear that he and Tails are More Than Just Friends. It’s not even coded when the hero is physically shoving a girl away in order to cuddle a boy. Though in my happy world of gay video game heroes, being a gay hero would not give you license to be a towering dick to the half of humanity you’re not interested in fucking–and that half would not be reduced to a stereotype and flung at the hero at high speeds so that he could show his awesomeness by crushing her. (Or him.) Wild dreamer, me.

But of course neither Link nor Sonic is canonically gay, and I think the programmers would be horrified at the suggestion. So given that they are mostly marketing these games to young boys and men and the Default Corporate Consumer is usually straight, why do these avatars hate girls so much? Why does Link no longer even want to tolerate the presence of the chick it is The Legend of?

Well, it is because girls are the worst. Their view is supported by Amy and Zelda being all up on the heroes’ junk and babbling about rings like disgusting, stupid girls do because they can’t kick ass or be awesome like a boy can.

This all came together for me because after my eyeballs and meds could not take Sonic’s fever pitch anymore, I watched Patrice O’Neal’s last comedy special on Netflix. And wow, it’s just nothing but “women are terrible, lolz” from start to finish. With such hits as “men don’t want anything but sex from relationships, but women don’t even like sex!” and “why can’t I harass women in the workplace? I’m a hunter/predator/caveman, it’s natural! PS You can harass me any time, ladies, as long as you’re not an uggo or a fatty because that is gross.” and my favorite Chris Rock cover: “allow me to demonstrate the act of physical intimidation I like to perform in lieu of hitting a woman, which I wouldn’t do because I am a Nice Guy.”

In this case, the act was “mushing,” which is grabbing a woman’s face and shoving her. And the audience laughed and women cheered when he asked who had had this done to her. At which point O’Neal breaks into a long set about how all men everywhere fantasize about killing their wives and girlfriends specifically because women are so awful killing them is an act of self defense, and asks people in the audience for their plans on how to murder their spouses.

Wow.

And all through that stand-up act was the message: there is no point to a woman except to have sex with her. She is useless unless she is actually having sex right now, willing to have sex in the very near future, or caring for the results of sex. No man would ever want to talk to or engage with a woman unless she is going to have sex with him very soon, and even then she should be careful to not talk or do anything to displease her man or else he might shove her or KILL her, but in the end, he’s still such a Nice Guy, and she is a Bitch.

So Sonic was mushing Amy. Fantastic. And since Sonic doesn’t want to have sex with Amy, either because he has a boyfriend or because he just isn’t interested, she has no purpose and can be mushed with impunity. I’m especially glad that this information is being imparted to young gamers, who are obviously all boys so there’s no need to even pretend like a magical supersonic hedgehog could be a girl and accomplish the same retina-searing feats of ring-collecting. Hey kids, girls are unnecessary and gross and whether you’re hetero or super into your best slender orange hedgehog buddy but conflicted about what that means for your identity, you should feel totally free to ignore, belittle, and assault them for showing the smallest affection or interest toward you. Now run out and play!

The sheer screaming balls-out hatred of women and displays of female affection shown in these games baffle me. I thought men were supposed to want sex from women? That’s what Patrice told me! But even worse is the straw-cartoon-man set up by showing any female NPC or PC as marriage-obsessed, pink, weak, and irritating. See? THEY TOTES DESERVE IT.

When I was a kid, I remember being so happy that I could play the Princess in Mario Bros 2–and she wasn’t really lesser than the other PCs–sure, she didn’t have much upper vegetable-hauling body strength, but she could fly. And she wasn’t shown as punishably useless or constantly throwing herself at Mario, even if she was pink. If I get into how Princess Peach is currently portrayed this post will never end, but the point is I was a little girl gamer. I am an adult female gamer. And when I see this regressive, ugly gender war crap laid out in the very latest games, I don’t understand how the world of late 80s gaming could have let me be a Princess who could fight, a girl who could wear the Metroid suit with no one the wiser, could let me believe Tails was like me, when the kid games of 2012 make damn sure that their audience knows being a girl is a sad, regrettable, even villainous thing, and if a male is even vaguely irritated with one, he should treat her as a low-level enemy and stomp on her face.

Grumble, grumble, as the Moblins say.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

Few things have depressed me more recently than this post by Charlie Stross. In fact, the night I read it I stayed up til 4 am having a full on panic attack about, um, the future of the world I guess. Which sounds stupid. It is not a reason to lay in bed making dramatic lemur eyes at the ceiling.

And yet, there I was.

Five years ago I was so much more optimistic about the state of the world and the future than I am now. Which is insane, because Bush was in power and things were shitty then, too. But I had such confidence in my generation and the power of awesomeness to win out. Is it just because we had, I don’t know, A GODDAMN DEPRESSION in there? That I’m over 30 now, so contractually obligated to be miserable about everything and pessimistic and want everything to be how it was when I was in my mid twenties? I don’t know.

It sucks to live at the end of a world. And we are–this is the end of industrial culture, kids. The tail end of the revolution. We live in the Shire, a hundred years post-Saruman’s Patented Electricalfantastik Oppression System. Industrial life has given the developed world all it had to give, and now we’ve offloaded the horrible parts of it to parts of the world we don’t like to think about and I don’t even know what we’re moving toward instead. I’m not that good a science fiction writer.

What I see in that post and in many other futurist predictions is that the only job in the future is Robot Maintainer. I simply believe our (American) government would rather see us all rot and die than take the smallest step toward a post-wage (ZOMGSOCIALIST) economy, and if everything can be automated, well, that 1% will have no reason to tolerate the rest of us as much as they do. And since I’m one of those assholes the internet says has no worth at all and deserves to starve because I got a LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE OH NOES (possibly I should stop reading reddit?) well, it seemed obvious to me at 4 am with my ceiling for company that my job would vanish into the black pit of WhoEvenReadsAnymore in the next few years. At least my husband has some Robo-Relevant Skillz?

It feels like dystopia is our only option. No wonder everyone’s writing about it. One of the comments on that post talked about replacing teachers with AIs to instruct kids and my brain just screamed INSTRUCT THEM TO DO WHAT? If even teaching, that most human activity, is offloaded to AI, and it will be, because AUTOMATION IS TEH BETTERZ and also current American culture has never met a job it didn’t want to get rid of or pay someone in a developing nation a penny and a half to kill themselves doing, what can we possibly educate kids in EXCEPT liberal arts if all the real world applicable stuff isn’t applicable at all because anything a human can do Apple has made an i____ to do?

Dmitri says I’m crazy, the post wasn’t dismal and he can’t understand why it would upset me so much. I’m not sure I understand. We fear change? Shit, even the cornerstone of my internet activity, long form blogging, is dying incredibly fast. I don’t like what’s replacing it, microblogging and UGH Facebook, which apparently people think is a permanent public utility now? And fairly soon I’d bet even microblogging will die off, so people can just be advertised to and play Farmville until they’re dead. I miss the days of the internet feeling absolutely positive to me, rather than something that has destroyed a scary amount of industries (and yes, made some, too) and given us once more, bizarrely, a monoculture. Entire, well-followed Twitters do little more than spout internet memes like a gross shallow fountain, and half of television just culls from YouTube for programming. I was happier when I read more Livejournal and less reddit.The internet is a beast, it owns our world, and the best is good and the beast is bad. But you can’t avoid the beast.

AND THIS IS OLD PEOPLE LAWN TALK. I hate myself for even saying it. Yes, yes, be the change you wish to see. Except that most of everything I as an individual have no control over. That’s been one of the biggest lessons of being an adult for me: the system does not care, and you can’t really affect it except in small ways. Climate change has happened already. It will keep happening. Even if I never eat tuna again that fish will go extinct in my lifetime. There is fuck all I as a person can do about that. And this is what keeps me up. Everything changes and you can’t even know if you are changing sufficiently with it. I started playing Skyrim, the game everyone says is the MOST AMAZING EVAR, and I got bored after a couple of hours and knitted instead. I am an old lady. I would rather cook in the real world than in Skyrim. I even got excited to snow shovel this morning because it makes me feel alive rather than numb in front of a screen, which is probably the ideal state of a human as far as companies and culture is concerned.

Maybe I take it hard because I grew up in the 90s, when the internet was new and briefly we thought everything was going to be pretty great for the forseeable future. Smile, we were all on Candid Camera.

Or did we not think that? Am I doing the thing, the Boomer Fallacy, where I think that when I was a kid things were good and easy because I was a kid and I didn’t know anything so the SHUT UP THE FIFTIES WERE THE BEST LET’S COSPLAY THEM FOREVER?

And maybe it’s not so bad. I come to my blog to wriggle out of my anxiety and it kind of works. I worry about 2032, and 2052, and will there even be such a thing as a “university” or a “job” for our kid, or even “winter” or “peacetime.” I think Occupy Wall Street was pretty much right about things and no one cared. I try to think that every generation despairs but things keep going somehow. And I try to hold on to this silly thing I wrote a few years back because it’s all I’ve got at 4am when the lemur eyes have settled on open, open, open forever.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

I used to get a lot of new music off of a Livejournal community called audiography. Every week they’d have a theme and people would post links to YouTube or other (mostly) free ways of hearing music that fit the theme. Sometimes the theme was a genre, sometimes a feeling, sometimes an image.

It was how I found the Decemberists, the Dresden Dolls, Sufjan Stevens, Rilo Kiley, Neko Case and a whole host of my other longtime favorites–and it’s mostly dead.

Audiography died off a long time ago, well before LJ traffic began to decline. The mods stopped posting themes and people stopped posting tracks. It had a resurgence in August and September last year–and immediately I discovered Florence + the Machine, Mumford and Sons, and First Aid Kit. (Ok, I am late on discovering those. But Audiography used to be my ticket to Knowing About Music Things! I am lost without them!)

I miss it. I listen to so much music–I need to have music on to write so my days are often filled with music from waking to sleeping. I like Pandora but I often miss what X song was called, and Spotify and Rdio can feel overwhelming. I’d try to revive Audiography myself except that I’m not a mod and can’t post themes.

But what I DO have is MAH OWN BLOG. So I am inaugurating Autoaudiography–my own one-blog version of the late great communal music pond.

I’ll post a theme every Monday, to loosely coincide with Twitter’s Music Monday hashtag. In the comments, post your favorite songs that fit the theme. Use (legit, legal, and free) links to Youtube videos (feel free to embed) or other sources for music that will not get me in trouble. Look through the comments for new music–I’ll repost my three favorites along with the new theme at the end of the week. Hopefully we can all find awesome new music, support musicians, and recapture some of that old awesomeness.

This week’s theme, thanks to the insomnia post that made me think about this and start listening to Florence again, is Night.

The title or artist can contain the word or related words, or the song can just make you think of nighttime, sleep, the moon, etc. Any connection to the theme is fine, it’s a loose sort of thing. Any genre is welcome, and, departing from Audiography rules, if you have songs of your own writing/singing/playing, by all means post them! Just keep it legal and non-piratical, please.

I’ll go first, on the off chance there’s someone else who hasn’t heard this song and seen this gorgeous video (which is kind of what I think that mask scene in Eyes Wide Shut might have been if that movie weren’t mainly about white people not feeling things) that has been my night-time companion the last few 3 ams:

So, what have you been listening to lately?

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

Our friends atheorist, his sister Sarah, and their mother Julie came over to spend Christmas day with us this year–which was lovely, as I like having a full house of folks I can cook for and take care of. As her present to us, Julie taught everyone about Zentangle and led us through making one.

Zentangle is this thing where they break down certain repetitive drawing patterns and use it to create a meditative experience which is less about doing nothing than about clearing the mind through repetitive action. Wax on, wax off, so to speak. I found it fairly awesome, as it’s similar to how I (compulsively) doodle anyway, but gives a structure I hadn’t had before.

That sounds a little stilted. I’ve always wanted to be able to draw, and been super shitty at it. I doodle because I have the restless hands, but I can’t draw meaningfully at all. My college notebooks are full of swirls and no notes to speak of. ZT has done a pretty great job of breaking images down into something I can draw–though I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do anything non-abstract, I am still excited about this. I can do awesome art deco/medieval/eschery things!

So, unfortunately, the online Zentangle culture leaves something to be desired. The starter kit is kind of broken–they don’t include instructions even for all the patterns in their little legend, and some of the ones included don’t even have instructions online. It’s all very focused on selling the founders’ seminars, and getting “certified” as an instructor, and that just doesn’t appeal to me at all, as well as turning art into a kind of weird scrapbookers’ Amway thing. But the thing itself has such worth. So I’m ignoring the tupperware club aspect, mostly, except for finding patterns, of which there are hundreds, much like knitting. I do like a lot of the Zentangle inspired blogs, which takes the technique and goes further with it, outside the original bounds of the notion.

In fact, it reminds me a lot of knitting, with the slow growth of complex patterns built with straight lines. Also medieval marginalia, though I’ haven’t found any celtic knot patterns yet I’m sure they exist. And last night I finally realized what it reminds me most of: mehndi.

Which, it turns out, is done exactly the same way–small, repetitive patterns fitted within larger shapes. Some of the patterns are, in fact, identical to Zentangle patterns. (Also explains why I know people who can’t draw traditionally but do mehndi.) I’m surprised that I haven’t seen anyone comment on this–though they may have, I’m not super involved with the community as I’ve said. The similarity is extremely striking to me, though–if there are less flower and bird designs in Zentangle.

So I’m hoping, as a resolutiony type thing, to do one Zentangle a day as a meditation exercise, because my brain is so birdyjumpy it needs to work the hands more or less constantly. I’ve been adding some words to my pieces, free association and alliteration, because I love words and can’t help it. Maybe I’ll try to pick up some calligraphy–though I’m pretty proud of my handwriting.

I don’t feel like I want to post them–there’s so many Zentangle blogs and I just want to do it for myself, not get certified or join the community. But I feel really nice about drawing every day. I think it will be grounding. I spent hours last night copying patterns into a blank book (with mehndi on the cover, amusingly) so that I can keep track of my abilities (also, the kit comes with a d20 so you can randomize the process, which is geekier than I suspect they know) and the patterns I really like, which tend to be curvy and flowing rather than geometric.

I’d be interested to know if any of you guys have heard of this or taken it up!

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

It is Christmas time and thus much is quiet for me online.

This year especially so, because we are having our biggest Xmas ever–meaning, more than just the two of us and Hogfather and pork pies. triskelmoon and her husband and son are here, soon to be joined by sarapada, and then justbeast’s parents are coming for New Year (hopefully we’ll have Russian TV set up by then). It is a full house! Plus we did solstice this week with added pixelcandy and clan, plus LJ-less Winter and Fire. I have done my best to spoil my friends and have cooked, pickled, preserved, and infused like crazy.

And the weekend before? We hosted Ludum Dare (code a game in 48 hours for fun and profit) and I wrote, er, three short stories and two proposals in the weekend so as to express solidarity with the Argentinian Proletariat programmers in my life.

So you see why it’s been hard to blog. Also I am desperately trying to finish my last knitting present in time for the day. I will return with renewed vigor post-holiday and in the meantime will be on the Twitters.

I hope you are all well, and cozy this winter.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

I have a new poem out today!

I am as proud of it as a short story so it gets its own post.

The Melancholy of Mecha Girl is a philosophical confessional poem about anime and giant robots. You can read it right over here, as Mythic Delirium, giant of the poetry world and 25th Birthday Girl, has chosen it as one of the issue’s featured poems.

This means! You can hear me reading it aloud as well as reading it yourself. And hopefully while you’re over there subscribe or just buy the issue, as it has many other amazing poets including Sonya Taaffe, Jeannine Hall Gailey (who inspired my own poem!), Mari Ness, Jessica Paige Wick, and Rachel Manija Brown.

I feel like I’m tentatively forging a new voice and a new phase in my poetry. I’m not really sure I could describe what it is, but this poem is definitely part of that. It’s exciting to me, and I hope it’s exciting to you, too.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

Myths of Origin, my VERY FIRST OMNIBUS EVER, is finally unleashed on the world!

It contains The Labyrinth, a surreal beatnik hero’s journey, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, a chronicle of an old Japanese woman and her madness or enlightenment, and The Grass-Cutting Sword, a retelling of the Shinto creation myth, all of which were out of print, and quite pricey hardbacks to boot, along with Under In the Mere, my Arthurian book, which was written at the same time as those early novels, though published much later. That all would have cost you about $100 back in the day, and now are just about $10 anywhere you’d buy it.

It also has detailed notes on each book, where they came from and where they fit in with my life and aesthetic development. It’s a pretty awesome package–and check out that gorgeous cover!

Given that 2011 was a breakout year for me, it’s appropriate that Myths comes out this year, contexualizing the wildest and weirdest of my books. I look at this hefty tome and see how far I’ve come, and how far I still have to go, and remember the girl I was when I was just starting out and didn’t know any of the rules, so just barreled through writing like a 6 year old playing Streetfighter, mashing away the buttons to see what worked–and coming up with occasional fireballs.

You can pick up Myths of Origin at Amazon, BN, on Kindle or Nook, and even some brick and mortars. Anywhere you normally buy books. (On BN, if you’re fast, you can catch a glimpse of an old cover version!)

Later in the week I’ll see if I can dig up some old school icons from the ancient book releases. I’m using one now!

And now, as celebration of the New Baby, I will make an offer I never have before.

Ask me anything about these four books. Anything–even if it’s “what the fuck?” I’ll answer honestly and completely, with spoilers. You can ask me about the worldbuilding, or the answers to riddles, or why I made any of the choices I did. About what a sequel would have been to any of them, a prequel, a musical, a movie. Fire away, I’m all yours.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

I’ve been watching 24 lately as I frantically try to accomplish all the things this week (finish my mom’s Christmas present, finish editing Fairyland 2, and the play I’m directing goes up on Saturday, too).

I pay attention to some seasons and episodes more than others–it’s not really hard to follow, even with only half a brain focused on it. A lot of the show is like a YouTube montage of people yelling WE’RE OUT OF TIME/RUNNING OUT OF TIME/WE DON’T HAVE MUCH TIME!!! only it’s not a montage, it’s just the show.

But the thing that frustrates me is such a writer thing to be frustrated by.

The villains, we just never know where they’re coming from.

Oh sure, America sucks, blow things up, yes, we get that they’re Bad and want to Do Bad Things. But we never hear why they want those things, what specific beef they’ve got, what their history is (I want to hear Marie Warner’s story, you guys) and how they got to that point. Most importantly, we never hear what sort of world they hope will follow their apocalypse party.

So you want to meltdown all the nuclear reactors/release a virus in all kinds of cities/whatever. You basically hope to bring about the end of America as a civilization, right? Because that’s what will happen. (And money is not a good answer either, even though they occasionally try that one, because it will not be worth much when everyone is dead and you are hoping to trade non-irradiated water for uninfected food.) And many of the effects of the 24 crises would actually be worldwide. So you want the zombie apocalypse. What is it you hope will follow that? I’m willing to hear that you want a pre-industrial Caliphate–I won’t like it, but it’s at least a concrete goal. I’m willing to hear that you think nixing half of humanity with an incurable 100% mortality virus will heal the earth because overpopulation or whatever.

What I do not like is the constant YOU CAN NEVER UNDERSTAND that the villains spout, and then clam up. Like, somehow that’s an acceptable response during an interrogation? It’s as good as asking for a lawyer, it would seem. We could never understand? Well then! No more questions, sir! Would you like the light or dark cell? Right this way. There’s something to be said for villains monologuing. At least we get to understand. No wait, we couldn’t understand, so I guess we won’t even try?

And I am always interested in the why. When I was editing Apex I asked for a rewrite on a story to give me more “whyporn”. I want it laid out, at least a little, why the villain does what they do, and more than that–why they feel they are righteous. Because they all do believe they are doing the right thing, the hard thing, but the right thing. To act as though those motivations are incomprehensible is to simply dismiss those who commit terrible acts as inhuman and beyond understanding–and really, most of the time they’re terribly human and very understandable. We just feel better about our own stupid, petty, venal motivations when we shrug them off and say they’re monsters, who cares why?

But most of the time, in real life, villains are acting out those stupid, petty, venal impulses on a large scale, that’s all. And it pays to understand the process by which the small ugly thoughts we all have blossom into this horrible angry all engulfing Thing.

That’s how you write a good villain. An interesting villain. And 24 makes interesting villains and then just stubbornly refuses to examine them or even allow them to speak. I know it’s supposed to be this Rah Rah Jack Bauer Punches People In the Soul show, but in its first seasons it was often quite deft and interesting–right up until we should actually hear the whyporn, and then the YOU JUST WOULDN’T GET ME scowly crap starts up, every single damn season.

Show, I am frustrate. WE’RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME.

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.

WOW!

Fairyland has made it to the final round of voting in the GoodReads Reader’s Choice Award! I’ve never even been nominated before, let alone made it to the final round. And Deathless made it to the semi-final!

Please, if you have a moment, head over and vote for Fairyland in the Middle Grade section of the poll. It just takes a minute–and there’s tons of other awesome books to vote for in a bunch of categories, too.

Real blogging soon, I promise! Like, today even!

2011 Goodreads Choice Awards: Best Middle Grade & Children’s Vote now for your favorite books!

Mirrored from cmv.com. Also appearing on @LJ and @DW. Read anywhere, comment anywhere.