I completed some of my 2011 Writing Goals, but not all of them. That’s okay. I’m not going to beat myself up about it. I’m just going to do better this year.
As I mentioned briefly on Saturday, Bellica is now available for the Kindle.
I ended up pricing it at $7.99, which is a bit lower than the $9.99 I had originally planned on, but still an accurate representation of the novel’s length and, frankly, what I feel I deserve for it. Also, this price was decided upon after extensive market research* by yours truly.
I’m currently also working on the CreateSpace file for a new paperback version of Bellica — one that will have bigger font and more pages. It will also be more widely available. More news on that as it unfolds.
Finally, you’ll notice few posts here and at Gossip Diet. I’m currently unable to type while sitting up and typing while lying down (the only position available to me) takes a lot of time and effort and causes me some pain. Therefore I shall be posting half as much at each blog, because that equals one blogs’ worth of posts, I think.
In the meantime, I have to wait for my back to slowly get better. It’s going slow, because it hates me. And now I hate it just as much.
*Extensive market research definition: I ran a poll on Facebook.
[TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of rape and sexual assault]
It’s a Thing. It really is. We’d like to think that the worlds we think up are oh-so-evolved, but the truth is that many of the worlds we think up have a rape culture in some shape or form.
Possibly because it’s nearly impossible for us to imagine humanity could be better.
Or maybe — and this I find more likely — maybe we really believe, deep down, that rape is something that just happens and it’s something we just have to deal with.
I don’t believe that’s completely true.
I do believe that humanity could be better. I believe we could build a sex-positive society. I also believe that within this sex-positive society, rape could probably still happen. The difference lies within our reactions.
Current rape culture
Person gets raped. Zie comes forth. Immediately blamed for walking alone at night, wearing ‘slutty’ clothing, having a uterus. What were you thinking deciding to have reproductive organs that would brand you as ‘female’? That was silly.
[my completely idealized] sex-positive culture
Person gets raped. Zie comes forth. Receives proper care and attention; is immediately believed and never ever blamed. Rapist goes through restorative justice, because we realize zie is still human and needs our help.
Generalizations, of course, but you get my point.
Sad thing is, there are very few rape culture-free fantasy books out there. In fact, I can’t think of one. Not even my own.
However, the rape culture I’ve created is a bit tamer than ours. Rape certainly isn’t as prevalent in Athering society, and the victims are never blamed. It’s still acknowledged as something that sometimes happens, and it’s dealt with: the rapist is turned over to the priestesses of the Temple*, where zie must go through penance to Desirelle, the goddess of sexual liaisons and consent — for it’s Her sacred laws that have been breached. That’s if the victim comes forward. Which they may not, for whatever reason, though that is not common.
I digress. My point is, even those of us who write sex-positive stories cannot eliminate the specter of rape from our worlds.
And I guess what I’m getting at here is what does that say about us? I know there are writers out there who write rape because they see it as a fact of life…one that happens to women who “don’t follow the rules”. Or as a common part of conquering another country: pillage, burn, rape.
And yet, in all these scenarios, people never write about rape as something that just happens to men.
Which I suppose is proof enough that we cannot get rid of all our patriarchal programming, no matter how hard we try.
That’s the one difference I made sure of in my book. I couldn’t seem to eliminate rape, but I did turn the tables: no one is exempt. It can involve anyone, regardless of gender.
That’s a fact we seem to forget. When we write rape culture, it’s women who get it. Yet when feminists bring up rape culture as a relentless assault on women, we get shouted down because “Men get raped too!”
Um, ok. Never said they didn’t.
But a lot of writers have.
In this snippet, Bellica Anala is attempting a daring escape from an enemy nation where she has been held captive in a drugged state. This is from my recently released novel Bellica, now available on Kindle.
Through some stroke of luck she made it to the stables, where a young groom got another sleeper hold from her. She found her horse easily, it being the shabbiest creature there.
She pulled the docile mare about halfway out of the stall when she stopped. What am I doin’? She needed to escape, not go for a gentle city ride. She pushed the mare back into its stall and took a horse from a few stalls down.
This one was a huge, black stallion, who looked as if he normally had a terrible temper. Anala approached him cautiously and held out her hand. He sniffed it, then nickered softly and nuzzled her.
She’d always had a way with horses.
Be sure to check out the other talented participants of SFFSat here!
Short update before the post: I’ve been AWOL from this site because of a spinal injury. Read about my bulged discs in these three posts at Gossip Diet.
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A lot of celebrities tend to choose particular issues to ‘crusade’ after, and the commentary on that ranges from rapt adoration to complaining about their ‘phony’ ‘goody-two-shoes’ attitudes.
Fact is, most of these things that are marked as either phony or absolutely incredible are just standards of being a decent human being.
It’s true that celebrities have more power than your average Canadian Joe, but that doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly better people because they used that power to do what any decent human would do. They’re just decent.
Which may be why it’s called phony so often — most celebrities know the kind of reaction they’ll get from their fans, so it’s hard to imagine they’re not just doing it for the attention.
In which case, I don’t see the problem — at least they’re doing something.
This discussion is brought about from my reading this news article, about Bieber helping out someone who needed a lung transplant through a tweet.
I have no personal opinion about Bieber, except that I don’t really like his music and beyond that he takes up no space on my radar. I’m glad to see that he’s still being a decent person through the fame that would be difficult for any young person to navigate and still come out whole. His motives for doing so don’t really matter to me; the fact is he’s using his power for good.
And that’s really all the acknowledgement needed. The author of the article I linked to seems a little too quick to give Bieber decency cookies. “Congratulations, you met the bare minimum for being a decent human being. Have a cookie.”
Because the fact is we don’t deserve special recognition for believing women have rights or for using celebrity power to help people get transplants. These are things that we should be doing regardless the rewards we may or may not receive. And if you’re going to stop doing something decent because you’re not getting kudos and pats on the head for it, then you’re not really a decent human being. You’re an asshole.
So. You have celebrity — use it. Continue to be a decent human being. You don’t have celebrity — do what you can with the power you do have.
And maybe the rest of society could grow up and realize these things really are just hallmarks of being a decent human being, and stop lauding celebrities with more praise than the average Jane gets for the same actions. (This phenom I see a lot on tumblr, where if a celebrity does one good thing — feminist Ryan Gosling, pro-LGBT Daniel Radcliffe, etc — they get tagged with things like “wonderful flawless human being” and then I feel like vomiting. They’re not flawless. They just met the bare minimum for decency. We just care more because we happen to see them on the silver screen all the time, and sometimes naked.)
Sincerely,
who is still working on being a a decent human being.
Cover of Thirteen Reasons Why
I picked up Thirteen Reasons Why recently because it was on my list of “to read” and it had received much critical acclaim. Also it was one of two books I’d brought with me while traveling (not including the two I read on mom’s Kindle). I figured it might be okay, at least.
Allow me to give you 13 reasons I dislike it. And by “dislike”, I mean “hate psychotically.”
[TRIGGER WARNING: RAPE AND ASSAULT]
[SPOILERS]
On the plus side, the spelling, grammar, and punctuation were good.
However, I can’t recommend this book to anyone. It was horrible, and there are much better ways to get the same message. Actually, I could be wrong, as I’m not even sure what the message IS. The anvil hit me so hard I have a concussion.
Final verdict: waste of a tree’s life. If you must subject yourself to this mound of tripe, buy the ebook or go to the library.
Cover via Amazon
I just finished The Hunger Games Trilogy. I’d read The Hunger Games a few months back, and between Sunday and Tuesday I read Catching Fire and Mockingjay (thanks to mom’s Kindle, which I will blog about later).
I really enjoyed both books. I think they’re well-written, have a compelling plot and characters, and make several good points. That said, they are all written in first person POV. Reading them has made me realize quite clearly why people hate first person stories so much.
1. With first person POV your character must be unaccountably dense to not get all the clues leading up to the end. Furthermore, the clues must not be as well hinted or revealed as they can be in third person POV, wherein the reader reaches the obvious conclusion before the character does. This effect makes the reader feel stupid, which is not something people like. (That said, characters in third person POV can be unaccountably dense as well — however, this does not hit you over the head as it does with first-person, where your only perspective is inside the character’s head.)
2. The big reveal at the end has a tendency to fall into monologuing. As the entire story is necessarily monologuing, it’s hard to show the reveal rather than telling it. This is most clearly seen at the end of Catching Fire [highlight for spoilers] wherein Katniss explains everything regarding the end of the Games and the rebel rescue in one short paragraph, almost monotone. It felt like one of those “The Least You Need to Know” sections at the end of a chapter in a Complete Idiot’s Guide To….
3. Your message can get anvilicious. You are no longer hiding this message within layers of interaction among characters from a third-person perspective or within setting; your main character is stating quite clearly what your message is. You are unable to let the horrifying truth of the events ring through without your main character commenting on them; otherwise your MC becomes a heartless automaton. This means walking the line between subtlety and anvil-dropping becomes more than a tightrope; it’s a veritable nightmare.
Flaws now addressed: I think Collins did a very good job with first person POV and I think she had to. I can’t imagine Katniss’ story being told in any other way. It’s a good trilogy and I do highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys a good dystopian story of the rise of the proletariat against tyrannical oppression. Or if you need a good cry. (Yeah, it’ll make you cry.)
Coming up: Friday Five about my trip so far and a post about ebook readers.
This is not the rape I'm talking about. (Image by jimmedia via Flickr.)
“Fat girls should be happy for any attention.”
“Oh, come on, she’s too fat to be raped!”
How many times have you heard or seen the above sentiments, or ones similar to them? How many times have you uttered them, either because you truly believe they’re true or because you’ve internalized hatred of yourself, or both?
I’ve heard and seen these sentiments a lot. I wish I had a quarter for each time, because then I’d have enough quarters for several rolls of quarters, and then I’d use them to beat people. Namely misogynistic fatphobic rape apologists.
Which, by the way, the people who utter these sentiments are.
I get it if you’ve internalized the hatred of yourself. I do. I was there for a long time. But darlin, you’ve got to pull yourself out of that trench. Please believe me when I say that a) rape has nothing to do sex and everything to do with power and b) you are beautiful regardless. And please believe me when I say that continuing to utter those sentiments contributes to rape culture and fat hatred.
This is the insidious thing about oppression: we are trained to be complicit in our own degradation. From birth we are put into this culture that tells us these sentiments, these vicious lies, and parades them about as truth. And with so many years of this being drilled into our heads, it’s understandable we may believe these things about ourselves.
So we utter these same statements and make it easier for the oppressor to keep his great big boot on our faces. We have been well-trained to hate ourselves. We have been well-trained to hate others like ourselves, to question their every move.
We have been well-trained to question if a fat girl was really raped, or if she’s just begging for attention with an outrageous story. We have been trained to believe that fat people are harder to abuse, to violate, because they’re icky or too heavy. We have been trained into thinking that if fat people get raped, they should be happy for the attention.
My personal experience begs to fucking differ.
There is nothing awesome about being raped. I’ve been through it twice, and because I am CAFAB, present as femme, and live in this society, I have already accepted that it may very well happen again. I can only hope that if it does happen to me again, that I am not so shell-shocked, so brutalized into silence that by the time I am even able to admit to myself what happened it is not too late to put the rapist behind bars.
The first time it took me 10 years to even be able to talk about it as something I was still ashamed of. It took telling someone else to even discover that it was rape.
The second time took only a year to accept it for what it was. Thank the gods for small miracles, I suppose.
News flash: I was fat both times. Both times had nothing to do with desire. Both times had to do with the rapist wanting to show me who was in charge/to break me.
Too bad for him, I’m not broken. And if he ever shows his face to me again, he better have good running shoes on because I will not hesitate in destroying him.
Too fat to be raped? Happy for any attention?
How about the notion that fat people deserve love, good relationships, and to have their boundaries respected, just like everyone else does. How about that.
