Mirabile Dictu

So I’ve been doing a lot of writing in Fullmetal Alchemist lately, which you probably do not know unless you hang out on my livejournal because I haven’t yet managed to make a satisfactory header graphic for the potential FMA page on the House of Hobbits. And it’s interesting, you know, because I usually write in book fandoms; aside from brief flings with The Faculty and Phantom Menace, I haven’t obsessed over a visual-medium fandom since I was a kid and in love with Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and the original Star Wars trilogy

Well, I mean, the interesting part isn’t the obsessing. It’s that I’m a very visual writer; I see stuff going on in my head and write down what I see. In a text-based fandom like LotR and Harry Potter, I have basically limitless room in which to do that. There are certain constraints that have to be upheld, obviously - Harry has black hair and green eyes, hobbits are short and have furry feet, and so forth - but in a sense, as far as inner visual representation and constructing my own version of the world, I’m standing in the middle of an empty loft with a set-dressing plan in my hand: black leather couch goes there, Louis XV chair goes there, spice rack on the island, plant on the bookshelves, but none of it’s actually there. It’s up to me to put it there, and if in the process I decide that the Louis XV chair clashes horribly with the decor, I can discreetly shunt it to the side or exile it to the closet. My Weasley twins are tall and thin, not stocky, and were even before the movies came out.

In a graphical fandom, on the other hand, everything’s already there. I can’t move the furniture; I have to work around it. I can place Ed and Al in it, but in a strange way it’s less like world-furnishing and more like playing video games - here’s your environment, here’s your character, make them interact. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s constraining, because I am so heavily dependent on visualization when I write.

The strange thing, I suppose, is that it shouldn’t be constraining. So I know exactly what Ed looks like, and what Roy looks like, and what the layout of Roy’s office is - so what? I’m not writing fanfic about the desk chair. But I don’t have the same sense of freedom in that environment that I do when Harry and Draco are facing each other across the atrium with the shadows of birds flowing between them.

I’m not sure where this is going, actually. But for whatever reason it’s easier to write in text-based fandoms than in ones based in visual media, which is probably why I never wrote Battlestar Galactica Mary Sues in my misspent youth.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

I’ve been out of town all week on business. I’ve been putting in 16-hour days and the nerves are not at their best, kthx. I get off the plane, fight my way home through traffic that causes me to take an hour and a half to make a 20-minute trip, sucking down the cigarettes after having been smokeless for four days, and after getting home and settled I fire up the internet to see what’s happened while I was gone.

Well, one thing that happened was that SoHW got linked on what seems to be a rather high-profile blog version of that endless, incredibly fucking stupid argument over the legitimacy of fanfic.

So SoHW is gone until such a time as the traffic from that site dies down, which should be about a week because the internet has a short memory. Hopefully people will hit the 404 screen and just go away, saving me from having to take down my whole site for the duration.

I lose at drafts.

See, in theory I understand their value. It’s just that I want stuff to be perfect, or at least in final form, the first time around. That’s why it takes me so damn long to write - I edit, really really heavily, as I go instead of just getting stuff down and going back and redoing things later. So a few days ago I was working on the opening chapter of a (theoretical) novel that I’ve been having trouble figuring out where and how to start, and I’m like “Well, I’ll just write a couple of beginnings so I can see how I want everything positioned.”

And it’s not like there’s no benefit. A few minor characters were established. I got a bit deeper into the world, or at least the main character’s immediate family. I discovered the voice that I really, really do not want for the main character, because Jesus, bitch, stop your whining or it’s the stewpot for you. I figured out that the opening scene I’d originally planned wasn’t really going to work, because I couldn’t quite figure out what else should be going on in it other than character introduction. Not a total loss, seriously.

But… it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t polished enough. It didn’t resonate. I didn’t like what was going on in the scenes, I didn’t like how slow they were to get going, I couldn’t figure out where in the scene I wanted to come in, and honestly, writing shit that doesn’t work is worse than not writing at all.

I know, cry me a river. I get that writing is a process of turning out six pages of dead-in-the-water crap for every half a page that shines, and even really great and famous writers deal with that so god knows I’m not excused. I get that even Clive Barker occasionally looks at his monitor and goes “Oh my god, is it too late to get a bartending job?” But I also get that, you know, that’s the sucky part of writing. Because of the thing where it sucks. Drafts suck. They suck almost by definition. There’s no sort of meta Mobius strip there where awareness of the fact that they suck somehow makes them not suck. And it’s never, ever fun seeing yourself write something that’s way below your standards. It’s like having stomach flu. The fact that you’re throwing up in the privacy of your bathroom and at least not humiliating yourself in public does not really go very far to mitigate the fact that if you had your way you’d never have stomach flu again as long as you live.

So yeah. I get that drafts are valuable and serve a purpose. I just don’t want to need them, you know? And I certainly don’t want them to be 90% irredeemable crap.

And I want a pony too.

From now on you’ll have to answer a security question before you can comment (and remember that comments are moderated so they don’t go through right away).  Sorry about that, but yesterday morning I had to clean 50 spambot comments out of the admin queue - no, literally, some spambot hit my blog overnight and left 50 comments - so we’re all going to be inconvenienced.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that no one would sink low enough to work for a spam company and actually do the programming that makes that sort of thing possible?  Maybe they’re all frustrated virus writers.  Christ, people, give up your life of sleaze and make an honest living waiting tables or something if you can’t get a decent job.

Every so often I get comments on my LJ that make me go “Jesus Christ, who the hell are these people? And how does every goddamned one of them find my journal?” And then I get all meta about, seriously, what the hell is going on?

I’ve been blogging for, good lord, three or four years now, and I’ve had all sorts hit my journal. Some of them like me. Some of them hate my guts and want me to know it. Some of them start out in the first category and move to the second. Some of them, for reasons I’m never quite clear on but that I suspect don’t have anything to do with me, really really want to be my friend, or at least it looks an awful lot like that’s what they want. Which, you know, okay; but. A lot of them go about it using this weird sort of forced-intimacy tactic, where they’ll make all sorts of really personal comments to me, or be constantly giving me advice, or wanting to tell me really personal things about themselves. And I think the reasoning behind it is that if Person X talks to me long enough as if we were BFFs, I’ll somehow forget that not only are we not BFFs, I actually have no clue who the fuck Person X is; like they want to be friends but they don’t want to go through the getting-acquainted process, they want Instant Friend Gratification, so they’re trying to take a shortcut and start out at the same level of intimacy I have with people who have known me for years.

Honestly, I think part of this is because people in fandom are very imaginative.

I mean, you fire up your friends list on LJ. And there you sit, like Jimmy Cagney at his rear window, watching all these tiny little contextless slices of people’s lives. You make nicknames for them. You speculate about what’s going on in their heads. You tell yourself stories about what they’re doing when they’re not in front of the window, or what they’re doing when they are. If you watch them long enough, in a strange sort of way they become part of your life; and it’s hard to fathom, because I think humans aren’t really wired to have nonparticipatory social lives, that someone could be part of your life but you aren’t part of theirs.

So you watch them, and you make up all sorts of stuff about them to turn this figure in the window into a three-dimensional person, and probably after a while it starts feeling less like Rear Window and more like an old Twilight Zone episode - that the whole courtyard is like a dollhouse, and maybe if you weren’t there to watch, the dolls wouldn’t really exist at all. And of course they’re your friends, of course they are, because when you were six years old, weren’t you and Barbie best friends as soon as you left the toy store?

So you post weirdly personal comments on their LJs, or send them strange emails, and you’re bewildered and angry when this person who does not know you from Adam smacks you down for being intrusive, or just doesn’t want to be your BFF on two comments’ acquaintance. Because hey - shouldn’t you be able to talk to your dolls any way you want?

So I probably should have said something over here too. Mea culpa.

No, I have not updated The Shadow of His Wings in a pig’s years. Yes, I am still writing it, and intend to continue writing it all the way to the end. However.

The last several months have been a period of intense stress and transition for me. For two or three of those months I was working three jobs and did not have the time or energy to do much of anything but come home and collapse. Things have settled down a bit now and I’m slowly but surely getting back to writing. Because things are still in a bit of a state of flux, however, I can’t give you an ETA for SoHW18. What I can do is point you at the first half of the chapter, which is up on my Livejournal here.

Like I said in my first post here, I sort of assume no one reads this blog, which is why I don’t make announcements like this here. I’ll try to remember in the future to make them just in case.

So not even I can carry my laptop everywhere, alas, and Cuthbert the PDA means well and tries hard but is sort of like the Commodore 64 of PDAs. So I wind up not writing sometimes when I’d really like to (on planes, for instance). This is annoying, because I do like to write, and plane rides are really damn boring; might as well see if I can figure out exactly how I want to start up the body of that novel I’ve been poking at.

As I was grumbling about this conflict of writing urge versus back muscles one day, a daring and cutting-edge thought occurred to me: I could, like, write. On paper. Notebooks (made of paper) aren’t heavy. They’d fit in my purse. I could write stuff and carry it around with me. I felt sort of like Keats’ Spaniards with the Pacific new-swum into their ken, if Keats’ Spaniards were of two minds about the whole thing and felt that the ocean was a nifty thing in theory but likely to do things like get them wet and make them smell like seaweed in practice so maybe it would be best to just stay up there on a peak practicing their wild surmise.

The thing is, I hate writing by hand. I haven’t done it on a regular basis since grad school, and I didn’t do it much then. I always grip the pen too tight and it makes my hand cramp, and the movement just doesn’t feel natural anymore. If I’d lived back in the day when manuscripts were actually manuscripts, not a word would anyone ever have heard out of me, unless I was occasionally moved to write porny haiku. I’m in awe of Jo March toiling away in a cold attic over her Bigass Stack O’ Paper, and always feel like I should take up a collection to have her carpal tunnel treated. Plus my handwriting is SO BAD. SO. BAD. Even I can’t read it half the time. Which, I suppose, is a bonus if I don’t want anyone at work finding my vaguely incestuous social horror morality play about tuberculosis, but not an advantage otherwise. Worse, I can’t edit. I have to scribble stuff out and write in the margins. If I decide that I want to switch two paragraphs around, it’s not as simple as selecting one and dragging it up above the other; it’s a big hairy deal that involves more lines and arrows than a cross-lagged longitudinal model of juvenile delinquency.

Nonetheless, I found myself eyeing the notebooks at the grocery store, trying to act all nonchalant lest someone think I was actually retro enough to use one. I finally bought a cute pink-covered one, because what the hell, if I’m going to write stories in my notebook omg like a middle schooler just discovering the kawaiiiii that is Harry/Draco, I might as well go whole hog and buy something I can write “Mr. and Mrs. Sean Bean” all over in purple sparkly ink.

I know people who swear by hand-writing stuff. I have no idea how. The only virtue I can see is being able to write when I can’t get to my computer, and I certainly wouldn’t do it with a functioning computer sitting right there with its shiny editing functions beckoning to me to come and rearrange my words to my heart’s content.

Nonetheless, I have bought a (paper) notebook. I haven’t written in it yet. I will, though, eventually. While smoking my cigarette in an eight-inch cigarette holder and wearing a cloche hat with a cute little black veil. And then when my hand cramps up half a page in I’ll give it up and listen to my mp3 player and read the Skymall magazine instead.

(No, I haven’t forgotten about this blog. I just haven’t had anything I wanted to put in it in a while.)

So I watched The Ring finally. Man – excellent, excellent movie. Not that it didn’t have its flaws – number one, it’s probably not a good call to make your corpses look quite that much like Munsch paintings, and number two, if you know your parents are going to go digging around into the life and death of a vengeful murdering ghost, don’t you think the time to clue them in on not letting her out of the well is before they go off to investigate and not after? – not, as I say, without its flaws, but an excellent movie for all that.

Now, The Ring, like The Grudge, is based on a highly successful Japanese movie. Interestingly, the Japanese director was called in to direct The Ring 2, which by all accounts just sucks like a sucky thing. I read an interesting review that chalked this up to cultural differences. It said that, in Japan, ghosts are scary, period. There’s this whole cultural thing around the long-haired female ghost who died horribly and is now out for vengeance on whoever doesn’t get out of her way fast enough, which apparently holds some particularly horrific place in the Japanese subconscious. Americans, though, the review went on, are a lot more blasé about stuff like this. We almost need the ghosts to stand in for something else, some fear much closer to the bone, before they’ll scare us. Maybe we’ve all watched too much Scooby-Doo, I don’t know.

I don’t know that I entirely agree with the review; if some dark night I close the door to my medicine chest and there’s some random dead chick standing behind me, I don’t think I’m going to need to position her as a metaphor for social contagion before I scream blue murder and call a priest. It’s true, though, that in order to be scary that ghost is eventually going to have to do something a little more alarming than stand there looking like she came back from the dead for a scrunchie.

So half the trick of writing horror, it seems to me, is figuring out what’s scary in itself, in its own nature, and what’s only scary by association.

Say what you like about Stephen King, but Pet Sematary is a fucking scary book. And it’s scary because it isn’t really about dead people coming back to life; it’s about how we’ve sanitized and euphemized and hushed up death until we’ve started to think it’s something unnatural and terrifyingly alien. Rachel says there’s nothing natural about death, and appears to be completely serious. We’ve made it into a Mystery, but it’s a mystery with no ritual to surround and contain it. For the first time in human history, King seems to be saying, we’re not only terrifyingly alone in the face of our own deaths, but in the face of every death that touches our lives. It’s up to us to face the Mystery and control it, to wrestle it like Jacob with the angel, and it’s a fight we have not a chance in hell of winning. And, you know, it’s not like dead people coming back to life isn’t scary, but facing Death alone, over and over, without knowing how to face it or knowing where you are in the dark? That’s something we can all be scared of. Similarly, The Haunting of Hill House isn’t scary because of things banging on doors; that’s probably, in my opinion, the least scary part of the book. It’s scary because we all feel like Eleanor sometimes – we all feel fragile, and want to hide away behind stone lions with a cup full of stars, and to be shown exactly how that fragility can lead down the garden path to insanity and suicide instills an unpleasant “There but for the grace of God” feeling in us.

So what’s not scary? Well, if you’ve read any of the thousands upon thousands of horribly addictive omg pulp horror novels, you know one straight off: body parts. Hacked off, squished, burned, jarred loose by the turbulence and flying off during sex, they’re just not scary. They evoke a visceral feeling of disgust and revulsion, yes, but that’s not the same as fear. You know who can make gore work as fright? Clive Barker. I, not being Clive Barker, am wise enough not to try. When I was a wee Miraling, I must have read John Saul’s Comes the Blind Fury ninety times, but that’s the only one of his books I can stomach – not coincidentally, it’s also one of his least gory. He’s one who overrelies terribly on smooshed body parts, as well as nasty things happening to children and animals – a frightfest party foul shared by endless woman-in-jeopardy movies of the week, which are similarly not scary. I think that’s supposed to be scary because it reminds us of a thing we hate to be reminded of: that innocence is no shield against having nasty things happen to you. Put that way, I don’t quite know why it doesn’t work. Maybe because it’s so transparently manipulative, and you can’t scare someone while simultaneously causing them to be like “Bitch, please.”

Here’s an interesting paradox. White Noise was largely deemed by the critics to be one of the worst movies of the year, and in a year where Uwe Bolle perpetrates more video-game adaptations on an unsuspecting public, that’s a tough mark to shoot for. But I don’t care what anyone says, the trailer for that movie, O my sisters, was fucking scary. Whoever made the trailer should have shot the whole thing. I think it was scary for the same reason Sixth Sense was scary: the idea that we think the dead are gone but they aren’t, they’re out there somewhere, and they want something from us, they want it desperately, and if they don’t get it they’re going to get angry, and we don’t even know what it is or how to hear them. It could be that The Ring 2 didn’t work because we know what the ghost wants, like the ghosts in Sixth Sense are only scary until we understand that they just want someone to listen to them. We don’t know, really, what Hill House wants with Elanor. All we know is how terribly easy it was for the house to seduce her into giving it.

There are a lot of things that are scary. The little old lady crawling across the ceiling in Exorcist III. The witch and her hand of glory in The House With a Clock in Its Walls. The little girl crawling out of the tv set in The Ring. The dust-covered wheelchair in The Changeling. The path over the windfall beyond the pet sematary. Part of the difficulty of writing horror, it seems to me, is that there’s not necessarily any one thing, or set of things, they have in common. Effective fright isn’t something you can necessarily analyze down to its component parts. Which, you know, kind of sucks for people who want to write it, but… well, I guess if there were no mystery to fear, it wouldn’t be scary anymore.

And now am off to dust off the boggart fic, and possibly the ghost story I started writing years ago and never finished.

So, it’s November. If you go anywhere near where creative people congregate, you know what that means: National Novel Writing Month, which I refuse to call NaNoWriMo because the sheer mortification of having to type something that stupid repeatedly would force me to take to my bed for a week and I just don’t have time.

Now, I’ve been sort of vaguely contemplating doing this unofficially. (The goal, for the uninitiated, is to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month. Presumably one takes a few months to go back and polish and edit, instead of, Anne Rice-like, sending off a deeply felt version to some hapless agent.) The thing holding me up is this: I’m under a fuck of a lot of stress. I never have enough time, or enough energy, creative or otherwise. This would be a huge, huge commitment. And the thing is, though fully half the people on my LJ friends list do this November writing binge, to the best of my knowledge none of them have actually come out of it with a published novel. I don’t know that any of them have even submitted the novels for publication.

Now, I get that the odds that any novel will be published are minimal. I get, too, possibly better than most, that the goal of writing is not necessarily professional publication. But for me, I have a very rewarding creative outlet through fan fiction, and I can (and do) write all the original fic my heart desires, which does not have to leave my hard drive to make me happy. If I were going to go to all this trouble to give myself one more thing to stress, worry, and feel guilty about, I’d damn well want to think that I stood the chance of some tangible gain. Otherwise… well, if I’m just doing it for my own satisfaction, why not just write it? Whenever I want and at whatever pace I want? The story’s not going anywhere. It doesn’t have to be finished to make me happy. I’ve been writing original fic as long as I can remember, and that’s always been true. In fact, if it’s not finished, I can continue to write in that world whenever the fit takes me - it’s not, for want of a better phrase, a closed book. If I love a world, and love writing in it, then unless I’m planning to do the endless-sequels-oh-my-god-will-you-just-stop-already thing, it’s actually not to my advantage to finish the story at all.

So why do a writing binge that will probably wind up resembling some really strange eating disorder?

Well… there you take me into deep waters. I’d still sort of like to, just to see if I can augment my seriously meager income with writing. Certainly it’s not my first choice of career, given that you can’t make a living at it unless you’re Stephen King, but every little bit helps.

Still. My worlds. My hard drive. For me. Stuff I have absolutely no desire to so much as show to my friends list, let alone to send off to an agent to rip apart.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll give it a try. But I’m not going to kick myself in the ass if I don’t make an arbitrary word count, and I’m not going to feel guilty if I decide that this world is also for me and no one else.

So Laurel linked to this site, which has a bunch of movie scripts on it. And I’m looking around, right, and I see that Chris Columbus - yes, that Chris Columbus - wrote a script for Indiana Jones IV.

“o.0,” I said to myself.

“It’s called Indiana Jones and the Monkey King, aka Indiana Jones and the Garden of Life,” says the site.

“O.O,” I say to myself.

For a moment, my resolve falters. But I am a staunch pilgrim on the path of the Way of Mock Fu, so I read anyway.

Bear in mind that I am not making any of this up. Those of you looking to read along at home can find the script here.

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