Author: Alex

Categories
marriage personal

More divorce thoughts

Now that the cat is out of the bag, there are some more kind of nitty-gritty things about divorce that I want to talk about, because I think they’re dumb or annoying or just kind of funny.

It’s okay that we’re okay.

While we were going through the whole process, we kept having these weird conversations, just randomly. Mostly in the car, since thats when our housemate isn’t around. Where one of us would just say something like, “We’re not arguing about anything. I feel like there’s something wrong with us.”

Mike and I never did much arguing before, but there is this mental image you get of divorce, where there is shouting and tears and throwing things perhaps. There was a little crying while we were figuring things out. There’s always crying when something ends, just because endings are always sad even when they lead into new beginnings. But there weren’t hard feelings. There wasn’t shouting. And it felt… kind of weird that there weren’t, in a way. Like we were somehow doing it wrong.

We had a lot of conversations that started like this, going in both directions:

“Are you still okay?” “I’m okay.” “Why does it feel weird that we’re both okay?”

It’s okay that we didn’t want to argue. It’s okay that there are no hard feelings. (In fact, it’s better that there are no hard feelings!) It’s okay that we’re okay. I figure not a lot of people get to be in this position, but it’s a place that exists. And if you find yourself in that place, don’t feel weird about it.

And everyone, I know it’s super weird when someone tells you they’ve gotten divorced, and you’re not sure how to respond. And it’s probably even weirder when the people in question are both happy and okay with everything. It feels weird to congratulate people on something society in general says is a terrible thing.

But hey, you can always congratulate us on the fact that we’re still BFFs. We don’t feel like us getting divorced was a bad thing. We don’t want anyone else to feel that way either.

It’s way easier to get married than divorced

The more I think about this, the more it annoys me, to be honest. Like, I get that there are certain things that make getting divorced way more complicated than getting married; the division of property, and heaven help you if you have kids. (And I’m glad we didn’t have kids, because that’s a whole other set of people who you really have to put first… but anyway.) But it is just materially much more difficult to get divorced than married.

When Mike and I got married, we went to the DMV to get the license, didn’t have to wait at all, paid $30 and answered a few questions (eg: are you brother and sister?) and that was it. Then all we had to do was sign the thing with witnesses and there you go. Married. If you don’t count the big party we threw for signing our piece of paper, getting married was cheaper than dinner and a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse. We also didn’t even have to even be residents of Colorado.

Filing for divorce was exponentially harder. And I mean that in a literal sense as well; we had to pay nearly ten times as much just to file the paperwork. (Now if we’d gotten married in Houston, we would have had to bay $71 for the license, which is around 1/4 of the divorce filing fee.) We had to have lived in Texas for at least six months and Houston for at least three, thankfully not a problem for us. And then there was a sixty day waiting period, between when we filed the original petition and when we could even go before the judge to get the final decree approved.

Like I said, I get that a lot of that has to do with just the legal messiness of untangling property, which is why you need to drag a judge into things. I even get keeping the judge in the uncontested divorce loop and wanting their approval on the final decree, because they’re there to make sure someone doesn’t get totally fucked because of a mistake or malicious design.

But a sixty day waiting period? Why isn’t there a sixty day waiting period for marriages? Even states that have “cooling off” periods for wedding licenses, they’re nothing like sixty freaking days.

This is not to say my marriage to Mike was some kind of mistake and we wouldn’t have done it if we’d had to wait two months. At that point, we’d been living together for over five years. I’m just saying that making people wait the same amount for a marriage as they have to wait for a divorce just seems a lot more fair. And it also feels really wrong to me, to make it super easy to get married, to the point that you can quite literally get married on a whim in many states, and then make it difficult and much more expensive and humiliating to end a marriage.

Anyone who is against no-fault divorce is either severely misguided or downright evil.

Considering Texas’s hyper conservative reputation, it might come as a surprise that it’s a no-fault divorce state. (Actually, according to Wikipedia, the whole US has been no fault since 2010, which is cool.) But that meant when I went before the judge and asked for a divorce, the reason I provided was quite literally:

My marriage to my spouse has become insupportable because of a discord or conflict of personalities that destroys the legitimate ends of the marriage relationship.

Which basically means “this marriage isn’t working out for reasons that aren’t anyone’s fault, please let us out.” And that is so. Incredibly. Important. For Mike and I, this was precisely the reason for our divorce. We’d grown to a place where we just didn’t feel that way about each other any more and no longer wanted to be married.

I don’t want to get too melodramatic here, but this is important. We’re  still incredibly good friends because we were able to decide that we didn’t want to be married any more, and then the state accepted that as a reason. This meant that neither of us felt trapped. Neither of us got put in a position where we could resent the other person. This allowed us to end that part of our relationship on incredibly good, cooperative, friendly terms.

If no-fault divorce wasn’t allowed, we would have needed a reason like abuse (not gonna happen) or adultery. And even when you’re both on the same side, being legally forced to blame someone for something that really requires no blame… I don’t think that would have felt very good for either of us. It wouldn’t have been fair. Sometimes things happen that aren’t anyone’s fault. There’s enough baggage on the entire word of divorce without the state forcing you to point the finger at someone and legally shame them.

I want to point this out because I remember in Colorado, political ads for certain candidates expounding upon the evils of no-fault divorce. There’s ongoing backlash and a definite sector of people in this country who would like to get rid of this kind of divorce, and their reasoning is total bullshit. Divorce is already difficult enough. Legally forcing Mike and I to remain married would not have caused us to somehow start loving each other in that way again. But it would have been a great way to destroy our friendship.

Everyone expects you to want to have nothing to do with each other any more.

I guess maybe because that’s the way it most commonly goes? But it’s been kind of weird in that respect. We actually ended up paying a lawyer to write up our final decree for us even just because if you download the form and want to fill it out yourself, there’s an assumption that everything is going to belong to either one person or the other. We wanted to keep one of our bank accounts jointly owned (so we could pay rent and bills out of it since we’re still housemates) and also keep the house we own at 50/50 while not having to just sell it and split it. They don’t make that easy to figure out.

And yes, we’re still housemates. We’re BFFs. We’re just really relieved to be sleeping in separate rooms. I know it’s kind of weird considering how these things normally go, but it’s worked for us.

My ties are incredibly powerful.

They tell you to dress nice for court. So I did, which included one of my power ties. I needed the confidence boost, man. Going in front of a judge is a nerve-wracking thing even if you have no-fault on your side. During my time at court, I got mistaken for a lawyer countless times (I guess only lawyers wear ties?) and caused several people some severe gender confusion.

It kind of made my day.

(Bonus: I was on crutches the entire time.)

Cake

Because yes, there was divorce cake. It was not as awesome as the wedding cake.

Like we murdered a fairy on top.
Yes. A funfetti cake. That’s right.

wpid-wp-1409675529754.jpegBut it was our divorce cake, and it was good.

 

 

Categories
marriage personal

This is about failure. This is about divorce.

I tend to be very careful, out here on the internet, about when and how I speak about my personal life. Ridiculous bitching about my period? Sure, why not. Navel-gazing about weight and body image? Sure. But all of those things are about me. When it comes to the people in my life and how I relate to them, I am ferociously protective of their privacy. Their lives are not for me to talk about.

I’m going to make an exception here, with Mike’s permission. Because I think this is important.

This is about failure.

I’ve never dealt well with failure. In university, the first time I ever failed an exam, it resulted in a near-hysterical crying jag because I was certain my academic career was over and I was completely without worth as a human being. I am not someone who fails with grace.

This is about divorce.

Last week, on August 26, a judge granted Mike and I a divorce. This will come as a surprise to pretty much everyone, because we chose to not talk about it publicly until everything was finalized. A lot of that was because, in our opinion, our relationship and its workings (or not-workings) were no one’s business but ours. We decided together to get married, and we decided together to end that marriage. But I think a lot of it was also because the word divorce carries a lot of highly dramatic emotional baggage.

I think nearly everyone in America knows someone who’s been touched by a really horrible divorce. Growing up, I had a lot of friends with divorced parents, in a myriad of different arrangements. And there’s also the image of divorce in the media, where it’s largely this dramatic thing that involves screaming arguments, and crying, and throwing dishes, and trying desperately to hurt someone else over stuff.

The specter of failure was what made things the most difficult as Mike and I talked and talked and ultimately came to the conclusion that this chapter of our lives was at an end. I kept thinking over and over, that because I couldn’t find a way to fix this, to fix me, I had not only failed myself, I had failed our friends, our families, and worst of all, I had failed Mike, who is still my best friend in the world.

I haven’t failed Mike. Mike didn’t fail me. And I don’t want to hear anyone characterizing our relationship, our marriage, our divorce, that way. There is this is this societal meme that deems divorce a failure of marriage, a failure of a relationship. As if finding someone compatible with you, who will grow and change as you grow and change and always maintain that same compatibility, is a simple and easy prospect that defaults in success. As if finding a single person who can ceaselessly put up with your shit (and the shit they have to put up with grows and changes too) and still love you just as much until one of you dies is the norm.

Maybe divorce sometimes is about failure. But I don’t think that’s the only potential meaning. It can also be just about ending. Failure is only one way of a multitude for something to end. And if I’d allowed myself to think about it that way, this process might have been a little less agonizing.

Mike and I have taken care of each other and supported each other through a lot of good times and bad times.We’ve shared our lives. But the thing about life is that it changes you, inevitably. The day you stop changing is truly the day you’ve ceased to live, even if you don’t get around to dying for a while after. And for nearly a decade, the changes life wrought on us kept us on the same path, and it was good.

You don’t really have control over how life is going to work that magic on you. And at some point we stopped growing together and started growing apart. That’s not anyone’s fault. That’s life. Mike isn’t the same person I married four years ago, let alone the same person I started dating five years before that. I’m not the same person he married. And if you gave it to us to do over again today, we’d say thanks, but no. But let’s have some cake anyway. Cake’s always good.

We’re not a failure. Our relationship is not a failure. Because we made each other stronger, better people. We loved and supported each other through thick and thin until we reached a place in our lives where we couldn’t support each other in that same way any more. It’s time to continue loving and supporting each other in a different way.

And you know what? That’s okay. We walked along the same path for close to ten years. But now it’s time for those paths to diverge.

When I think of it that way, in terms of the fullness of our lives and the way’s we’ve grown, I can’t really call our relationship, our marriage anything but a success. We are both greater, stronger people than we were when we started. And if it’s going to end, then let it end. Holding on to something that is no longer supporting either of us would be the real failure.

There are a lot of people in the world. A lot of people. I feel lucky every time I meet someone with whom I can connect on an intimate level of any kind. Maybe there is someone (heck, ten someones, fifty, one hundred!) who will by some miracle of statistics be that perfect one for me, who will always match me and be matched by me. I don’t know if I will ever meet that person, and I won’t know if I’ve met them until I’m on my deathbed. And that’s okay.

I am incredibly lucky to have met Mike. We have been best friends for nearly ten years now, and for a bit less than that we were more. Mike has been an amazing, integral part of my journey to where I stand now. He has made me who I am today. And he has had the courageous soul and boundless generosity of spirit necessary to keep cheering me along on my own path, just as I’ve been cheering him along on his. Even as those paths have taken us farther and farther apart.

We haven’t failed. Because wherever we end up, we will still love each other.

Friends til the end.

 

Categories
filmmaking movie rants this shit is fucked up

Ridley Scott explains nothing, actually

Okay, someone hold my hat, I am about to come unglued here.

So yeah, by now you might have heard that Ridley Scott is making a movie called Exodus: Gods and Kings, which is based off the Bible story. Which takes place in Egypt.  Allow me to illustrate, briefly, where Eqypt is located:

Egypt: It's a place in Northern Africa.
Egypt: It’s a place in Northern Africa.

Okay? Now. Some people, including me, are kind of pissed off about some of the choices he’s made. Allow me to summarize why with a picture:

Notice anything, here?
Notice anything, here?

And here, have a bonus:

Even Christian Bale looks unimpressed.
Aw, they’re building a statue.

Just for reference, in reality land:

Here, some actual Egyptian statues. (Per source, Ramesses II, even.)
Here, some actual Egyptian statues. (Per source, Ramesses II, even.)

Now, if those don’t explain why a lot of us on the internet are breathing fire, just… tell you what. Go read this.

All right. We all caught up now?

So then Ridley Scott “explained” his casting decisions. Which he described as careful. (Hoo boy.) Like, to a certain extent I get, hey I like this actor and want to work with them and they are perfect for this role. Trust me, I now totally get that urge. And as many people have pointed out, if the casting seemed truly colorblind (Ken Watanabe as Nun! Benicio Del Toro as Rameses II! Viola Davis as Tuya!) I could go for it. I really could. But let’s look at the first ten actors listed on IMDB:

  • Aaron Paul – white (American)
  • Christian Bale – white (British)
  • Joel Edgerton – white (Australian)
  • Sigourney Weaver – white (American)
  • Ben Kingsley – non-white (British)
  • Indira Varma – non-white (British)
  • John Turturro – white (American)
  • Ben Mendelsohn – white (Australian)
  • Maria Valverde – white [spanish (literally from Spain)]
  • Emun Elliott – white (Scottish)

I would like to say, first, I feel gross and horrible after writing that list out, and awkward, and ugh. But I also feel it serves an important point, which is basically, out of the first ten people on the case list, there are two actors who could really be considered non-white (both Ben Kingsley and Indira Varma have an Indian parent) and Maria Valverde, who as an actual spanish person from Spain to my understanding should be considered white for the purposes of what we’re talking about. The point here is that the top listed actors are 80% white. If you go with the actors that are really being used to advertise the film, which would pretty much be the top five, you’re still at 80%.

In a movie. That takes place in Egypt.

Scott was not asked about the racial component of his casting decision, but he did answer a question about how he formed the international cast — which has been criticized for only featuring colored performers in small roles, such as servants, thieves and assassins.

“Egypt was – as it is now – a confluence of cultures, as a result of being a crossroads geographically between Africa, the Middle East and Europe,” Scott said. “We cast major actors from different ethnicities to reflect this diversity of culture, from Iranians to Spaniards to Arabs. There are many different theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people, and we had a lot of discussions about how to best represent the culture.”

Yeah, all different ethnicities. You know. American, British, and Australian.

If you want to actually see most of the different ethnicities Scott’s talking about, when you go to the IMDB page, click “see full cast list.” Most of them are hidden in there. Which indicates much, much smaller parts. But we kind of already knew that from the pictures, right?

Oh and?

There are many different theories about the ethnicity of the Egyptian people, and we had a lot of discussions about how to best represent the culture.

I did a little googling around because I was curious. And yeah, there’s controversy, most of it seeming to stem from much more openly racist times when people couldn’t handle the idea that someone who wasn’t snowy white made something white people think is awesome, like the pyramids. While at this point the science apparently boils down to:

There is no scientific reason to believe that the primary ancestors of the Egyptian population emerged and evolved outside of northeast Africa.

While that’s no doubt an oversimplification considering yes, the area is a major crossroads, using that as an excuse to justify the vast majority of your principle actors looking like they didn’t mind the gap on the Tube and fell through a rip in space and time to land in ancient Egypt is pretty fucking disingenuous.

(Actually, that’s a bad joke on my part, since apparently London is ~60% white and thus would not be well-represented by Ridley Scott’s casting.)

I imagine when you’re a director of Ridley Scott’s caliber, you can end up getting a lot of your principle actors by just calling them up on the phone and telling them you have a script you want them to read. So it’s really on him to take a step back and ask himself why most of the people he thinks are the best man or woman for the job are white rather than doing elaborate mental gymnastics to justify it later.

Because I really, really am not down with the implication that somehow, the best actor for the job is almost always white. Because there are amazing actors out there who aren’t white, and I’d bet you anything even more amazing actors who are just waiting for a chance to shine, if people would just fucking give them that chance.

And it’s not hard to do, by the way. All you do is write a casting notice like this:

[Gender], 20s to 40s, non-white…

Or if you don’t want to close the door all the way, fine:

[Gender], 20s to 40s, preferably non-white…

And trust me. You will get a response, from amazing actors, and I bet you anything one of them will be the right person for the job.

Categories
charity movie suffering for charity

[Movie] Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: could have been worse

Well, you did it, so I did it, so here we are. Charity gets $300 and you get to make me suffer for a little over an hour and a half. There was unfortunately no drinking accomplished during this movie, but that was because I had two tablets of vicodin on board to help defeat the rawness of the healing incision in my foot. This may be why Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made not one iota of goddamn sense to me, though my housemate assures me it made no sense to her, either, and she was completely sober at the time.

But I’m going to try to be positive about this.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Lips for the lipless

Remember how, back in the heady days when Transformers didn’t have lips and no one had even conceived of the idea of making a movie out of a fucking board game, the teenage mutant ninja turtles were either animated or played by dudes in costumes obviously made out of rubber, the way god and nature intended?

Top-10-Interesting-Facts-About-Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles
Remember when practical effects were a thing? I miss those days.

Now you get this endless protean horror that’s the result of a weird and highly illegal genetic experiment that involved Shrek, college frat boys who just desperately needed some beer money, and something unidentifiable, perhaps the last shreds of Michael Bay’s conscience which had until now been kept preserved in a jar of pickled eggs in the recess of some broom closet. It looks something like this.

Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles-Donatello-Yell-700x396
I LIIIIIIIIIIVE

Which is a fucking cruel thing to do to someone who is one prescription pain medication, let me tell you. There is shot after shot of all four of these horrors grouped around and staring down on an unconscious or confused character, and every time it felt like I’d been caught in the kind of bad trip I could expect if the drugs I was on weren’t legal and had potentially been cut with some kind of weed killer. I’d experience this full body twitch of terrified revulsion while I waited for a set of those rubbery CGI-lips to press against the screen and begin to siphon my soul from my body while another chanted Y’ai’ng’ngah / Yog-Sothoth / H’ee-L’geb / F’ai Throdog / Uaaah.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: A significantly shorter movie than Transformers 4

Pretty much all of the fighting takes place between rendered characters. And while there’s more visual coherence than you get in the average Transformers movie, where it looks like bundles of scrap recycling getting battered together over and over, this made up for being able to tell what was happening by bring incredibly fucking boring.

What I can’t blame on the vicodin is the bit where they felt the need to make Shredder’s suit sort of… transformer-ish? Partially mechanized? Come on, guys, Shredder was badass enough on his own, making him half swiss-army-knife is really not the way to impress. I think at one point he might have wielded a corkscrew or the wine bottle opener.

Apparently the hellturtles learned their techniques from Splinter, who literally taught it to himself from a book that he found discarded in the sewer, which thankfully was a pictorial instruction manual in the way of ninjutsu. I wish I was making that up. I wish I was making any of this up. I wish this had just been some sort of anesthesia-induced fever dream, and I’d soon wake up to find it was still actually Thursday and I’ve just fallen asleep with a copy of The Mountains of Madness over my face, then I’d think about the horrifying turtle-lips and vomit a lot.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: If you like exposition, then have I got a movie for you

Because there’s a lot of it. Exposition, I mean. Really meaningless exposition. I never thought I’d accuse old-school TMNT of being sort of intellectual, but in comparison, yes? Because at least the old ninja turtle writers seemed to realize that certain things could be left unsaid, and that certain bits of exposition didn’t need to be repeated over and over again. It strikes me that in a movie that barely made it to 100 minutes, maybe the director could have gone out on a limb and, I don’t know, shown us a few things instead of telling.

When Sacks gets mentioned to Splinter, he takes the opportunity to explain why Sacks is evil and in league with Shredder (which he knows because…reasons?) instead of the movie having a couple of scenes to say develop Sacks as a character, have him betray April and the turtles, and show he’s evil. Why make this decision? It wasn’t in the interest of running time.

And if you like background info dumps, this is a wonderful movie. Want to hear several times about April and her dad and her connection to the turtles? Got you covered. What about the foot clan? There is like a foot clan forecast in every scene in which they tell you what activity level to expect! Useful! (They are also apparently the only evil ninja clan in the history of ever to be so terrible at ninjutsu that they use guns, but then have worse aim than the average Stormtrooper.)

I don’t know, maybe the turtle lip budget was running severely over at that point. If there had been less exposition, there would have been more scenes with the turtles, and more souls would have needed to be harvested for Shub-Niggurath the Black Goat of the Woods With A Thousand Young.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: One third the female characters, slightly less sexism.

So the movie is about April, a lady reporter who, as far as I can tell, suffers from severe, untreated exercise-induced asthma, because she’s always short of breath in every scene no matter what she’s been doing. And Vernon, her camera guy, with whom she has a pretty awesome kind of bro-ish friendship except at incredibly random and awkward intervals the script has this hiccup and decides that oh yeah April is a girl so Vernon should hit on her. Because that’s what boys do. Like the time Vernon drops April off at Sacks’s house and literally says, “Nothing better than dropping off a pretty girl at a rich guy’s house.” He was randomly neckbeard fedora-y, except he has no neckbeard, but at one point he literally does wear a fedora. A fedora that he immediately disavows in apparent confusion when called on it.

It’s almost like there was this script for a boring but fairly normal movie, and then someone realized Michael Bay was involved and thus ran it through a random creepy sexist comment generator. Or maybe there was a whole subplot with Vernon that got left on the cutting room floor, in which Vernon has at times been replaced by a terrifying clone made from mutated white bread, and the only way you can tell them apart is that the real Vernon is just sort of doofy and doesn’t creep on his coworker.

But anyway, Vernon and April team up with the four ninja turtles who are, if I recall correctly, named Nerdy Turtle, Manpain Turtle, Generic Turtle, and Creepy Turtle. Or if you believe the script, Donatello, Raphael, Leonardo, and Michaelangelo, but I think my names are much more accurate. There are sad attempts at witty banter. The only turtle who is even slightly likable any more is Nerdy Turtle, but he still looks like he’s going to eat your soul from within the film so that doesn’t help at all.

Yeah, that? That's Donnie.
Yeah, that? That’s Donnie.

I found Creepy Turtle personally upsetting, because Mikey was actually my favorite from when I was a kid. And yet the moment he shows up on screen he starts hitting on April, including uttering the immortal line: “She’s hot. I can feel my shell tightening.”

Hello ladies, you can call me Dr. Reptilove
Hello ladies, you can call me Dr. Reptilove

Back in the day, Mikey was a kind of free-spirited party turtle. Apparently in the year 2014 that translates to “let’s party like it’s Steubenville.” It’s gross. And every time Creepy Turtle said something fucking creepy, you know who I heard laugh? Not the kids in the theater. The dads. And that made it approximately a million times creepier.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: It could always be worse

There were actually two scenes in the entire movie that I really liked… because they were the ones that reminded me most of the turtles I grew up watching. Early on, there’s a scene where Splinter is trying to get the boys to admit where they went, and he finally breaks their silence by tempting them with the mystical “99 cheese pizza.” That was cute. And then toward the end, all four of the turtles are in an elevator going up a long way, and then they start beat boxing using the beeps from the elevator. That, too, was cute.

The rest?

Maybe all you need to know is that the word Cowabunga is uttered only twice in the entire movie, right at the end. First, with appropriate enthusiasm. Then again with the sort of “gritty grimdark I’m about to walk away from an explosion while putting on my sunglasses” tone that made me want to weep in despair.

But fear not. The turtles have a new catchphrase: Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

Categories
rants someone is wrong on the internet writing

Yeah, whatever happened to starving like a *real* artist?

Sameer Rahim, are you fucking kidding me?

I know people rarely get to write their own headlines, so I tried not to just punch my laptop in the screen when I saw this one: Whatever happened to writing for love, not money?

But the article isn’t any better.

I know they have to eat, but when did it all become about the money? The time when writers could live comfortably off their income was an anomaly of the Eighties and Nineties. These days, apart from a few big-money payouts for the next big thing, publishers are going back to being as cautious as they were before. And why shouldn’t they? Everyone else is tightening their belts.

I know you have kids and a mortgage, guys, but why should you expect to be able to make a living off a craft you’ve been perfecting for years? The art should be its own reward! Starving is awesome, it makes you all thin and waif-like and then maybe you’ll get consumption and it’s so romantic.

Call me a romantic but it might actually benefit a writer not to rely on books as their main source of income.

There is nothing in that sentence that I would call romantic. Because there is nothing in the least bit romantic about having to work a shit job to make ends meet while you attempt to write in your rapidly dwindling spare time. There is also nothing in the least bit romantic about working an awesome office day job like I do and then attempting to write in your rapidly dwindling spare time.

I would actually argue that there’s some good to doing a bit of work, volunteer or otherwise, outside your field at all times just because it gives you a chance to meet people and be in new situations and talk to others you wouldn’t necessarily talk to. That’s idea fuel right there. But trying to work two full time jobs is a good way to destroy your health and sanity and never have time to recharge.

Alternatively, I have heard it suggested that, rather as the bankers were bailed out by the, state so authors should be given public subsidies – the perils of which should be obvious. This isn’t China.

Yeah, I know man. Writers and dancers and sculptors won’t stop trying to crash the economy with their irresponsible gambling. (Also, special bonus for gross China reference. A+)

Luckily, the freedom offered by the internet offers a chance to resurrect the idea of writing for love, not money.

The notion was never dead. People have always been writing for love rather than money. The internet just makes distribution easier.

So far online self-publishing has been the preserve of fan fiction and erotica but it can’t be long before high-quality fiction starts to emerge.

Wow. Every time I think you can’t get more insulting, you do. Frankly, there is plenty of fanfic out there that is of publishable quality. And there’s also some damn good erotica out there too.

Right now there is a distressed writer sitting in front of her computer somewhere, worrying not about whether she’ll make enough money to give up the day job or how many copies she will sell, but obsessing over form and language, meaning and truth.

Yeah, and you know what helps the writer hone those skills that go into the art? Having some fucking time to practice them. If you’re working 40+ hours a week (and heaven help you if you have kids) your time to practice the actual craft of writing is severely limited. And then on top of it when more and more often you’re having to act as your own publicist? Eats up even more of that time. And what your readers want are books, regular as clockwork, and those books are damn hard to write and much slower to produce if they are not the main focus of your energy.

So what, people should only get paid for doing work they find hideous and agonizing? The only people who should get paid, then, are perhaps janitors, garbagemen, soldiers, and so on. Not politicians or professional athletes or scientists. Certainly not successful actors or dancers or fashion designers. Or are artists just the exception to the rule because we don’t actually produce something you deem personally worthy? Or is it just writers who are the exception, because we’re not real in our art unless we’re fucking miserable?

(This ignores the fact that being fucking miserable and depressed is not a good way to produce art.)

What bothers me most about this piece, which is so full of bullshit the stench will never leave my keyboard, is the idea that you should be happy not getting paid for work so long as it’s work you enjoy. Work is work. It requires time and energy and a big chunk of the limited lifespan you have on Earth if you want to be any good at it. And this same argument has been used for years to try to justify things like keeping the wages of teachers severely depressed. Yeah, you teach because you love it, right? It’s so irresponsible of you to want to make a decent living. The smiles of children and the glow of a job well done should pay for your housing and the clothing of your own children.

Tell me, Mr. Rahim, did you write this piece for free?

Categories
the human body is made of bullshit

Adventures in Anesthesia

I had surgery again today. Yay me. To get a bone spur shaved off of my left big toe and get the joint cleaned up. (Old kung fu injury, blah blah.) I’m looking forward to being able to run again once I’m done with the PT.

Though for now I’m sitting on the couch, wishing I could take this damn dressing off because I swear it’s making things hurt worse. I’ve got my foot propped up on a mound of pillows. I also only really woke up at 2130 even though my surgery was at 0800. If you follow me on Twitter you know I was all over the place this morning before crapping out. And incoherent.

Basically, fun with anesthesia.

I didn’t do the greatest with the anesthesia when I had my shoulder scoped. But it wasn’t too bad. I had (I think) something like a panic attack when I first came out, so they put me under again. After that I was fine. But I also had a nerve block done that time, so I think they didn’t put me on so many painkillers. Once I was out of the hospital if I remember right I went to Jack’n’Grill and had something both greasy and spicy and was fine.

Well, this time I elected to not go for the nerve block. I wasn’t offered one originally, so I assumed it wasn’t needed. Then the anesthesiologist came back and told me another anesthesiologist had texted her to suggest she do a nerve block. But hey, it was only a toe. She didn’t seem to think I needed one before, right? Just more pain medication during anesthesia, with pepcid so I wouldn’t get so sick.

Next time someone offers me a nerve block, I’m saying yes. Hell, I’m asking for one.

It’s not a pain issue. It’s a being incoherent and vomiting every time I stood up issue. Finally after 12 hours I seem to have gotten out of that, thank goodness. I’ve had two bagels and they’re sitting okay. In a bit of pain but not too bad. Have to use crutches to get around right now though.

I don’t think I had a panic attack this time. But instead when I woke up, I was paranoid. I kept telling the nurse that I needed to leave and go for a walk. My legs wanted to move and I couldn’t hold still. Then I realized that the surgeon put a tracking device in my big toe and I needed to get out now or they wouldn’t let me. Good thing the nurse and Mike wouldn’t allow me to get up And then even worse, I knew that the doctors were reptoids and I needed to escape.

I’m not even joking. It’s weird and hilarious now, but at the time I was convinced that my doctors were aliens and they were going to do terrible things to me.

It wore off quickly, though. Then it was just fatigue, dizziness, and vomiting. So if I was tweeting/texting with you and I suddenly disappeared, sorry. I kept falling asleep. They’ve got me on vicodin this time instead of oxycodone so hopefully that will not make me randomly throw up as well. Just makes me sleepy. I think I’ll jut be sleepy all weekend. Loki was a sweet boy and kept me company all day in bed, and now Tengu has figured out how to dock on my lip even though I’m laying out across the couch instead of sitting properly. The kitties are being such helpers. And Mike and Kathy have been great, too. I feel super guilty having to ask them to carry everything for me and making me sandwiches and stuff. (I made my own sandwich around 2200, to prove I could, but now I’ll let them feel useful. That’s totally why.

I have to call in the morning to set up my followup with the doctor (I have to keep the dressing on until then god I think it’s crushing my foot) and I think I’ll ask what I got put on for the anesthesia. I really don’t want to ever go back to a drug planet where I believe in reptoids.

Categories
movie

[Movie] 4 movies I saw on the plane

I’m back from the UK. This means I’m unfortunately in Houston again. The less said in regards to how I feel about that situation, the better. (It’s been nice to see my friends at work, though! And do some geology! So that’s positive.)

Anyway, quick comments on the four movies I saw on the flights to and from the UK.

Cuban Fury

I’d been wanting to see this one for a while, because it involves Nick Frost, and I love him to pieces. It was cute, and funny, and there was a lot of very enthusiastic salsa dancing in it, which just made me look forward to when I can start dancing again. It had some pretty formulaic rom-com boy gets the girl at the end tropes that I really could have lived without, including Julia (Rashida Jones) being incredibly dense about both a mix tape and the fact that Drew (Chris O’Dowd) was intensely gross and creepy. I think the only thing that really bothered me about the movie was Chris O’Dowd playing a note perfect gross, creepy, sexist dude and everyone just sort of… turning a blind eye to everything he did and taking it. Probably because it was so uncomfortably reminiscent of real life.

Divergent

This movie wants to be The Hunger Games so desperately that it gets kind of embarrassing to watch, really. It runs into the same dystopia problem as The Maze Runner, in that there’s a kind of fun concept that completely falls apart when you have to even superficially explore why in the hell anyone would have thought it was a good idea to run a society like that in the first place. At least The Hunger Games manages to get past that superficial level of thought on the politics and sociology, which is necessary because the story is all about political machinations. Unfortunately for Divergent, the fun concept runs aground on Kate Winslet trying desperately to deliver a believable villain speech that boils down to “we have to kill you because reasons, okay?” When it’s not trying to clumsily justify why the super special “divergents” are dangerous to the poorly constructed society, it’s a fun enough movie.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit

Starring Chris Pine’s intense blue eyes and Kenneth Branagh’s embarrassing attempt at a Russian accent. There’s a kind of exciting scene wherein Chris Pine kills someone in a bathroom. But it probably says a lot about where this movie fell on my personal spy-fy foodchain that I lost interest completely after the bathroom murder and decided I’d rather just write porn on my airbook instead.

A Long Way Down

I decided to watch this movie just because I recalled it being mentioned in Empire. Glad that I did. For a movie that’s ultimately about suicide, it’s incredibly funny, and with the awkward sort of humor that I tend to love. Brosnan’s character gets a little hammy at times, I thought, but the others were complex and interesting and incredibly well played. I cried twice as well, and not for the reasons the summary would make you expect. I think the biggest winner of the cast was Toni Collette, who played Maureen. She’s the least outwardly neurotic of all of the characters, but I think her story had the most emotional meat to it, which was well-served by the quiet way she played the character. Boy, when Maureen smiles, you can really feel it, because of that quiet reserve she has most of the time. I definitely recommend this movie.

Categories
convention worldcon

[Conventions] A Modest Proposal for Feminism Panels

Screen Shot 2014-08-16 at 7.21.04 PM

Proposal:

From now on, there will be one token male panelist on all feminist panels. At the beginning, as every panelist is introducing themselves, he says:

“Hello, my name is _____ and I do ______. I’m a feminist. And in the interest of presenting an example as a good ally, I will now do what male feminists ought to do at times like these: I will listen.”

And then he won’t speak again for the rest of the panel unless asked a direct question. But he will nod and make sympathetic noises without ever being tempted to mansplain/condespalin or try to tell us how to “fix” things.

Categories
ask the dapper sir writing advice

[Ask the Dapper Sir] Is it okay to share my stories online?

Say I have a couple of short stories ready. Is it best not to share it on a personal writing blog until it’s published, if ever, or does it not matter?

It actually matters a lot.

There are basically two categories of submissions for magazines: originals and reprints.

An original is a story that has never been published anywhere ever. Even the tiniest of audiences count for this. If you published it in your school newspaper/literary magazine, it is considered to be published and thus selling it as an original is no longer an option. If you put your story up on a blog or forum where it can potentially be viewed by the general public (as opposed to a forum where it’s viewable only to members, and membership is controlled and regulated) then for all intents and purposes you have self-published the story and you can likewise not sell it as an original. Rule of thumb is, if the story is available in a way that could be conceivably considered public, it’s been published. (Some markets may make exceptions to this, but if so it will be in their guidelines. Remember how I said to always read the guidelines? Read the guidelines.)

A reprint is a story that has been previously published elsewhere. Some markets may take reprints. Many do not. Reprints always pay significantly less than originals. (eg: if you get $0.07/word on an original, you will probably just get $0.01 or $0.02 for a reprint if you’re lucky.)

So basically, if you share your story on your personal writing blog, unless that blog is only accessible to a very restricted set of your friends, you have self-published it. Which means you can only submit your story as a reprint to whatever markets will consider reprints. (Don’t even think about trying to lie to editors and pretend you never published the story. Editors are very good at the Google, and most have earned the Way Back Machine merit badge as well.)

Generally, even if your blog is friends-only, I tend to recommend to not publish it there because mistakes can happen, security settings can be randomly changed (hi, Facebook) and you could end up shooting yourself in the foot by accident. I’d say if you want to share a piece with your beta readers, use a private forum, or e-mail, or maybe an invite only file sharing service like Google Docs.

What about after your story has been bought and published?

Most contracts will contain some sort of exclusivity clause. For example, this is from the guidelines for Strange Horizons. 

We buy first-printing world exclusive English-language rights (including audio rights) for two months. After that period, you are free to republish the story elsewhere. We hope that you’ll allow us to leave the story in our archives indefinitely after it’s rotated off the main table of contents, but you have the right to remove your story from the archives at any time after those first two months.

First printing world English-language rights basically means the story needs to have not been published anywhere in print in English, because otherwise you no longer have those rights to offer. Strange Horizons also asks for audio rights because they do story podcasts, so your story needs to have not been published in an audio format before either. “World” means anywhere in the world; they want the story to have not been published in English anywhere in the world, and your story published by them will be available world-wide. This is standard for internet-based magazines, since… you know, world-wide web. For print publications, you’re more likely to see a more specific ask, such as “North American English-language rights.”

The exclusive… for two months means that the story is theirs and theirs alone for that time period. After two months elapse you can try to sell reprint rights to other markets or publish it in some other fashion (eg: putting it up as a self-published ebook). So you also cannot put your story on your personal blog until after their period of exclusivity has elapsed or you will be in breach of the contract. While I doubt anyone is going to sue you over a story that earned at most $720, the damage that could do to your reputation would be far, far worse. Also, please note that the period of requested exclusivity will vary from market to market. Always read your contracts and keep a copy on hand.

Now, Strange Horizons also does a cool thing you’ll note in their guidelines where at the author’s request, they will take the story out of their archive after two months. This is actually very unusual; most online publications reserve the right to keep an archived copy for as long as they please. What this means is that, say, if there’s a market that will take reprints but not if they’re freely available online, you can ask Strange Horizons to get rid of the archived copy. But the thing to consider here is that your story on your personal blog, post-publication, is also a readily available online copy. The more widely available a story is to anyone with a search engine, the less attractive it might seem to certain reprint markets. It’s just another thing to consider.

Other questions? Anything I missed?

Categories
trip report writing advice

I’m in London! And current rejection stats.

The two are not related.

Just I’ve been talking to a few writers who are even newer to this than me and I wanted to give some perspective on the short story submission thing. I’ve now had 20 sales, not counting reprints. Out of 20 short story sales:

  • Average number of rejections per sale: 6.85
  • Fewest rejections before publication: 0
  • Most rejections before publication: 20

Keep in mind that my sales range from pro to semi-pro to one that was token payment. I don’t submit stories to non-paying markets, period. I also have 9 stories that I’ve trunked without selling, because I stopped believing in them.

The three stories I consider to be the best I’ve written thus far—Comes the Huntsman, The Heart-Beat Escapement, and They Tell Me There Will Be No Pain—received 3, 7, and 4 rejections respectively before being published.

So basically, just keep bouncing your stories back out into the slush pile until you’ve either run out of markets (in which case you wait for a new one such as an antho to open) or run out of belief in your vision and/or your execution of that vision in writing.

And yes, I am in London right now. I’m enjoying my vacation already in my most splendidly failtastic style, which is to say I do a lot of sleeping and taking my sweet time at the gym and working at the non-geology jobs and typing on the computer while I listen to the ambient sound of a foreign city. That’s how I roll. The flight was good (I got a whole row to myself), the getting to the rental flat was a comedy of errors, and I can’t figure out how to make one of the showers work because I think its controls were put together as a joke. (The Canadian couldn’t figure it out either so you don’t get to blame this on me being a stupid American. Blame the stupid inscrutable British plumbing.)

You know, normal life in the UK when I’m here. Planning to live on a diet of toast, nutella, and bananas for the next week. Generally pleased with everything, looking forward to hanging out with friends. The pay as you go gym is unfortunately further away than I wanted thanks to us being moved to a different flat, but the space is nice. All of the guys in the strength training room very carefully Did Not Notice My Existence, which is how I prefer it. Except for one guy who made an abortive lunge for the bar when I was doing my final rep in a set of 105lb bench presses, so I had to assure him that I totally had it. At which point he started carefully ignoring me as well, but with occasional sidelong glances just to let me know I was worrying him. I try to take these things as adorable, well-meaning helper fails as opposed to anything more frustrating. (But really, people, don’t lunge at the bar unless someone actually asks for help, it’s kind of distracting.)

Looking forward to a relaxing week before Worldcon!