Author: Alex

Categories
movie

[Movie] 300: Rise of an Empire

300, why can’t I just quit you?

wpid-IMG_20140308_190058_335.jpg
Oh yeah. That’s why.

I can’t help it. It’s full of men with rippling six packs wearing nothing but tiny leather underpants1 and leather skirts with strategic crotch windows of the sort you normally see women wearing in fantasy art. I’M ONLY HUMAN OKAY2.

(light spoilers throughout)

It actually amuses me more than I can say that in this movie, there are two (wow, count ’em, two! we’re moving up in the world of Frank Miller, ladies. And neither of them are strippers!) women with major speaking parts, and both of them spend the entire movie wearing more than the men. Even during the one sex scene, Artemesia comes out wearing more than Themistokles because at least she’s still got her skirt. 300:RoaE feels like even more of a homoerotic ode to speedos than the original while desperately trying to be hyper uber no really believes us please you have to cartoonishly manly. There should be a subtitle that flashes in the lower right hand corner of every scene that says: **No homo. We swear.

In one scene Gorgo tells Themistokles to stop stroking his cock while he’s watching a bunch of Spartans wearing only modesty speedos wrestle. I’m not even joking.

This movie is ridiculous. And it takes itself so very seriously, which just makes it nothing short of hilarious in scenes. 300: RoaE contains probably the greatest hate fuck scene ever put to film. There are entire server farms no doubt devoted entirely to producing the gouts of cartoonish blood that fill the battle scenes, not to mention the horse that Themistokles rides across several ships that are on fire so he can have a massive sword fight with Artemesia.

And I loved Artemesia, even if I really wanted to lick a napkin and scrub some of the eyeliner off her face. She was just the kind of cold queen bitch character that I am helpless against, and what I loved best was she stayed bad until the end. There was no change of heart caused by an encounter with the One True Cock. (I would have thrown things. Seriously.) I almost died giggling when she taunted Themistokles “You fight harder than you fuck!”

I think that’s the reason I keep watching these movies, and damn me, I enjoy them. Despite the fact that even on their face, they are  cringe-inducingly problematic. It’s got all the unsubtle subtext of the original 300, but turned up to 11 just in case you didn’t manage catch it last time. The Greeks throw around the words freedom and democracy more than your average presidential candidate, and the existence of Greek slaves is for the most part carefully skirted around while slavery practiced by the Persians is given plenty of screen time. The “barbarian” bad guys are pretty much all middle-eastern or black, commonly deformed, etc, and there they are facing off against the chiseled jawlines of the Greeks3. There are even fucking suicide bombers in this one. No really. The Greeks make a great caricature of self-consciously hyperpatriotic America, complete with at one point Themistokles (I think it was him) saying that the Persians just want to kill them because FREEDOM.

But godammit, it’s so fucking pretty. It’s kind of like eating that extra large piece of chocolate peanut butter cheesecake that was baked for you by Satan himself, where you know you shouldn’t like it, you know it’s bad for you, and you just can’t help it anyway because at the time it’s just so nummy. Then next thing you know, you’re laying on the bathroom floor with crumbs in your hair and a mouth that tastes like regret, considering if it would just be better to sanitize the plumbing fixtures by setting them on fire, only hopefully you’ll die quietly from your gallbladder strangling your heart before you ever get that far.

There’s going to be a third movie. It’s inevitable. And I predict with advance shame that will see it too, and then have a mouthful of regret that no amount of nicely cut pecs will be able to erase. I can only hope in the next movie, maybe we’ll finally get an answer to the question of why Xerxes has eyebrows like a chola. Probably because he hates freedom.

(See also: io9’s hilarious review)

1 – Oh my god for extra hilarity, if you’re looking at this before this post falls off my blog’s front page check out which slice of the picture WordPress chose to represent the post. JUST LOOK AT IT. I did not pick that. Sometimes perfection just happens on its own.

2 – Just in case someone out there wants to leap on the fact that I have tacitly admitted that I am an actual human being capable of prurient interest in swathes of rippling man-flesh, I would like to note two important points:

  1. I would never in a million years advocate putting the above image or anything like it on the cover of the magazine of a professional organization of which I’m part.
  2. I would not use the phrase “rippling man flesh” or anything like it in such a venue either, because that would be super creepy. As a real-life grown-up, I know there is a time and a place for rippling man-flesh, and that normally involves my blog and a beer.

3 – There is a very token effort to humanize the Persians in this one. You see Xerxes’s grief over the death of his father, which apparently is what caused him to go soak in a mystical pool filled with a combination of nair and miracle-gro. You also find out that envoy that Leonidas killed at the beginning of the first 300 was actually the man who rescued Artemesia from death and raised her.

Categories
thinking out loud

Do the Thing

So, I loved this movie titled Addams Family Values when it came out oh sweet baby Jesus over twenty fucking years ago YOU’RE KILLING ME a while ago, but weirdly the scene that’s stuck with me the most is just this short bit of dialog where Uncle Fester (played by Christopher Lloyd and his terrifying I have looked into the abyss and the abyss looked back into me stare) is getting a pep talk from Gomez about asking a woman out, and Fester says: “What if she says no? What if she says yes?” with his tone indicating that yes might actually be the way scarier answer.

Wish I could find a youtube clip for you, but we didn’t have youtube back in the stone age, and maybe no one’s gotten around to digitizing the petroglyph-filled stone tablets that we stuffed in our VCRs (Visually Creative Rocks), so you’ll just have to trust me on this one.

Anyway, there was a point to this other than how fucking old I suddenly feel.

And that point is: getting rejected sucks, and change is really fucking scary. But you should try stuff anyway.

We’ve all been rejected before, gotten our hopes up and had them dashed and it feels bad, man. Really bad. Rejection is the reason disappointment fajitas were invented. And change? Even when it’s a potentially positive change, it still means things are going to be different on the other side of that door labeled tomorrow, and you can never be quite certain how different. That can be really intimidating. Uncertainty can be terrifying stuff. But in many ways, life is an uncertain prospect. Maybe change is scary, but change also means you’re growing and living.

So you should try stuff anyway.

Because if you never try stuff, and you never do anything scary, and you never risk getting a little hurt, the likelihood that in sixty years you’ll be scrolling through ancient jpegs stored in your neural hard drive and wishing that you’d just done something when you were young and had fabulous hair and no mortgage, goes up exponentially. (Though don’t get me wrong here. I firmly believe it’s never too late to do the thing. Expect to see me out on dance floors up until the point I’m a disembodied brain in a jar.)

I’m not telling you to quit your job and run off to the beach and forget your car payments and paint seashells. But I think whenever there’s a chance on the horizon and you’re eyeballing and trying to decide which direction to run because you can’t quite tell if it’s a cotton-candy fountain or a pissed-off rattlesnake, the thing to really ask yourself is: What’s the worst that could happen?

If you come up with answers like jail time or complete financial ruin or grievous bodily injury and potentially death, then yeah, you might want to avoid that. But if the worst you can realistically come up with is I could get rejected or I might feel embarrassed? Rejection and embarrassment are part and parcel of the fabulous thing called being human. They suck, but you also eventually build up callouses, I promise. You learn that you are category 5 kaiju of pure awesome and it takes way more to stop you than rejection, than embarrassment.

And it’s a biological fact: regret stays in your system a hell of a lot longer than a plate of disappointment fajitas.

Take a deep breath.

Apply for the job.

Send the query.

Submit the story.

Do the thing.

Categories
the human body is made of bullshit things that are hard to write

The hardest part of discipline

So last week, I let a doctor jam a needle into the proximal joint of my big toe. Then pump cortisone into it. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt pain like that. The only reason I didn’t haul off and punch him in the arm was because he was holding a needle. Stuck into my fucking toe.

Today, it actually feels pretty good. I can wiggle the big toe on my left foot. Which is more than I could say this time last week. I’m doing physical therapy exercises now, which means picking up marbles with my toes, after first retrieving those marbles from the far-flung corners where Tengu has put them when I wasn’t looking. That cat loves marbles.

So I guess this another installment in my ongoing series on how the human body is made of flimsy bullshit.

I ended up at the doctor’s office last week because my back has been bothering me off and on since August. The big toe on my left foot has been almost immobile far longer, and I thought I’d have the doctor look at it while I was there. The x-rays on my back came out fine, thanks for asking. My toe, not so much. The joint is badly narrowed and I have extra bone growth, which is a bad thing. This lead to the cortisone shot and the exercises, and hopefully that will work because otherwise I get to look forward to foot surgery in the near future.

Though I guess, having made it through shoulder surgery, foot surgery can’t possibly suck that much.

But it’s also incredibly upsetting. Because I feel like I did this to myself. Over a year ago, I hyperextended my toe pretty badly while I was practicing kung fu. (Which means, by the way, I screwed up when I was practicing, since that isn’t something that should normally happen.) It hurt like a bitch, so I went to the doctor after a week and got told it was a sprain. I just needed to wear one of those immobilizing shoes for three weeks and give it time to heal. But it didn’t heal.

I should have gone back to the doctor when it didn’t stop hurting. But I figured I’d just work through it. The pain steadily got worse, but just a little at a time so I didn’t really notice. Until I started tap lessons.

I should have figured out already that working through the pain when it’s that kind of pain is a stupid move. Look how it turned out with my shoulder, after all. Maybe some day I’ll figure out that these aren’t the kind of problems that can be cured with tenacity.

I’m big into discipline, into making things a habit so you feel weird if you don’t do them. For me, it’s worked for writing, and it’s worked even better with exercise. But with writing, there’s yet to be a time when doing daily wordcount could hurt me. Maybe that day will come. With exercise, though, there are times when exercising can and will hurt you. Exercising injured may sound like a badass thing to do (keep going on your broken leg! win the game!), but it’s not. It’ll likely just get you more hurt. And while I don’t think you get any prizes if you get buried with all of your original parts, you also don’t get any prizes for breaking yourself into non-functioning pieces because you were too damn obstinate to just pause.

One of the hardest emails I’ve sent in recent memory was the one to my tap instructor, when I told her I wouldn’t be able to continue with lessons until my foot was better. Just like when my shoulder blew out, one of the most upsetting conversations I’ve ever had was telling Shifu that I had to drop out of class for a while. Good teachers, good coaches, are always understanding about these things. Good teachers don’t want you to hurt yourself. They understand.

It’s a lot harder to give yourself that kind of understanding. First off, there’s the disappointment of it, but I’ve had my fajitas (and a margarita) now, and I’m over it. It’s more that I’ve never been any kind of fucking athlete. After fighting so hard to be able to run or do kung fu or dance when once upon a time I could barely climb a couple flights of stairs, I’m just so afraid I’m going to lose it. After going so many places and doing so many things powered by sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness, maybe I don’t know how to deal with a problem that I can’t just wear down. I’m lucky I have friends who are willing to tell me over and over again to stop being stupid and rest.

I have to believe in myself, that when I get injured it isn’t the end of the world if I have to stop and rest. That I will recover whatever ground I might lose, or that I’ll be able to find new ground to cover. But that’s the hard part. The scary part. It’s easier to do something than not do something. It’s easier to stay in motion when you’ve been in motion.

And that’s why this is another part of discipline that I have to learn.

Categories
movie

[Movie] Non-Stop

Maybe this is just a combination of nostalgia and confirmation bias talking,but I could have sworn that back in the misty past, Liam Neeson didn’t spend most of his time on screen killing people. I feel like one day, he gained just a couple more gray hairs and little crows feet and that set off some computer in a secret bunker whose only job is to compute cragginess algorithms, indicating the moment when an actor becomes perfect for Male Baby Boomer Action Hero Wish Fulfillment.

I was only thinking about this because Liam Neeson’s looking particularly craggy and done with everything for Non-Stop. Which I’ll admit, Mike and I saw this weekend because there was literally nothing else both of us were interested in seeing at the theater. I like a good popcorn action with a bit of suspense flick as much as the next guy, when the next guy is Mike.

I actually liked Non-Stop a lot more than I thought I would. I came in just not taking any of it at all seriously–come on, Liam Neeson shoots people on an airplane, how fucking serious can this be?–and actually got very drawn in at the beginning. The film feels very gritty and claustrophobic thanks to the camera work, which I think helps it feel more serious than it has any right to be. I mean come on, the basic concept is that Bill (Liam Neeson) is on a flight where a mysterious person threatens to kill a passenger every twenty minutes if he or she isn’t given a bunch of money. And the hell of it is, it actually kind of works in the sense of convincing you to just give it a whirl and suspend your disbelief…until the last thirty minutes crosses the line of Too Damn Silly.

Eh, and I’m going to just hit some spoilers now, so consider yourself warned.

Continue reading “[Movie] Non-Stop”
Categories
publishing someone is wrong on the internet stoopid

If JK Rowling stopped writing, people would totally buy my books, right?

If JK Rowling Cares About Writing, She Should Stop Doing It

Okay, it’s 7 in the morning and I haven’t even had a cup of tea yet, but someone said a dumb thing on the internet so I can’t even look away. Really, I’d normally just bitch about this on Twitter, but my thoughts are a bit more than 140 characters long so here you go.

Basic  summary of the above blog post: JK Rowling should stop writing because everyone is buying her books instead of mine.

When I told a friend the title of this piece she looked at me in horror and said, “You can’t say that, everyone will just put it down to sour grapes!”

Should have listened to your friend, dude.

I didn’t much mind Rowling when she was Pottering about. I’ve never read a word (or seen a minute) so I can’t comment on whether the books were good, bad or indifferent. I did think it a shame that adults were reading them (rather than just reading them to their children, which is another thing altogether), mainly because there’s so many other books out there that are surely more stimulating for grown-up minds.

I can basically point to the above two sentences as the real problem with Ms. Shepherd’s piece. It basically boils down to, “well it’s okay if she sticks to her stinky genre, but she should get out of mine” crossed with barely concealed disdain that actual grown-ups are reading said stinky genre. Double special bonus fuck you asshole points for never having actually read Harry Potter while still being a patronizing douche about it.

This sort of attitude, I will note, is why plebes like myself often have the general impression that “literary” fiction is a place for pompous assholes. And why genre writers still get to nurse our treasured persecuted artist complex despite the fact that by all measures but for gatekeeper approval, we seem to be winning.

Look, I know it sucks when you’re struggling to make sales. I would sacrifice any number of goats to the Great Old Ones if I thought it’d give me a chance at your numbers on my novellas, Ms. Shepherd. I haven’t even managed to sell a full novel yet, and in my more crapulent moments of despair I can and have gone on ego-comforting rants about how the world is full of philistines that totally don’t get my genius, and what the fuck is wrong with the industry that they’re publishing shit like Twilight when my obviously superior talent is languishing unappreciated.

But this is the thing. I keep the wailing and ineffectual fist-waving limited to whatever audience is in my living room at the time (usually the cats, sometimes Mike, who keeps his headphones firmly on and just sort of nods along and makes vague noises of agreement until I’ve run out of steam) instead of recording it for posterity on a well-trafficked site. Apparently because I have the requisite self-awareness to know, in hindsight, just how pathetic it all sounds.

Four simple points:

  1. The major assumption here, that if people weren’t reading JK Rowling’s books, they would be reading yours or any you personally deem worthy is bullshit.
  2. Frankly, considering the wide range of other leisure activities that people have competing for their time, I maintain forevermore that we should be happy they’re reading at all. And they are reading, you realize. Don’t give me that “kids these days” shit.
  3. As a corollary to #2, if you hook someone in to reading with a piece of really popular fiction (eg: Harry Potter or Twilight) there is a good chance they will give the whole reading thing a go because it was so much fun this time around and try more books. (Whoops, maybe that’s why my stinky genre is doing so well!) For all that I love bitching about Twilight as much as the next feminist with delusions of being a writer, I am still actually glad for its existence because I personally know of people who started reading again because of those books. There are writers out there now who have sales because Stephenie Meyer and JK Rowling turned someone back on to reading. So back the fuck off.
  4. I, too, have had my moments of lamentation about how the masses only want to feast on shit and isn’t it a shame we can’t get real art made these days. (Normally in connection with movies; you try figuring out how to get a film funded when it lacks the requisite explosions and tits.) Well, them’s the breaks because we went with that whole capitalism thing. But it’s also, frankly, the huge commercial successes that even make the game possible for the little guys who might not ever earn out their advances. So many of these big sellers like Harry Potter just come whipping out of left field. No one has a formula for what’s going to catch on, and publishing moves slowly enough that writers are commonly advised to not try to chase what is “hot” because by the time you get it written and in the pipe, the next wave will have hit. Makes me wonder just how many writers have gotten their debut sales because someone was willing to take a chance on them thanks to the massive successes of others.

As someone who wasted money and valuable hours of my life I’ll never get back on The Casual Vacancy, it wouldn’t break my heart at all if JK Rowling went back to writing YA, because I really liked those books. But this is the thing. I know JK Rowling isn’t my bitch. I know you don’t get to tell other writers what to write. Ever.

By all means keep writing for kids, or for your personal pleasure – I would never deny anyone that – but when it comes to the adult market you’ve had your turn.

Christ, what an asshole.

Categories
charity movie suffering for charity

Pompeii: Deadly Weaksauce Eruption Destroys City

Well, I did it, you bastards. I saw Pompeii. Sorry that it took me 24 hours to get my write-up done, things were kind of busy today.

So this is the thing. I went into this movie expecting to be incredibly annoyed by the geology. But actually, the geology wasn’t that bad. There were volcanic bombs when there shouldn’t have been, there was a pyroclastic flow that apparently put on the brakes just for the purposes of barfalicious romance dialog, and there was an overly large tsunami. But that stuff, I can put down to dramatic license; it’s nowhere near Dante’s Peak, let alone The Core levels of badness.

What actually really ticked me off about this movie, far beyond the utterly tepid romance plotline that almost made all of the googly eyes in 47 Ronin look like a great love story and the mustache-twirling stylings of Senator Weaksauce Villainus Pantsius was the way it so blatantly and desperately tried to rip Gladiator off.

Do not fuck with Gladiator.

There was actually a gladiatorial battle scene in Pompeii that lurched along all the same beats as the reenactment of the Battle of Zama scene from Gladiator, down to the bit where the smarmy antagonist observes that he doesn’t recall the Romans losing the battle. But the reason that scene was so fucking badass in Gladiator was because Maximus just takes control of his fellow slaves as a general and uses Roman tactics to win.

Oh yeah. That’s the stuff.

Pompeii didn’t have any of the requisite badassery, and the main character was no fucking Maximus Decimus Meridius. And there was absolutely no good reason for the slaves designated as the losing team to win other than oh the script says we’re awesome so we’ll just like…shove people a bunch until Milo can use his magical Celt horse powers and stuff.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Warning: Spoilers. Like you give a fuck.

Continue reading “Pompeii: Deadly Weaksauce Eruption Destroys City”
Categories
rants

The Kids Are All Right

Just finished my first panel at ConDFW, “Androids at the Dinner Table: Gadgets, Social Media and Society.” I was expecting to pretty much talk about things like the use of cell phones at the dinner table, the gross creeper potential of devices like Google Glass, and even some of the fun people have been having with stuff like Google Streetview.

It…didn’t really turn out that way. We talked about cell phone issues a teeny bit at the beginning of the panel, but after that the topic wandered a bit into publishing today versus back in the day territory, and also the usual “kids these days” tropes. Which seems to happen often when there’s a panel talking about society in the present and near future.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t count as one of the “kids these days” any more. I’m in my thirties. But maybe I have a different perspective on a lot of these issues because I grew up during the surge of this technology. We went from mobile phones being these hilarious looking bricks or things attached to your car when I was in grade school, to suddenly in high school the rich kids had them, and by the time I had my first career path job (at 19), I’d bought my own and they were everywhere. I cut my teeth on dial-up bulletin boards before the www and browsers were really a thing, and by the time I hit high school we had a computer in every classroom and I was making websites on geocities and posting my terrible Sailor Moon fanfiction online.

And maybe I also have a different perspective about the kids these days because the roundabout way I got my degree (returning to a traditional university after a near decade-long hiatus) and my current social life have put me in a space where at 33, I’m dangerously close to being fossilized.

So, speaking from that perspective: Lay off the kids.

We’d rather text people than call. So what? We establish our personal space in crowded environments using a cell phone rather than a newspaper or book. So what? We meet people we like and get to be friends with them via social media, chatting back and forth in endless instant messenger conversations, watching movies together by live streaming. So what? Instead of sitting down at the local nerd lord’s kitchen table, we roleplay on journal systems or forums or by IM or have players skype in. So. Fucking. What.

I’m beyond tired of hearing about how we’re isolated, how we don’t know how to talk to each other any more. Have you ever considered that maybe, you just don’t know how to talk to us?

I have more friends now than I ever did before the age of the internet. I have more friends who will drop everything and talk to me if I’m having a problem, who will go out of their way to help me, who will create art with me. I have more friends that I can meet online for card games or roleplaying games or first person shooters (like paintball without the cardio component or the injuries), than I ever have in “real life.” I have more friends who have laughed with me and cried with me and been connected to the transformative moments of my life.

There is little anyone can say that will offend me more, and in a more personal way, than claiming that my friends are not real because we are so separated by physical distance that we have to use technology to communicate.

And kids these days don’t read? Don’t create? Can’t imagine?

You literally cannot use the internet without reading, without communicating using the written word. Did everyone sleep through the YA boom that Harry Potter set off? Have you been avoiding the young nerds who will talk your ear off about this amazing world they made up and want to use as the base for a video game or comic or novel? Have you completely missed the massive presence of fanfiction and fanart, a set of interlocking communities that are populated by people of all ages, yes, but mostly young people? Have you avoided the innovative ways “the kids” are expressing themselves on youtube and with podcasts and using services like vine?

Doing something differently doesn’t automatically make it inferior. Living life differently doesn’t automatically make it less of a life.

So let me tell you about the “kids these days” I have come to know. They are smart, and they are creative, and they are empathetic. They are people who are deeply worried about how the older generations have fucked up the world they’re going to inherit. They’re people who are aware of what kind of giant mess the schools are ejecting them in to, and yet they’re still reaching out to each other across unimaginable distance and doing what human beings have always done: create, and connect, and love.

The kids are all right.

/drops mic

Categories
convention

ConDFW schedule

Whoops, and it’s almost time to head up to Dallas for ConDFW! Here’s my schedule for the convention, please come say hello to me if you’ll be there. I should be easy to spot. Look for the red-headed dapper sir wearing a waistcoat (and at least one of the days, a top hat).

Time: Saturday, 11AM
Panel name: Androids at the Dinner Table: Gadgets, Social Media and Society
Location: PROGRAMMING 2 (Chinaberry)
Description: We see it more and more in this day and age: a group of friends at a restaurant, every one of them with their smart phone open and texting away. The age of the Internet is not upon us, it passed by about twenty years ago. What is acceptable in this day and age? Our panelists discuss this and other issues. Note: If your cellphone rings during this panel, you will be mocked mercilessly, and then debated about for a good twenty to thirty minutes.

Time: Saturday, 4pm
Panel name: One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor: Creating Maps
Location: PROGRAMMING 2 (Chinaberry)
Description: It is amazing how much easier you can visualize a world once you have built a map of it, or see a map on the first few pages of a book you picked up. But how do you build such a map so it doesn’t look like a five year old scribbled on a napkin with random crayons? Our resident scientists and creative artists help collaborate to build a map that inspires the imagination. Note: Maps may or may not allow you to simply walk into Mordor.

Time: Saturday, 5pm
Panel name: READING!
Location: READING (Trinity VIII)
Description: I will be sharing the room with K. Hutson and Selina Rosen. And I will bring some kind of sweet treat, because I am not above petty bribery.

Time: Sunday, 1pm
Panel name: The Science of Comedy: The White Face Clown vs The Red Face Clown
Location: MAIN PROGRAMMING (Addison Lecture Hall)
Description: In a book by Eric Idle, “The Road to Mars”, the idea of typecasts for humor is explored. There is the White Face Clown, generally thin and never gets pied in the face. Then there is the Red Face Clown, generally fat and jovial, who always gets pied in the face. Examples of this are Laurel and Hardy, or Penn and Teller. Is there any truth in this? Our humorists debate, and pies may be thrown.

Time: Sunday, 3pm
Panel name: Upwardly Mobile: Writing about Dirigibles and Other Flights of Fancy
Location: PROGRAMMING 3 (Trinity VII)
Description: One of the most common sights in both Steampunk and Cyberpunk is the dirigible. Otherwise known as zeppelins or blimps, the hydrogen or helium filled craft lazily float through the sky. It is one thing, however, to imagine it. It is entirely another to be able to write about it believably. For instance, which of the above named craft has NO internal supporting frame? (Blimps!) Our authors talk about the differences and other things to know about when writing about semi-rigid airships.

Categories
geology

…Google, no.

A lot of descriptive geology is just pattern recognition. I spend a lot of time Googling pictures of various structures, minerals, and other phenomena to get an idea of how the same thing can look wildly different.

So today:

You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

….no, Google. No.

you tried

(Psst: This is nodular bedding.)

Categories
sfwa

I’m glad I’m part of this hot mess.

So obviously, kerfuffle, asses being shown, not going to retread that. There’s so much bothering me about the situation I could rant about for days, which could really be summarized by me throwing my hands up in the air and shrieking, “You’re grown damn adults, so act like it!” Meh. I have a really rough core description that’s melting down most of my higher brain functions right now, so my capacity for continued melodramatic outrage is on hold.

But I do want to say something, because I think it’s actually important: Since the start of this, there’s been a sort of hoo boy there goes SFWA again attitude, with a helping of glad I’m not part of that hot mess, which I’ll admit is pretty standard when you’re enjoying a steaming cup of fresh schadenfreude on the internet.

Obvious fact: I’m a SFWA member. And I’m actually pretty proud to call myself that. I’ve been even more proud recently because we’re weathering a wankstorm that, from where I stand, got thrown our way for doing the right thing.

This is not going to be me going on and on about how much we’re trying. Because no one really gives a shit. Do or do not, there is no try. All nerds know that. What I want to tell you is why I joined SFWA to begin with and why I’m still a member despite occasional moments when I really just want to start chewing on my own office furniture.

I joined SFWA in 2010, literally the same day I signed by contract with Beneath Ceaseless Skies for The Book of Autumn. To a certain extent, this was actually John Scalzi’s fault, because I’d been reading his blog forever, and he mentioned SFWA from time to time. But it was more because I’d decided I wanted to start writing seriously. It didn’t take a whole lot of research at that point to figure out that the list of SFWA-approved publications generally paid better than others, and were far less likely to jerk writers around. By that time I was also very familiar with Writer Beware.

(You do regularly check Writer Beware, right? If not, you really should. That site has saved my ass a couple of times. There are some bad people out there who like feasting on the desperation and bank accounts of people who want to be published.)

I also, I’d like to note, owned my very own copy of Atlanta Nights before I joined SFWA, and maybe you can point to that as the main event that made me an actual fan of the organization. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, do yourself a favor and go read about it. It’s a hilarious story and something of a caper, and it actually happened.

In a way it was also my own experience as someone who started her professional life in a union that made me so eager to pony up my membership fee. I thought of SFWA (and still do) as a loose sort of writer’s union. Not something that had the power of collective bargaining, say, but an organization with enough heft that it could at least put a dent in the actions of abusive publishers and try to encourage better contract conditions and pay.

The nice thing is, from that angle everyone has the potential to benefit from the organization’s existence whether they belong to it or not. Anyone can get information from Writer Beware. Anyone can submit stories to markets that SFWA considers qualifying. I’d daresay anyone can tattle to SFWA (or probably any of the other professional writers’ associations out there) about the shitty behavior of a publisher and get their attention. In the less than four years since I joined SFWA, I’ve seen the organization go after multiple publishers who weren’t meeting their contractual obligations to their authors. I’ve seen the organization pressure publishers who were trying to trying to slide by shitty, predatory contracts (eg: the original Random House Hydra Imprint contract).

When I got my contracts sorted out for my third qualifying short story sale, I immediately upgraded my membership.

There are a lot of other things SFWA can do for members, most of which I haven’t needed to go near yet, and I honestly hope I never will. I’ve never had to use the Grievance Committee. I’ve never needed help from the Emergency Medical Fund. To be honest, any immediate material benefits I’ve received so far from the organization, I would still get without membership. But I’m there anyway. I want to support an organization that’s already done a lot to make my floundering attempts at a writing career easier, and I’m in a financial place where I can definitely afford to do that.

And don’t get me wrong, there are definitely things actually being in the organization has done for me, some of which are much more fuzzy in terms of immediate benefit, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’ve gotten to meet and talk to some really amazing people I probably wouldn’t have gotten to meet otherwise. I’ve gotten to watch some really informative (and entertaining) arguments take place. I’ve heard about opportunities and been warned about pitfalls. I’ve got access to a group of people to whom I can ask silly questions without being worried I’ll get shit on for it. I’ve gotten to play door dragon at the last two Worldcons and you have no idea how much fun that is for me. I’ve made the current president of SFWA laugh so hard he spilled his drink (a nice whiskey) down the front of his shirt.

The first SFWA officer I ever met was Jim Fiscus, incidentally, during a regional meeting at Mile Hi Con. I told him I had just joined SFWA, and he shook my hand and welcomed me in. I walked away from that conversation with one of the biggest warm fuzzies of my young writer life. It makes me incredibly sad to think that not everyone has gotten to have even that simple, kind experience. I know that not everyone has had my good fortune, and I wish that wasn’t the case.

This shouldn’t be read as an attempt at recruitment, or a slap at people who could be members of SFWA and aren’t. Whoever you are reading this, you make your own decisions about what’s best for your own career and sanity, and I don’t make a habit of arguing about that kind of stuff. Like most all things on my blog, this is about me. Me, me, me. In light of the wank still circling on the internet and the muffled screams emanating from my own frustration, I wanted to lay it all out there.

When you love someone (or something, I suppose in this case) it can frustrate you like nothing else, probably because you do love it and expect great things. Sometimes you get disappointed. Sometimes (hopefully most of the time!) you don’t. And I have a lot of reasons to hang onto SFWA with the kind of ferocity normally reserved for terriers when you try to take their favorite toy.

Don’t be surprised if there’s growling.