Categories
education rants

No really, you should care about education. Even if you don’t have kids.

Well I was going to rant about this on tumblr but my app isn’t uploading the post (too much froth?) so fine, it can just live on my blog.

Okay, childless/childfree people, let’s talk for a minute. I don’t have kids. I doubt I ever will. I still vote for every way to fund education that I can, and I pay close attention to school board elections and other education issues. And it’s not because I have nieces that I love, and it’s not because I am so rich that I’m desperate to give my money away. It’s certainly not because I don’t have other things I’d rather be doing with my time and money.

It’s because I am trying to ensure that kids learn how to think and cooperate and socialize, so that they grow into adults who can think, and cooperate, and socialize.

I’m not a fucking island. I don’t run this country on my own. (If I did, it’d be a much different place.) The decisions that other people make effect me deeply–just look at environmental issues and the battle we’re still fucking having about denial. And the kids of today are going to be running this place when I’ve retired.

Allow me to repeat: The kids of today are going to be running this place when I’ve retired.

There is a reason people with wacky ideologies try to pack school boards–look at creationists and their endless quest to fuck up childhood education. This stuff matters. This stuff controls the future in both short and long term.You think your life would be half as good as it is now if fundamental biology education got torn up by the roots?

Education matters. Even if you don’t have kids, and will never have kids, education should matter to you. You are not paying for someone else’s little annoying monster to learn how to add fractions and not eat paste. You are paying to live in a place where the people around you can maybe understand complex issues that affect everyone.

And yeah, right now that doesn’t seem to be working. I agree it’s not fair to hook things to property ownership. It’s damn unfair to kids in places with low property values, and it’s an obviously bad idea unless you have a (gross) personal interest in perpetuating class-based inequalities. But I’ve also yet to see a funding issue of ANY kind pass by popular vote. (Up until this year I lived in Colorado.) And I agree something needs to change if we actually want to pursue that golden ideal of producing people who can reason and think critically and address the challenges of the modern world. But starving schools of funding ain’t it, and ignoring the issue ain’t it, and saying it isn’t your problem because you don’t even like kids sure as hell ain’t it. Why do we even keep having this argument?

Maybe because we still haven’t figured out that education isn’t a product, it should be a public good. Maybe because we’re still having more arguments over how much money teachers make than how much money people who get their living off capital gains make. Maybe because we’re more concerned with test scores than actual end results. Maybe because fiddling while Rome burns should be our national pastime, not baseball.

And we’re also still having this same damn argument about how you shouldn’t have to pay for education if you’re childless/childfree. Whether they sprang from your loins or not, whether you like it or not, you will be sharing the world with all of these kids and their ability to think or not will affect you and all other living things on this planet in ways you cannot even begin to imagine.

Education matters, and funding it matters. If you want humans to stop repeating the same stupid mistakes over and over, it matters.

/drops mic

Categories
shakespeare tom hiddleston

Coriolanus: Adventures in Aggressive Furniture Arranging

Back from Coriolanus. All I can think right now:

DRAMATIC MUSIC CUE! QUICK, REARRANGE THE FURNITURE.

Okay I’m sorry. I know. I KNOW. It’s a very serious play. And it is. There is a definite non-zero quantity of fake blood that gets used, to great effect. But goddammit people, I’m only human.

First off: these tickets were acquired by queueing at the box office in the pre-dawn depths of the morning. The tickets I got via Barclay’s Front Row are for two weeks hence, at which point Mike isn’t going to be with me. And Mike likes him some Shakespeare too, so he wanted to try to see the play while we were in the UK for Christmas. I wasn’t sure if it’d happen since I’d been getting a kind of scary impression about the queue. Well, just to add a data point, we walked over to the Donmar and got there around 6:50. We were something like 17th or 18th in line, and by the time we got in to the box office there were still a couple of returns seats available in each show for the day, and what sounded like a decent amount of standing room. The biggest problem was really that it was cold, so if you want to try to nab tickets and don’t mind standing in line for about three hours, you ought to be good to go. Just wear some wool socks and bring a book to read. (And if you go to the Cafe Nero nearby to get a tea to warm your hands, tell Bruno the adorable trainee barista I said hello.)

I’m feeling very scattered about the play in general for several reasons. I’m familiar with Coriolanus, but not as much as I am with, say, any of the Henries, so I spent half the time just keeping up and rolling around in the language like a dog in a nice grassy yard. And during intermission while I was waiting in the toilet queue someone who recognized me from the internet came up and said hi, and told me she likes my work and that just kind of filled me with so much squee I still haven’t recovered. GAH I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.

Anyway. Coriolanus. I’m still really thinking about the set design, the sound, the costumes, all that. For all I joke about the aggressive rearranging of the furniture, that was used to great effect throughout the play. I’m less sure about the bit at the beginning, where everyone was on stage, seated at the back. It was nice in that it let us put faces to characters–which is very helpful since the characters have unfamiliar names, and many start with the same letter (eg: Volumnia, Valeria, and Virgilia, whom I ultimately gave up on and just kept mental track of as Mom, Wife, and Their Ladyfriend) which is the sort of thing that normally makes editors scream at writers but Shakespeare can do whatever the fuck he wants; he’s dead, and he’s Shakespeare for god’s sake.

Some of the sound (particularly musical cues) I found kind of distracting in a bad way, and some of it was very interesting, like this staticky sound that I want to try to track when I get to see this play again at a later date because I have thoughts. But I actually liked the moments of complete silence scattered throughout the play best; they were used to incredible, often heart-wrenching effect.

The costumes took some getting used to, since it was this kind of funky mishmash of very modern looking stuff with added leather armor bits, but that’s the kind of thing I can roll with. I’m not sure if I’ll ever forgive Coriolanus for causing me to have the following conversation with Mike, however:
Mike: Okay, so Coriolanus’s wife. Just… what was with her shoes?
Me: …what do you mean?
Mike: Just, they looked like they wanted to have laces like boots, but they didn’t. Why is that?
Me: I don’t know, I guess they were designed that wa–wait a fucking minute, are you asking me about women‘s shoes? Oh for fuck’s sake.

And of course the chairs. They were basically 85% of the set, and for all that I’m giggling like an immature little shit about them now, when you’re in the moment and just riding along with the actors it’s excellent stuff. The chairs do a lot of actual furniture duty, but they also play walls, shields, objects waved in the air in celebration, etc. They got kicked and thrown around by the actors, and I can say with all conviction that I saw no stunt chairs being used. Hardest working furniture in London, hands down. That the chairs didn’t get a credit in the program book really makes the entire exercise a sham.

Okay Rachael stop being an asshole now

Mixed feelings on some of that or no, it was very visually interesting. And of course since it was the Donmar (god I love that theater), we were all practically sitting on the stage anyway so you could see everything.

I’m going to go on and on randomly about story and character a bit now, so… spoilers I guess? But come on, it’s not like we all don’t already know how the play ends. Or at least you know if you’ve read it, which I always recommend you do first when you’re going in for Shakespeare unless your bard-fu is strong. (And if it is that strong, you’ve probably already read it, eh?)

Continue reading “Coriolanus: Adventures in Aggressive Furniture Arranging”
Categories
doctor who tv

[Doctor Who] Time of the Doctor

Obviously, SPOILERS.

Continue reading “[Doctor Who] Time of the Doctor”
Categories
movie you need to do better

[Movie] Blackfish

Some nebulous time when I was in grade school, my family went for a roadtrip vacation in South Dakota. We did that sort of thing, just driving to the other nearby square or nearly square states, because we most definitely did not have the money to fly anywhere, let alone places that involved Disneyland and Sea World.

On this vacation to South Dakota, I remember going to see a dolphin show. Yes, in South Dakota. I think it was at the Marine Life Center in Rapid City, which no longer exists–but don’t quote me. Like a lot of little girls my age, to go with my strange horse obsession (I grew up in the suburbs, for goodness sake) I had a dolphin and whale obsession. Big, cool mammal obsession, I guess. But the idea of getting to see real live dolphins was compelling. I’d been reading about them in various middle-grade books (like this one) where you came out feeling like dolphins were similar to dogs in how much they just love humans to bits.

The dolphins in South Dakota jumped and dove in the pool like you’d expect, but in my memory it was all very… gray. I remember the facility better than I remember the actual dolphins now. The pool was concrete, surrounded by metal bleachers, and I can only recall it being my family there and a group of Mennonites watching the show. (I remember them because all the women were bonnets and long, very old fashioned dresses.) Everything felt very strange, dingy and run-down. It wasn’t like the advertisements for Sea World, where everything is clean and technicolor. It felt like an old high school gymnasium, complete with funky smell.

I don’t think I can honestly tell you what my reactions were, that day. Looking back on the memories now, it all makes me intensely uncomfortable. But I don’t know if assigning that kind of discomfort to my grade-school self would be rewriting history and giving me an awareness I didn’t have at the time. Maybe I was just excited about seeing Real Live Dolphins(TM) and let that kind of overtake the creepy gas station bathroom feeling that I get from these memories now.

But I can tell you, from more than twenty years in the future, I know there was something deeply wrong about it.

Blackfish made me think about that that trip to South Dakota. I put off watching this documentary for a long time, to be honest, because I knew it would wreck me, and it did. It’s something everyone should watch, and then think, really think about the ethics of using wild animals for our own entertainment–let alone wild animals who are so plainly intelligent.

The framework of Blackfish is an incident in which Tilikum (the largest killer whale in captivity) deliberately killed his trainer, Dawn Brancheau. The documentary builds a compelling case that neither Dawn nor Tilikum (who had probably already killed two other humans before her) was to blame, but rather the conditions in which the killer whales were kept.

The documentary tries to take care to not anthropomorphize the animals. But it’s not a stretch to understand that in general, captivity in a small space with absolutely no entertainment isn’t healthy for any living thing. It’s not a stretch to realize that any living thing that has family groups will have problems when those family groups are artificially disrupted. There are parts in the documentary that are existentially horrifying, and other parts that are simply heartbreaking, such as when a female orca has her calf taken away and keeps trying to locate her.

And for what purpose? Entertainment. Money.

This is the sort of documentary that makes you feel horrible for being a human being. And it’s well-earned, in this case.

I’ve never been to Sea World. It’s safe to say that I never will go to Sea World. I’ve also never been to any circus that uses animals, and that won’t ever change either. I still think of watching the dolphins in South Dakota, and I’d like to believe that even then I knew there was something fundamentally wrong with marine mammals surrounded by land, jumping through hoops for our supposed entertainment.

It’s a shameful memory, and I never want to forget it.

Categories
shakespeare

Oh and this other thing happened [MEGASQUEE]

I will be seeing Coriolanus. At the Donmar Warehouse. With some of my amazing friends. My squee runneth over.

This is entirely due to the efforts of Sera The Great And Powerful, who organized a group of us to call and hit the Barclay’s front row website for the 10GBP tickets when they were released. I called and was breathing heavily at my laptop as if sheer willpower could make the online queue cough up tickets.

What ultimately worked for me was calling. I got through when there were still tickets, and so did my husband actually, though his customer service rep initially grabbed tickets for him on the wrong day, and by the time they’d gotten that sorted out, everything was gone. I managed to speak with my rep in a reasonable, adult fashion despite the fact that I was dancing in place like a three-year-old hyped up on pixie stix.

I thought I’d take down a few notes here, if you’re trying to get tickets for the show, since I actually had tried twice before and had no luck and the advice would have been nice.

  1. Do not be a dick to the customer service people. Ever. Just don’t. (Not a mistake I made, obviously, but a very important point.)
  2. Consider enlisting a friend or two to help with the queue roulette. (Particularly if they can go with you! No brainer.)
  3. Remember that there is a limit of two tickets per person and plan accordingly.
  4. The tickets release on Monday at 10 AM GMT, two weeks before the week in which the shows occur. So today (the 23rd) was for the shows January 6-12. If you go to the Barclay’s Front Row website, it’ll tell you which dates are coming up.
  5. Calling seemed to work better than online. I honestly never had any luck with the online, but it never hurts to try both if you are capable of basic multitasking.
  6. For the website, you need to be online and watching it around 9:45GMT. As soon as the link to ATG at the bottom goes live, hit it, then reload the as you approach 10 AM until it tells you that you’re actually in queue. Which is, as far as I know, all you can do other than burn offerings to whatever dark and terrible god you think might give half a shit about Shakesepeare. (Azathoth? Not known for his love of the bard.) Then you just wait and see if there are any tickets available once you’re out of queue. Click like the wind!
  7. For the box office, call about five minutes or so before 10AM under the assumption that you will be put on hold. If you call too early and get picked up before 10AM, they’re not going to sell you the tickets.
  8. Know which show (date and time!) you want and have a couple on backup so you can tell the rep which ones to look for.
  9. Cross your fingers.
  10. And do not ever, ever be a dick to the customer service people. Did I mention this before? Because it’s important. (Not because this will magically help you get tickets, but because it will generally mean you are a good human being and that should be more than enough incentive.)

And then I was so incredibly excited, I had to have a cup of tea and do push ups. Mike and I are actually going to try to wait in line for returns when we get back into London this coming weekend, because that will be Mike’s only chance to get in to see the play. We’ll see how that turns out.

In the meantime, I’m going to re-read Coriolanus. (Hm, wonder if it’s one of the ones Mike’s parents have the Arden Shakespeare for…) Then I can be one of those There’s No Pleasing Some People nerds and grumble about what got cut. (Just kidding.) (Mostly.) (I had a nice little grumble about Henry V after all, even with all the squee.) I’ve gotten to see a show at the Donmar before, Roots (thanks to the ever-wonderful Kate), and the theater is fantastic. I can’t wait.

Still feeling like this, even seven hours later:

Categories
Uncategorized

A quick catch-all

I’m in the UK for the annual Christmas thing. Still attempting to get a short story written and ready to submit by the 31st because I hate myself. The normal stuff. There are Yorkies here (Indy and Brody) and they’re absolutely adorable. My cats will be so angry when I come home and smell like other animals. LIKE A BIG OL’ WHORE.

The flight was pretty good, though more turbulent than I normally like. I felt very bad for a guy I’d met while standing in line for the bag drop. He was a professional cyclist who had just gotten hit by a deer (yes you read that correctly) and broken his collarbone badly. Not something that mixes well with turbulence, hopefully he was loaded up with enough drugs for the flight. He showed me pictures of what was left of his bicycle and it made me want to curl and weep. (Frame snapped in four places.)

Normally I try to catch up on movies, but between the hectic week and the flight being delayed an hour, I was actually incredibly tired. I managed to sleep! For something like six hours of the flight, which is just unheard of. So I only watched a bit to fill up the rest of the time.

The Great Gatsby: I’d been wanting to watch this movie since I saw the previews, but also wasn’t so certain about it since it was directed by Baz Luhrmann. Who I’m certain is a lovely human being, but of the two other films of his I’ve watched (Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet) I didn’t like either of them. They were visually interesting (very colorful!) but there’s just something about his style that I can’t seem to connect with. Sorry to say I had the exact same problem with The Great Gatsby. It was pretty, and I just didn’t even care. I actually fell asleep about halfway through the movie. Oh well, at least I tried.

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa: I had no idea about the Alan Partridge thing going in. Honestly, the only reason I picked that movie was it was short enough to finish in the limited time left on the flight–well, and I remembered seeing something in Empire about it being very funny. Very funny doesn’t really do justice to this movie. It’s fucking hilarious. And in that particularly British way that I love. I think I made the guy sitting to my right (not Mike) a bit uncomfortable because I was laughing so hard. As a bonus the movie is about Colm Meaney snapping and taking his fellow employees in a radio station hostage (but in a ridiculous way, it is a comedy) so you get to feel like it’s Chief O’Brien who has lost his shit.

I’ve got my preferences on BA set up so I get a vegetarian meal, since at this point the only way I can keep myself from having what I feel like is too much meat in my diet is to actively avoid it. For fun, this time around I had the “asian vegetarian” meal, which was actually the best in-flight meal I’ve ever had. And it involved okra, which I guess is now something I like so long as it’s done in an Indian style. But I got a bit of an odd look from the flight attendant when the meal ended up going to me instead of the beautiful lady wearing a head scarf who was one row ahead.

The weather here is extra British-ly hideous, with hard rain and high winds. So needless to say, I didn’t go for a run today. But I did do exercises with a resistance band, so I feel like I accomplished something. And then we decorated the Christmas tree. It’s looking particularly awful this year because we tried really hard.

By the way, I get to have a piece of this after dinner tonight. I will now bask in your jealousy.

Categories
Uncategorized

[Movie] The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug

I’ll admit it right up front: the only reason I went to see The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug opening weekend in the theaters was so I could hurry up and say snippy things about it. I wanted to get my snark on before it got tainted by everyone else’s. And obviously, we already know I did not take it at all seriously.

Which is okay, because I think maybe it didn’t want to be taken seriously? I’m not sure. And that’s part of the problem.

First, let me note that I have very purposefully not reread The Hobbit since I heard the movies were being made. I want to address these on their own merit. (At one point, I used to believe movies should be faithful to books. I don’t any longer.)

And then spoilers:

Continue reading “[Movie] The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug”
Categories
sarcasm science fiction writing

Yes, I am trying to destroy science fiction, thank you for noticing.

God, what does a woman have to do around the internet to get her heathen liberal-fascist* feminazi reverse racist anarcho homosexual agenda aimed at the complete destruction of a literary genre noticed? I was about to start setting shit on fire, I fucking swear.

But it’s okay, guys! Senpai noticed me! (Okay, and a lot of other people, but I’m still getting some dokidoki in my shriveled, blackened little kokoro.) Finally, someone gets what we’ve been trying to do all along! We no longer have to go creeping around under cover of the internet, stealing Edgar Rice Burroughs novels from babies and pushing well meaning white guys (who just want to explain to us that we should stop whining because racism and sexism aren’t actually a thing any more, or wait maybe they are a thing but we should just suck less okay) down the stairs.

I for one am relieved. I’ve hated scifi since the minute I first encountered it. As my mother read The Hobbit to my brother and me as children, I had only two thoughts:

1) I was pretty sure I could take my older brother in a knife fight. If I sacrificed him on the altar if the dark and terrible lesbofeminazi gods, would I grow up to look absolutely fabulous in trousers and have my very own mustache to twirl?

And.

2) I was going to destroy Middle Earth and the rotten literary ground from which it had sprung. And then salt the soil with the bitter tears of all god-fearing, proper fans.

I never managed number one, though I do still look fabulous in trousers. But goal number two is ticking along nicely. I have joined an (apparently not so secret) cabal composed of basically everyone who isn’t a straight white guy oh wait there are some straight white guys in or cabal too, um shit, I guess it’s actually a cabal of people who just don’t think everything has to be about straight white guys. Yeah, that. And then, of all dastardly things, we WRITE.

Because we saw, you see. We saw so clearly that the foundation of all speculative fiction is actually straight white guys, not, you know, fantastical elements and what if like those lying bastard liberals tell you in their “college courses.” (Hah! Our secret liberal indoctrination works again!) So if you replace the straight white guys in fiction with people that actually reflect the diversity of the population, IT WILL ALL COME CRASHING DOWN LIKE A JENGA TOWER SURROUNDED BY DRUNKEN UNDERGRADS.

AHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA

I mean, we SAY we would just like to read stories about people like us, that a little diversity doesn’t hurt, but smart guys like senpai know. He’s on to us. We hate art, because art is only the stuff senpai likes reading, and the rest of us totally don’t count because we don’t get the greatness of all that ART. We’re just going to burn that shit down. I for one only read scifi because I hate it. I only do things I hate. That’s how my bitter, sad, and twisted life works. That’s why you should all run out right now and bake me cakes because if there is one thing I hate more than scifi it’s cake and I’ll eat cake while I read a scifi novel so then MY HATE-FILLED, MISERABLE EXISTENCE WILL BE COMPETE.

I am so glad I don’t have to pretend any more. It’s like a great burden has lifted from my shoulders.

Now, I’m going back to writing my story about a lesbian Sikh werewolf going to the prom because I am doing my part to destroy everything that scifi stands for. Which, let us remember, is only straight white guys. Only that. Ever.

* – That’s what it’s called, right, Bill O’Reilly (or was it Glenn Beck I don’t even know any more they’re all like the same person) is no longer actually intelligible through all the froth, so I’m guessing.

Categories
fandom rants writing

Fanfic < "Real" fiction?

Okay, darlings, I’m getting just a little tired of this shit. Since a thing involving fanfiction happened of course we’re up for another round of arguing about the “worth” of fanfic. Because what is the internet for if not being a long distance dick about things other people like? Well, let Evil Auntie Rachael lay down some fucking truth for you.

First off, define “real” fiction. Unless you’re writing pure history or biographical stories, you are literally making shit up. Define real in that context. I dare you.

Okay, so you mean original fiction? When we’re talking written narrative fiction, I should note that original is a pretty loaded word. Everyone likes to laugh about there only being three (or five, or six, or pick a number) plotlines in the entire world, and it’s really all just about giving it a twist or telling it a new way. Are you telling me fanfiction can’t do that? Even the idea of original characters is a loaded one, since we’ve got archetypal characters for a reason, and you can make a compelling argument for nearly every character belonging to an archetype, with the serial numbers cunningly masked by, say, curly hair and an interest in bowling. (And here, we aren’t even touching the entire issue of licensed tie-in fiction.)

So do you really mean fiction for which someone would potentially pay money? First, please explain to me how assigning monetary value to art makes it more legitimate. Because here I was thinking the true value of art was actually a thing without price, namely the act of creation itself and the idea the art communicates. And second, getting paid for fiction is not that easy. TRUST ME.

But Evil Auntie Rachael, original fiction is better quality than fanfiction. Really? Give me five minutes and Google and I will find you ten fanfics that display more sophisticated writing, better plotting, and deeper characterization than Twilight. Give me a full day and some dramamine, and I bet I can find you ten Twilight fanfics that are better quality than the work upon which they’re based.

The only thing original fiction gets to hold over fanfic in regards to quality is that it’s professionally edited. (IF it’s traditionally published or if it’s self published AND the author coughed up the dough to independently hire a content and line editor.) And sometimes, that doesn’t mean a whole lot. Every single one of us has read a book in our lives where we threw it on the floor in disgust and announced that we could totally do better than that.

Fanfiction is an incredibly valuable tool for learning and honing the craft of writing. I wrote fanfiction for years and years. I know other writers who wrote fanfic for years and years (and most of them have published far more than me). Some of us still do. What fanfiction taught me was how to build a plot, and how to plot long, and stay true to character while I was doing it. Writing fanfic isn’t easier or harder than writing original fiction–it’s the same process, the same parts of your brain.

And you know what? Fanfic is fun. You’re not writing it to a deadline, you’re not thinking about how many fucking times it’s going to be forcibly ejected from a slushpile, or which of your darlings the editor is going to expect you to kill. You’re writing it for the sheer joy of writing something because you like it and you can. God, and the feedback! You have an instant fanbase of people who will actually engage with you about your story! I wrote one short little fic after I saw Thor: The Dark World and in the time since I put it online I have literally received more feedback on it than I have in total for every piece of original work I’ve ever published. It’s like pure black tar heroin for the sad little twitching addict that is a writer’s ego.

Two years ago, I sat in on a panel at Worldcon where two editors from large publishing houses said yeah, they know people in publishing who keep track of fanfiction because it’s a way to find amazing writers. Patrick Nielsen Hayden said:

There is no ceiling on how good fanfic can be because it’s all unpublishable. You can find great writers.

So you can shut the fuck up about the supposed inferiority of fanfiction now.

Oh, and if a published writer has the sheer ego necessary to tell you that all fanfic is creatively inferior and doesn’t count, you tell them to go fuck themselves. Tell ’em from me, too. At the end of the day, we’re all just making shit up.

Categories
fandom

Why are we embarrassed about our fanfiction?

Forgive me if this is all a little disjointed, but I’m kind of writing things down as they occur to me. Also, since I’m a writer, I’m going to focus on writing, but I bet a lot of what I say is true for stories is also true for art.

Since the colossal Sherlock fanfic dick move, I’ve been thinking about fanfic, and talking with some people who still actively fic. (Yes, to fic is a verb. Now you know.) To go with the utter rage at what a colossal dick Caitlin Moran was, there’s been this general embarrassed recoil among fic writers. It’s a thing of sheer horror, thinking something like that could happen to one of our little stories, like AO3 is a rock that could be overturned at any moment and we’re worried we can’t scurry away fast enough.

But why is that? Why are we embarrassed about our fanfiction?

This is the thing: I don’t think we actually are.

If you were actually, actively embarrassed about a story (or any piece of art you created), you wouldn’t show it to anyone, would you? No. I imagine a lot of people are probably like me, with half-finished (or fully finished but hideous) stories that just don’t work stashed in a padlocked trunk in the attic where they can’t hurt anyone.

But if you get your story to the point where you’re willing to put it out in the light of day where people can actually see it? You must think there’s something worthwhile there to be shared. Sure, maybe it’s imperfect, or you’re frustrated and want feedback, or a lot of other reasons. But the basic idea still holds: if you’re letting other people look at it, there is some kind of marrow to your story that you think is good. In which you believe. In which you feel pride. Even if it’s a story that has you throwing your keyboard at the wall because it just won’t fucking work, you wouldn’t be putting it out there for critique if you didn’t think it had a heart worth saving.

You don’t put fanfiction on the internet because you’re embarrassed about it.

So next question: why do other people make us feel embarrassed about our fanfiction?

Except I don’t think that’s even the right question. Because if you knew for a fact that a non-fan, when told about your fanfiction, would at worst just shrug it off, say that’s a cool hobby let me tell you about my fantasy football team, or ask you if that’s a thing you can do to make money (No.) then you wouldn’t ever feel embarrassed about it. There wouldn’t be a reason for embarrassment, because it’s just another hobby.

I think this is the real question: why do other people want us to feel embarrassed about our fanfiction?

Because they’re assholes.

Or maybe that’s too easy. Even if they are assholes, that doesn’t really say anything about the source of this dickish mode of behavior.

Embarrassment comes from shame. Shame comes from the fear of other people thinking your behavior is wrong or foolish.

Okay, so what’s wrong or foolish about fanfiction? Nothing empirically. You’re not making money off of someone else’s intellectual property. It’s sure not any more foolish than a whole host of other hobbies I could name, like say paying a bunch of money to go sit in a cold stadium and watch men in tight pants run up and down a field chasing a ball.

I can see a lot of factors in this.

Maybe it’s that poisonous idea that liking things unironically is somehow mortally uncool. Well, fuck being cool anyway. If people who pull shit like Caitlin Moran and Alan Carr are the cool kids, thanks, I’ll take my tray and go sit with the M:tG nerds again. I don’t find the practice of cultural cannibalism at all satisfying.

Maybe it’s being enthusiastic about things that aren’t mainstream. Like, it’s totally fine to go to football games and paint your face and chest, or have a fantasy football team, but god help us if we’re making shit up about anything that’s not sports. Probably worth noting here that stuff stereotypically liked by guys is generally viewed as cooler than stuff stereotypically liked by girls.

Maybe it’s the writing thing, though I can already put paid to that notion because people generally think it’s mega cool if you’re writing original fiction. But then again, that means you get the stamp of some kind of cultural approval because hey, someone gave you money for your words. That must mean it’s okay. (Unless it’s romance. But we’ll get to that later.)

So then maybe it’s the fact that you’re writing stories for free about someone else’s characters? Frankly, anyone who likes any of the plethora of Sherlock Holmes-sourced shows and movies doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to that. And so on and so forth. Anyone who has ever come out of a movie and said, Yeah that was cool but they really should have done X/Y/Z, write it down and congratulations you just did fanfic now shut the fuck up.

Maybe it’s the porn thing? Ah, well, there is that. We live in a country where for entertainment, graphic torture is a-okay for pretty wide consumption and consensual cunnilingus is just way too shocking. And we’ve all read stories about a teacher (almost always female) who moonlights as a romance or erotica writer getting fired because some parents found out her dirty little secret. Funny thing is, you don’t get fired if you write mainstream literary fiction, hard crime, or even scifi/fantasy.

I don’t think that point should make us feel embarrassed. It should make us angry. The puritanical (and often hypocritical) attitude about sex isn’t something that deserves to be fed with our embarrassment. And in this case, the people who should really feel ashamed are the ones who dump porn in the lap of a person who did not consent to it. Because as I said on Monday, that is never okay.

Maybe it’s because fanfiction is dominated by women, and it’s always fun to take a steaming shit on anything women do creatively? Wish I could say I didn’t think this was a factor, but considering the last several sexism shit storms I’ve witnessed as a writer of original sf/f, this one deserves to be pinned on the board. It’s kind of fascinating to see on one side, DC Comics basically cancelling a show for being too popular with girls, and on the other Alan Carr showing Tom Hiddleston porny Loki fanart like it’s the fucking Ark of the Covenant and he’s expecting faces to melt. (And by the way, you are never getting a movie about Wonder Woman or Black Widow.) Yes, women are taking an interest in fandoms that were originally aimed more at men, and we’re doing it in the ways we always have, and maybe some people find that shocking? (God, why can’t you people just shut the fuck up and buy action figures.)

Maybe it’s because the world is full of assholes who just want to return to the natural order of tearing up the nerd’s notebook of carefully plotted dungeon crawls and feeling good about themselves. (Though considering some of the people doing this crap are pretty damn nerdy themselves, one does wonder.)

Whatever the reason, hey, don’t be a dick. That shouldn’t be such a difficult idea to grasp.

Weirdly, this entire question of embarrassment, makes me think about my niece. Stick with me here. I love my niece to bits. She’s young, and inquisitive, and still at the stage where she’s scribbling pictures on pieces of scrap paper and giving them to everyone as gifts, telling you proudly that the figure on the paper (almost unrecognizable as human) is you. She is happy with the art she’s made, and proud of it. And because she’s happy with it and proud of it, I’ve taken the marker squiggle masterpieces home and given them a place of honor on my refrigerator, as I was told to do by my Evil Auntie’s Handbook.

In our childhood, we are all artists, and we all know the joy of creation.

I remember being like that. I remember writing stories as soon as I could form letters with a pencil, and proudly showing them to anyone who couldn’t run faster than me. (I was a chubby kid. I wasn’t hard to outrun.) I bet you were like that too. At some point, we all take a hit to that enthusiasm to share.

When it’s because we’ve gained enough experience to realize that not every piece of art we make is a masterpiece, that’s called learning the craft. That’s called self-editing and growing and improving. And that’s good, so long as we never hit a point where our internal editor becomes so megalomaniacal that he keeps us from letting our art see the light of day.

But there’s another reason people stop creating and sharing. And it’s because some asshole out there (or many assholes) said that what we’re creating is bad, and stupid, and we should be ashamed of it. And then instead of finding the good heart of what we make and believing in it, we only believe that other people will laugh at us. All art is in some way taking a piece of yourself, some feeling or experience or idea, and making it manifest. No one wants to feel like what comes from inside them deserves shame.

That’s what bothers me the most, about these assholes out there trying to shame fanwriters and artists. Creativity is a muscle that requires exercise to be healthy and strong. Art needs oxygen and sunlight to grow, like most other living things. And everyone, everyone in the goddamn world who has ever made art, has an endless learning curve they have to travel.

You know what I’d call someone who shoves an artist off the learning curve just for a nasty chuckle? A bully. And someone who tries to make an artist feel small for having the cojones to rip out a little piece of their heart and say I made this myself and I’m proud of it? A mean-spirited coward.

Fuck ’em. They don’t deserve any more of my words.

Never stop creating, darlings. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. Believe in your art and grow.