Frolic Through the Fantasic

This morning I realized something:  at times I have trouble remembering my dreams because I don’t know if I was dreaming, or if my ideas were intruding and becoming manifest.

Let me explain:

Yesterday was an all around good day to dream.  I started about laying out a new plan for a school grounds that would, should, could end up in a story, and it was a bit o’ work, because I’m working off an area that’s real, and I needed to try and get my measurements correct.  I’m nutty that way, needing to see what’s available in the real world, and then going to work so I can get the fantasy as real as possible.

Some people call it too much work; I call it part of the job.

I know there are adjustments in one of the buildings I created.  for one, the space is far too large, and I need to scale it down just a bit.  I’ll do that this morning, after I finish this post.  Maybe I’ll add a few buildings.  Maybe I’ll start giving them names, and start in on instructors . . .

Then it was off to Fantasies in Harmonie.  I didn’t get into the story until around nine-forty PM, which is late by anyone’s measure, but I was so enthralled by my grounds work that I didn’t notice the passage of time.  When you get into your groove and you’re overtaken by the world you’re creating, you can find yourself getting lost easily.

There was writing, though, and it went smoothly.  It was time to describe the various transformations, and though I’d done one and went part ways through another, there was room to discuss what had happened to my characters, and for one person, that involved a lot of self-discovery which, in turn, required a bit of wordage to show what she was doing.

I once again found myself in my groove, because I’d finish a paragraph, then think, “Keep going; you need to finish what she’s feeling.”  It’s late, I’m tired, my eyes are starting to hurt–but I needed to finish.  That’s a feeling I haven’t had in a while when it comes to my writing.  You take a couple of months off to edit your work, to get your stories ready for publishing, and you get out of that mood of writing because you need to get something said.

By the time I finished with the line that I’d been waiting to write for a while–lets just say it’s something Ariel should have said after she washed up on shore–I’d put eleven hundred words behind me, and I’d done that in one hour.  I was even impressed, because I haven’t cranked out something like that in a while.  But the fantasy was there, and it demanded I give it my energy–and I did.

I had to write.

This is why I have trouble remembering my dreams some mornings:  I don’t always know what’s a dream and what’s left over from my imagination.  They are both one and the same–and it’s my job to get them out for others to see.

 

Fatalistic Offerings

Friday night is becoming a bit of Recharge Night:  the time when I need to shut down the brain because of all the week’s work activity and try to get back into something akin to a grove.  I’d almost fallen asleep at the wheel driving home yesterday, and spent a few miles with driver’s window down so the cold air could wash over my face and wake me the hell up before I plowed into a bridge pillar at sixty miles per hour.  If I’m like that at five in the afternoon, then I know anything I write at eight PM is gonna be crap.

So I relaxed and talked.  I helped out one friend with the naming of her newest crocheting patterns, and learned that the first chain mail showed up in 3 BCE.  Research, suckers:  it gets you when you least expect.  Then I played some games online, which are a good way to kill time as long as you don’t kill too much time . . . and then I set the keynote for the evening.  I ran across a friend online–someone I know who writes but also games, which means she’s very special in my book–and asked her the most damning gaming question of all:  ”Have you ever heard of F.A.T.A.L.?”

Since I know the majority of you reading this have no idea what FATAL is (I’m disposing of the periods at this point, because that’s how I roll), allow me to explain.  If you’ve ever played a table top RPG (think D&D and you’ll know what I’m discussing) then you’ve run across some good games, some mediocre, some bad . . . and some that defy description because their incredible awfulness has burnt out a significance portion of your temporal lobe.  FATAL goes beyond that last, for a thousand years from now, where our cities are dust and the 21^st Century is but a memory, people will find a pdf of FATAL, read it, and say, “The fuck was wrong with these people?”

There is a trilogy of games that are considered the worst ever developed–a term I use loosely here–and FATAL sits atop this festering heap, beating out a game written by a possible schizophrenic and one written for white supremacists.  It is a game that has been immortalized by the famous (some say infamous) S&M Review of Darren MacLennan and Jason Sartin upon RPG.net a decade ago, where they ripped the game apart with a long, profane, scree that was on the money.

It is a game that will make you die a little inside when you read it, because you’ll so understand that someone actually sat down and thought, “You know what a role playing game needs?  A way to measure how tough a virgin’s hymen is so my character will know how much pressure to use when I rape her.”  If you think I just made that line up, wrong:  that’s a statistic for female characters in this game.  It’s a game where no matter wherever you go in the world, everything looks like Medieval Europe during the dark ages, and anyone who isn’t white isn’t right.  It’s a game where there are no rules for dating, but there are rules for raping, and your male characters can even go on “rape quests”.  It’s a game where if you’re playing a female characters, you can work in a bar, or be a whore–and the chances are good if you work in a bar, you’re still a whore, because it seems like all women are good for his in game is having sex.

It’s also a game that, when there were many a forum flame war over it’s dubious merits, there were scores of gamers who stood up and said, “What are you saying?  This is totally like the best Game EVAR!”

I’ve been a gamer most of my life.  One of the reasons I got into games was to allow my imagination to stretch, and that helped me become a writer.  I loved immersing myself into a world and creating something that might, just might, become something I could look back upon with pride, for I wasn’t just having fun, I was creating a story.

But, as I told my gaming friend last night, it seems that for every great gamer I’ve ever met, I’ve met three who were juvenile assholes.  And juvenile is being kind, because I’ve also encountered my fair share of gamers who were such childish, racist, misogynistic, homophobic losers that  I wanted to toss all my games in the nearest bin and deny I’d ever played one session of Cyberpunk or Vampire:  the Masquerade.  And I’m talking about teenagers here:  I’m talking people in their thirties and forties, people who should know better, but have sadly decided that it’s far cooling to be massive dicks if they can’t get their way, and that calling every character their run into a “fag” or a “whore” is the way to have fun.

I only mention this because this trend isn’t just found among gamers–or as Our Valued Customers points out, people who come into comic book stores–it’s everywhere.  Every day I seem to find posts on Facebook where someone is decrying how “bitches” are preventing them from acting as sexist as they’d like, or how gays getting married is going to destroy the world, or even how voting is a racial entitlement–yeah, Justice Tony, if the asshole robe fits, you wear it.  There been groups on Facebook that were pulled for supporting gay marriage  but where groups about raping slowly a woman while she sleeps is okay, because we don’t want to step on anyone’s rights.

So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that games like FATAL exist, and that it’s highly likely that something very similar will reappear from time to time.  The attitude that it’s okay to be an ass seems prevalent these days, particularly in my home country.  It’s all about having the right to act like a dick, and I’m cool with that, because if there’s one thing I won’t do, it’s infringe upon your freedom of speech.

Just don’t get shocked when I call you out on your mulling dickishness, because pointing out how wrong you are is always gonna be my right.

Love in the Shrunken Universe

Since getting into the development of Elektra’s life within Chapter Thirteen of Suggestive Amusements, I feel like I’m learning more about the state of New Mexico than I’d ever imagined I would.  When I put her together I created her home town on the fly, making her a Southwest Desert Girl from the go, so living in Las Vegas wasn’t going to be a huge climate change for her.

Culturally, though, I’ve got her growing in ways I wouldn’t imagine the rest of us would ever experience.  Then again, we don’t live in novels.  Or do we?

It seemed to take hours to write my eleven hundred words last night, mostly because I not only did my research, but I was doing my nails, too.  Hey, nothing wrong with a little base coat drying as you type away, right?  But for an hour or so I did a lot of set up, and then, when I was down to the last six hundred words, I imagined her visiting these different areas of the state, and before you knew it I had her hooking up with . . . Izzy.

Don’t laugh, but that’s her nickname for another person in her past who led her onto the Road of Kink.  Believe it or not, I took the name from a character that grew up in New Mexico, and I even mention that other character by name.  (I don’t need to tell any of you who it is, because I have very bright readers.)  So she and Elektra meet, get to know each other, have dinner, get to know each other better, and before you know it, they’re meeting on a regular basis.

That’s how good relationships should begin.  Find your interests, get to know each other, and eventually end up on a side road near Roswell laying on the hood of a Jeep, staring up at the sky and holding hands while looking for UFOs.  That was how I left Elektra and Izzy last night, thinking it was a good place to jump out and gather my thoughts–and get ready for bed–because I needed the time to see where I’m taking this . . .

If you asked, “Straight into the gutter?” you’d likely be correct.

I like this chapter, and I like what I’m doing with Elektra.  All this, “What I did before I met you” stuff is giving her dimensionality, it’s turning her into a real–albeit kinky–person.  This is what we, as writers, strive to do with every character:  we want them fleshed out so when they turn sideways to us, we don’t watch them vanish.  Sometimes a writer doesn’t care if their character is two-dimensional, because the story is driving the character, not the other way around, but for this story, I’d like the characters to have a bit of thickness to them.

The question I have now is:  does Elektra think about some of the experiences she had with Izzy, and do I get into the fantasies she never got to experience with her?  I know the answer to both side, so it’s a no-brainer for me.  I believe the second part of that question should be shown in Chapter Fourteen, because that’s what we’re always being told:  ”Show, don’t tell.”

Okay, I’ll do that.  I wouldn’t want to upset any writing instructors . . .

Life to Mars

NaNo grinds on.  I’m over fifty-five thousand words, and to say I’m going to his sixty-five thousand is a forgone conclusion.  With ten thousand words to go–or there about–I can finish up by Sunday.  I felt good about the writing last night, with the chapter flowing very nicely.  I was also using the Document Target function in Scrivener to hit my goals, and to push myself a little–as in, once I hit my goal, I see the counter for another hundred words, then I hit that and set it for another two hundred words . . . Yes, those programs can help you move along, and get to those word counts that you want to hit.

There was something else that happened to me–in my dreams, of course.  It wasn’t triggered by the news that something “Earthshaking” is coming from Curiosity, or the vision that Elon Musk has for getting to Mars . . . but I think it was Mars that called to me–

Or to one of my characters.

It was just a quick vision, not a real dream, one of those things that comes to you in the hinterlands between sleep and awake.  The things that came to me . . . well, it was food for the story mill.

It was a woman, walking through a desert.  She was in a long coat, and her face was wrapped to keep the dust out of her face, and goggles to keep her eyes clear.  The sky was dark, the sand red, and in the distance there was a city, rising up beyond the rim of something–maybe a ravine, maybe a crater.  The woman stopped to take in the vista, then unwrapped her face–and smiled.

That was all I got before I woke up.

Some time back I had a dream about a woman who was also a mecha pilot, and probably a Muslim as well.  It was an interesting dream, because there were things happening in the dream I didn’t expect.  Since that dream, I get something like a little nudge about the story, but not much beyond that.

The vision that came to me, however–it was related to this story, and to the character.

For some reason I’ve thought of Mars these days, probably because I’ve always found the place interesting.  And with Curiosity now there, more is going to come to light about the Red Planet.  I still have my copy of the Arthur C. Clarke novel, The Sands of Mars, with the famously now-wrong-after-all-these-decades line, “There are no mountains on Mars,” because we know a lot better these days.  The Mars I know these days is not Barsoom, though someone has taken the opportunity to place Barsoom on today’s Mars, which is a very cool thing–though I’m damned if I can find the link right now.  Woe is me.

Perhaps this is the direction my next story is suppose to take:  a tale of struggle upon a Mars that looks slightly terraformed, or maybe with people who have become transhuman, and for whom walking upon the surface without breathing apparatus isn’t that big of a deal.  It’s possible it’s both.  I don’t know at this point–

Because I haven’t started building my world.

Our Lips Aren’t Sealed

First, lets give credit where credit is very much due:  the idea for this came from a post on Ink Out Loud, another great blog about writing and how it makes us, the writers, feel.  Go check it out, and follow.

As for the post in question, I found it waiting for me this morning, a short discussion of The Bechdel Test, and whether your current WiP passes.  If you are somewhat remiss in having not heard about The Bechdel Test, you can find a primer here.  When you’re finished there, you can go check out the movies that don’t pass.  Go ahead, look:  I’ll be right here . . .

All done?  Great.  Let’s move on.

The Test came about because, lets face it, most novels and movies end up being sausage fests.  Look at some of the books that don’t pass The Test:  Lord of the Ring trilogy, eighty percent of Sherlock Holmes and James Bond stories, a lot of the Golden Age science fiction I have on my book shelves, damn hear all of the Dirk Pitt stories . . . and on and on.

When you get into movies:  forget about it.  The original Star Wars trilogy fails like a boss.  Fight Club–are you kidding?  Since the LotR novels failed, it’s a given the movies failed.  And when you’re speaking of the most popular movie of the summer of 2012, you have to put a big “F” on The Avengers because when did you ever see the named women speaking to each other?  (Though I have to laugh when it’s pointed out that Hawkeye has the least screen time, gets brainwashed by the Big Bad and is in need of rescuing, shows the most skin–evening doing a butt and boobs pose in official promo material–and runs like hell when shit is about to get serious–therefore making him the Strong Female Character of the movie.)

Well, then . . . what about the stories you’re working on?

Reading the above post today started me thinking about my current NaNo Novel, Kolor Ijo.  Actually it got me thinking about all my work, but since I’m cranking away on this novel at the moment, it came to mind.  I began looking at the story, and the characters, started thinking about who says what, and came to the conclusion–

It fails.

Why does it fail?  Well, lets look.  One, I do have more than one named female character.  Two, there is a conversation between two of the women–in fact, the entire chapter I worked on last night was all about Indri and Sari having a conversation.

However, when I get to Number Three, that’s where things get shaky.  See, the conversation is about a murderous spirit, and the why for these murders goes back to something one of the women’s father did when they were in the military twenty years before.  Since they are marginally speaking about a man, it sort of fails.

Then again, they were speaking about killing ghosts and the whatnot as well, so I can score a plus–yeah?

I’m not worried about it, because given the places this story goes–and considering the characters–the few times I can get a couple of women together to discuss something besides the XY’s they know isn’t easy.  Then again, I seem to do pretty well on my stories:

When I look back at what I’ve written in the last year–or twenty–I’ve been very good about having female characters in my stories.  Transporting have seven named female character and two male, and the women talk about things like saving a planet, making love in a sub-dimension of reality, and showing a person what their planet looks like from orbit while Rocket Man plays in the background.

Echoes and Diners at the Memory’s End use many of the same characters from Transporting–as well at a couple of added ones, all women–and their discussions tend to be about things other than women.  In Echoes, in fact, you have something along the reverse of The Bechdel Test, where I have two men talking for a long time about a woman.

What of the others?  Couples Dance almost fails until the very end.  Captivate and Control fails, only because there are two characters in the story, a man an a woman–and they’re talking about some stuff that you may not think of as romance, but whatever works, right?

Her Demonic Majesty:  six named women, three named men, several secondary characters of both genders–and at one point I have four women talking about gargoyles and how to blow up a building.  Yeah, that sucker passes by with eyes straight.  And when there is a discussion going on about relationship, it’s between two of the women about their relationship.  No boys allowed, ’cause it’s icky.

And two shorter stories I wrote for the Storytime Trysts blog are very female-centric.  Gotta love those ladies.

Some people may wonder if something like the The Bechdel Test is needed.  If I look at my current story Kolor Ijo, and then got back to the story that first featured these characters, Kuntilanak, I see that The Test is pretty much dead.  Does that make either stories bad?  No.  And if I want to push it, Kuntilanak did have more than one named character, and in a way two of those characters did speak about something other than guys, so–there win there.

But I’ll tell you why something like this needs to be looked at.  It’s because you still have pantie stains like Frank Parlato, Jr., an editor for the Niagara Falls Reporter, who told his film critic Michael Calleri of his feelings for being a manly man, and how he wouldn’t have ever let his sons see any movie that had Strong Vagina as a lead.  (By the way, when I create a band, I’m calling it Strong Vagina.  Taken.)  It’s because you still have people who believe that movie goers won’t watch a film unless it had “two white male leads”.  It’s because there are a lot of people around who think Don Draper is the man because he’s a true believer of “Two C’s in a K“.

It’s because it’s the second decade of the 21^st Century, and a writer reduces women to a stereotype in their stories at their own risk.

As for me?  I just write what I know.  And I know women are amazing.

Just ask.  We’re more than willing to tell you.

But I Liked It

Oh, you miserable day.  Why does thou torment me so much?

Actually, it’s not this day; this day is just getting started, and who knows what it’s got lying in wait for me?  No, no:  I’m talking about yesterday.  Well, not just yesterday–last night.

My dreams.  You killed me with such strangeness.

Don’t ask me how I was back in college without actually taking any college courses, because that’s the way dreams work.  They aren’t suppose to always make sense, but here I was, hanging with friends, driving at breakneck speeds down a country road–like that have here in Indiana by the butt-loads–the windows rolled down, the radio cranked up, the wind whipping everywhere.

And like that–it all went to hell.

Somehow we drove up a huge ramp and launched out into empty space–as in, we were flying over everything.  Then the ground dropped away, and there was about a two hundred foot fall for us to enjoy in what seemed like very slow motion.  You know, you’re falling, but the fall is taking forever.  I even expected my life to flash before whatever was functioning as eyes, but apparently it’s too boring for even a quick death scroll.

Then, we hit bottom . . . and everything was fine.  Seriously.  It was as if we’d just suffered a minor fender bender; the car wasn’t even damaged that badly.  We just stumbled out of the car in shock and collapse wherever we though was a good spot.

That’s when it happened . . .

One of the passengers in this flying death machine was a pretty cute redhead, and as she grew near me, I reached out and gave her a kiss.  Not just a kiss, but one of those, “We survived death; lets make babies!” kiss.  I felt everything:  the touch, the warmth, the tenderness, the excitement . . . I don’t normally feel things in a dream, save for terror or sadness, but this was so nice, so wonderful–

Of course, that meant it also had to go to hell.

Once we all found our way back to whatever crazy ass campus where we stayed–which was so cool it had an indoor baseball field–and no sooner we were back in a library, one where we were the only people there, the girl I kissed came up to me, all pissed to hell and screaming, telling me that I didn’t mean it, that I’d only kissed her because–and here she waves a paper at me–it was all for an assignment!  Apparently there was something on the paper about finding life affirmations and stuff like that, but that’s not important:  the woman I’d kiss was totally burned with me ’cause, when I kissed her after surviving freakin’ death, I didn’t mean it!

Which mean I wasn’t getting any others.

The dream went into a tailspin quickly after that, mostly because I really did want another kiss.  It’s been a long time since I’ve kissed in real life, and the dream one was beautiful.  So to be told that I didn’t mean it, no chance you’re getting another one, loser, really burned me hard.  Not only that, but I lost my car in the snow–which popped up overnight during the summer–and then I couldn’t find my shoes . . .

Man, when things go to hell in my dreams, they go to hell.

Oh, I’ll edit today and put things behind me.  Forget the cute girl who said I didn’t mean my kiss when I totally did.  Forget I cheated death again.

I wonder what the hell I’m gonna get thrown at me tonight?

Write Like a Girl

This may come across as a bit of a rant–which it is, in its own way.  It’s Saturday morning, I’ve been cleaning junk off my computer for two hours, and coffee isn’t helping.  Not to mention, this idea has been bouncing about in my head since lunch time yesterday.

Time to let it out so it can smack down a few items along the way.

Yesterday I was reading a story, one that was intended to be erotica.  It didn’t start off bad; it was written so that it appeared to be an entry in a woman’s diary, and it opened in such a way that you wanted to know more–

That is, until I reached the point where the character described herself as having “B cup boobs”–and just like that, my suspension of disbelief collapsed faster than the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

Maybe I’m being too harsh.  Maybe the writer’s character like referring to her breasts as “boobs”.  Maybe she really does like her boss’ “nice D’s”.  Maybe she’s really focused on cup size when she thinks about breasts.

Or . . . maybe it’s a guy doing the writing, and he has no other way of getting across the idea that one woman has normal-sized breasts, and the other is slightly larger, and figured, “I’ll just have her write about their cup sizes, that’s gonna do the trick!”

I read a few more paragraphs after that, and stopped.  It wasn’t that the writing was bad, but the writer was doing a really crappy job telling the tale from his female character’s perspective.  She didn’t come across as a woman, but more like a guy with a bad idea of how a woman might talk about the sexy.

If you know me through this blog, you know I write a lot of female characters.  I’m not always perfect, but I feel I do a very good job creating characters that are three-dimensional, and fairly realistic.  I was even complemented by one writer, who said my characters were so good, she thought I was a woman.

I take a lot of pride in my characters, because I feel that stories need to be character driven, and if you have crappy characters, you’re going to have a crappy story.  In particular, I like my female characters to come across as intelligent and realistic–mostly because so many stories don’t do the same.  Even when I was writing fetish fiction, I tried to make the women in my stories real, as opposed to just objects for one to wank over.

I understand that finding a woman’s voice is not always easy.  I don’t always find it easy myself, and I’ve worked hard at it over the years.  It’s hard finding a voice for any characters, male or female, but female characters seem to get the short shrift most of the time.  It’s easy to go for the stereotype, to reduce her to some background noise that’s more of a notion of how a woman should act.  And way too many people go that way, because–hey, why not?  Writing is hard, didn’t you know that?

Writers are supposed to be observant; the Watchers of the Watchmen, so to speak.  When it comes to women, though, it seem like all a majority of writers–aka, men–see are B and Bs, and it ends up coming across in their stories.  And if your female character sees herself the same way, you’re not going to get any love from me–or any further reading of your stories.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh.  Perhaps I’m nitpicking over another writer’s style, and my feelings for his characters arise more out of a general dislike for his work.  Maybe I’m just making a big deal out of nothing–

Perhaps, though, I’m hitting the nail on the head, because he’s not the only one guilty of doing this.

Know your characters.  Because taking the easy way makes you a hack.  Who wants to be a hack?

Not this girl . . .