Um, eww.

[mrissa]

I get a medal for being the best homeowner/wife/puppymom in the world today: Ista was playing with a dead gopher in the yard, and I disposed of it.

With its viscera coming out of its nearly-severed neck and its wee little paws all curled.

*SHUDDER*

timprov is not yet up (for those of you coming late to this party: sleep disorders), but I reminded markgritter that if we'd been born a couple of generations earlier, there would have been no question that disposing of dead things in the yard was his job. He was, to borrow the phrase I usually apply to myself, glad to be living in the future.

We're getting the doglet some Listerine.

*SHUDDER*

In happier news, it has been a reading day, mostly, as I am Taking It Easy and not supposed to be working on Sampo on my days off. So I finished Mind of the Raven (and you're a good enabler, pameladean) and a YA anthology called What a Song Can Do. I got it for free and will be passing it on, and for awhile I was theorizing that only people represented by three-letter acronyms on my friendslist should edit YA anthologies. Then I thought of Jane Yolen and the Datlow/Windling projects as well as sdn and pnh, so that theory is out the window. Still, it was all the worst things about bad mainstream YA, condensed down without any of the redeeming bits: MESSAGE! Messagey messagey message! And social relevance! And also some more message! And it was About Muuuuuusic. This is right up there with being About Jeeeeeesus for things I approve of making awful messages. (It's all the vowels, is what.) Stories about music and musicians? Fine, good, cool. Stories that are really trying to have an Uplifting Message About Song? Pfffft.

Then, with some trepidation, I read Charles de Lint's Wolf Moon. ksumnersmith and I have had several conversations about What Is Wrong With Recent De Lint*, but this one was a reprint. And in some ways it was more frustrating: he showed that he knew how to write books without the same twitches. In this one, the bard was Bad News (this is a spoiler from approximately page 5). Nobody else was a Creative Artistic Type, and there was absolutely no wallowing in the magical goodness of Art. So he can do it. So I wish he would. In -- what was it, The Wild Wood? -- one of those, anyway, he was talking about an artist in a rut and what she needed to do to get out, and I thought, well, she could read her own book. And guess that maybe crows and artists in funky clothing were about played out by now, maybe?

But still: one more decent, readable de Lint (with a few twitchy prose moments, but still) is better than none. And I really liked the buxom barmaid who was an actual effective character, and I would have liked her even more when I was first becoming, er, buxom. At that age, I kept running into Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey going on and on and freakin' on about how it was okay to be a late-bloomer, and the plucky adventurous late-bloomers were going to outshine everybody and la la la go late blooming. And the girls who had big tits always came to a boring end. And I read them and thought, well, screw you, then. It's not like you acquire secondary sex characteristics by focusing on them to the exclusion of other things; it's not like I was a GURPS character who spent ten points on boobs and so didn't get horseback riding. By the time I found Suzy McKee Charnas's "Boobs" when I was 14, it almost made me cry for having a cool early-bloomer heroine whose adults were saying the same stupid things adults said to me, and who got to KICK SCRATCH BITE RIP TEAR SHRED *ahem* be the heroine. If I was not from the Upper Midwest, I still probably would have fallen upon suzych's bosom weeping in gratitude last year when I saw her on the elevator in Boston, and that was twelve years after reading the story.

All those visceral 11-and-12-year-old reactions come back now when I come upon slogans like "real women have curves." I know where people are coming from on this, really I do, but 1) skinny girls can have curves -- you can ask the people who've met me, they'll tell you and 2) flat-chested narrow-hipped women are real, too, dammit. It's a big, bad mistake to look at an incorrect overgeneralization and decide that reversing it is the way to make it all better. Not everyone has to be shaped a certain way, no matter what way that is. If you have a 12-year-old with DD boobs, buy her a sports bra before she goes off to slay the dragon, and move on with the story.

(And for the love of Pete, please don't write a story prominantly featuring the heroine going shopping for a sports bra with her mom before slaying the dragon, because -- well, I won't say it's impossible, but it certainly doesn't look easy to pull off as anything but lame. At least don't blame me if you try and fail.)

I think this is one of those situations where it was lucky that I recognized early on that authors were people like me only, I thought at the time, sadly less competent, because I didn't internalize that I was incapable of kicking butt, I just decided that lots of authors were going to be stupid about it. Which is, on the whole, much less destructive. (I don't think I've met any authors yet who seem dubious about my butt-kicking abilities. Certainly none who have seemed to need me to verbally demonstrate. So that's good, I guess. Writers aren't like clergy, is what I'm saying; I don't have to knock them on their butts first to get anywhere in conversation. Not that all clergy is like that, but too many of them make faces like fishes when a twenty-something layperson with tits knows words like "adiaphora" and uses them in conversation.)

Ahem. Right. So I finished the de Lint, and now I'm reading O'Brian's The Truelove. The end of this series is coming up so fast I can smell it from here, and unless O'Brian turns out to be undead, there won't be more. Sigh. Somebody wrote the Zombie Francis Crawford of Lymond; won't somebody write me the Zombie Maturin? (Clearly not the Zombie Jack Aubrey. Poor sad Zombie Jack Aubrey.)

*I haven't read The Blue Girl, so it is excluded from this gripe.

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

Somebody wrote the Zombie Francis Crawford of Lymond

[falls over; twitches]


[claws self back up from floor to ask]

um, who? and where might i get my hands on such a thing?

[rilina.livejournal.com]

minnow1212. Here (http://www.livejournal.com/community/la_la_la_2004/3184.html). It's brilliant.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

People do not fundamentally get what it means to be very tall, especially as a late-bloomer. I'm not very tall myself (5'6"), but I know enough very tall people that I know it's not like being average height but with more cabinets.

Anyway, the What Is Wrong With De Lint Lately:
1) The Redemptive Power of Art and how you can tell the Special People from the Non-Special People at a glance
2) The imagery doing exactly the same things over and over again
3) The obligatory cameos by every single character in the canon
4) The fact that everything has to relate back to Newford somehow
5) The prose tics never improving (okay, we all did the mirror description of the first person narrator when we were 12, but when you have been publishing books for most of my lifetime, it is time to learn a better way to handle this)
...well. I'm tired, so I think I'm done right now, but #1 is big and encompasses a lot for me.

I can go check the novel_gazing archives tomorrow if you like.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

<"http://www.marissalingen.com/080104.html">August 2004: The Onion Girl is as much as got put out in public; mostly it was e-mails between ksumnersmith and me going, "YARG!" "I know, yarg!" "And another thing, yarg!" "Definitely yarg!" Only with more words.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I feared that about Jilly's sister as well, and was glad when she was just Jilly's sister.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I did that, but they didn't seem to have as much content as the one I linked. Except the one with the Block discussion stuff in it, which I prefer to avoid, as it caused Kerfluffle.

(I don't like Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books. At all. I am perfectly willing to like people who do. This is sometimes not good enough.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Some people find the prose charming. I do not. Some people have tried to tell me that I should like them because they support non-traditional families, but in my view they support non-traditional families in the way that romance novels and non-skewed fairy tales support traditional ones, which is to say, not well.

Also, I am fond of plot.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's part of my issue with them, yes: in some ways they're a love song to LA, punctuated only by a love song to New York later in the series, and I am not the slightest bit in love with LA. And I was reading them at a time in my life when I was not feeling very pro-California in general.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I think I like them mostly because they're a love song to - not LA as I've seen it, but LA in its best self, maybe, just as I like Sean Stewart's love songs to Houston and Galveston, despite the fact that I didn't particularly like living there[/understatement].

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

#1 is enough. I'm always blown away by how well some of the most incredible people I know (and know of) can pass for being perfectly 'normal.'

erratum

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Blerg. I meant especially as an early-bloomer.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

*I haven't read The Blue Girl, so it is excluded from this gripe.

People seem to like The Blue Girl who don't like other recent de Lint. So I guess that's good.

I got like three pages into it before hitting--not the Creative Artistic Types, at least. But the People Who Are Explicitly Misunderstood Because They're Too Weird For Everyone Else, And Are Being Snotty About Everyone Else To Boot. And so I bailed. Perhaps unjustly early, but I figured I'd cut my losses. Alas.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'll pick it up at some point, I feel pretty sure. From the library if nobody gets it from my Amazon wish list. Writing YA seems to fix some people's brains and break others; we'll see.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But to address more directly: I know exactly what you mean about the Aggressively Weird and Misunderstood Characters, and sometimes they get on my very last nerve as well.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

One of the things I dearly love about C. J. Cherryh's Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider is the way she goes after that cliché and harpoons it.

One smackdown, laid.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Cecil Castellucci did. It's called Boy Proof. *g*

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think many of us went through that phase. It just drives me nuts when people aren't out of it by, say, 21. You've either been to college or out of school for several years by 21. Stop proclaiming yourself "the weird one." If there is a clear "weird one," your group of friends is not interesting enough. Go get some additional interesting friends and construct your self-image around something else, preferably several somethings.

(Obviously not Moi-you, general-you.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I lived in Wahlstrom Hall, home of geeks, artists, druggies, and various combinations of those three traits. At Gustavus, if you tried to get all "I'm so weeeeeird," people would respond, "Duh, you live in Wahlstrom" and move on with their lives. It made us a demographic. It was good.

In my fiction studio, everyone could guess, without a moment's hesitation, that I lived in Wahlly. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

[sraun]

He was, to borrow the phrase I usually apply to myself, glad to be living in the future.

ROFLOL! Irene I both found the whole sequence vastly amusing!

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Where'd the dead gopher come from? Did Ista make it dead all on her own or was it a Discovery?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We don't know. I really prefer to go with the Discovery theory, especially as she was joyfully playing with the corpse (*SHUDDER*) but did not seem to be all that clueful on causing any further deliberate damage. But she can go off in the woods and do stuff, so I don't know for sure.

*SHUDDER*

[greykev.livejournal.com]

Poodles were bred to be hunting animals, Ista dislikes the gophers being in her yard. It seems pretty open-and-closed to me. ::shrugs::

Even if you choose not to hunt she'll still have the insticts/traits for it, perhaps she would benefit from some retriever training to know it's a bad thing to, er, 'worry her catch'? Plus, since she's smart, you could probably train her to fetch the remote without chewing dimples into it. :)

None of which makes cleaning up dead rodent any better. Hope tomorrow's surprises are of better quality.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, Kev, big leaps there.

The head was nearly off the gopher, but there was no blood on the dog at any time during the day. That indicates to me that not only did she likely not kill it, she likely did not find it immediately after its death. Recently-dead things bleed.

Also, hunting is not nearly as much the instinctive behavior people think it is. Yes, a dog will shake a toy as if to break its neck, but on the other hand, dogs who are quite intelligent but untrained and un-hungry will often catch a bird or small critter in their mouths and then just hold it there like, "Okay, what now?" Puppies have to learn hunting techniques from their mothers, and as we don't want to encourage her to do it at all, we're not going to go that route. Teaching her "no" and "drop it" is much simpler than teaching her to bring us dead things we don't particularly want.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

The De Lint which bothered me most: Trader. Protagonist is magicked into another man's body -- and doesn't realize it till he looks in a mirror. Looked at the ending, and he still isn't aware of the difference unless he looks down at parts of the body or sees himself in a mirror.

A different body would feel different.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, but that's a piece of fairly isolated suckage, whereas some of his other suckage spreads out and puts tendrils into even non-sucky things.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, I, too, wish I had had early-blooming heroines to read about (menarche at 11, thank you very much). It might have helped.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It certainly couldn't have hurt. Or even, if not early-blooming, not so aggressively late-blooming.

I was 9. Ohhhhhh, the suck.

And my well-meaning teachers, when they finally got around to teaching the basic "parts and their function" sex ed when I was 10, kept badgering me: didn't I have any questions about what it would be like to have my period? Wasn't there anything I wanted to know about how to be prepared? Look at the 10-year-old with bigger boobs than yours, lady, the kid who usually has a million questions about everything, and consider that maybe, just maybe, she no longer has to ponder what it will someday be like in the fuuuuuture when she bleeds.

Idiots.

I have no patience for people who refer to menarche as "becoming a woman." I was a little kid. I remained a little kid. I am eternally grateful that my folks and my godfathers recognized that fact.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ai-yi-yi.

I know some women find/found their experience of menarche empowering and a sign of adulthood and all the rest of it. I know this, but I've never quite been able to believe it. Because, yeah, I was still a kid. A kid trapped in this body that had an agenda I didn't even want to know about. I might have been a lot more comfortable without the "becoming a woman" ideology. I wasn't ready to become a woman, and I knew it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't really feel trapped, but that didn't mean I felt like a Woman, either.

Most people I have met who found their menarche empowering were late-bloomers who had been waiting and waiting.

I still sometimes have a pang when I see my friends' 11-year-olds curled up in their laps, casual as kittens, because I was the height and approximate weight you see me now when I was 11, which is exactly the same height as my mom and grandma. So if I sat on my mom's lap at 10 or 11, it was a political statement, not a comfort to be taken for granted.

On the other hand, I had just an intellectual explosion at 12, and I think it was a great relief to me that people were willing to treat me like more of an adult, as though I was a precocious 15-year-old instead of a precocious 12-year-old. If I'd still looked like a little girl, I would have gotten treated like a little girl intellectually more outside the immediate family, and it would have driven me batshit.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was lucky: my mom was very clueful. Of course, at the time, I was the kind of little girl who told her parents absolutely everything, so they wouldn't have been able to go on in oblivion very long.

Writers are people too

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

"it's not like I was a GURPS character who spent ten points on boobs and so didn't get horseback riding."

This comment is amusing on many levels, including a commentary on what I didn't like about GURPS in my gaming days (one test sesson, no more), and as a social critique. :)

I like authors despite flaws, sometimes. But then aren't we all flawed?

Mack

Re: Writers are people too

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

You mean to tell me that I'm a people? And that many of my best friends are people as well? And that none of us are perfect either as people or professionally?

My goodness. This will take some time to sink in.

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

Obviously, I wasn't as clever late at night as I thought I was. This is a common failing of mine. I was trying to say something about your observation about writers and liking the humanity in their work, even when you see their selves mirrored in a character or a piece in ways that bother you. I didn't quite need jumping on about it; I do apologize for my lack of clarity and expression, though! Undeveloped thoughts will do that for me.

Mack

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry about the jumping. Mostly in my life "[group] is only human" has meant "and you are treating them as though they aren't," which is particularly upsetting when I'm part of that group and in no danger of forgetting it.

A piece of humanity shining through deep flaws can make an otherwise uninspiring piece of art into something resonant. But when an author keeps showing the same pieces of humanity and the same flaws, I can't help but think that some change might be in order: do something, as my dad says, even if it isn't right. Part of being human is that we owe it to ourselves to grow.

[ladysea.livejournal.com]

The guys and I tag-teamed Cel's distasters, but I have gotten animal clean-up twice now. Both bunnies. The guys washed the puppy the first time, the second time, no mess.

I agree alot on the gross factor.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

We're getting the doglet some Listerine.

*SHUDDER*


Thank you. God, that was funny.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

flat-chested narrow-hipped women are real, too, dammit. It's a big, bad mistake to look at an incorrect overgeneralization and decide that reversing it is the way to make it all better.

THANK YOU! I've recently been engaged in some extremely frustrating conversation on that topic, about a knitting book subtitled, "Big, Bold Patterns for Real Women with Real Curves", in which more than half the people commenting, including the authors (who didn't pick that title themselves) totally didn't understand why, perhaps, someone who found that title insulting might not just be oversensitive. As I said there, I understand the problem here, but I don't think combating prejudice with exclusionism is a particuarly effective tactic. I gave up on that discussion when people started making comments like, "It's only a book, anyway!" on the theory that someone who thought that was logical was likely to need more explanation from me than I had time or patience for.

I have a sister-in-law who actually is shaped like a model. I can't say I'm particularly fond of her, for other reasons, but I am fairly sure she's real.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

How odd: it told me this comment had been deleted. Anyway, yes, I think the people who are willing to say it's "just" a book are missing some very crucial points. The solution to one group feeling excluded is not to exclude some different group! Yarg!

[(Anonymous)]

I deleted a previous version because I'd screwed up the italics. LJ really needs an "edit comment" function - or if it has one, I need to learn about it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think they don't want people to pretend they said something different, so that it would look like you said, "I disagree with you," and the next person said, "How dare you say that!"

Still, marking something as edited might still do.