While there, I invented a parlor game of interest to writers and fans in general.  It was inspired by this inspired blog post about matchups between heroes and villains to decide the eternal battle of good versus evil.  However, as the game evolved, it seemed a better name was needed than simply Good versus Evil or Heroes versus Villains.  Instead, taking the name from the most warped match-up that presented itself, let me present Mary Poppins versus Cthulhu.

The rules are fairly simple: You need two players, along with any number of judges and kibitzers to decide the fate of the battle for those cases where the contestants can’t agree.  Each player thinks up a hero or villain from the pages of history or literature, then on the count of three, says the name.  It is then decided which of them would win in a battle to the death, with all their powers and resources brought to bear on the problem.  Players alternate heroes and villains each round, and it’s of interest to writers because it gets you to think about characters strengths and weaknesses and the way things will logically happen in a plot.

I played mostly with John De Cles at the dead dog party at the end of the convention.  With the case of Mary Poppins versus Cthulhu, the logic went as follows: While on the face of it, Cthulhu is an ancient evil elder god who will rise from the waves when the stars are right, if you go with the book version, there’s no contest–Mary Poppins rearranges the stars in the course of babysitting and can also summon Greco-Roman gods as a way to amuse kids on a shopping trip.  She’d banish Cthulhu without even breaking a sweat and do it in time for tea.  And even if she were limited to the powers of the Disney musical version, Cthulhu would find himself in a magical chalk painting with nothing to eat but pearly kings and penguins, and by the time he’d finished that, Mary Poppins, having the power of Julie Andrew’s perfect diction, would be able to banish him by speaking the appropriate eldritch words from the Necronomicon.  For example, “Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious,” which is of course “something quite atrocious” which fits Cthulhu to a T.  However, Cthulhu would at least get to eat Burt the chimney sweep.

In a similar match-up, Willy Wonka was able to deal with the monster from Cloverfield, since he’d previously faced snozwangers, hornswogglers, and those horrible wicked wangdoodles, not to mention vermicious knids which are certainly more than Lovecraftian enough too.  So he’d know what the Cloverfield monster was and how to deal with it, and barring that, would find a use for unsafe Wonka gum and turn it into a blueberry the size of the giant peach.

Evil however was able to take points in unexpected places.  For example, Superman, champion of good and utterly broken superhero, was taken out by the Child Snatcher from Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, who doesn’t have much in the way of power beyond a facility for disguise, a little sweet-talking, and the ability to design a good trap.  Then again, this is what everyone uses to get the better of Superman, so the Child Snatcher is well prepared.  Add a Kryptonite lollipop and Supes was toast.  Eliza from Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also taken out by Lucrecia Borgia, who had never followed her out onto the ice, but instead just poisoned her beforehand.

There were also some embarrassing deaths.  Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist commited suicide after being confronted by Casper the Friendly Ghost (who would not have tried to kill anyone despite the rules of the game, but whose constant attempts at friendship mixed with Bill’s unsuccessful attempts to kill him led to Bill taking his own life).  Lobo the bounty hunter from DC comic simply shot Pongo from 101 Dalmations.  Sauron was utterly unable to tempt Sidartha, who simply threw the One Ring into Mt. Doom without stressing out about it.  And while we were not certain of exactly what went down beforehand, Hans Brinker ended up skating to safety while Snidely Whiplash fell through the ice.

And then there were the odd ones.  Valentine Michael Smith eventually realized Mrs. Lovett was a bad person and “sent her away” but then proceeded to eat the meat pies anyway.  And while Shirley Temple was successfully assimilated by the Borg Collective, adding her uniqueness to their own led to the Borg Ship “Lollipop” and probably the strangest Borg Queen ever, absolutely ruining their street cred as villains and handing the round to Shirley.

It’s been interesting.  After I get a work in print form I generally read it once, then don’t read it again unless I have to do so for some reason.  And re-typing is not just re-reading: the act triggers all the editorial impulses that are generally in play when I’m working on a final edit of a story.  Do I change stuff?  Leave it alone because it’s now an Historical Document?  Six of one and eight of the other? Generally I don’t change what I’ve already written, except when I do.  But retyping has been necessary, and I’ve learned a number of useful things during that process.  

First: I wasn’t a terrible writer when I started out doing this stuff.  There are some sentences (curiously, they’re often sentences I remembered being very proud of at the time they were written) which now strike me as forced, arty, too cute.  But over all the word-work is solid, and the stories genuinely affect me.  This is as it should be: if I don’t pull my own chains, how am I going to pull anyone else’s?

Second: I wish I had pulled out all those too cute, forced, arty sentences that I loved so well then.  I still have sentences I love when I’m writing, but I tend to love them, now because they say exactly what I want, simply, or they capture the character clearly, not because I was showing off with words.

Third: I look at some of the stories and wonder where they came from.  I remember writing them all, and the genesis of some of them is very clear.  ”Willie,” a story about a mad scientist who raises the monster as his own son, was a direct result of seeing the Kenneth Branagh Frankenstein at a point in my life when I had a toddler in the house.  Others–”Papa’s Gone A-Hunting”, for example–appear to have come from the everywhere into the here.  I didn’t have kids when I wrote it, but the story is about an astronaut’s wife who is having a hard time adjusting after a miscarriage.  And it’s about friendship, too.  Also pottery.  But why I wrote this story, what its source was in my own head, is now a mystery to me.  ”Cuckoo,” grew out of a workshop where a stray comment about something else–”The gargoyle speaks!”–sparked the story about a woman who adopts a foundling child who turns out to be not quite human.

Fourth: some basic themes emerge.  I doubt anyone will ever write scholarly papers about my work, so it’s left to me to note that, even before I was a parent, parenthood seemed to loom in my writing.  So does loneliness.  So does making your own family.  So does the different forms that love takes.  Given that I got my start writing romances, it’s perhaps natural that some of the stories–”Somewhere in Dreamland Tonight,” for example, have a strong romantic undertone.  Others don’t.  Don’t ask me: I only write here.

I’m going to keep keyboarding and adding stuff to my bookshelf at BVC until I have all my old stories there.  Partly, yes, I want them to be written.  Partly, also, because they’re pretty good, and I’m pleased about that.  And partly because I’m discovering some real pleasures in retyping and closely re-examining work that is–some of it, anyway–now old enough to vote.

It’s a useful process; I recommend it to you.

*Doesn’t that sound like invaders swarmed into my home, tied me up, replaced my hard drive, and left? Nah: I brought my laptop in for a keyboard issue, didn’t back up anything but my most recent work files, and…they replaced the hard drive. Still not sure why it needed to be done, but, O well.

Fort Freak

Aside from the good feeling of having a proposal accepted, there’s also the writer’s anxiety about writing about something you don’t know and fear of getting it wrong.  Mary Anne Mohanraj (also among the writers, and new to Wild Cards) was writing about the same thing, relative to Fort Freak being a police story, something she knows little about beyond what she’s seen on television.  My knowledge of police dealings has a slight benefit in that one of my best friends had studied to be a cop (until health issues made him change to lawyer) and his brother is a cop, and I have other friends who work in law enforcement, so I have people to run legalities by so I won’t run too far afoul of Sjöberg’s Law of Cinematic Inaccuracy.   (”Movies get everything wrong. Hacking-based movies are laughable to hackers, military-based movies are laughable to members of the armed forces, and Indiana Jones movies are laughable to archaeologists.”)  Or, as it’s recently been termed on tvtropes.org, having a story “Dan Browned,” a subset of the trope “Did Not Do the Research.”

Of course, there are sins and sins.  Television budgetary concerns can excuse Television Geography and even “The Mountains of Illinois”, but novels and short stories?  Not so much.  I’ve read short stories set in San Francisco where people had a picnic in Candlestick Park (not realizing that it’s a baseball/football stadium) or walked from Alameda to downtown SF (somehow forgetting that not only is this quite a distance, but the bay is in the way).  And these were published too.

So, I’ll confess my failing: I’ve never visited New York.  Neither state nor city.  But I’ve written stuff set there.  Most recently for my story in Busted Flush (the scene cut for pacing and plotting, not inaccuracy), but before as well.  And now I’m about to do it again.

On the plus side, I’ve at least touched Connecticut brownstone (the Flood Mansion in San Francisco is built of the stuff, imported at ruinous expense back in the day) and being familiar with the architecture of San Francisco and other cities helps, in that what was built in one city was then reproduced in other cities of the era, often by the same architects.   (Driving around Mexico City a few years ago, I was getting deja vu, thinking at times I was in parts of San Francisco or New Orleans or even downtown San Jose.)  And with Wild Cards being an alternate timeline which diverges in 1946, there are structures which were knocked down in our Manhattan which can still exist in the world of Wild Cards.  Not tipping my hand too much, but I’m currently researching  one of those, both because it’s neat in terms of alternate history to preserve something rather than destroying everything, and because if I’m pulling from museum archives and photographs, I don’t have to worry that much about someone who actually lives somewhere looking up from the book and rolling their eyes about how I’ve got it wrong.

I’ll also be running the story by some native New Yorkers, so I can get the errors caught before publication.  But right now, it’s research time.

Witch Way to the Mall

This was going to be a small announcement that I’ve got a story coming out in Esther Friesner’s Witch Way to the Mall this next June, and Baen is offering five of the stories early, including mine (you have to click all the way to the end to find it, since it’s not linked in the contents), but, well, it’s sort of morphed into a rumination on copyrights and giving it away for free.

This was prompted by a short letter I got last night from Paizo, a gaming company I’ve bought from before and who has given me some very nice PDFs of their other games as free samples:

Dear Kevin,

Wizards of the Coast has notified us that we may no longer sell or distribute their PDF products. Accordingly, after April 6 at 11:59 PM Pacific time, Wizards of the Coast PDFs will no longer be available for purchase on paizo.com; after noon on April 7, you will no longer be able to download Wizards of the Coast PDFs that you have already purchased, so please make sure you have downloaded all purchased PDFs by that time.

We thank you for your patronage of paizo.com. Please check out our other downloads at paizo.com/store/downloads.

Sincerely yours,
The Paizo Customer Service Team

This has prompted a great deal of talk on the Paizo and Wizards boards and elsewhere, with a press announcement from Wizards saying they were shocked shocked! to find that people were violating their copyrights on the internet, and they’re now suing people as far away as Poland and the Philipines — this particularly ironic since a number of years ago, they themselves violated the copyrights of a number of authors, myself included, with the publication of the Dragon Magazine compilation CD.  But the fact that my very first professional sale (if not publication credit), which was reprinted by Wizards without my permission, was then pirated around the globe without Wizards’ permission?  I suppose I could fall into a fit of apoplexy that my words my precious words! were no longer under my control.  But since I’ve been giving that article away for free on my website for years, the mental chain is more: sauce, gander, world’s tiniest violin.

This isn’t to say that I don’t think Wizards has the right to pull those works they do hold copyright to from publication, but giving customers who’ve already paid for the work less than twelve hours notice is rather bad form.  Moreover, I think it’s inane to cut off electronic reprints of out-of-print books, especially when there’s a demand for them and the fans will have to chose between pirate networks and the absurd prices of antiquarian booksellers.  And when I say absurd, I mean absurd: Last night I went on to Half.com to get a book I wanted, and while I was there, the engine (which had remembered my previous searches) told me I could get a copy of  Wild Cards Card Sharks, which has my first professional fiction publication, for only $1.37.  This seemed absurdly reasonable, and since I’d heard they were going for much more (and I only have two copies myself) I decided to snatch it up, only to find that the price had jumped to $53 once I clicked on the link and it was absurd the other way.

I’m not going to pay $53 for a paperback.  Moreover, I don’t expect any fan to.  And it’s not like I’d see any of that money from the antiquarians in any case.  I’d rather the fans download it from Polish pirates, then buy something current (such as, for example, Busted Flush or Witch Way to the Mall).

Which I suppose brings us full circle: There are free stories–regardless of how they got there–and if you like them, you can buy more stories.

In her well-famed essay, to which I refer you for reference, the great loremistress lists the following thirty-one words as being the components of eighty percent of all craft names:

• Wolf     Raven Silver     Moon     Star
• Water     Snow  Sea     Tree     Wind
• Cloud     Witch     Thorn     Leaf      White
• Black     Green     Fire     Rowan Swan
• Night     Red     Mist     Hawk     Feather
• Eagle     Song     Sky     Storm     Sun
• Wood

Aside from modern witches, Wiccans and neo-pagans, this list also holds true with the majority of witches and wizards in fantasy fiction, especially popular roleplaying games, and is thus of use and interest to the writers and readers thereof.  But with all due deference to the esteemed lexicographer, her rule breaks down in one crucial area: evil overlords and wicked enchantresses.

With the exception of the always serviceable “Black” and “Night,” few evil overlords or wicked enchantress use more than one word from the above list in their craft names, seldom two, and never three.  The same holds true for the titles of books chronicling their black deeds.  However, this is not to say that the practitioners of the black arts are any more original than their white and off-white colleagues.  They simply draw from a second, but even more limited, word list.

After perusing my vast library of blasphemous texts and eldritch tomes (mostly the aforementioned fantasy novels and gaming supplements), I, Lord Ooky Hellwrought, have found the same sixteen soul-searing words repeated again and again.  Herewith, my addenda:

• Bane     Blood     Bone    Curse    Dark
• Death    Dire    Doom    Dread     Fell
• Foul    Grim    Hell    Hex    Nether
• Shadow

These words may be combined with those from Lady Pixie Moondrip’s original list in the same manner, or, for added effect, may be added to professional titles.  Dread pirates and blood ninjas can charge more than mere ninjas and pirates.  And while no one is much impressed by a merchant or thief, the same cannot be said of death merchants and shadow thieves.  (Lord Ooky Hellwrought notes that a few professions, such as hairdressers and proctologists, are beyond help.  Aspiring evil overlords and wicked enchantresses would do best to not list these on their resumes.)

As for me, I personally prefer to read or view for the first time without knowing what is going to happen;  I like to experience the plot “in real time” with all the surprises, setbacks, revelations and shocks that may entail.  I enjoy the experience of my own reactions, and if I really really like a book or film I will read/see it again, which provides yet another experience, the experience of watching the known story unfold and anticipating or recognizing the way the narrative builds and twists.

Others will approach the reading (viewing) experience differently, and that’s as it should be.

But I want to talk a little here down a sideline, not so much about “plot points as spoilers,” but about the larger sense of preconception.

We carry preconceptions with us everywhere, in all aspects of our lives.  Our preconceptions filter how we see and experience and react to the things we come in contact with.  This is inevitable.  (And in my experience, the people who most insist that they are truly objective and function beyond such filters are often the ones who are most fooling themselves.)

I just finished reading a novel with minimal preconceptions as to its content.  This was an odd but pleasurable experience.

A few months ago at the bookstore browsing, I came upon the Alastair Reynolds selection and recalled that

1) I had read his first novel and liked many elements of it although it hadn’t totally worked for me
AND
2) I hadn’t read anything else by him since that novel
BUT
3) I knew he receives consistently good reviews.

So I first ascertained which of the novels on sale were seemingly not part of a series.  Then I picked up what appeared to be a standalone.  I purposefully avoided reading the synopsis on the back cover.  I read the first chapter and found it engaging.  So I bought the book, knowing only that it was what I call Big Ticket science fiction, with probably some Nifty Concepts to be thrashed through, and something to do with Paris.

Those are actually plenty of preconceptions, but fewer than I would normally have when I might pick up a novel or sit down to watch a film or tv series having heard bits and pieces about the setting, set-up, plot, or character conflicts.  You know, the kid is growing up in his relatives’ house but he’s really a great wizard, or that one about the evil and good twin only that isn’t revealed until the sixth chapter (so then you’re waiting for it), or it’s set in a world where there was a nuclear war a thousand years ago (so you’re looking for hints), or or or.  I rarely am able to approach a book or film or tv show these days without rafts of plot or character or style or critical preconceptions.  Sometimes I like that but often preconceptions just annoy my intake mechanism, which prefers the revelatory vista, like driving cross-country on a road never before traveled:  Whoa, look there!

In this case, I had no clue as to the plot or characters or Nifty Concepts.  Nuthin.  All I knew was that it was sci-fi, albeit with an opening chapter seemingly set in late 50s Paris with no apparent skiffy element.  And I had an expectation, mostly from that quick read of the first chapter, that the writing would be good.

Which means I was able to enjoy the unfolding story without seeing too much into it, without anticipating beyond my normal tendency to guess what might come next, without settling too many expectations over the landscape or plot.

I was fortunate enough to watch the first season of Veronica Mars (via Netflix) and the first season of The Wire in much the same way, having only a vague idea of the set-up (girl detective, or complex Baltimore cops and drug dealers character/city study) and a ton of positive recommendations to go by.  What I didn’t have were much in the way of expectations on what I would find inside.  That lack of expecation enhanced my enjoyment.

In fact, there have been times when expectation has killed my enjoyment as a reader or viewer;  it can get very hard for me to set aside preconceptions once they are in place.  It shouldn’t (and it doesn’t always), but I’m weak that way;  I’m sure many of you are stronger.  And as I said above, those who are indifferent to spoilers are perfectly right to read fiction and view shows in a way that works for you.  It is how it is.  This is just how it happens to work for me.

There’s an additional entire branch of this discussion that I haven’t gone into here:  I’ve seen folk comment on a book or film/tv, and it has seemed to me (reading and judging between the lines, whether fairly or unfairly I can’t say) that the reader has come to the book with preconceptions that override anything else.  That they end up reading the book or viewing the film/tvshow through those preconceptions rather than giving it a chance to speak for itself.  This can serve the narrative ill or well, depending on the nature of those preconceptions.  But it does change the experience of reading.

So I was delighted to read Alastair Reynolds’ CENTURY RAIN with so few preconceptions.  I enjoyed the novel.  You might, too, if Big Ticket sci-fi is your cuppa.  But I’m not going to tell you what it’s about.

I’ve written a lot of books.  Traitors’ Gate (due August 09 USA with Tor Books USA and early Sept 09 with Orbit Books UK) will be my 19th published novel.  That’s counting The Golden Key, the collaboration I wrote with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson, but not counting the two early unpublished works which are unpublishable and will remain that way because they’re also really embarrassing.  Hey, I was young once, too.

That’s not my point.

My point is, that I continually strive to improve as a writer.  I want to write better books, not worse ones.  I want to get more disciplined, not more lazy.  I want to hone my craft, not become dull and stagnant.

So obviously, this being my goal, I work to make each book better than the ones that came before.  I use the usual methods.  I try to recognize and repair my weaknesses and continue to play to and heighten my strengths.  I attempt to keep an artisan’s eye on repetitive flaws so I can get rid of them or at the least lessen their impact on the text.  The things I’m good at, I remain alert about so I don’t get sloppy.  I try to push myself.

Many books ago, I decided that one way to push myself was to choose a specific craft goal for each book as I was writing it.

By that I do not mean that I only work on one craft element per book.  I’m always working to build on what I’ve learnt before.

What I do mean is that with each book I pick a specific element or trick or device or thing I think has been problematic, and flag that as my craft goal for that specific novel.

I wish I had kept a list all this time, because I’ve forgotten what my various goals were for the different books, and it would be interesting to trace the progress of my goals.

They might have been things like:
1) work on narrative drive, on trying to make the narrative implacable

2) channel emotional intensity in interactions (don’t keep emotional distance)

3) focus on making all third person description of landscape and other people’s reactions fit the particular pov, that is, would be the things the character would notice, which will change with each pov shift

4) tailoring details to fit the tone or intensity of each scene

With Shadow Gate, the goal was:  cut extraneous verbiage and make every detail and digression count.  (This is a huge problem for me.)

With Traitors’ Gate, I worked on two specific goals.

The first was specific to this particular novel and would not necessarily have been applicable to any given novel I had written or might write, in that I had an extremely complex plot with multiple pov characters that had to be layered down exactly the right way and at the right time to make the plot work AND to make sure I completed this plot in this volume, because I was very very determined that this not become a four volume trilogy.  So in a way, that goal doesn’t quite fit the “craft goal” model as it was too specific to the book in question.

The second was to work on how small character actions and movements (literally) are handled within scenes.  I wanted to emphasize using them to point and intensify character interaction in a way that would create and enable the emotional impact received by the reader.  I admit that during the period I was writing Traitors’ Gate I was also watching the first four seasons of the HBO series The Wire, and I was pretty heavily influenced not by the content but by the execution of that series as I thought about how I wanted to write and execute scenes in Traitors’ Gate.

Again, it’s not that I don’t do these things or attempt to do these things as I’m writing all my books.  But I am not a perfect writer;  I make lots of mistakes, and if I were to try to focus to that deep a degree on every problem I have with every book I write, I would lose my grasp on all the threads.  By giving special attention to a single specific craft goal for any given book (without losing the usual awareness of trying to write the best book I can), I think it helps me really knead that skill or device or element down through my process so I can more readily continue using it in subsequent books.

Well, while I don’t want to give any spoilers, Fox has put Dollhouse alongside The Sarah Connor Chronicles in what makes sense as a scifi block, but had promos with Summer Glau and Eliza Dushku that, if the sound were turned off, looked pretty much like 976 commercials:  “SciFi girls want to talk to you.  Just call them.  They’re waiting….”

Regardless, there was talk at the party about how Fox had asked for revision up on revision so that the first few episodes had been turned into something other than what Joss was wanting.  Something with more cop drama and explosions.  But since I can’t really discuss the truth of this without spoilers, they’ll be there after the fold:

Here’s what I saw in the pilot.  We’ve got this girl named Caroline (Dushku) who gets into some nameless but undoubtedly bad trouble such that she makes a Faustian bargain with Unpleastant Authority Figure Lady (hereinafter UAFL) such that UAFL gets to scrub her mind and use her body for five years, after which point UAFL puts her memories back and all the unpleasantness goes away for good.

After being brainscrubbed for UAFL by Blond Geek Boy, Caroline is rechristened “Echo” (with nice mythological resonance, but with the scifi explanation that all the dolls’ names are just military lingo for the alphabet) and goes to live in the Dollhouse, which looks rather like a fancy health spa except for the electroshock therapy sessions going on upstairs where they scrub people’s minds and download them onto old zip drives.  (It’s amazing the uses you can find for old technology.)

The Dollhouse requires a great deal of suspesion of disbelief.  One is that scientists with a health spa filled with childlike innocent dolls will let them just wander around anywhere they want, including into electroshock therapy sessions which Echo finds understandably upsetting and not the massage therapy she was looking for.  We also see Amy Acker playing a young Geek Girl With a Significant Facial Scar Not Covered by Make-Up.

More problematic than that, the basic premise is that ludicrously rich people are paying for the dolls to be downloaded with personalities for their own personal “Fantasy Island” weekends, whether that fantasy is sex or assasination or something in between.  Which is fine, except that in the ubiquitous world of cell phone cameras and MySpace pages, its not that credible that the dolls would remain anonymous for that long, especially with the high class circles they mingle in.

Which of course gets us to another of the players, the Handsome Cop Guy who’s out to track the Dollhouse down.  We find out that he has a hobby of being a boxer, but I’m thinking that a few less headblows and general thuggery and a bit more sneakiness and eavesdropping and he’d already have tracked it down.

Anyway, we find that Echo’s first mission is to be fantasy motorcycle party girl for some guy who pays for the perfect weekend and the perfect girl to go with it, then finishes it off with giving her a Kay Jewelers cheap gold heart pendant which looks rather sub-par for someone in the gazillion tax bracket.  Regardless, she gets her memories scrubbed, becomes Echo again, then becomes super negotiator woman to save the kidnapped daughter of some latino mob boss.

As super negotiator woman, we find that Echo has been downloaded with not only real people’s personalities, but also their disabilities.  She’s now nearsighted so she can wear sexy librarian glasses and asthmatic so she can pull out an asthma puffer and have attacks at dramatically important times.  This is explained by Blond Geek Boy, basically him saying that all the dolls are roleplaying game characters and you have to take some disads to get extra points to put in the stuff you want.  Really.  Well, those weren’t his exact words, but pretty much.  I was wanting to ask him what would happen if one of the dolls was downloaded with the memories of an amputee or someone of the opposite sex.  Or both.  “My legs!  I have legs!  I can walk again!  And I have breasts too….  WTF?”

I expect this is something we’re not supposed to think about too hard, or at all, but in any case, Echo is paired with Former Cop Guy (and token African-American cast member, so don’t confuse him with Handsome Cop Guy) who helps her along with the negotiations until things go south since it turns out that one of the memories that Echo was imprinted with came from some woman who was formerly a victim of Child-Abusing Kidnapper #3, which is why she became a super negotiatior, before commiting suicide and having her brain put on a zip drive by Blond Geek Boy (or maybe Geek Girl with a Significant Facial Scar).

It’s actually a cooler plot twist than it sounds, and the first episode ends with another cool plot twist of someone watching old sorority videos of Caroline in the middle of corpses of the people who possibly were the former owners of the sority videos.

In any case, that’s the pilot of Dollhouse, which has some intriguing characters, but more cops and former cops shoehorned in than any non-cop show really needs.  Instead of a dogged FBI boxer, why not a reporter?  It certainly worked for The Hulk, and would be easily modernized to a blogger.  And I’m really not certain why The Dollhouse is employing a former cop either, except in that I strongly suspect some Fox exec got it into their head that they need to put cops in everything, so Joss compromised with a former cop.

Scuttlebutt has it that of the next two episodes, one will be better, one will be worse, then the show should hit some sort of stride.  Which I dearly hope for, since I’ve enjoyed Joss’s previous shows.  This?  Well, there was an awful lot crammed in.  But we’ll see where it goes.

Some good things have come out of this, though: some very thoughtful, intelligent posts, many of them by bloggers whose words I would not otherwise have discovered. One of these was Mary Dell’s New Criticism vs. Post-Modernism, with a Side of Privilege. It got me thinking about the great reader/writer relationship.  Go read it: I’ll wait.

Back?  Good.  Okay, here’s the thing.

When I read, partly because I was trained this way, I can be very interested in the author’s world view, place in history, all the things that informed the writing of the book. I can be interested, or at least aware of, critical response (by critics, or just by friends who’ve discussed the same work).

When I write, I am somewhat aware of my own influences (largely because, when I’m working in an historical or fantasy milieu I’m trying to defeat some of those influences in pursuit of a sense of other.  And I try to be aware of my readers’ influences as well: I don’t use the historically accurate word “dude” in the Regency because, well, dude.  No one would believe it.

But when I’m reading (because I wasn’t raised as a post-modernist, I suppose) I am often completely unaware of my own influences, my privilege, my prejudices.  If I react negatively to a written work I tend to think it’s the work’s fault: usually because it was predictable or boring or ill written or didactic.  But now I’m wondering if I don’t put those labels on a book that might have offended me for some other reason: it was predictable because it was sexist.  It was ill-written because it was anti-semitic.  When some of these values are subtle, I might not see them at all.

So my new New Year’s Resolution (because it’s still January, I figure I can make New Year’s Resolutions) is to try to be a little more aware of what I hadn’t been seeing, and a little more aware of what I’m bringing to the table.  It’s only fair.

The usual denigrating points were made about young adult literature not being literature to those who don’t actually read it, but that’s SOP.

More of interest to me was this quote:

MISHAN: Teen-age boys don’t read, apparently. As Caitlin Flanagan writes in [Atlantic Monthly], an adolescent girl “is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.”

Not long ago I was reading some seventeenth century letters and essays that dealt with this very subject. Alarm! Girls of that tender age, just before marriage, are devouring novels! Oh noes, it’s the end of the world! Girls are also writing reams of letters to their friends about same novels. Charlotte Lennox wrote her Female Quixote to make a statement about this very danger, but it ends up too preachy for most modern readers to enjoy. Jane Austen did a far better job in the first half of Northanger Abbey when she depicts two young women talking passionately about reading–and then comes that brilliant discussion of novels, why they are unjustly (and hypocritically) condemned, whereas fictional but pompous speeches put in the mouths of historical figures are considered respectable and worthy.

My exploration into the history of female writers has led me to two conclusions: that with the rise of literacy young women especially were reading, dreaming, scribbling long letters as they found like-minded companions, writing their own poetry and novels (and fan fiction), in an effort not just to satisfy those emotional and spiritual cravings, but to better their lives. Everyone wanted a better life, for whatever definition of better fit. The reading and writing of letters et al was a way of trying out the ideas, inventing scenarios, in a pleasurable way. Certainly more pleasurable than sitting with one’s hands folded and back straight, listening to long hectoring sermons about Female Duty.

It seems to me that despite all predictions of the death of literacy that young women now, with perhaps more liberties than ever before, are still reading. Are they reading for the same reasons their foremothers did?

The article goes on about teen boys’ reading. Some maintain they don’t read, with few exceptions–with one person saying, …Those men end up joining the bourgeoisie in two ways: law school and untouched home libraries full of leather-bound Shakespeare. which I think says more about the speaker than about teen boys who read angsty and angry poetry, or listen to same in musical form.

I think the article is dead wrong to assume that boys don’t read. Speaking as a junior high and high school teacher for 20 years, I found that, as in my youth, when my male peers devoured comics (which were dismissed as trash) a lot of boys’ reading passes under authoritarian radar. Many boys read non-fiction, complicated game manuals, all kinds of material lying outside the purview of those Summer Reading Lists chockfull of earnest books deemed Good For You.

There’s another possibility, and that’s that many boys aren’t seen reading—they don’t make it a social act as do so many girls. Do boys read for different reasons than girls?

I read the Atlantic Monthly article quoted above, but except for a couple of points, found it disappointing. The writer gave a vivid example of reading to learn the “how tos” of life, but I really think that point is a given for all young folk. Her “I hate Y.A. novels; they bore me” was certainly daunting.

My feeling is that, just as tastes vary not only from person to person but in a single person over time, so does the experience of reading. Is it possible that girls are more likely to make reading a social act rather than a solitary one? A social and creative act? Because what first drew me to reading about the history of the novel, specifically the early novels of the 1600s and the rise of the salons, was how women swiftly organized themselves as soon as they found one another and a shared venue for expression.

Here are some quick impressions from my own non-academic and entirely sporadic reading.

The Renaissance brought about a revival in learning, with an especial focus on classical literature. The Renaissance contributed not just new ideas, but a new paradigm–the idea that the world could be different. From monarch to middle class, the use of classical vocabulary gave you style points–meanwhile, the content of the classics led to extrapolations in various forms of writing about what the ideal world could be . . . which in turn led to ideas about what the ideal man could be. Of course this “man” was assumed to be literate, and Castiglione exhorted in his book of social climbing, The Courtier, “He must be of noble birth.”

But though the language of classical literature was male, guess who else was reading? With the spread of wealth came leisure time, and as women had been denied much involvement in seignorial concerns, they turned to books. Women read, talked, penned reams of letters.

In the 1600s Madame Scud?ry’s novels were not just romances, but long conversations and careful details about courtly behavior. A lot of those conversations were published separately in the latter part of the century as manners manuals. They were meant to depict an ideal of civilized life–but eager young women read them in hopes of emulating those up the ranks, to better their lives.

Meanwhile, Louis XIII’s court was so uncouth that a remarkable woman named Madame Rambouillet opened her house in 1618, and for three decades the haut French courtiers and literati came to her place, instead of the king’s court, to speak about refined love, and other polite subjects. She designed the ruelles, or alcoves, which were to become a standard of most salons; at first made so that the temperature of the room could be controlled, these intimate little partial rooms appealed so strongly that other hostesses raced to make their own.

The definition of public and private was changing. To be private, and intimate, among chosen people, was also to be exclusive. Madame du Deffand, a famous salonniere of the mid-18th Century, took eighteen months to design and furnish her place, to a very specific design. No detail was deemed too trivial; the buttercup yellow silk wallpaper in her entertainment rooms was copied by most wannabe salonnieres throughout Europe.

What did all this mean? The romance is tied up in the betterment of life–the happy ending if all live up to a standard. Unfortunately, the focus here was the betterment of an exclusive society, rather than the betterment of all. Or rather, the two things conflicted, which caused rifts among women publishing in the years before the Revolution. Not surprisingly aristos wanted to hold onto power and privilege, and women born lower down on the totem pole felt that civilization ought to benefit all.

During the patriarchal nineteenth century, there was one calling where women could hold their own with men: reading—and writing.

It’s interesting to me, watching the remarkable organization of fanzine fandom (specifically fan fiction) over the past thirty years, done mostly by women. What’s going on underneath fanfic? A whole lot of stuff. Women writers exploring sexual questions is usually the first thing brought up (or mudball slung); but there is so much more going on—including the notion of transformative story. Are our attitudes toward story, ownership, creativity, and the meaning of ‘author’ changing?