Posted on by Eileen Young

Meta: Karl Marx

This was written for a contest hosted by a friend of mine, one that focused on songs as prompts for stories and poetry. Here are the annotations I included with my original submission:

Annotations:
Songs referenced:
Rag and Bone by The White Stripes
45 by Shinedown (word count)
Believe by The Bravery
Other:
“Religion is the opiate of the masses.” ~ Karl Marx
Religions as represented by their flags (rainbow)

I include those here because that is the context the judge was given, and context is everything.

Rag and Bone was the original prompt, but I was inspired by the concept of the contest to include as many songs as I felt fit. All three songs have similar kinds of grasping desperation, and that’s what I wanted to embody.

It was the confluence of listening to Rag and Bone for the contest and Believe from my regular writing playlist that solidified the idea of begging and being on the fringes of society and coming across almost like a caricature of a junkie, but for ideology rather than anything physical.

There’s some deliberate ambiguity as to whether atheism is the ground state from which one gets high or whether it’s a sharp drop from normal.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Poem: Karl Marx

Hey c’mon and give me something
something to believe
something to breathe (for)
something to inhale
You don’t need all that ideology, do you?
Spare some philosophy for a poor man
You’ve got your opium rainbow
and I’m stone cold down here with the atheists
Posted on by Eileen Young

Thought Bubbles

This was not quite the article I was looking for, but it covers the gist of it. Not having people disagree with and criticize you is bad for you as a person. More importantly, it is also bad for you as a writer.

For example, I know very few people who vote conservatively. Those I know who do are mostly relatives, or not people I discuss politics with on any kind of regular basis. This creates a thought-bubble for me, where everyone I discuss politics with is fairly liberal. This leads to things like blank incomprehension when my favoured party does not win elections. Blank incomprehension is bad, and means I am not paying attention and probably cannot write about the topic effectively.

If I do the same sort of things in writing, that means I will end up mostly with second readers (beta-readers) who agree with me or have a similar style. With similarities in style, they are less likely to notice weaknesses in mine. That would lead to putting inferior work out into the world, which would be terrible.

I am lucky enough to have a fairly wide circle of friends who write and are online a lot. So, when I finished a short story I wanted to post for someone’s birthday, only a couple hours before the end of that birthday, it was to the online writer-friends I turned for feedback. Of those people who were on, one flatly refuses to read fanfiction, while another has a hard time with graphic medical things (my story was both fanfiction and graphically medical). Another eschewed fanfiction in general, probably wouldn’t object to reading it from me, but has enough antipathy to some of the plot elements that their critique would be more focused on that than on the writing. Another, newly acquired, I hadn’t ever seen critique from, so I was not completely sure of it’s potential utility. I asked Pat and Theodore to read it, because even though Pat as a rule doesn’t read fanfiction, he’s fast and can concentrate on technical things, and Theodore is in the same fandom and was able to comment on things like consistent memetics in the story universe.

Both of them had minor issues with something (different somethings). Pat’s was based on terrible imagery, and I ended up not taking his advice because the original amused me too much and was also something of a fandom joke. Theodore’s was based on consistency, but we discussed it and deemed it plausible given other factors. This disagreement and discussion made me feel more confident in the story, because they both have different approaches to writing than I do, and so if this was the most they could come up with to nitpick, then I was probably doing reasonably well.

Am I still in a thought-bubble as relates to writing? Quite possibly. I am doing my best to ameliorate that, though – which is why comments on the pieces I post on Sundays will always be welcome.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Meta: First Person

Perspective and the relationship between the narrator and the story itself fascinate me. Obviously unreliable narrators are one of my favourite things to play with.

That was one of my major motivators in this piece. I wanted a narrator who couldn’t trust their memory enough to portray things as dialog, and I wanted an ephemeral tone to the whole piece. That’s why fog and steam and coffee imagery persist: I wanted the fic to feel like the first inhale of a London Fog.

I had no particular gender in mind for the priest, and so am unsure if this is edgily transgressional or not. The priest was not an important character to either narrative, and so was not assigned a name or gender. Actually, no one got names, because it was not important to what I was trying to do.

Names are usually one of the last things I come up with, and very rarely have any meaning attached other than plausibility. Unless they are from a culture wherein they select their own names, names will have been selected based on what the parents thought was significant, and may or may not have anything to do with the character themselves. I read a lot of amateur fiction wherein the heroine is named something like RavenMoon Bloodless or whatever because they have long black hair and pale skin and oh they had somehow not noticed they are from an ancient line of vampires. My hyperbole is only slight. This personal context is why I shy away from naming characters at all in most short fiction.

I should also admit that this story is a bit over a year old, and I was experimenting with how well I could stay constrained to present tense. Now, of course, there is the Homestuck fandom, so switching between first, second, and third person and past and present tense is as natural as breathing.

I also wanted to work on wrapping things up, and denouement, as it was something that had been frustrating me in working on my novel at the time. I find short stories helpful as scale models of some problems, though the scope is often much more limited.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 2 Comments

Fic: First Person

I love when stories are first-person; I’m not sure, always, whether they’re telling me fact or fiction, memory or dreamy possibility.


The man sitting across the table from me is telling a story in a low soft voice that smells of the artificial sweetener in his coffee. The brown steam-swirls in my own undoctored cup makes heady illustrations of his words. I can’t bring myself to look directly at him – it might make him stop talking, startle him out of this storytelling reverie. And I’m afraid that, once startled, he’ll remember that this memory is private, or lose the thread of the fiction if it is so. 


So I stare into my coffee as he tells me about his impassioned affair with a married priest whose husband had tried so hard to kill him when they were discovered. His hands illustrate his feelings, waving in and out of my field of vision, punctuating tension with broad palm strokes. His exact words get lost in the fog of emotion and cadence that drifts softly over me. 


I can’t bring myself to look for them too hard. 


The fog cannot hold it’s density; probably a combination of the sunshine and coffee, and I find myself once again firmly entwined in his thread. He is describing the ways the husband struck back at him; the confrontation in a dark alley outside a pub, the after-hours fire at his office that the police chief, a distant cousin, never got quite around to ruling arson, the voodoo. 


I can’t stop my eyebrows winging upwards; voodoo from the husband of a priest? An admonishing finger swings under my nose, chastising my doubt. 


I smile, wiping the consternation from my face, curiously disappointed to have fiction confirmed.


Rings flashing darkly silver in the sun, he shows me the shape of a curse, intricate and lethal. He gestures vaguely at his ribcage when talking about the freak accidents caused by the curse, the piano leg that had impaled him cartoonishly from height. And the small things, black cats and broken mirrors. He’d sought a blessing from his lover; holiness to counteract dark magic. He was refused, on the grounds of regret and suspected insanity; voodoo didn’t exist, so he would be fine, he was just trying to get close again. He’d had to find his own magician, and flee their island out of time. And so he’d found himself on another island, whimsy made stone and coffee shops, and engaged in conversation with a stranger.
Posted on by Eileen Young

I’ll be the judge of that

Being Editor in Chief of a magazine and running a contest have unique pressures, but one of the commonalities between the two is the necessity of impartial selection.

Just as important as impartial selection – maybe even moreso – is the appearance of impartial selection.

Would you want to submit to a contest or magazine with a history of the coordinator’s close friends winning a disproportionate amount of the time?

The answer is probably no.

In magazines, this is relatively easy to get around: do blind judging, and make it known that you do blind judging. You don’t have to trumpet the fact that you do it to everyone, but it can be reassuring to have ‘don’t include your name in the body of your submission’ as part of your submission guidelines. Issues focusing on particular writers are a separate issue completely. Another option is acquiring an unimpeachable reputation, or drawing from a wide enough field that there is no way you could know most of the people submitting. But I like process and things I can trust more than I like relying on my reputation, and Victoria in particular was not an incomparably vast pool to draw from when I was working on Island Writer.

In contests like Adam‘s Anything Goes Writing Contest, entries are submitted directly in a forum thread, so names are attached. We also spend a fair amount of time just conversing there, and the contest runs monthly through most of the year and fortnightly through the summer, so it’s inevitable that he ends up getting to know people. Strangely, studies I made up just now have shown that when you spend a lot of time talking to people with similar interests, you end up friends with some of them!

The difficulty is that then you still have to judge them side by side with people whom you have never met, and you need to do it fairly.

In the couple of years I’ve been hanging around in the contest, I’ve only seen it implied once that the contest might be less than impartial, and by someone relatively new who was doing a one-on-one challenge with a regular, and concerned the regular would have an advantage. This post is not in response to that person. This post is not in response to anything in particular except my own nagging need for transparency, because knowing for myself that I judge as fairly as I am able does not reassure the people considering entering my contests. In this case, Adam ended up not being the judge at all: he called in another contest judge and participant in his contest who billed themselves as hating everyone equally.

Yes, this is the bit where I shamelessly upload video of myself (it’s also on Adam’s site).

//www.youtube.com/get_player

The transparency of including critique as well as results has been one of the reasons Adam’s contest has fared so well despite his quite scandalously becoming friends with some of the regulars. As I suggest in the video, the level of critique is pretty indicative of how the judge is going to come down about results.

This model might not work so well with larger-scale contests in which getting feedback to more than 50 or so people would be truly onerous, but on the kind of small-scale contest he and I are running, it’s the kind of transparency that encourages people to enter.

Transparency preserves the appearance of fair judgement, which lets us feel less bad when our friends win on the strength of their writing. It is not our fault that we make friends with people who write well.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Meta: Can I kiss you?

I jotted this down while reading 50 Shades of Grey, because I went to a presentation my freshman year of university that really stuck with me. It was entitled ‘Can I kiss you?’ and was about consent being ‘yes’ and not just the absence of ‘no,’ and how we should always ask.

I sometimes see requests for consent from romance writers like Christina Dodd, which always make me happy. For the many who don’t have them, the people who have not explicitly given their consent are still enjoying themselves, and it is still all happily ever after at the end.

But this relates back to cultural narratives and my obsession with normalizing things that are healthy, like consent. The things we consider normal shape our brains.

Another contributing factor to this short story was reading this story (Merlin fanfiction, too sexy for work), and finding the idea of arguing literature as foreplay completely and unutterably adorable.

But, of course, having brought up literary criticism, and having already been toying with the idea of doing this before I started it, the comments about Derrida are not just nonsense filler. It’s only in learning about kishotenketsu and reading more about literary criticism and semiotics that I’ve started to understand that Derrida’s presentation of stories revolving around binary opposition has coloured almost everything I’ve ever thought about storytelling. I’ve yet to read anything he’s written.

So the dialogue here are snippets from an argument I’d love to arm myself well enough to have in a few years.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Fic: Can I kiss you?

I don’t like that he looms over me from this distance. I am not a short woman, but he makes me feel positively petite. Sometimes I like that. Sometimes I want that. But as I’m trying to stare him down, drive home with a bespectacled glare that his opinions on Derrida are positively ludicrous, I want to feel tall.

We are both drunk.

“Can I kiss you?”

“No. You can back off and finish your damn point, execrable as it was, about deconstructionism.”

He settles back so he’s not looming quite so much, and starts up again. “The entire notion of deconstructionism has damaged Western ability to assimilate new concepts of story structure.”
Posted on by Eileen Young

Fandom part something

One of the interesting things that has stemmed from the corner of Homestuck fandom to which I pay attention is the surge of literary criticism.

Casual, lengthy, in depth literary criticism that examines motifs and characters and mines them for all they are worth. It’s generally referred to as ‘meta,’ since it is discussion of the story that does not directly relate to speculation about future events. It does not typically make negative statements about the original work, either, which may be a reason the word ‘criticism’ is shied away from.

To illustrate:

  • Take your high school English class around the time you had to read The Yellow Wallpaper
  • Take the worksheet or quiz with questions on it like “Who was Jennie? What was her relationship to the narrator?”*
    • Burn it.
  • Instead
    • At least one group of people is hotly debating it as a feminist critique of late-19th century treatment of post-partum depression.
    • Someone is writing a story from the perspective of Jennie.
    • Someone is writing about it as reflective of the social unrest in England throughout that time period.
    • Someone is writing about it as reflective of the untenability of separate sphere ideology in an industrialized country.
    • At least six people are writing commentary on it that I can’t even fathom.
  • Now make the source text all about teenagers kissing in space and you have the part of the Homestuck fandom that I follow.
    • It is like having a huge fantastic book club that only ever discusses one book.
This has been incredibly inspirational to bear witness to, to say the least. I think the Homestuck fandom has contributed more to me being a critical reader than most of the rationalist stuff I read, largely because it is explicitly about examining literature.
So I’m going to start an exercise: on Sunday, I’m going to post a short story. On Monday, I’m going to post about the thought process that went into it and what certain aspects of it are derived from. I will repeat as needed.
This serves a whole bunch of purposes: I will have a place to put fiction too short to submit to other places, or that I have no interest in submitting, or that have been submitted to contests and they don’t mind me reposting. I will have a log of the thought process that went in to it. And, down the road, when I have perspective on them, I will be able to read the pieces with fresh eyes and read the though process and judge how successful I was at incorporating the ideas I wanted to incorporate and what subtext I might have included unknowingly.
*To be fair, my high school English class did discuss its historical context as well, in terms of how women were treated for ‘hysteria.’
Posted on by Eileen Young · 2 Comments

HULK SMASH

I may have to read 50 Shades of Grey.

I am not enthusiastic about this.

I have heard that it is Twilight fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off. This is an issue for me not because of any opposition to fanfiction, but because of an awareness of the common tropes of fanfiction, vast tracts of which exist only to have characters kiss.

I have heard small sections of it read aloud (not safe for work), to dawning horror and helpless laughter.

I have heard how it treats BDSM relationships. Stories that feature BDSM relationships that are creepy and abusive and push boundaries are even more culturally abhorrent than the never-ending stream of coming-out YA fiction. The only mainstream stories featuring gay youth being coming-out stories is boring and repetitive. The only mainstream stories about people in BDSM relationships being about really questionably abusive relationships is detrimental to things like submissives being able to safely go to the police if their safeword has been violated, resulting in assault. If all media representations of BDSM relationships (with the exception of Dan Savage’s column, of course) have issues with consent and none of them draw crystal fucking clear boundaries between acceptable play and creepy abusiveness (you know, the kind of boundaries that exist in real life), then it makes the world less safe. This is a problem. I have heard that 50 Shades of Grey contributes to this problem, and also that it attributes interest in BDSM at all to psychological trauma.

But I don’t want to judge it without having read the source material. It is the entirety of the context I am missing, and I want to fill that in and not just pass on judgements based on hearsay.

Later:

This is the part of the post where I remember that my parents read this sometimes and I curl up and die a little on the inside, but am too angry to leave it alone. Mom, Dad, Sara, come back next week for something else, okay?

So I purchased 50 Shades of Grey, and read it in something like three days. I’ll say this for it: it has really phenomenal pacing after the rather slow start. Once the main characters start actually macking on each other, it alternates rather neatly between plot point and smutty bit.

Except for the majority of one chapter that was a contract.

I discussed the book practically incessantly with anyone who didn’t overtly tell me to shut up about it while I was reading it. They didn’t even have to be listening, just not fleeing in the other direction.

The only person I discussed it with who’d actually read it liked it, and said they liked it mostly after they remembered that it was only a book.

Remembering it is only a book would probably be key to me enjoying it, but I had issues doing so. Key to my issues with it is that I felt it insulted and demonized anyone who is a sexual dominant, thereby insulting and demonizing several nice, bright, conscientious people about whom I care a great deal. They are soldiers and nurses and students with jobs: people who contribute to society and have healthy interactions with varied social circles. Normal people who happen to have sexual preferences that run to dominance. Having Christian Grey presented as this quintessential dominant is like presenting sharks as quintessential fish. Yes, they both swim, but one of them is a predator and hardly typical of everything in the environment. Yet 50 Shades presents Grey’s deepseated psychological issues as not only a contributing factor for his interest in BDSM, but as the entire basis of it.

I had a very useful conversation with one of my many rant-victims about the things that bothered me. Paraphrased, they put forth that anything that normalizes BDSM is probably positive for the community. My response was that this would be true of anything representing a relationship that even shared a zip code with healthy, but that the relationship in 50 Shades was controlling, borderline abusive, and did not present the potential submissive with the initial option of adding hard limits.

Jokingly, they asked where’d I’d been when Twilight normalized stalking and abuse.

I replied: angry.

He’s also controlling and introduces power play elements to their sexual relationship before she has formally consented to power play elements. In mainstream culture, this is (stupidly, horribly) accepted to some extent, but he has already indicated to her at this point that he is interested in power play and that extended contact with him will involve explicit power exchanges. He proceeds to initiate power exchanges without her explicit consent. This is not okay. This is never okay. Consent is important.

For anyone who fell in love with the idea of a sexy prince, here are some things to know:

  • a significant other who wants to be able to contact you all the time and tries to enforce this (by demanding you answer phone calls or email, or by buying you expensive communication devices) should have red flags go up. 
    • Knowing your every move is a right reserved for parole officers.
      • And also everyone you have as a friend on Foursquare.
  • negotiation ideally occurs for every scene. Unless and until you are completely comfortable with a partner, you should know what you are signing up for once a power exchange of some sort occurs, because it can be super-hard to renegotiate mid-scene. 
    • It’s like Prom. 
      • “Wanna go neck in the car?” 
      • “Definitely! And it’ll only be necking because I want to wait.” 
      • “Hey, I know we said just necking, but is it okay if I undo this bit of your outfit?” 
      • Later: “Oops, I think one of us is imaginary-pregnant, even though I said I wanted to wait, because I make super-awesome decisions when high as hell on hormones.
But the BDSM itself was not horribly portrayed. I was happy about that. There are safewords, which is really important. The major issue for me with the BDSM aspect remains the ascription of psychological damage to anyone who is sexually dominant.

Probably the thing that freaks me out the most about the portrayal of BDSM and dominants in particular is how much it has boosted interest. Apparently Fetlife, a kink social network, has had a huge boost in interest and membership. Then there’s this article from Salon, and this article from Pervocracy referencing a really terribly thought out article from Cosmo. 50 Shades is encouraging people into BDSM without encouraging any kind of outside reading or research. I have read more socially responsible fiction on erotica sites. You know what would be neat? If, instead of giving Ana a car, Christian gave her SM 101 (Amazon link, perfectly safe for work, unlike most of the rest of this post). Then not only would she be more informed, it might be contributing to a cultural narrative where people do their research before letting people tie them up (even in toilet paper). Informed consent is sexy consent.

On to those things which are not ranting about BDSM.
Despite being original fiction now apparently, the number of times they make comments about wanting read each others’ minds (mostly him saying it) was annoying. In fanfiction, this would be a reasonably entertaining nod to the original canon. In ‘original fiction,’ it’s those places where someone got sloppy with the metal file and left part of the serial number intact.
It also revisited some themes that I found frustrating in Twilight, but enraged me here. A lot of the things that enraged me are the things we’re supposed to grow out of. Things like accepting compliments gracefully. Yeah, it’s a skill. If you don’t have great self-confidence, it can be a hard-won skill, but it’s still as fundamental to wider social interaction as ‘please pass the salt.’
My feelings on how Steele is about accepting gifts are ambivalent. On one hand, accepting gifts without trying to throw them back in people’s faces is also a basic life skill. On the other hand, someone I’ve know for like a week buying me a car, no matter how rich they are, would send me screaming irretrievably for the hills. With my GPS turned off.

Steele’s complete lack of self-worth also annoyed me. Yes, I understand that some people feel that way, and it’s always good to have characters one can relate to. But just once I’d like to see a romance novel heroine who has some sense of self-worth, or can observe that practically every dude they meet throws themselves at her and use logic to extrapolate that, irrelevant as looks may be to their general self-image, they are apparently fairly attractive. And it’s another layer on the ‘normalizing stupid things’ cake: I do not particularly look forward to a world in which stalking, controlling relationships, and crushing lack of self-worth are all considered the norm.
The writing itself was not monumentally execrable. Again, pacing was excellent. The vocabulary employed was not entirely puerile. The vocabulary employed were mostly Australian ex-pats. This is a situation in which the author could possibly have spent some of the time they spent on Washington geography on, oh, finding out that very few people refer to tank tops as singlets in North America. Seriously. Regional vocabulary is not hard to research, and the internet is really helpful.
And there we go with 1500 words of why I need to stick to reading things which are recommended to me instead of things which are popular.