Sink Your Teeth Right Through My Bones, Baby

ushobwri

Guilty yet?

As you can imagine, and have probably read, this shows up fairly often in fic. It generally follows a particular pattern:

1) The most beloved but flawed (and occasionally badly treated) character (think Rodney McKay of Stargate: Atlantis or Ezra Standish of the 1998 The Magnificent Seven TV series) will experience something in canon that is perceived as cruel and/or unfair by his fans (I'm sure female versions of such characters exist, but I can't remember encountering any).

2) The fans, angry at this character's perceived helplessness and unjust suffering, then write a story either dealing directly with the ep where the unfairness happened, or a story that keeps the same general theme of bad treatment.

Wherein:

---The Beloved Helpless Character will be treated with great cruelty and prejudice by the other characters, often to an uncharacteristic or even absurd extent. Shunning may occur in retaliation for something the BHC did in canon or otherwise, or threats to the BHC's continued acceptance in the group and/or employment. Rarely, their life.
---The BHC will not contest this or stand up for himself in any way. There may be an attempt at protest or apology, but this will be rebuffed by the other characters. The BHC will subsequently just accept his fate.
---The BHC will either ostracize himself from the group, or, already shunned, go off alone and/or cease all but minimal communication or interaction with the other characters. Rodney McKay may take himself to the wretched bowels of Atlantis to do horribly unpleasant menial repairs unworthy of his skills and intelligence. Ezra Standish may leave Four Corners without telling anyone, preferably by riding into a monsoon or blizzard.
--- OR, the BHC will attempt or actually commit suicide, or will be believed to have died by the other characters. The BHC will then get to, in essence, attend his own funeral and witness the other characters' praise of him and their remorse at his ill-treatment. (If the BHC dies, then the reader is their proxy for this.)
---The BHC, due to their misery and the privations of their ostracizing, will become horribly ill and/or injured. It will likely take days to find them, unless they manage to drag themselves back to aid. Either the other characters will have begun a frantic search at this point, or will not even realize the BHC was in peril because he's been shunned to the point of insignificance.
---A character who is the BHC's True Friend and The Only One Who Understands Them (like Rodney McKay's buddy Carson Beckett, who is conveniently a doctor, or Ezra Standish's Mom) will then proceed to berate the fuck out of the other characters for their cruelty, generally while standing at the bedside of the insensate and possibly dying BHC. The True Friend will also, if necessary, explain the BHC's real motivations for their original offending action(s) and basically make the other characters go fetal with guilt. Unless they're already fetal with guilt, in which case the True Friend's job is to make them feel even worse about their treatment.
---The BHC naturally survives and either returns to his previous position within the group or gets some kind of promotion. Occasionally he'll leave for a better offer from people who will appreciate him. Either way, the other characters will fall all over themselves in apology and remorse, which the BHC will righteously milk for all it's worth. Maybe, if he deigns to stay with his former abusers, at the end of the fic he'll begin to forgive them. Maybe.

As you've probably guessed, I call these kinds of fics "Passive-Agressive Utopia" because it's possibly the one place in the universe where the tactic actually works exactly the way its adherents would want it to. Their BHCs are vindicated, glorified and defended, all without them actually having to do anything. They go eat worms because nobody loves them and everybody hates them, and they really do get admired for it; they nearly or actually commit suicide and everyone really is sorry. It's the best of all possible worlds.

And honestly, who wouldn't want that? I still have to remind myself sometimes that my darling husband can't read my mind so if I'm pissed off I need to tell him. It's scary to admit you're angry when you've been raised never to show it. How awesome would it be not to have to?

So I get it, I really do. I just wish it didn't show up so often. And you'd better agree with me, or I'm going to slink off and sit outside in the rain until I get pneumonia. And then you'll be sorry.

Picture is courtesy of antpkr at freedigitalphotos.

Snobs

It's the kind of moment that stays with you, and sometimes, like when I'm about to post on LJ or--especially lately--when I send out another novel query after the previous one was rejected again (three for three so far!), I hear those words. They don't wanna know you.

I realize this isn't helpful, and not even true (at least with non-footwear). I've met many people who wanted to know me, though I can't speak for their shoes; and many of these people both still know me and still want to, as far as I can tell. And I know that the people rejecting my novel aren't actually rejecting me. Maybe they'd want to know me if we ever met in person, even if they did describe my novel as 'fairly well written' and 'off-putting' in the same paragraph.

Maybe I wouldn't want to know them, but that's not the point.

Radio Host Jay Smooth, who is a bit of a YouTube celebrity for his commentary on racism, homophobia and gender issues, calls these kind of internal mantras "Little Haters". He has a video about them, which is pretty cool:

And Martin Freeman, lately of The Hobbit but possibly more beloved as Sherlock's Dr. John Watson, told an Entertainment Weekly interviewer that he doesn't read reviews because (to paraphrase, because I can't find it), it wouldn't matter how many awesome reviews he got, he'd only remember the negative ones and they would ruin his life. He has inner haters too.

That's reassuring, of course, to know that even famous people have their they don't wanna know you moments. But it's also discouraging. It'd be nice to think that at some point, somehow, maybe, I'd reach a threshold of success that would mean I didn't have to make the little haters shut up all the time.

Instead, most some days, like right now, it's a constant battle to keep writing, and posting to LJ, and sending out my novel when it seems like no one will ever want it. And to remind myself that they--whomever 'they' actually are--probably do want to know me. Just maybe not my writing.

It's a battle I don't think I'll win, but I'm still trying. And I'm still writing. And that's something, right?

But their shoes would love me. Really.

Photo: "Colorful Sport Shoe" by John Kasawa, via Freedigitalphotos.net

Yes, exactly.

A summary is the shorter version of what the book's about, an important distinction that I'm sure I'll forget again as soon as I've finished writing one. Normally I've found the synopsis to be worse, because it's longer while still requiring pithiness, and its hard to figure out what bits are important enough to mention when I'm trying to describe the plot in as few pages as possible. My agent (which makes me sound wayyyyy more famous than I am. Like, enormously way more famous) prefers the synopsis to be no more than two. Publishers don't have much time to read stuff, yo.

And I'll just let the irony of that go unmentioned.

I remember gnashing my teeth and lamenting to the very kind sgamadison about writing the synopsis for Black Hawk Tattoo, though the short summary was pretty easy. But with this novel, so far it's been the other way around.

That's the thing about romance novels: the relationship is the point, so anything that happens that doesn't directly relate to the two protagonists' journey to kissyface can be safely left out. But unlike BHT, my current novel is a fantasy, where the romance is important but far from the only thing that happens. I could, actually, leave the kissyface out and still describe the plot, but these days it seems you can't sell a novel without romance; so mentioning somewhere that yes, the heroine meets a hero for kissyface and mutual lifesaving is probably important.

So, bearing that in mind, how's this?:

This book has magic in it.
There is kissyface.
Lots of bad stuff happens.
No one actually dies.
Then end.

Perfect, right? :P

Okay, break's over. Back to work. Yay. I love writing. No, really.

It was a lot more fun making duck movie posters

I was all set to make my villains torch-and-pitchfork-because-of-fear villagers, because I liked the idea of my novel having antagonists but not any conventional villains. (This would be my next novel; the one I'm working on does have conventional tear-your-entrails-out-because-it's-fun villains. I'm trying to change things up, yo.)

Great idea, right? Of course! Awesome! Bring on the unconventionality! And then I realized that if I do that I have two problems. Two fairly big problems:

1) Unless I have the protagonist kill them all, they have no reason to stop coming after him*, and this isn't the kind of story where the actually-friendly protagonist will have time or opportunity to convince anyone of his good intentions. Which makes the happy ending problematic.

2) If I have the protagonist kill them all, he won't be the protagonist so much as a mass murderer. Which makes a happy ending impossible.

Oops.

Luckily, I have another idea! Sort of! I just wanted to share my useless doubtlessly fascinating insight. Now I need to motivate the bad guys.

*(my plan is to send this one to Dreamspinner Press, and they only take books with male protagonists. The novel I'm currently revising stars a woman. Yes, I felt the need to mention that.)

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