Done and Undone

The only way this post will make sense is if I outline it: 

1. Collection soon 

2. Book finished 

3. New project 

1. My mini-collection of short stories, Wire Mothers, releases in just about a week. Confetti emoji! I am long overdue on making the announcement that I'll be appearing in Brooklyn in late June to promote it, but I haven't gotten my ass to Canva to make a graphic for that event, because April was messy (see 2). 

Art by Bri Chapman. Order here.

I've gone on record lots of times that I don't consider myself a great writer of short stories. I have gathered this from the world rather than believing it in my heart. I've tried (a lot) to write New Yorker-style minimalist short fiction, and I just can't do it. My stories, thus, got rejected constantly for the better part of a decade. And yes that is a very normal thing for a writer to report, stories getting rejected constantly for the better part of a decade, but whatever mold I was supposed to be reshaping to pour my short-form fiction into over all that time, so as to make it suitable for magazines - I never managed to find that mold's schematics. My acceptance rate didn't improve post-grad school, post-having a firmer grip on my craft. I write what I write, and magazines rarely like it, and I've accepted that (even if they won't, ha HA). 

So these five stories are the result of that process, of figuring out what kind of writer I am and accepting that I'm unacceptable. I like them a lot. I like how they turned out. I hope you will, too, but I long ago stopped believing that people who like regular American short fiction will like my stories, so it's OK if you don't. 

I'm moaning about lack of publication but the fact is, three of five of the stories in Wire Mothers were previously published. (This is not the average ratio for the stories sitting in my hard drive.) Fun fact: the editor who published "To-Do" in 2015 wanted to remove the bullet points. If/when you read that story, enjoy thinking of it without them. Editors can be idiots. 

2. For the first 12 days of April, I was at a residency, my first ever. It was at Yefe Nof, which is located at Lake Arrowhead, California, which is 5,000 feet above sea level. I did not think this would be a problem, because I've visited Denver multiple times, did a long weekend in Colorado Springs, etc., and never noticed the altitude. But I was increasingly ill the entire time I was there: digestive problems, anxiety, poor sleep, shortness of breath, et al. I pushed through and wrote a staggering number of words, successfully finishing a draft of my novel, Men from Other Countries. Then I went home early and hugged my husband. 

For the following couple of weeks of April, I stayed more or less in the zone, revising and rewriting and working through the draft, until I had something I was ready to give Matt. He read it, and gave me useful feedback, and now it's with my second reader. The door isn't completely open to more reader-friends yet, because I need one more line edit plus more feedback re: Matt's points before I can consider it really a finished draft, but it's functionally finished, and I'm so relieved. 

I started this book in 2017, but then I got sidetracked by Ceremonials and Junk Film. Gun to my head, I'd say I've been working on it for about two years, especially considering research, but the majority of the word count was written in two huge bursts in November 2023 (30k) and April 2024 (40k). I'm explaining this for transparency, and because when the book gets published, people are going to ask how long I worked on it and I want to have an answer to hand. It's not an answer that lines up with the historical record of me working on this book, but it's spiritually close to say two years, on and off, with inconsistent work and gaps in between for other priorities. 

It's a good book, and I'm proud of it, but it was rarely fun to write the way Highbinder was (and nowhere near as fun as Junk Film was). I remembered the fun I had with that book as I was reskimming it the other day, and the comparison was stark. Other Countries was serious business, and I only enjoyed myself on a handful of occasions (eg I came up with a reason for my gay character to hide in a closet). So, for my next trick... 

3. ...I'm going to write something that I hope is a lot more fun: a series of essays to form a character study of Tom Paris from Star Trek: Voyager and explore my stupid crush on him. 

just look at this idiot. God I love him so much

The project is also intended to reflect some more light on Voyager as a metaphor for family relationships and a much better Trek show than it's given credit for. But mostly it's about Tom. 

I'm a little concerned that it's my rebound project after working on Other Countries so intensely, and that it won't amount to anything. This concern is amplified because I'm telling people about it, instead of waiting to see if private work on it comes to something. That tends to be a jinx. But my list of undone projects includes this Tom Paris thing, a really dark hybrid essay I'm not ready to write yet, a very annoying revision of my grad school thesis that I have to read philosophy to do, and a huge undertaking about Jean Harlow's husband, which is likely some years away from being ready to write, if I even decide to do it. So I thought I'd start rewatching Voyager and taking notes and going from there instead of just waiting for my second reader to get back to me (hellish), or getting a real job (equally hellish). Very casual work for a possible fun-writing reward, no pressure. 

4. Misc: I've been wishing I had something good to write about re: movies, like the essay I wrote about The Zone of Interest here, but I haven't happened upon anything just yet. I gulped the entirety of the Hannibal TV show in less than a week, but most of what's generally useful criticism about that show has been said already, whether in words or in fan art. Pretty sure I'll be making this x-stitch pattern, though. 

found here

This Is Not for You

I wrote and polished the below as a brief essay for a website like The Mary Sue or Jezebel, but neither responded to my queries. Before it gets too out of date, I want at least a minuscule audience to enjoy it. Et voila.

This Is Not for You

I think I'm done with spectacle movies.

You could also call these types of movies "blockbusters" or "summer movies" or "Baystravaganzas" or "movies where you just turn your brain off and enjoy the explosions." But because this demographic has kind of Voltroned in recent years to include superhero movies, sci-fi epics, resurrected franchises from the 80s, movies made from popular books, and other odds and ends, I'm just going to call them spectacle movies.

The last one I saw was Star Trek Into Darkness, and that's mostly why I think I've had enough. Rob Bricken over at io9 said it all about the incoherent plot, but I do have to add that of all the dudetacular spectacle movies I've seen in the past couple of years, this one was the most stunningly noninclusive. STID’s version of the future contains more white men than my average day in 2013. Even in the background, at meetings, they couldn't toss in a few extras of different races or genders? Really?

I'm tired of turning off my brain for these movies, but more than that, I'm tired of turning off my gender. More and more, I don't see where I belong in popular film. I am obviously supposed to identify with the central male character(s), but I don't, because I’m not male. I can't identify with most of the, uh, central? female characters, because they are nearly always sketches at best and cardboard stereotypes at worst. Recently, Iron Man 3 has been getting points for passing the Bechdel test. That's nice, but it's an outlier, and still not anything close to about the women in it. The big movies of late have told me, loudly and clearly, that they were not made for me.

One of these things is not like the others

I've come to the conclusion that many well-meaning men just don't get this. They don't see how the default setting in spectacle movies is for their eyes and their attitudes. (It took a film degree for me to see this.) They don't see that women are required to get over the hump of our gender in order to enjoy the piece, and men are not. I'm not talking about women not enjoying explosions or Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as much as men do. A friendly but ill-comprehending man will say, well, of course STID doesn't pass the Bechdel test. It's about a starship crew mostly composed of men. That is precisely the point, I say. All the movies are about groups mostly composed of men.

Where are our spectacle movies? Where can women go to turn their brains off? Jezebel recently put together this revealing chart, showing how romantic comedies have vanished as superhero movies have bloomed. (I place this at the feet of the Farrelly brothers, for dudeifying rom-coms to the point where they're too vulgar and insulting for women to withstand, but that's really beside the point.) I never liked rom-coms much to begin with; they seemed to be about women who somewhat resembled me without really being for us. No mainstream movie about women has really felt right to me until Bridesmaids, and even that had the whiff of Apatow about it in places.

Coming soon are Man of Steel, which has Amy Adams going for it, but otherwise...; World War Z, in which Brad Pitt evidently ditches his wife to go fight zombies; The Lone Ranger, which has a disposable woman or two in it but seems to be largely about Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, and their respective hats; The Wolverine, which is by my count the fifth major release in fifteen years focused on one of the most hypermasculine characters in all of geekdom; and that took me to the end of July, where I got depressed and gave up.

Remember Hanna? A 2011 action movie starring Saoirse Ronan as a kickass girl fighting against a powerful woman? Yeah, not many people went to see it. It had far fewer plot problems than STID, and much more interesting hand-to-hand action sequences, but it came and went with hardly a whisper at the box office. I wish even half the women who unwillingly went to The Hangover II that year had seen Hanna instead. They might have seen someone they could actually identify with instead of feeling shut out.

Me? I'm done. I'll see Man of Steel because Zack Snyder's attitude toward women interests me (I could talk about Sucker Punch all day), but the next time a Star Trek movie comes around, I think I'll stay home and watch my DVDs of Voyager. Janeway could've taught Kirk a thing or two.