WTF World?

Stuff unrelated to writing or the industry, generally world events.

Dear Fandom: Grow the Fuck Up

I’ve been in a state of apoplexy for the last 48 hours or so, because a) I’m still in recovery mode from Comic Con (short version: it was awesome and overwhelming, more later), and b) coming back from Comic Con has left me maybe hyperaware of all that’s both right and wrong about the entire media-consuming community. Comic Con itself is an example of what’s right. 100,000+ people took over downtown San Diego for 5 days and there were no riots, nobody got shot, and while there was one unfortunate incident, for the most part things went remarkably well. SDCC […]

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There’s no such thing as a good stereotype.

Rantytime. Warning for profanity — although I’m going to try and rein it in, as best I can. Nobody listens to Angry Black Women, after all. This rant has been partially triggered by yet another discussion of “strong female characters” circulating in the blogosphere. (A good jumping-off point for this discussion is this io9 article, where I butted into the comments for a minute to pretty much make this same point.) This isn’t a new discussion, of course; people have been talking about it for awhile on and off. It’s just the latest hiccup. The strong female character (SFC) is

There’s no such thing as a good stereotype. KEEP READING

SOPA… SOPA CaPIPA…

I’m going to have Barry Manilow in my head all. Damn. Day. Er, anyway. This is a linkspam post. As you’ve no doubt noted from the many, many sites that have chosen to “go dark” today (in some cases only for US browsers), there’s a little bit of a protest going on, over extremely harmful internet regulation laws that may soon be passed by the US Congress. I’m not going dark myself; IMO that sort of protest is primarily effective for the most ubiquitous sites on the internet, not esoteric little hideaways like mine. But I’m doing what I can

SOPA… SOPA CaPIPA… KEEP READING

The desperate quest for a new TV fantasy

I’m one of those people who’s perpetually behind the pop-cultural cutting edge. In fact I pretty much lurk at the blunt ass-end of what’s new/hot/now; I discover TV series years after they’ve been cancelled, I catch up on the popular movies only when I find them in the bargain bin, I’m years out of date on the coolest animanga and games. Netflix loves me; I order DVDs and don’t watch them for months. This is by choice, mind you: with a full-time writing career and a full-time job to juggle, something had to give. And I don’t mind being out

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A Writer’s Education

Apologies in advance; not gonna talk about writing for the moment. Instead I’m going to talk about the writing life, in a way. See, I took the GRE on Saturday. I did OK. Astounding on the verbal and abysmal on the quantitative, as I expected. I’ve been using my verbal skills steadily and with increasing intensity throughout my adult life, after all, and I haven’t done combinatorics in 20 years. No amount of short-term cramming can really make up for that, and I didn’t expect it to. All I really wanted to do was not embarrass myself, and I think

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Where it comes from

I get asked a lot how I concocted the worldbuilding of the Inheritance Trilogy — the politics, that is, as much as the mythos. People ask me how on earth I came up with a society in which the law is whatever the hell the people in charge decide to enforce, for whomever they deem worthy of justice; in which the right to kill is not a moral question or a quest for righteousness, but merely a cherished privilege of power; in which the wanton destruction of entire peoples and landscapes is constantly obfuscated by revised history; in which a

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Welcome, folks from Blastr

Please mind your manners and wipe your feet before coming in. Everyone else: sorry, but a couple of people (or one determined person with a lot of time on his hands) have not minded their manners re my last post. Apropos of which, the blog is on moderation — if you’ve commented here before successfully, your comments will be approved. If not, they’ll be held ’til I can get to them. Also, I’ve shut down commenting altogether on older posts — everything past 14 days old. Sorry, ’bout that. I’ll lift the moderation once the children get bored and go

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Go#$%!$ Hollywood!

YOU CAN’T DO THAT. YOU CAN’T TELL A NUANCED, COMPLEX, INTERESTING STORY ABOUT BIGOTRY AND USE BIGOTRY TO DO IT. YOU WILL SHOOT YOUR OWN MESSAGE IN THE FOOT AND RUIN AN OTHERWISE EXCELLENT MOVIE. DOES THIS NOT OCCUR TO YOU? ARE YOU INCAPABLE OF THINKING FOR TWO MINUTES DURING THE SCRIPTWRITING? DO YOU JUST NOT SEE THAT SAYING “RACISM IS BAD” DOESN’T WORK IF YOU’RE PERPETUATING IT YOURSELF?! WHAT THE EVERLIVING HELL — ?! ::Stops. Takes deep, calming breath. Goes for bike ride, reads something, seeks the peace within herself, etc.:: Okay. Let’s try that again. I went to

Go#$%!$ Hollywood! KEEP READING

An anecdote

Been sort of vaguely following the whole kerfuffle over that dumbass article on fantasy over at the NY Times. (I mean “dumbass” in the most respectful way.) I’m not particularly upset about it because ignorant bigotry rarely upsets me; it’s the bigotry of the supposedly knowledgeable that I find more dangerous. And this is bigotry, for all that we’ll probably use a less inflammatory phrase for it, like “genre snobbery” or whatever. The thoughtless, irrational, overly-generalized adherence to a set of wrong beliefs about a whole group of people is always bigotry. It’s worse when those beliefs cause the believer

An anecdote KEEP READING

Dear Hollywood: How’s That Bigotry Working Out for You?

Dear Hollywood: I get it. Those of you who control the purse-strings: You say you’re only interested in the color green, but your behavior doesn’t bear that out. I know you’re really only interested in stories of straight white men doing straight white mannish things, whatever those might be. I get that the voices of women grate upon you like a rasp over nutmeg and you’re not really interested in desegregating racially either. Seriously, there’s no need for you to justify yourself or try to explain that you’re not bigoted, it’s just the audience that you’re concerned about… because frankly,

Dear Hollywood: How’s That Bigotry Working Out for You? KEEP READING

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