Blood & Rhetoric

On the streetcar, sort of nodding off and jerking awake. I’d had the sort of day where you wake up already exhausted and it never quite comes together from that point. The kind of day where existential angst keeps creeping in on you and you start to wonder what, if anything, is worth it anymore. And so I arrived ten minutes late to the prearranged meeting place he had suggested– which turned out to be a cozy, intimate restaurant, and I was a little perturbed by his choice of location but shrugged it off to paranoia. After all, although this felt eerily similar to other situations I had been in – situations gone horribly, awkwardly awry – it was no reason to jump to conclusions.

He would know me from my picture but I had no idea what he looked like, and so I stood nervously at the door, scanning the mostly empty restaurant; waiting for some lone soul to claim me.

I felt like I was on a blind date instead of a “business” meeting – a feeling that would only increase in intensity as the night went on — but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

And then finally a tall, dark, handsome man in a suit comes over and introduces himself.

We’ll call him Jack. Because I like that name

We’ll call him George.

The “business” in question was a potential job. One of those multifaceted types that included writing, blogging, marketing, and video hosting with television potential (they all believe the television potential line) and so basically it translated into your typical media gig of insanely long and irregular hours with third-world-country standard hourly wages.The ad was seeking an “attractive and engaging female host with strong verbal and written capabilities” and I like to think I am those things. So I applied with my resume and headshot and “George” contacted me for a face-to-face meeting.

And so here I was at this stupidly trendy restaurant. Your typical Toronto spot serving the standard generic-Asian-fusion fare at inflated prices.

And here George was talking about everything but the job at hand. And asking a lot of personal questions.

And it’s starting to get awkward because he’s complimenting me.

Him: “You know, Jana, you seem so different from the models I typically work with.”

Me: “I think that might be because I am neither a model or your co-worker.”

(Thinking: thanks asshole. Is this akin to the Say are you a model? pick-up line other jackasses are so fond of using on women? Every woman? Because you’re starting to make me feel like I want to rip your face off.)

Insert long tedious monologue by him where he expounds upon the various times in his illustrious director/producer career where he’s gotten a “break” for other nubile young females like myself working in the media/writing field – or “modeling” as he refers to it interchangeably. This speech also includes him telling me he’s been compared to George fucking Clooney (who says that?) and name-dropping all the Very Important People he’s “friends” with.

At this point I haven’t mentioned my boyfriend yet, as I’m still clinging to the hope that this is in fact a business meeting and not a surprise first-date and I’m putting on my most glacial Eastern European façade in the hopes of deterring him. The glacial Eastern European thing usually works very well for me, but it’s obviously going straight over his head.

And as the minutes tick by, it starts to feel too obvious to even mention a boyfriend as I obviously am on a surprise first date, and mentioning one will make me look like one of those girls who lies to deter unwanted suitors and then this train-wreck of an evening will be even worse.And I shouldn’t even have to do that, goddamn! Because this is a meeting right? An interview? A professional thing? Right??

Oh no it’s not? You mean that’s asking for too much? Yes, indeed.

And to make a long story short: I cut the evening early and went home feeling dirty and confused.

And this brings me to my point: I fucking despise 99% of the people who list themselves as being in the “entertainment industry.” Fucking hate ‘em. I’m friends with some wonderful people in the field. But I’m also acquainted with some of the biggest pricks. I’ve unfortunately dated this breed of man and he is invariably the most obnoxious, selfish, egotistical, insecure asshat you will ever spend time with.

Kinda like a lot of the assholes in “finance” or the striped shirt guy, but possibly worse.

I’ve been in too many situations watching a group of insecure posers preening for their peers — who have neither the clout nor the influence they themselves believe they do — practically begging to suck their cocks for a chance at something. Anything. But dear lord gimme something

And I see a lot of writers doing the same. Begging and pleading and stalking agents and editors.

And I just want it to stop.

I stayed up late the other night and CityLine was airing one of it’s hilariously bad soft core porns and I stopped to watch for a few minutes because the TV menu guide listed the description as something about a writer — and of course the plot revolved around a young woman with enormous titties fucking and sucking her way to a publishing contract.

Granted, I seriously doubt that this happens ever, or often anyways, but it did make me giggle. And then my sleeping boyfriend woke up on the couch and gave me a weird look. Right before asking if we could reenact the scene on the TV.

I caught up to all this too late, but I couldn’t resist!

Basically, some random wrote an absurd article over at Forbes about how “Amazon Could Change Publishing!!!”

(I added the exclamation points myself, and I’m not bothering to link to the idiot article in question because it ENRAGED me)

The funniest response thus far has been by Sir Thomas de Kay over at 101 Reasons to Stop Writing.

Imagine a world with no middle man to wade through the horibble, horrible slush.

If you already feel overwhelmed by the amount of published crap that makes it through the big filters, imagine even those imperfect filters turned off and us, the poor consumer becoming the slush pile reader?

It would be anarchy! Anarchy!

We’ve been working on worldbuilding and culture over at Forward Motion’s 2YN class recently, and it’s got to me to thinking about glossed over aspects of culture and society when it comes to many fantasy novels.

Food is a major one.

Our society takes for granted certain foodstuff and naturally doesn’t give much thought to where and how a particular vegetable or fruit was cultivated and when it actually gained popularity as food for people rather than livestock or prisoners or the very poor.

Many fantasy novels don’t take into account that many of the foods we consider common today, were virtually unknown until Columbus introduced them to the new world, and even then, many were disdained for a long time after the fact. The potato and corn are perfect examples of this. Potatoes didn’t actually become a standard staple in our diet until the 1780’s. Corn didn’t achieve popularity until even later, the 1840’s, and both vegetables were not considered fit for your average person.

(The very poor and prisoners don’t count as “person” by the way in this definition.)

These foods were known and enjoyed in Latin America of course, but it took a while for that popularity to spread.
Other foods like this include: lettuce, tomatoes, peaches, broccoli, carrots, pumpkins, squash, strawberries and etc.

And, yes I did have to Google a few of these things to verify the bare facts, but even without knowing exact dates of inception, I know that when I read about Princess Moerghanna sitting down to her delicious meal of a leafy green salad followed by steak and potatoes, that unless her story takes place until well after the start of the 1700’s that the author didn’t do the research.

Furthermore, the peasant characters in fantasy eating a steady diet of meat is just as unrealistic.

And spices? Dude, don’t get me started on spices.

Not everyone will be as nit picky about these things. But I am, and I assume just as many others are.

So now as I start to build a culture around my characters and infuse it with food and textiles and other necessary things, I have to keep all these things in mind.

I know, I know — Amazon is evil. But the place sells some hillarious shit too.

This is just a few of the weird, funny, and/or disturbing things I found there today instead of actually, uh, working.

And my birthday is coming up in September. I think I’ll start hinting to the boyfriend just how badly I’ve been wanting my very own tank.

$20,000.00 is really a bargain for that kind of power.

Not alot of people in North america are familiar with Nick Cave, and it’s a real shame because he’s produced some of the most beautiful and heart wrenching poetry through his music.

He even wrote a novel “And the Ass Saw the Angel” which was critically lauded, compared to Gabrial Garcia Marquez, and unfortunately - again - not very widely read.

Now I may not believe in writer’s block but his song “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” is one of the most beautiful songs ever written on the subject.

“There She Goes, My Beautiful World”

The wintergreen, the juniper
The cornflower and the chicory
All the words you said to me
Still vibrating in the air
The elm, the ash and the linden tree
The dark and deep, enchanted sea
The trembling moon and the stars unfurled
There she goes, my beautiful world

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

John Willmot penned his poetry
riddled with the pox
Nabakov wrote on index cards,
at a lectem, in his socks
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
imprisoned in a box
And JohnnyThunders was half alive
when he wrote Chinese Rocks

Well, me, I’m lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I’m lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I’m lying here, for what seems years
I’m just lying on my bed with nothing in my head

Send that stuff on down to me
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

Karl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
while writing Das Kapital
And Gaugin, he buggered off, man,
and went all tropical
While Philip Larkin stuck it out
in a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in
St. Vincent’s hospital

I will kneel at your feet
I will lie at your door
I will rock you to sleep
I will roll on the floor
And I’ll ask for nothing
Nothing in this life
I’ll ask for nothing
Give me ever-lasting life

I just want to move the world
I just want to move
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,
brother, and blow it
If you’ve got a field, that don’t yield,
well get up and hoe it
I look at you and you look at me and
deep in our hearts know it
That you weren’t much of a muse,
but then I weren’t much of a poet

I will be your slave
I will peel you grapes
Up on your pedestal
With your ivory and apes
With your book of ideas
With your alchemy
O Come on
Send that stuff on down to me
Send it all around the world
Cause here she comes, my beautiful girl

There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

I don’t like anything that pulls me out of a story, and prologues/flashbacks can do that quite often as they usually take the form of a huge infodump where multiple names and dates and gods and events are thrown at the bewildered reader with reckless abandon.

And until I care about the characters and their plight; all that infodumping just reads BORING and my eye skips ahead until there’s something actually happening.

There are of course exceptions and blah blah blah — standard disclaimer and all that — but when the prologue/flashback fails, as it does often, it sticks out more memorably then when it works.

I’m writing about this because I’m struggling with this in my current WIP.

These people have a history, a religion, rituals, ceremonies, styles of dress, symbolism etc. and so do the other people and cultures living within their society and I want that to come across in the story without it slamming anyone across the head.

How does the writer accomplish this? What’s the fine line between being descriptive and just plain reciting facts like a text book?

One thing I do know for sure, is that I don’t like having every detail or foreign thing explained to me when I’m reading a fantasy novel. I like being ignorant in that respect, and figuring out the foreign thing on my own and being shown its meaning and function through story and action, not expository essay.

The same goes for setting. With a foreign world or city it’s easy to want to explain every nuance, but I’d rather get a sense of the world through my own mind’s eye and not read it in excruciating detail.

I suppose this is why first drafts and red pens go so well together.

This is Nightwish with their video for the song Sleeping Sun.

It makes me feel refreshed the same way eating a grapefruit does.

Yessss indeed.

Yay!

I found this on Justin’s blog The X-Files Returns

Batman: The Dark Knight, The X-Files: I Want to Believe (working title, I think) and Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Three franchises that I have loved and been border-line obsessed with since I was a small child. Movie-wise, this will be an exciting summer indeed.

Yes, I am a nerd. Thanks for asking.

Batman: The Dark Knight.

I don’t want to talk about Heath Ledger and how this was his last film. The details of his tragic death have been delved into everywhere ad nauseum, and will be brought up again as this movie is officially released. I will say this though, and it has been said before, but you can’t tell it’s Ledger playing Joker. The voice, the character — amazing.

I’ve been a huge Batman fan ever since first coming to Canada at the age of five. I watched the cartoons, I watched the cheesy Adam West show, and I loved the movies. And I was obsessed with Catwoman. I would play pretend like I was her and in my childhood imagination, I commandeered a huge army of cats. Batman and I usually wound up married by the end of my game. Again — I was a child, this isn’t a recent thing!

Like alot of fans, I was hugely disappointed by cartoonish crap the films were becoming; the final straw being the horrible 1997 Batman & Robin, unfortunately starring the luscious and talented Clooney. Really, I felt bad for George, but he should have known better.

When Christopher Nolan took over and made Batman Begins with Christian Bale, I was in love with franchise all over again. It became the best of the bunch for me, and Christian Bale is without a doubt the best actor to ever play Batman.

 The X-Files

The X-Files is probably what piqued my interest in Science Fiction. It was another childhood obsession (I was like 8, or something, when it debuted) that I never quite grew out of. I was also one of the crazy internet fans who would argue different conspiracy theories online and argue over inconsistencies and etc.And I’m going to admit now that I may have actually written some fanfiction. May have.

I stopped watching soon after David Duchovny left the show; as a huge part of the success of the series was the amazing partnership between Scully and Mulder.

The X-Files: Fight the Future came out ten years ago; and now, finally, we have the sequel which apparently is based on events between seasons 4 and 7. Not sure as to the truth on that one. There’s alot of secrecy (read: clever marketing) surrounding this one.

Finally, we have Indiana Jones 4: Kingdom of The Crystal Skull. Say all you want about Harrison Ford being too old, but as far as I’m concerned, even at the age of 97 (or whatever) he’s sexier than alot of guys my own age.

Indiana Jones made me want to be an archaeologist; and, even after I grew up and realized that archaeology equalled a decade of post-secondary education, relatively low pay, and mostly desk work, I always cherished the image of the intellectual adventurer discovering long-buried treasure and secrets.

I rarely — if ever –get excited about big blockbuster movies, so these had better not dissapoint.

Wow. James Frey has emerged from the Cave of Shunned Literary Aspirations and Tears (yes, it’s a real place) to write yet another work of fiction and HarperCollins is releasing it!

“There will be a lively media response to the book, but we’re publishing it because it is an extraordinary piece of work,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of the Harper imprint. “He has a huge number of fans. They will come readily and eagerly to this novel, which is emotionally powerful.”

Bright Shiny Morning (released next week) is described as thus as Amazon:

“One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel—a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original.

Dozens of characters pass across the reader’s sight lines—some never to be seen again—but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA’s lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives: a bright, ambitious young Mexican-American woman who allows her future to be undone by a moment of searing humiliation; a supremely narcissistic action-movie star whose passion for the unattainable object of his affection nearly destroys him; a couple, both nineteen years old, who flee their suffocating hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the great city; and an aging Venice Beach alcoholic whose life is turned upside down when a meth-addled teenage girl shows up half-dead outside the restroom he calls home.

Throughout this strikingly powerful novel there is the relentless drumbeat of the millions of other stories that, taken as a whole, describe a city, a culture, and an age. A dazzling tour de force, Bright Shiny Morning illuminates the joys, horrors, and unexpected fortunes of life and death in Los Angeles.”

I must admit, I’m a little confused by whole “celebrated author” thing. He’s really one of our most celebrated authors? What the fuck? And kudos for using “controversial” in the cool, noncomformist sense of the word. Like he’s our wee little literary rebel.

Although I have no intention of actually reading this, I am excited. Mostly because I honestly thought Frey would commit suicide after the way Oprah guilt tripped him on her show. Personally, I would have been in tears. She’s a scary woman.

Good for you Jamie (can I call you that?)

I can only hope a similar scandal will one day help me skyrocket in the bestseller charts and to be mentioned in every literary magazine and blog.

Well played, sir, well played.