truepenny | Entries tagged with balrog

It is not a good sign when your state government's act of colossal asshattery makes the Breaking News bar on cnn.com.

In case you were wondering, yes, I am directly affected by this reprehensible piece of union-busting on the part of Governor Walker (the same man who sabotaged Wisconsin's chance at high-speed rail BEFORE HE EVEN TOOK OFFICE) and the state Republicans.

mirrorthaw is a union member and a state employee. If he weren't, I wouldn't be as anxious and stressed as I am right now, but I would still be just as fucking FURIOUS at what's currently passing for democratic government in the state of Wisconsin. My state of residence has elected a man who believes that he can do whatever he wants to, that he doesn't have to compromise or negotiate, and that unethical behavior is perfectly okay as long as it's he and his allies who benefit.

What makes me LIVID is that, thus far, Governor Walker has not been proven wrong on any of that.

When I was a teaching assistant, I was a union member, and I know exactly and in detail why collective bargaining is necessary. I also know that, no matter what Walker claims, this bill is not and never was about balancing the budget. (I also think that gutting the state infrastructure is a STUPID way to balance the budget, but then, I am a socialist.) The unions offered to take the pay cuts if Walker would drop the collective bargaining clause. Instead, Walker has dropped the pay cuts and rammed the collective bargaining clause through in a piece of legislative chicanery that I certainly hope gets the snot investigated out of it.

Because Walker believes that negotiation and compromise are for weaklings. Which, of course, is why he has to get rid of collective bargaining--collective bargaining levels the playing field between the "weaklings" and bullies like Governor Walker. Without it, state employees have no way to make the state government listen to them. And, no, it won't listen if it doesn't have to.

Governor Walker wants your lunch money.

So hand it over.

1. We had a thirty-six hour internet outage yesterday and today. SO not amused.

2. Also not amused by Wisconsin's governor. But yay for the 30,000 protesters!

3. Sean Wallace has posted the cover mock-up for the new edition of The Bone Key. I am in love with the cover art.

4. 169 copies of Unnatural Creatures have arrived! I have signed and numbered the entire print run, and this weekend will be all about making up orders and shipping them out.

5. Today, Milo and I cantered off the lunge line! This is huge, because the last time I tried cantering off the lunge line, back in May, I fell off the horse. It's taken my instructor and me this long to get me to the point where I was ready to try again, and OMG it felt completely different and SO MUCH BETTER. Completely psyched.

This is a list of all the words MS Word has mishyphenated in Unnatural Creatures. (And, yes, I double-checked all of them with the American Heritage Dictionary. Well, except "although," because really.)

alt-hough
anim-al
catech-ism
circ-ling
Co-leridge
des-cended
domin-ies
edit-or
Esth-er
extra-vagant
ima-gined
irrit-ation
juni-or
lib-rary
natur-al
philanthrop-ist
posit-ively
reas-onably
re-cognized
squeam-ishly

Booth would be appalled.

Also, for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture, the sale is extended another day.

Word believes that "although" is hyphenated "alt-hough." And due to the UTTER IDIOCY of their quote-unquote "manual" hyphenation feature, you cannot correct it.

Although (ha), even that isn't as bad as what it did to Coleridge. There will be one change in the text of "White Charles," as the only way to prevent Word from hyphenating it "Co-leridge"--drawing a discreet curtain over the interim carnage--was to add in "Samuel Taylor," to get "Coleridge" away from the end of the line.

Really horrifically unpleasant dreams (I think my subconscious was punishing me for championing nonhuman species' right not to be Evil Hordes, because the aliens in these dreams--hoo boy), followed by this (about which I am so furious and heartbroken that I just . . . there aren't any words for how much I despise the people who did this) and this (ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, WISCONSIN VOTERS? ARE YOU?)--I pretty much hate everything right now.

So the bit in Fellowship where the Balrog leans down and goes GAWOAAWOARRRR!!! in Gandalf's face? Yeah. Like that.

Last night was Lovecraftian: unspeakable, abyssal, and possibly squamous. Maybe batrachian. Not so much with the eldritch, though.

The RLS teamed up with my insomnia, so I was uselessly awake until four. I hate the fact that all the drugs and supplements and everything else have really been able to do is make the RLS unpredictable. So I don't have it every night--which is great, don't get me wrong. That part I have no quarrel with. But when I do get it, I have no idea why. Why last night? Why not Saturday night? Or last Thursday night?

*ahem* Obviously, I'm just a tad bit cranky today. Move along, nothing to see here. We are a hedge.

And, in fact, I have something shiny and distracting to offer:

Mad Norwegian Press has announced the full list of contributors and the table of contents for Whedonistas, which is slated for publication March 15, 2011. My essay, "The Kindness of Monsters," is about the struggle of monsters in Whedon's various worlds to learn to be human, and why the finale of Angel made me cry.

(If you'd rather not deal with a .pdf, the table of contents is here below the cut:

( here! )

Lots of cool women, including

coffeeem,

matociquala,

yuki_onna,

rm,

priscellie,

seanan_mcguire (whose essay is online here at Tor.com), and many others whose LJ handles I do not know.* And, ne plus ultra,

rarelylynne.)

I, personally, am geeked beyond words about the Juliet Landau interview.

---
*If you are one of them, or you know their handles, comment on this post, and I'll add them in.

Dear Twitter:

When you will not let me log in, I cannot play Echo Bazaar. For some strange reason, this makes me VERY CRANKY. Please to straighten up and fly right.

Love,
Mole

Dear Citizens of America:

The Fourth of July does not begin on the first of July. I'm just saying.

No love,
Mole

Dear Cosmic Powers Of Which We Wot Not:

Many of the people I am fond of are struggling with really terrible things right now. Could you ease up a little?

(Also, I still need a job.)

Love and kisses,
Mole

And now I'm going to take this terrible mood and go swim laps.

It feels weird to be saying this about the CEO of a corporation, but John Sargent is proving himself this week to be a class act. Here's his update on the Amazon fiasco.

Notice that Sargent is talking to authors and illustrators and about authors and illustrators, as well as about consumers. Compare Amazon's (thus-far) only public statement here, wherein the ONLY AUTHORS MENTIONED are self-published authors (who, not coincidentally, can self-publish through Amazon). Otherwise, from Amazon's letter, you would imagine that Macmillan as a corporate entity somehow produced all its content itself on that same corporate level. Clearly, this is why e-books should cost so much less: the publisher lays them like golden eggs! N.b., if you want an idea of how much work goes into that there egg,

jaylake has an excellent post on the work done by all the people who are even more invisible than writers in this new cosmology of publishing. The only people in Amazon's letter are the consumers.

Amazon's letter is a clumsy and puerile piece of writing, but the response to it indicates that the letter accurately pushed a number of buttons for its intended audience: that audience's entitlement to cheap e-books, the a priori evil of the big corporation (Macmillan, in this case, not Amazon), the sense (whether justified or not) of being an underdog, the idea--much more implicit than stated, but still clearly there to be exploited--that the only "real" authors are self-published authors and the rest of us are just corporate apparatchik monkeys pounding on our typewriters. (Hey, another reason e-books should cost less! Corporate apparatchik monkeys can be paid in bananas! And can sleep in their cubicles! And if one gets sick, why worry about health-care? Just euthanize the fucker. You can always find more monkeys.)

Obviously, I'm more than a little bitter about the apparent perception of (non-self-published) authors as parasites. I'm not the only one. And this is why my favorite line in Mr. Sargent's letter is "we will now have a business model that will ensure our intellectual property will be available digitally through many channels, at a price that is both fair to the consumer and that allows those who create and publish it to be fairly compensated."

It is true that many, if not necessarily all, people who work in publishing, whether as authors, editors, book designers, or anything else, have chosen their profession because they love books and they love working with books. But this is a bonus--and it's another way in which I am lucky. It does not make the work we do less important--or less work. And it is not a replacement for being paid.

Bananas are not a balanced or sustainable diet.

Okay, Mirena.

While I appreciate the dramatically reduced menstrual flow, the REASON you're lurking up there is to deal with these ever-fucking menstrual cramps. Being woken up at 5:30 A.M. by random, vicious cramping is NOT ON.

Get with the program.

No love,
Mole

[ETA For those of you who would, in fact, like to own The Virtu in hardback,

sleary is the Hero of the Revolution to whom you should apply.]

Right now, The Virtu is out of print in both hardback and paperback. My editor is trying to get it into the POD program Ace is starting up, and my agent is making a formal protest on my behalf to Ace Books. But unless and until Ace changes their mind (or the rights revert to me and I figure out what to do to make the book available), you're going to have to look for it used or remaindered.

Yes, this also means the Google Book Settlement is, hello, extremely concrete and personal right at the moment, and I have to say, for a company whose motto is, "Don't be evil," Google is and has been behaving like, well, serious evil on this subject. Essentially, as I understand it, what Google's position boils down to is, We aren't going to respect your copyright and you can't make us respect your copyright. If you want ANY say in what we do with your copyrighted material, you have to agree that it's ours to begin with. [That would be opting in to the settlement. And please notice that this involves agreeing to Google's false premise that they can ignore your copyright in the first place.] And if you don't agree [i.e., if you opt out], well, we're going to do it anyway unless you sue us. And if you sue us, we can squash you like a BUG, little author, because we're Google and you're not. Neener neener. Opting out of the settlement doesn't actually protect your copyrights from Google, it just means that you don't agree with the deal the Authors Guild worked out. Which I don't, because it looks pretty much like signing away your birthright for a mess of pottage.

So, yeah. Dear Google, what happened to "Don't be evil"?

[ETA: And opting in ALSO tacitly agrees to the false assumption that the Authors Guild has the right to represent me. As someone pointed out on a mailing list I'm on, Google is not the only entity behaving like an asshat here.]

This is appalling. And infuriating. And Not Okay.

(My books have not been stripped of their sales rankings--I just went and looked. But clearly they should be.)

ETA: Smart Bitches, Trashy Books FTW: Amazon Rank.

ETA2: Nicola Griffith, who is seriously one of the most awesome sf writers I've ever had the chance to fangirl in person, is among the authors affected. If there was anything needed to make me angrier (which there wasn't), this would have been it.

I'm closing the polls on this round of Q&A. Fear not! I shall do another, probably sometime after Corambis comes out.

A reminder: if you do not have a LiveJournal account, please sign your comments. I like to know who I'm talking to.

Not a Q, but I'm saying it anyway because, well, because dammit.

If your religious beliefs lead you to conclude that marriage between two consenting adults of the same sex/gender is wrong, then that is a reason to refuse to preside as a minister at their wedding. Or to refuse to attend their wedding should you be invited. It is not a reason to write/campaign for/vote for/pass legislation on the subject. Getting married is not a democratic process. We should not be able to vote on whether somebody else's marriage is real or not. Proposition 8 and all its kind make a travesty of marriage, and as a woman who has been married for ten years to a man whom I love deeply, I object with all the strength I have.

I'll say it again: people who love each other choosing to get married is not a threat. It is not an insult. It is not a desecration. It is an act of love. Trying, through and because of hatred and fear, to prevent people who love each other from having that choice? Threat. Insult. Desecration.

And now on with the show.

Q: ( spoilers for The Virtu )

Q: ( more spoilers for The Virtu, also for the end of Melusine )

Q: This is a silly question but why did you give Midmay a scar? I am curious. Wasit just a random thought...oh lets create this character with a a scar down his face? :)

A: ( if you haven't read Melusine, this is a spoiler )

And finally, a bunch of questions about A Companion to Wolves, which I have also prevailed upon the lovely, talented, and recently tattooed

matociquala to answer.
( cut for possible spoilers and certain length )

Thanks to everyone who asked questions. You all made this a lot of fun.

The first presidential election I can remember is 1980: Reagan vs. Mondale. I was in first grade and not quite six. I don't know if my parents (life-long Democrats) explained it to me, or if we were doing something about it at school, or both, but I grasped the gist: Mondale was the good guy (his VP was a woman! in 1980!), Reagan was the bad guy. And on Election Day, the bad guy won.

[ETA: Alert readers have pointed out that the preceding paragraph conflates the 1980 election and the 1984 election. So the first election I remember is either 1980 (Reagan vs. Carter), when I was not quite six, or 1984 (Reagan vs. Mondale), when I was not quite ten. I honestly have no idea which mistake is the one I made, although the longer I think about it, the more I think I do remember the 1980 election. I just remember the 1984 election better. The sentiments in our household were much the same both times, and the point about my first impressions of American politics remains unscathed.]

Obviously, this is a child's understanding, and I'd like to be able to say that the twenty-eight years since then have given me a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of American politics. Really, I would love to be able to say that. But I can't. The Republicans are the bad guys, and they win. Reagan. Reagan. Bush. I wasn't old enough to vote for Clinton in 1992, but I was ecstatic when he won. . . . And then watched as the Republican Party threw an eight-year temper tantrum, whining and yelling and obstructing and scandalmongering and essentially doing their best to make sure government could not happen because their guy wasn't king of the hill. The good guys sure as hell didn't win that one.

I voted for Gore in 2000. I sincerely believed that he was the best candidate we had. I even more sincerely believed that a formerly dead cat would have been a better candidate than Bush.

The bad guy won.

In 2004, I voted for Kerry, although it would be more accurate and honest to say I voted against Bush. (I am a yellow dog Democrat. I would vote for a yellow dog before I would vote for a Republican. In the last election, if I'd known a yellow dog, I would have voted for him as a write-in candidate.) Didn't matter. The bad guy won.

Over the twenty-eight years of my political awareness, I've watched the bad guys win. I've watched with sick, impotent fury as the Democrats--apparently both desperate and stupid--become more and more like the Republicans, until honestly I can't tell the good guys from the bad guys any more. They're all bad guys. And they always win. And the people down here, the ordinary citizens of America, don't even matter to them. They don't care what we want or what we think, because somehow our government has become so self-perpetuating and self-protecting that they don't have to.

I hate politics. I hate the smug self-righteousness of our politicians. I hate the things they say and the things they do. I hate the way the things that matter to me (education, peace, women's rights, minority rights, GLBT rights, ecological responsibility) don't matter to them. I hate the way that even things where it looks like the good guys have won--Roe vs. Wade, for instance, or that whole freedom of religion thing--the fight's never over until the Republicans say the fight is over. And they never say the fight is over until they've got the outcome they want. I hate the way that American politics over the past twenty years has completely fucked up not merely our relationship with the rest of the world (come on, guys, can we AT LEAST pay our United Nations dues?) but has contributed significantly to fucking up the planet as well. I hate the way men and women who have well-paying jobs with all the benefits they need get to decide that other people don't deserve health insurance. I hate the way that I can't tell the good guys from the bad guys, or--when I can--the way I know, with a sick, sick certainty, that the good guys will never win.

I voted today. If you've read this far, you know who I voted for. And I hope like hell that he wins. I hope that everything I know about politics, everything I've been taught by twenty-eight years of watching it happen, is wrong.

I can't believe. But I hope.

Of our two major-party candidates for President of the United States in the year 2000, one is sharing a Nobel Peace Prize with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Don't mind me, I'll be over here choking on my own bitter laughter.

Oh, yes, and happy Columbus Day, too. Celebrating 515 years of rape, murder, theft, oppression, and genocide.

Current Mood: indescribable

*ring*
*ring*
*ring*

Me: [having checked Caller ID, and thus knowing that this is XYZZY Bank] Hello?

[pause]

Automated Voice: Please hold the line for an important incoming call.

[pause: I fret about my bank balance and a whole horde of unlikely but not impossible disasters]

Automated Voice: Please continue to hold. I'm still trying to connect.

[pause: I continue to fret]

Automated Voice: Please continue to hold. I'm still trying to connect.

[pause: I continue to fret]

Automated Voice: Please continue to hold. I'm still trying to connect.

[pause: I continue to fret]

Automated Voice: Please continue to hold. I'm still trying to connect.

[pause: I continue to fret]

Real Person: Hello, may I speak to Sarah?

Me: Speaking.

Real Person: Hi, this is X from XYZZY Bank. How are you today?

Me: Fine.

Real Person: This is a courtesy call to let you know about our spring loan promotion.

Me: No, thank you, we're not interested.

Real Person: Oh. Well, thank you for your time and have a nice day.

Me: You, too.

*click*

Now, I have no actual problem with the Real Person in this little playlet. He was polite, and didn't give me grief about cutting him off before he got his spiel launched. (He actually sounded all of about a nervous sixteen.)

I have a SERIOUS problem with the Automated Voice because that fucker was lying to me. This was not an important call. Moreover, I am deeply and profoundly annoyed by the tactic of making me answer the phone and then wait on hold for a call I don't even want. I would be annoyed if it was somebody "important" pulling this stunt (like, oh, say the president of XYZZY Bank); for a unsolicited telemarketing call ...

I balrog.

Current Mood: annoyed

ETA: since metafandom has apparently linked to this post sans context, let me state explicitly that I'm talking about the MISLABELING of original fiction featuring a same-sex relationship--as for example, matociquala's Carnival--as slash in reviews and commentary by people who are not slash writers themselves. I'm not trying to talk about what slash writers choose to do within their fandoms and communities. Not a slasher. Don't play one on TV. I'm arguing that slash, as a term, belongs to fanfiction, and should not be applied to works that are not fanfiction. My reasons for feeling as I do, explained in the following post, stem partly from my own career as a pro writer whose work features a lot of same-sex relationships, and partly from my appreciation, as a genre theorist, of the intertextual subversion inherent in what slash does.

The subtext, as Giles says to Buffy in "Ted," is rapidly becoming text.

hth

More specifically, let's talk about slash and why it is offensive and heteronormatizing to equate it with homosexual relationships.

The subversion/containment model (proposed by Foucault and applied by a bunch of New Historicist critics in the 1980s) has buried somewhere in the unexamined assumptions of its premise the notion that somehow subversion is bad. Or nonsustainable. Conservation of energy. A society tends to conserve the status quo.

This may be descriptively true (she says, looking dourly at her own society), but prescriptively, it sucks major moose cock, because it assumes that subversion exists to be contained. Hence Natalie Zemon Davis's elaboration of Foucault with her "pressure-valve" idea. (Which, btw, I think is incredibly helpful for understanding extremely conservative societies--like I said, descriptively the idea can be very helpful.)

Slash is subversion.

(For those of you who are still wondering what on earth I'm talking about, slash is a kind of fanfiction which posits a romantic/sexual relationship between two characters who in canon have no such thing. You might also describe it as an underground movement. It's named for the labelling convention that marks it; the first slash was K/S: Kirk-slash-Spock.)

Slash says, "These two canonically romantically-uninvolved characters have a close, intense, and obviously loving relationship. Our society--as inscribed on these characters by censorship and other kinds of normatizing pressure--does not allow that relationship to be developed in a sexual way. Let's transgress the taboo."

Now, obviously, that transgression can be done mindfully or otherwise, but the key component to slash is the overt sexualization of a non-sexual, or only subtextually sexual, relationship.

That relationship is, 9 times out of 10, between two men. Because, 9 times out of 10, the most intense and interesting relationship in any given canon is--wait for it--between two men. (And that has to do with a whole bunch of other factors and influences including, you know, four or five millennia worth of patriarchy.)

Now, why am I so adamant that slash is not the same as homosexual relationships?

Because I insist that homosexual relationships ought not to be categorized as subversive.

(Okay, yes, leftist liberal commie bitch, that would be me. Please don't tell me you're surprised.)

Labelling a homosexual relationship in a work of fiction as slash is wrong for a couple of reasons. One is that it's eliding the line between a work of fiction and commentary ON that work of fiction. I think it's inherent to slash that it is subverting and deconstructing and undercutting a canon text's assumptions about sexuality and love (using "text" here in a broad and metaphorical sense, rather than the literal one of words-printed-on-a-page). Slash is a game played with canon, and part of its value is in the tension it both creates and illuminates between canon text and subtext.

The other reason that it's wrong to label homosexual relationships, whether in or out of fiction, as slash is that it is reinscribing heteronormativity on our society and our discourse. It's a syllogism. Slash is gay sex. Slash is subversive. Therefore, gay sex is subversive. The subversion/containment model is a BOX, and as long as we keep putting homosexual relationships in that box, we are reinforcing the idea that heterosexuality is the standard by which all other sexualities will and ought to be judged. The same idea that is powering the (often hysterical) attempts to define marriage in such a way that gay and lesbian people cannot have it. Because their committed monogamous relationships are being judged as subversive.

And that's so horribly wrong that it's eaten all my words.

Current Mood: cranky--also COLD

Right now I hate the world.

My page-proofs are evil, my website is evil, my cats are evil, the gods of electricity hate me and my desk is evil to boot.

It's also Too. Damn. Sunny.

So. Please. Tell me something good.

Current Mood: hate hate hate

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Entries tagged with balrog

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government by bullying

5 things

A comedy of errors

beware, beware, his floating eyes, his flashing hair

::kicks world::

Whedonistas: much more interesting than my screwed up neurology

Fretful porpentine is fretful.

Don't talk back, just drive the car

DO NOT WANT

FYI: Virtu

I see a bad moon rising

Q&A the Whatevereth and Last, with special guest star, Elizabeth Bear

why I hate politics

Sometimes history is cruel.

my bank just lost major karma points

Let's talk about sex.

::BALROG::

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