Author: photog

Moving on to Something Better

photog Current Events ,

With millennial women writing articles called; “The Death of Millennial Feminism” and; “Millennial Feminism Is Undead” I guess the patriarchy and I really did win!  Does this mean all the girl bosses and Karens are going to put on their Handmaiden outfits and start making sandwiches for all of us?  Well, not exactly.

These people will always be the most annoying insufferable weirdos they’ve always been.  What it does mean is that they’re reaching their forties and they’ve realized that they’ve run out of time to have normal lives.  They’ve traded in the chance at love and family for lower middle management careers and mean tweets.  And, as it turns out, for women that’s a pretty hard pill to swallow.

Reading through the first article is pretty awful.  All the “body positivity” and “polyamory” nonsense that this crazy woman spouted did nothing to save her from ending up enormously fat and saddled with a husband who she had to allow to bring a normal weight woman into her bed as her way of sticking it to the patriarchy.  The just plain craziness of all the “everything is just a social construct so we can’t invent our own rules” is on exhibit here.  They talked themselves into believing that the differences between men and women were just tools of patriarchal oppression and now that those differences are becoming impossible to ignore, they are panicking.

And so, these articles are the admission of what has been going on for the last few years with the endless YouTube and TikTok videos of thirty something and forty something women shrieking their shocked anger that their thirty something and forty something male equivalents aren’t interested in marrying them or even dating them.  Some of these women do break down and cry.  And I find that sad.  But most of them are just angrily indignant that these men don’t know what they’re missing.  Now, those I find hilarious.  I’m guessing the sad ones are just the angry ones after a few more years of loneliness.  As it turns out the female biological clock isn’t a “social construct.”  It’s a ticking time bomb that every woman ignores at her peril.

So, here’s hoping that the millennial feminism actually is dead.  All it ever brought was anger, confusion and dysfunction into the world.  Let’s hope that the women of Gen Z learn something from their older female relatives that fought the patriarchy and lost their happiness doing it.  Maybe they can find a way to embrace the full reality of being a female human (a woman!) and learn to enjoy the rich heritage that our species has inherited from the biological world we were created within.  The war between men and women is a real thing.  It’s always existed and it always will.  But it’s also just the dance that goes along with sexual reproduction and the rules of our species.  Men are what they are because of their role in the family and so are women.  Sexuality and family are the most rewarding parts of being human.  Let’s hope feminism stays buried and we can move onto something better.

Thinking of Humor

photog Humor, Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner , ,

If you go through my entire book looking for moments of humor, I think there are fewer than ten.  And that is counting sarcasm as humor.  I’m guessing that in an adventure story that’s probably not unusual.  With a team of men that know each other pretty well, there will be a certain amount of banter which can be defined as humor.  But, I don’t feel like I’ve fallen below some critical thresh-hold of comedic content.

But, at the same time, I have to confess that comedy is one of the things I greatly enjoy in stories.  To my mind stories that do not have a certain amount of humor seem flat and lacking in interest.  And for that reason, I was recently wondering if I could introduce a character in my next book that is a “wise guy.”  And by wise guy I’m not thinking of the Good Fellas definition of an Italian American mobster as a wise guy.  I’m harking back to my childhood when every block had at least one guy who was the clown.  In my neighborhood we had a kid who today would equate most closely to an insult comic.  He was a mimic and he could find a way to mock anyone and everyone.  This often earned him at least a mild beating if the victims of his mockery pooled their strength to grapple him to the ground and pummel him until he shut up.  But it was almost as if he couldn’t help himself.  He was a slave to his craft.

Now I don’t intend to try and recreate that type of juvenile humor but I think I could make a character who doesn’t know when to shut up.  I’m guessing I’d have to do a lot of work editing the dialog from this character because obviously that’s the kind of thing that pretty easily can be taken too far.  As an example, look at the movie Dead Pool.  This character shoots an almost endless series of insulting jokes at every other character in range regardless of whether they’re friends or enemies.  For the most part it’s entertaining but at some points it can become wearisome.  So, I understand that doing comedy “right” is a matter of balance and skill.  And the other part of it is providing the “comic” with a foil; a straight man.  So Dead Pool needs the haplessly earnest Colossus as the butt of a lot of his jokes.  Building up a duo like that must be handled carefully so that these two characters can be more than caricatures.  And all of this mustn’t take away from the main action of the story but merely come off as the personalities of the characters involved.  It needs to seem organic to the relationship of the people involved.

Now after talking all that through, it seems like this would be a lot of work for not much gain to the story.  But for whatever reason, I’m excited by the idea.  Making the characters real seems to be as important to the writer as making the action exciting.  I’ve found myself actually caring for my make-believe people as if they were real.  Well, anyway, tonight I was thinking of humor.

It’s a Wonderful Life

photog My Fiction, photog's Corner ,

Since I’ve had to use YouTube to learn how to perform the various tasks associated with publishing a book, my YouTube feed has filled up with the various subjects that authors seem to get involved with.  So, I’ve been bombarded with videos on every aspect of writing, editing and marketing books.  But this week I seem to have arrived at the crazy outer reaches of the book publishing ecosystem; namely, sensitivity readers.  Now I had heard of alpha readers and beta readers.  These are the first people you give your book to in order to get feedback on the story from normal people.  This all makes sense to me.  But sensitivity readers are something entirely different.  Apparently, these are people who go through your book looking for reasons to be offended by your story.

Sensitivity readers will read your book and then provide you with hundreds of notes on all of the ways that whatever you say can offend a multitude of easily “triggered” types of people.  One video talked about how story lines and even characters can upset a whole host of fragile readers.  Women, minorities, blind people, deaf people, paraplegics, quadriplegics, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, queers, “non-binary,” all the various kinds of “trans” people, women wearing septum rings, antifa supporters, pacifists, the homeless, meth heads, heroin addicts, other drug addicts, women with blue hair, the lactose intolerant, the gluten intolerant, vegans, poor people, pedophiles, other sex offenders, dyslexics, the neurodivergent, ADHD individuals and many, many more.  The only ones they left out were the red-green color blind.  That really ticked me off.

I looked at this list and realized that many of the people on this list might be offended by my book.  After all my protagonist unleashes a non-lethal chemical attack on an antifa riot that includes many blue-haired women with septum rings and several sex offenders in their ranks.  Without even trying I had unknowingly transgressed against the boundaries meant to be protected by sensitivity readers.

This made me sad.

Then I found out how much these people charge for their service (0.5 to 2.0 cents per word).  For my book that would come out to between $325 to $1300.  So, that’s a lot of money!  Plus, I read that they literally come up with hundreds of items that must be “fixed.”  Hundreds.  That would take weeks to edit.  So, I would be paying someone many hundreds of dollars to make even more work for myself at the same time as she made my book much less enjoyable for my target audience; normal people.

Well, I decided not to hire a sensitivity reader.  But I felt guilty.  So, to assuage my grief I instead watched a bunch of videos about sensitivity readers.  And it worked out great.  These videos are hilarious.  To hear the various absurdities that get brought up by sensitivity readers to these terrified writers is to experience comedic genius.  The things these people worry about are stunningly stupid.  They’re worried about elves and goblins in fantasy stories being mistaken as dog whistles for different races and ethnicities.  They worry about people being cured of diseases in the story making readers who have those diseases upset.  And the funniest thing of all, the readers and the writers look exactly how you would imagine people who worry about such things would look like.  It’s a wonderful life.