Lilith Saintcrow

My weekly post is up at the Midnight Hour. It’s about story arcs and structure.

I’m exhausted. I just want to spend a few weeks in bed, doing nothing but sleeping. Of course, I’d probably get bored after ten hours or so and want to read something. I just finished Robert Goddard’s In Pale Battalions, which was amazing. I saw the major plot twist but was snookered by the identity of the murderer, which is a pleasant thing. I’m used to knowing who the villain actually is in the first ten minutes.

In any case, there’s going to be a long weekend full of work of one kind or another. If I get to bed early tonight I may even be bright-eyed tomorrow. Just don’t expect bushy-tailed. Heh.

Have a good weekend, dear Readers.

So my forum was hacked recently. This morning was spent fixing that, applying security fixes, and purging spam members from the database. Fun fun fun until someone takes my keyboard away. I have kind of neglected the forum of late, being occupied with the Chihuahua of Real Life making advances to my metaphysical leg. Bad Lili. No biscuit.

On the other hand, the hack was amateur and the fix simple, so that’s good. That’s the kind of problem I can solve.

I’m slowly catching up with the mountain of work that slammed into the bay during the recent unpleasantness. I think I’ve done a month’s worth of work in the past week alone. Plus I’ve been stuffing my head with books. In addition to all the new stuff I’ve gone back to comfort-food reads–Stephen King’s Rose Madder and Nancy Price’s Sleeping With the Enemy. Both are about abused wives who leave their husbands, but there the similarities end. Of the two, I think Price’s is the better book; but Rose Madder hits a few nerves with me that are both uncomfortable and cathartic. I seem to remember King saying in On Writing that he wrote it while Under The Influence, and there are certainly some stylistic messes in there. Still, there are moments of cold shivers that I keep going back for.

Sleeping With The Enemy is as different as it’s possible to be. The structure is much tighter and the book is much, much shorter. There is no paranormal element. The motif I like best is the “books can save your life” running through the whole thing. As a testament to the curative power of literature, it’s pretty matchless in my opinion.

The biggest quibble I have with BOTH books is that the abused wife goes straight from the abuser to a New Love. Which is SO NOT WHAT ONE SHOULD DO. That’s a good way to get into a new abusive relationship. I wonder why such different books share this hiccup. The treatment of domestic violence in a lot of fiction hinges on highlighting the New Love as gentle and sincere, a change from the Old Bad Love; maybe because the idea of a woman who doesn’t want anything to do with men after being beaten to a pulp by one might not move a story along in the traditional way. Or is it because a woman, in our culture, is still largely viewed as an adjunct to maleness and therefore must go from one relationship to another in order to be “defined” enough for the story’s purposes?

Why is this theme so prevalent in fiction about domestic violence? It’s damn near a trope; I seem to remember it in every movie that touches on the subject as well as most novels I’ve read dealing with it.

I am undecided whether this is a narrative crutch/copout or whether there’s a deeper gender bias issue here. I’m interested to hear your thoughts, dear Reader.

*throws golden apple*

*retreats to watch*

Yes, this is my morning. Pretty much.

And the UnSullen Teen wants another one. To which I say, firmly, NO. And no again.

The kids get so used to me being flexible, it’s quite a shock when I say “no” outright.

And hard on the heels of the cat beating me out of bed with a baseball bat is the news that our harasser (I say “our” because this person’s actions are affecting our whole family with the stress and bother) has escalated again. *sigh* Fortunately we’re well equipped to deal with this, but still–how much longer is this going to go on? *sigh*

Anyway, I should be able to knock off more of the copyedits today. Work is a sure panacea.

Be safe out there, dear Readers. And keep your eyes on those tricksy little beasties.

Meow.

First, NEWS! You can now preorder both the first Jill Kismet novel, Night Shift, and an anthology with a Selene and Nikolai story, Hotter Than Hell, at Amazon. Also in Hotter Than Hell are stories by Kim Harrison and lots of other cool peeps. (I don’t have the list handy, but trust me. It’s, as the Teen would say, badass.) The books won’t be out until July and June, respectively, but just having them up for preorder is marvy.

Next, random sorts of pieces of things. Bad seventies rock is going through my head. In a little bit I’ll put on some vintage Rolling Stones to get it out. Fortunately, Jill likes Rolling Stones. A LOT. It goes with her fondness for muscle cars. I’m not even sure how old she is, because she seems fluent with a lot of things before my time–but then again, so do I. (She likes Amy Winehouse and Keely Smith too. Go figure.)

If you haven’t guessed, I finished a pile of proof pages and am about to start on copyedits. Then it’s revisions for a completely different series, and more revisions for the third Kismet book. (Which shouldn’t be too rough, and should set me up to get into the fourth Kismet book–the closed-door-mystery circus book. Which I have to read Spangle for, apparently.)

It’s good to be working again. The recent unpleasantness did drain me of most of my usable emotional energy, and I was having even more trouble sleeping than usual. But gulping down massive quantities of art has helped, and taking a few days’ worth of vacation helped too. Can’t run an engine without fuel, after all.

In any case, it’s time for a shower and then diving into copyedits. I have a brief burst of productivity this week before a bit more unpleasantness next week. I plan to spend the weekend working round the clock too. I feel surprisingly good and energetic. It could be the sunlight for the past few days–we don’t often get such brightness in February.

The trouble with staggering personal revelations is that once they’re finished, you have to engineer a whole new set of habits to harness the insight you’ve gained. Otherwise, you might as well just sink down into the slough of old habits, and the entire thing is wasted. It takes about ninety days to get a new habit worn into the groove of the old ones, and it’s a slow process. The trouble with self-help books is that they give you the “jolt” of a revelation but don’t force you to make new habits. So you feel like you’ve done a lot of work, but in fact you’ve only used the ersatz emotional hit of the book to avoid further work. *sigh* Of course, self-help books are like lose-weight books; if they really worked a whole multi-billion dollar industry would sink without so much as a bubble and we can’t have that, can we?

Jeez. And I thought I was an optimist. Happy Tuesday, all. Hope yours is sunny and bright too.

It was a lovely weekend. I worked, read American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows (a massacre in 1857, where Mormons killed over 150 settlers, men women and children, and tried to blame it on Indians.) and The Shipping News, which was amazing. I also watched the original The Manchurian Candidate–Angela Lansbury! Frank Sinatra! Janet Leigh! OMG!

I also went and saw No Country For Old Men at Cinetopia, pretty much the only place near me it’s playing. I’d already read the book, so I was pretty prepared. But I have to say, the Coen brothers plus Tommy Lee Jones plus Josh Brolin equals win.

I have this very, very embarrassing fondness for Josh Brolin. Not in Goonies, mind you, but in Young Riders. I loved me some Young Riders back in the day. I hated the fact that the female Rider had to fall in love and be completely emasculated (it’s the only word that fits, but I hate some of the overtones.) Why, I wondered, couldn’t they make her strong in her own right, and make the man an accessory to her, instead of pigeonholing a character who could have been genderbending?

*sigh* But I loves me some Josh Brolin. Yes I do.

I also bought Supergirl for the kids. The Little Prince is in love. He woke me up this morning by poking my nose and whispering, “I just want to watch Supergirl?” With big eyes and all. Little flirt. I doubt he understands it’s Faye Dunaway we really watch for, and Peter O’Toole. I’m kind of sorry the movie didn’t do well at the box office, because as much as I love me some Christopher Reeve or George Reeves, I liked Helen Slater’s confused teenage supergirl. Easy on the eyes, that muffin was.

My Muse demanded a great deal of food this weekend, which is all to the good. A period of consuming right before a huge artistic push is the norm for me, and it shows I’m gathering steam. The complete spending of emotional energy drains the well creative endeavor is drawn from; it’s kind of a creative law of thermodynamics.

I also came to a huge realization. But more about that later. Suffice to say it wa a good weekend, I feel rested and renewed, and ready to…oh, damn.

Proof pages. Copyedits. Revisions. I’ve got a lot of work to do and not much time to do it in.

*headbonkety*

*rolls up sleeves*