Captain America 2, The Winter Soldier: Short, Controlled Bursts

It's a fucking snakeskin turban, people. And no, Mom,
 she doesn't "just look that way" and those aren't her real
cheekbones. Gah, we argued so much about this dumb movie.

It's always a kick in the pants when the Oscars come around. My degree is in cinema studies and working at a grocery store comics. This left me rather depressed, having read my living-the-dream, scriptwriting amigo's annual top ten list to discover I'd only heard of any of the films via a fashion blog I read and not seen a single one. I haven't seen any of the nominees this year, except (cough) Maleficent which is up for costume design. Arg.
through high school and college, I was ever so tapped in to Hollywood (and beyond). The steep drop in my consumption of film--at least current film--coincides quite noticeably with the absence of any disposable income to speak of. Ah, how culture eludes the impoverished! I graduated six years ago in the spring and I've reduced myself to what I can steal from the internet, my streaming-only Netflix subscription, and movies related to my chosen field,

Giving Me a Number, Taking Away My Name

More than the snobbish angst of having not enjoyed any high art at the multiplex this year--and that's being generous in assuming some was made, I'm a cynical snob--is that I have no brevity in my nature. My articles on Watchmen and The Hunger Games are more akin to essays, and between tracking down images, writing and editing, they took days of time to produce. This is a hurdle, more than a flaw, I'd say: It's the way I tend to rant articulately about my opinions to a few people, promise myself and others that I'll write down my thinking and then never do that is the real, real problem. But, since I'm a deli-slicer extraordinaire these days (we don't give out numbers, actually), I might as well do as Devo commands and get up off my ass.

I've Got One Hell of a Job

This is a challenge all writers face: Not writing and feeling bad about it. Let's remember to work with what we've got, draw inspiration from whatever truly does inspire us, and just keep trying to write it down. I did see some movies that were in release this year. I do have opinions about them, discerning critiques as a writer, a filmgoer and a scholar of the silver screen. Let's get nitty and gritty, let's think critically about mass-audience entertainment, let's commit to following through on our promise to ourselves and each other and elevate even the lowest common experiences to the level of intelligence befitting discourse! Or, at least let's delve into a very long exploration of Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier, like I fucking said I would when I saw it in April. Yeehaw!

After this point, there are mega-spoilers, not that I probably need to warn anyone about a movie this old and some triggering things like descriptions of violence. Oh, and hereafter, there will be no more references to "Secret Agent Man" by Devo, in part because Steve Rogers makes the worst secret agent ever.

The F Word

In my personal life as well as in my writing, if I had to put my finger to one truth, its that sex is absolutely vital, and one of the most telling aspects of personality and mental state. Sexuality is an essential thing, yet how we choose to act sexually is influenced so very much by our gender, our class, our education, our mood, our luck, our love. I love to think about it, especially in the context of my characters, because it helps me know them and helps me explore my own biases, feelings and desires. That being said, writing a good sex scene is really hard!

This morning, I read through the top ten entries on The Guardian's annual Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction awards. I wanted to see "what not to do", and compare it to my own work, from my novel The Wide and Burning World, which is, in parts, a veritable treatise on writing about sex. Let's take a look, shall we?

The following article contains sexually explicit writing that's NSFW (no pictures, though) as well as triggering things like non-consensual sex, sexualized violence and rape. 

The Male POV

I used to worry a lot about writing things that I hadn't experienced. The "agony of release" that is the male orgasm, for example. That is until I received some mind-changing perspective on the matter (of writing, not orgasm): No one feels anything the exact same way. If a story/description/idea resonates with one person, it may not with another, no matter if I crib the whole thing word for word from life. This wisdom freed me to rethink the way I gauge my own inspiration, and I do a lot more work with my full conviction.

My fiction is my domain. If it resonates because I've managed to reveal and portray some sliver of genuine human experience, then it doesn't matter if I have a cock or not.

Golden Beam from the Darkness

There's nothing like a sudden hit of inspiration. Usually mine comes from my drive to improve things, either my own work or the execution of others'. This time, the ball was in my court, deflated and moldy from being left in the rain too long. Time to pump it up with some perfect words in their perfect order!

The brunt of my classical training in creative writing is in poetry, and it just wouldn't due to publish (yes, someday, I'm getting to it, shut up) Orphans with a poem-fragment in it that wasn't, you know, good. The poem I refer to is one that must evoke a sense of worldliness and a distinctly masculine sexual viewpoint. My placeholder is:

Stretch’d before my eyes,

the radiant tie of your heart to mine.

In the palm of this hand

blood. In the other,

a puddle of pearls.

Tomorrow brings naught but crimson.

But tonight the moons are up

and you are beautiful.

Okay, yeah, there's the reference to the plural moons for an "it's not Earth" nod, and the goofy semen image. But "stretch'd?" Who talks like that? Stilted, randomly archaic and dumb.

Yesterday this occurred to me, instead: 

Launch a ship from my harbor heart
Fleet and fine.
Solid, sleek. Mast and plank
Drenched, adrip but never sinking
And all sails full beneath the sun
An arrow in the sea between us.

If that doesn't make you want to have passionate, urgent sex with the person who wrote it, I don't know how many moons orbit the planet you come from. Such yearning! Such lusty saltiness! And best of all, its author has never been to the ocean or seen a seafaring vessel (in the book, not yours truly, that would be silly).  Success!

The Dark Knight Rises "Preview"

No, I didn't sell any of my precious bodily fluids to see The Dark Knight Rises in pre-release. This is my pre-review, or How I Learned to Stop Caring and Save $10. (This will pay off at the end, I swear...somehow this got ranty... And the Kubrick reference goes throughout. I dunno, I just like Kubrick.)

Several New Ones

There's really no sense in spending this post tearing Ridley Scott's "effort" Prometheus the...criticisms it deserves. I can only count my stars lucky that this was not the film that emerged in the stead of Alien, given that the strong, independent, yet achingly feminine Ellen Ripley might have been replaced by a shrieking female lead defined by little more than an obsession with pregnancy and a fuzzy understanding of the important difference between belief and proof.

What to learn, what could it be? I like characters that attempt--even in vain--to lift themselves above their emotions when the situation requires. I like love stories: It's love that moves the mountain, or at least, what makes you want to move it. But there are more interpretations of the love-drive than the howling abandonment of reason in the face of loss. It's a good first step to realize this as an author. The next step is allowing your characters to learn the same lesson. Sometimes there is work to be done; suck it up, leave your boyfriend in quarantine and go do it.

The Challenges of Everything

I come to this particular revelation often: Anything can happen.

On the one hand, it's paralyzing. I find myself so overwhelmed with possibilities that I don't know which to choose. My mind burns twice as bright for half as long, and then goes dark.

On the other hand, what the hell kind of thing is that to complain about? Too many ideas? Bosh. The gut knows: Write, try, see how it feels.

My characters will tell me if it works or not. Recently, Arlo (from The Wide and Burning World) got angry. I wasn't expecting that to come of all those cycling directions, but it did. It was really comfortable. In fact, even though I never meant to go in that tract, I discovered that in order to keep him from being so angry, I'd need to undo a substantial amount of previous characterization. I'm rolling with it. Just keep rolling, that's the key. Because it only counts as written once it's wrote.

Never Ever

I just finished reading a webcomic (I'll save which and my feelings thereon for a review post) wherein the male lead risked getting shot in the head. It made a lot of sense, as far as I could tell as a first-time reader: It would have solved a lot of problems, in most of the characters' minds, and would have certainly punched up the action a bit.

Of course, he was the male lead, so as I read along and saw his defenseless head cradled in the female lead's arms, I knew that he was not going to be shot. There was, I assumed, going to be a twist where shooting him in the head no longer became a reasonable solution and lo, I witness swathes of exposition that explained this twist and made everything okay for the leads to have their lives and get married and all that. Happy ending.

Don't mistake me: I didn't really want him to get shot in the head. I thought the character was well-written and I was feeling girly enough that I was hoping for some more romance (although watching this particular illustrator stretch her wings and draw some gore--clearly something that doesn't interest her--would have been nice). I don't like twists for the sake of twists. And some of my stories have happy endings. I find tragedy interesting, but not, again, for its own sake.

But just so we're all clear, if I had been writing this story, I would have very seriously considered having my male lead get his brains blown everywhere. It's not like there wasn't a twist coming anyway, but predictability is beside the point. I wouldn't do it for shock value, or because it runs against what's expected (reactionism is just as deadly to the creative impulse as plot armour). I would do it because the man holding the gun believed it necessary.

My characters are never, ever safe. Not from each other, and certainly not from me.

If it makes the most sense in the story for something horrible to happen, for one of my characters to be cruel or cowardly or simply snuffed out while they're crossing the street, then it happens.

Yes, I put the gun in his hand, but then I asked him what he wanted to do with it. If he answers "Shoot that dandy in the head," I only have two options: Go back and find a way to take the gun out of his hand--make him a different man, in essence--or let him pull the trigger.