I haven’t sent them anything in forever, but they were my first sale so I will always have a yay-spot for them

You know, I really SHOULD send them stuff again.

You know, I realize it’s super for the publisher that they don’t accept simultaneous subs, but with a 3-6 month turnaround time, that realistically means you’re only shopping your manuscript around to like 3 people a year.

I should explain that I like the stories in books for a reason. Those are the stories the author intended to tell us. I have no problems with the stories that movies and TV intend to tell us, but I do not understand the point of buying the rights to a story you don’t intend to tell. I mean seriously, save your money. I’ve watched so many adaptation movies where I’ve been pretty sure they could have called it something else and not gotten sued by the author, since it bore so little resemblance to the book. I know things have to change in order to go from book to movie, especially things with a lot of dense prose, things need to be cut out, and the places they were cut need to be papered over in some way so the movie story isn’t full of gaping holes. It’s things added for no real reason that tick me off.

Cutting Tom Bombadil: okay. Adding that weird crap scene where Faramir falls to the temptation of the ring and drags Frodo into Gondor, where a Ringwraith sees him and the ring… and then miraculously vanishes with Sauron STILL not knowing where the ring is, just to build tension? NOT ok.

Watchmen did it right. Coraline did it wrong.

Which is surprising to me, because I’ve read all sorts of reviews about how fabulous Coraline was. I think having read the book made Watchmen more enjoyable, and Coraline a lot LOT less.

Watchmen was pretty much what I would consider a perfect adaptation. There were changes, yes, and at least one of them was fairly major. However, I think it was necessary in order to make something so plot-dense into something resembling a coherent movie, and frankly? I never liked the ending of Watchmen.

The "dropping the giant tentacle-vagina onto New York to scare humanity into cooperation" just never worked. It was too convoluted, how Veidt did it was confusing and not all that compelling, and the result made no sense. So an alien arrived dead in New York. How exactly does that make the USSR want to be our friend? The world still wasn’t given a concrete enemy; there’s no indication of where the monster came from, why it attacked, when it might do so again… heck, it could have been a squid-monster commuter who made a teleportation error on the way to the office! It wasn’t a Starship Troopers sort of situation, where we knew where the enemy was and had to pull together to combat it – even though we really didn’t. Moore clearly wanted to make that leap, but it wasn’t belieable for me.

Making Dr. Manhattan the monster at the end, blowing up multiple cities worldwide… that worked. Not only to cut out a ton of convolution that would have made even less sense to a viewer than a reader, but because Dr. Manhattan is concrete. They knew who he was, they knew where he came from, they were already terrified of him. The only problem I saw with it was that frankly, Dr. Manhattan was TOO scary a monster. There was no way to defeat him. He’s more of a doomsday device than all the nukes they were threatening each other with: humanity didn’t get out from under the thumb of assured destruction by having him be the enemy. In fact, this time the nuke had its own brain and was obviously malicious. I can see how the world would pull together to fight him, but I can’t think there would be any kind of surge of hope.

Most of the story was lifted bubble-for-bubble and panel-for-panel from the graphic novel, which made Kirstin and I squee in many places. The actors were perfect in looks and in their portayals. The credit sequence of diorama-like flashes was an amazing and economical way to put the backstory all in one place at the beginning without belaboring it. As a fan of the graphic novel, I found the movie an extremely satisfying adaptation.

It did bug me that at no time is a PoC on the screen who isn’t blown up in some way. But I can’t blame it on the movie; that’s the source material. Didn’t make me less uncomfortable though.

The rape scene bothered me, not just for the obvious reason, but it was extended. The Comedian gave her more of a beat-down than the comic – really, after her slap, it seemed like he was a lot more interested in hurting her than fucking her (which, I admit, is quite in character) but I really didn’t need to watch it. And they cut out Hooded Justice’s line, which to me was the most brutal, telling part in the original scene. He stops the Comedian from raping her – but he does it because he’s a superhero, and that’s what they do. Then he turns to Sally and says "Get up. And for God’s sake, cover yourself." It really brings it home: they have no respect for her. She’s not a collegue. She’s a publicity tart in a short skirt. The Comedian wasn’t the only one who didn’t respect her strength; none of them did. I felt cheated by having that taken away from the movie, because it just felt like Hooded Justice swoops in an rescues Sally from the one misogynistic bastard in the group – which makes both her nostalgia for "I was a hero!" and her decision to sleep with Eddie later less understandable.

And the line they added at the end when Laurie points out she knows who her father is? "I forgave him, because he gave me you." I gagged. I did.

The other problem I had was the death of Rorschach. At the end where they took off his mask, he was weeping, but not in the way I associate with that scene. He was sad and shaking. They redeemed it when he screamed "DO IT!" but that earlier bit really bothered me, because it really seemed to undermine how much Rorschach chose that ending becuase of his refusal to compromise. And having Dan be there to add a Big No that wasn’t in the source? OUCH. That sucked.

Still, I think it was one of the most successful adaptations I’ve ever seen, and yes, I’ll be buying a copy with the extra half-hour or so of footage they had to cut. Hopefully they’ve got the news-stand guys in it, maybe a little more background on the New Frontiersmen (both of them appear on the end without any context) and I’ve heard it’s got the scene where Dan and Laurie serve coffee to the people they pulled out of the burning building. Yay!

The best thing about Coraline was the 3-D effects. They were fun and awesome and well done. The shame of it was that Kirstin and I sat there through the movie, knowing this was the kind of movie we usually enjoy and should be enjoying… but completely not enjoying it. The resemblence it bore to the source material was so tenuous that I really think they could have renamed the characters and not spent the money buying the rights to the marvelous story they all but discarded. I guess I’m glad Gaiman got paid, so he got something out of the bargain.

The most notable change for us was that the characters were extremely unpleasant. Coraline isn’t just bored, she’s a nasty, angry little kid. Her parents aren’t just busy and sort of benignly neglectful, they’re actively telling her to go away. Her mother’s a real bitch. The neighbors, instead of being just sort of eccentric and strange, are actively creepifying and a little scary. The rats got changed to jumping mice (boo!) and the "twin" doll got added.

The addition of Wybi pissed us both off. For one thing, it made us both angry that apparently the movie people thought we’d never believe a little girl could have all those adventures on her own. She clearly needed a boy companion in order to make it believable. Or you know, maybe they added a boy in to make little boys want to watch it, so they’d have someone to relate to… because god knows, us girls never get stuck watching movies with only male protagonists and no one to relate to, right?

They also decided to make Wybi some sort of half-assed deformed Magical Negro – he’s Black (but not TOO Black, he’s a nice, mild brown ) and apparently has scoliosis or a hunchback or something (which doesn’t prevent him from acting in perfectly able-bodied ways like riding his motorbike to Coraline’s rescue) has no other friends except a black cat and no life except popping up occasionally to guide, clue, or nudge Coraline in the right direction.

I don’t even know what the point of the utterly cruel name the character is given – Wybi is short for "Why Were You Born" which is just… ugh. A name the now-mean little Coraline feels the need to taunt him with, despite her own annoyance that no one bothers to say her own name correctly. The fact is that Coraline is so cruel and nasty to this kid that in the Other World, her Other Mother creates a version to be friends with Coraline who cannot speak and has no voice. And Coraline LOVES that. When the real Wybi shows up to talk to her, her reaction is to roll her eyes and say "Oh great, the Wybi who can talk." Gee, cupcake, so sorry that you really adore the emasculated, de-voiced single-and-only CoC in the movie… who got inserted in to make up for your gender-deficiency in the first place.

*gag*

Aside from that, the movie was interestingly made and had some interesting moments… but it really missed the point of the story it was only barely telling. If you want to see a much better adaptation of the story behind Coraline, I feel like Mirrormask is a better bet (in fact, I saw Mirrormask before I read Coraline, and was awfully confused by the fact they weren’t related except that Gaiman wrote them both) because it just really captures the wonder and the terror of the idea so much better.

I feel like the movie actually a lot more than the book illustrated why Coraline might want to stay in the Other world, since it’s a LOT nicer there than her real world… but they did it artificially, by adding a bunch of lovely things (like the garden scene) to the Other world and making everyone in the Real world actively awful. And really, Coraline herself was such a brat I couldn’t really root for her.

I do want to say though that the casting of Watchmen adds active fury to my upset about the Avatar debacle. They managed to cast actors who look amazingly right for the parts. These are people that, both naturally and I’m sure with some manipulation through makeup and maybe some digital work (not sure how much, except for Manhattan) look pretty much exactly as Dave Gibbons drew them. And they’re all good actors who really nail the parts.

So… it’s impossible to cast the "best" actors who actually look like the CoC in Avatar? Oh, Hollywood, blow me. Seriously.

It’s been percolating through my head the reason why 90% of the the populations in SF/F are white, or white-identified. Because really, if you stop and look at the world, at populations, at where people come from and whatnot? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Fantasy makes the most sense, I suppose. Because usually fantasy it set in a quasi-Arthurian European setting, which means there aren’t people of color. Fairies and Elves are traditionally described as being pale as snow and whatnot, except for the more hobby-gobby ones, who have skin like bark, or water, or shadows, or whatever they’re affinitive with. So ok, I can accept that fantasies in those settings don’t have people of color, because they’re set in a very narrow area.

Very narrow. Seriously, if you look at the basic geography of humanity? The “white” population, being what is currently considered “white” – people with pale skin, green/blue/grey eyes, and blonde/red/light brown hair? It’s a pretty narrow strip. It’s only naturally occuring on a couple of cold islands and their related surroundings. (NOTE: I have not been able to gather enough specific information from the internet to determine the original population of the Russian/Eastern European area as being either white or asian in character. Sorry, I truly apologize for the lapse. It’s something I’m looking at. I want to lean toward asian though, as it makes the most sense. If I am wrong, I will update.)

That means the rest of the world is some shade of non-white and carries other characteristics, which are extremely diverse. Lumping people into “white,” “black,” “asian” and “other” doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because context changes things. To the natives of South American, the Spaniards were white; there are “whiter” people in Europe who historically considered them swarthy and sallow-skinned. Also, that “other” category? Yeah, way too big. No one really fits in those boxes, so why use them?

So when worldbuilding, from scratch, an alien planet that is “M-class” (haha!) or Earthlike, or an alternate world, or an alternate dimension… why does it make sense to have the majority of the population be white? Seriously? The time I’ve spent building the races in my world has been inextricably tied to building geography. Geography informs the characteristics of the people, and there’s a very narrow set of characteristics which seem to naturally produce “white” people.

I’ve always been confused by the Men of Rohan. I know they’re white and Anglo-saxon and blonde and blue-eyed, but their culture as described, the place they live, the way they lived… they always looked like Native Americans to me. They’re the horse-lords! And at the time of my childhood readings of LOTR, the Native Americans were the only horse-culture I was aware of. Of course, taking LOTR in its world-building context, all the brown people of the world have already been conquored, corrupted and subverted by Sauron (the Easterlings, the Haradrim, the Southrons) and are marching on this last bastian of (white) goodness in Middle-Earth. Again, it’s a situation where the setting is (somewhat, technically) English and so there aren’t brown people to be had, so I can give it a bit of a pass in that regard.

So, is every fantasy world everywhere pseudo-English? I uinderstand that between Arthurian legend, legends of Fairyland and LOTR, the English kinda invented the genre. And that’s awesome, props to them! But is there some reason they have to be the only population of it?

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, from a world-building standpoint.

When I made the Katriel “people of color,” it seemed natural. They’re not even really an extreme example, I guess they’dfall into that pesky “brown/other” category. They’ve got swarthy skin, black curly hair, and black eyes. It seemed natural to have the invaders from the sea be “white” because they were built on Viking boat culture, with obvious (and very large) tweaks like having the boats be generally floating cities containing whole families who lived there all the time. The only reason the “white” people are the majority in the first book is that (a bit like the real world!) they were conquorers who artificially implanted and expanded themselves all over the landscape.

I’m just spitballing. To me, it doesn’t seem like it should have been a big shock that everyone in Earthsea was brown. Look at the setting! It should have been shocking for everyone on the island archipelego to be white, I think. To me, it’s weird that the Rohirrim weren’t brown. It’s odd that the Dunedain came from their sunken island and landed in a place where everyone looked… just like them. What?

The geography, racial characteristics and culture will all inform one another. To ignore any aspect of that is just lazy worldbuilding. Yes we nod and smile about that, every time we pick up a fantasy novel that is once more set someplace where, miraculously, everyone looks like the Norse and the climate and geography don’t support it at all.

Pam Noles: Shame

Please read.

What stings a little is that it was the formiest of form letters… not only unsigned, but only on 1/3 sheet of paper. Presumably so they can reject 3 queries for the price of a single sheet.

Well, back on the horse. I really need to fix my synopsis though. It sucks painfully. It’s really awful. I finally have my query to (I believe) an acceptable place… but that synopsis. Ugh! Awful!

Anyone who’d like to take a look at it and tell me things like "Is that sentence supposed to be English?" and "I have no idea what you’re trying to say here… who did what?" and other helpful things?

There have been a few interesting tidbits. Like when I realized that the freak-out two characters are having over a bit of information given to them at the end of Book 1… wasn’t in Book 1 at all. It must have been in an earlier draft and somehow got deleted is all I can figure. No one’s ever noticed that Zefyn never tells Patrik X thing at all! And yet Patrik reacts to it, discusses it with the other characters…. I quietly sneaked it back into Book 1 and then went and banged my head against a wall.

One thing bugs me though: re-describing the characters. I know there’s a certain assumption that people who are reading the second book already read the first one, so they know this stuff and should only need a little refresher. On the other hand, there’s also an assumption someone bought the book without noticing the "Sequel to X" beneath the title, or forgot most everything between one book and the next, so they need you to re-hash everything. You need to remind them who is who, what they look like, what they’re all doing where they are now.

It used to drive me insane that every time I’d pick up an X-Men comic in high school I’d have to read about "the focused totality of my psychic powers" whenever Psylocke was on-page, and Wolverine’s "adamantine-laced skeleton and mutant healing factor." I understood that the writers were accounting for the fact that anyone could pick up an issue of X-Men, fans or not, and needed to know what was going on. At the same time, it seemed to punish regular fans by reguritating those phrases at us every dang month.

I know that novels aren’t something that come out every month so you need to pound that stuff into the reader, but you’ve got to have some level of recap in a sequel. It always feels awkward though. I never know how much is too much… and since I have a natural tendacy to over-describe and over-word my books, anything that requires me to artificially add more always makes me itchy.

It reminds me of an outline I once made for my books.

Chapter 1: Something Bad happens to Rain and Fire-Eyes
Chapter 2: Something Bad happens to Mika
Chapter 3: Something Bad happens to Liat’s family
Chapter 4: Something Bad happens to the King
etc

I think I should sum it up in the spirit of the link though.

Something Bad happens to the characters. Mostly, the other characters happen to them.

THE END.

I do want to briefly meta on some of this gender-in-fantasy stuff that’s going around lately like a cold. And I say briefly because I like irony.

Relevant links that got my thinky thoughts churning are jimhines‘ post, Writing Kick-Butt Warrior Women, sartorias‘ Men With Boobs post, and aberwyn ’s Tears, Idle Tears… post.

Sometimes, reading the meta that goes around fandom and working on my story, I get this angry shoulder-devil reader in my head. I write what I write for the story, but I try not to buy into the awful sterotypes and tropes that I was practically breastfed on as a storyteller. deepad  made an amazing post during the Cultural Appropriation Imbroglio which I recommend everyone read, because it took the thing to an angle I’d never considered. How we are all fed these stories and ideas and how they get into our head as "of course that’s how the story goes, that’s how the characters look, that’s how the hero acts, that’s how the heroine acts." He’s coming at it from a cultural direction, and right now I want to come at it from the gender-in-fantasy direction that’s been kicking around.

Every time I make one of my female characters cry, every time she needs help, every time she’s looked down on for being thegender she is, every time she’s subjected or even threatened with sexual assault, every time she falls in love, every time she gets pregnant, every time she’s the healer, every time she’s the psychic, every time she’s the mama bear, every time she’s beautiful, every time she’s a princess, every time she’s the witch… that shoulder-devil reader in my head squawks about how I’m betraying my gender. And part of me sits there and chews on it and wonders how right it is. I wonder if I’m undermining my own freedom to have strong female characters by refusing to write them that way.

Because we do get these stupid tropes stuck in our head. Even Eowyn got hurt, rescued, locked away for the battle and then married off. The Ladyhawke of the title really does nothing but scream and act as the tug-toy for the male protagonists. Princess Toadstool is in another castle. Princess Leia is the best shot with the laser pistol, but she still needs to be saved by the boys, who immediate speculate about hooking up. And that just scrapes the surface of the stuff I grew up with, I could bring you a hundred examples, but why bother, you folks know most of this stuff already, whether you realize it or not.

I don’t like the men-with-boobs trope, mostly because in my head, behavior isn’t limited by gender. Two of the most emotional people I know are my mother and my best friend; two of the most outwardly stoic are my husband and my best friend’s wife. So the "making your princesses men-with-boobs" bit is insulting, to me anyway, because what the hell is that saying? That only men can be sexually aggressive, physically aggressive, like guns, carry knives, etc? On the other hand, the books and movies we grow up with tell us that yes, that’s how it works, and it’s not really subverting that to make your card-carrying ice-cold badass a woman if there’s really nothing female about her.

Now, I’ve got a character in this book who is probably one of the strongest characters I’ll ever write. She IS a card-carrying badass ice-cold bitch. She leads a coup, raises her own army, raises herself up by her own bootstraps from the bottom of the heap to the top, and is totally ruthless about bulldozing the world around her into the shape she wants. She’s a nearly-unstoppable badass with a sword and magical speed/strength to go along with it.

I don’t think she’s my only strong female character. In fact, I don’t think being a driven, ferocious killer necessarily make you one. I certainly don’t think all my female characters need to be like her, because yikes. But when she has her breakdown and cries for a moment over what she’s done, that reader-devil went "YOU JUST RUINED EVERYTHING!"

One of my main protagonists happens to be female. She happens to be proficient with weapons, efficient, outwardly confident and stoic. It’s all about the quest for her, she doesn’t sidetrack, she doesn’t want her emotions in the way. She doesn’t cry. She gets shit done. She saves the boy, and she’d like to hook up with him but she’s too busy working and has no time for love. She’s protective and emotionally distant. She reads, when you really look at her, a bit like those old fantasy heroes, with her stiff upper lip and dedication to honor above all.

And you know what? It’s nonsense. She is the LEAST strong of my female characters. She has no agency. She does what she is told, she adheres to rigid behavior standards because she’s been told that’s how it works, she feels ashamed of her emotions. She’s terrified every minute that something changes and she needs to do something that doesn’t fit with the plan. When she cries it’s because she’s been forced to see that all she’s doing is following someone else’s plan, blindly, because she’s too scared to think about it.

So did I fit the trope or subvert it?

I don’t know, and I won’t know. I don’t writefor tropes, I don’t tailor my stories to be popular, but I would like them to be empowering. I would like them not to hurt other people. I would like people of other races, and people of all genders, to be able to read the stories without getting hurt by what I’ve put on the page. It’s not always possible. There’s a rape scene that I’ve been chewing on for about four years because it’s such a big event that I never want to do for the wrong reasons. But that shoulder-devil is really starting to piss me off.