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Jan. 3rd, 2020 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. In a bit of a reading slump. I tried Courtney Milan's latest After the Wedding part of the Worth Saga, and finally gave up. She tries hard to do a biracial and bisexual romance, but gets a bit too interested in hammering the reader over the head with it, and far too much telling not enough show. The heroine, who is a bit of a whiny wet-blanket, I wanted to smack upside the head, and the hero...sigh, felt a bit on the weak side as well. Also, quite a few items felt off in regards to the historical period. She's doing a biracial romance in a time period in which it wasn't acceptable, and the two characters, a white maid and a black valet are forced to marry by a Bishop and a Rector at gunpoint, in England, during the 1800s. This is a time period in which it was illegal in various countries for people of different races to marry. (I'm not sure about England though.) In addition the heroine is bisexual as is an elderly woman, and they are openly so.
Not sure that works either in the 1800s. Rose Lerner handled a similar plot thread far better, as did Cat Sebastian.
It's not that diversity and racial issues can't be handled well in romance novels -- they have been and are -- I just felt the author was either burnt out or overly self-conscious? Meredith Duran, Sherry Thomas, Alyssa Cole, and various others have handled it better somehow.
What Milan does do is drop the physical descriptors for the most part -- which is key. Now if she'd just scale back on the annoying internal monologues.
Anyhow, I've jumped back to Julie London's A Dangerous Gentleman, which I may or may not stick with.
I'm bored of the books I'm reading at the moment. I tried a sci-fi. I tried a fantasy. I've jumped to various and sundry romances. I just can't find anything that grabs me. I may start reading Crime and Punishment in a fit of desperation.
2. There's a meme going around regarding what "you were fannish about this decade" and I can't remember. Was I fannish? I don't know. I was never your typical fan to begin with...
I kind of dabbled in fanfiction, but never really comfortable writing it. Prefer creating my own characters and world -- don't particularly like having someone tell me what I can or can't do with characters. I'm like a cat -- I'm weirdly territorial about things. And while I don't mind sharing my toys, I'm not overly comfortable borrowing and playing with someone else's toys (particularly without their permission) - it makes me edgy. (Possibly the copyright lawyer in me, raising its ugly head.)
So by dabbled? I wrote two or three pieces. And mainly read whatever I could find in one fandom from roughly 2002 to 2010. Then gave up. One does run out of stories that one has not read or seen before after a while. There's only so many ways people can write the same characters after all. Probably would have been better off if I were more diverse in my fandom tastes and ships, but alas no. I did read a few Farscape fics back then as well.
I think between 2010-2015, I read a few Doctor Song fics, and a Merlin one. But that's about it or all I remember. Oh, I did try to read X-men fanfic -- and god, it's bad. The problem with long-running soap operas, whether they be comics or well, television shows, is that the writers of said soap operas are technically writing fanfic already. There's really no where the fans can go that hasn't already been done by the actual professional writers. Why read amateur fanfic when you can have the professional stuff? I mean, less typos and grammatical errors for starters. Granted you do get porn with the amateur stuff. Let's face it we're never going to see a Cyclops/Wolverine sex scene in an actual Marvel comic. Or for that matter a Jean/Emma one -- although Hickman will imply it. Televised soaps on the other hand...it's a possibility. Daytime soap operas tend to be a little less prudish about sex than comic books.
And I don't do vids or fanart. (Well not entirely true -- I have done it in the distant past, just never felt the need to share any of it. Don't ask -- it's long gone. I didn't keep it.)
No. What I like to do is discuss the thing I'm obsessing over to death. Also hunt down videos and Q&A of actors/writers involved with it and get all the back-stage or behind the scenes gossip about how it was put together, what the intent was, etc.
In short I'm a geeky nerdy meta writer and reader. If I get obsessed over something -- that's generally the direction I go in until I get it out of my system.
I don't want to interact with it. I don't want to play role-playing games. I don't want to put on the character's costumes. I just want to analyze it to death. This tends to annoy most fans. I have to hunt to find like-minded nerdy geeks who are into that sort of thing. Which makes me the atypical fan.
So...with that in mind, was there anything? Eh, not really. If so, they were so short lived and didn't have much of a fandom that was interested in participating -- that it well didn't last long enough to be memorable.
Examples of such flashes? Breaking Bad, The Wire, Game of Thrones...
I tend to do it more with television shows than books -- mainly because there's more content to do it with. Also books tend to be more...detailed, tight and less open-ended.
For me to do it at all -- I have to fall for or get intrigued by the characters. I'd say I need other fans who are similarily obsessed, but considering I wrote reams of meta on Cyclops and the X-men, and absolutely no one cared (this did not curtail me one bit) -- apparently not. I can do this to just entertain myself, the rest of the world be damned. I really don't do anything to please the world or obtain validation from it -- I do it to please me. The world, lets face it, is impossible to please -- best not to try to hard.
So...I think I got the most fannish about The X-men and Cyclops. It really wasn't until the whole House of X/Powers of X, that I got fannish about characters and stories outside of Cyclops. Also I was fannish about the MCU movies. Those surprised me, and they delivered the ending I wanted. I wasn't disappointed -- and I expected to be. (Always a good idea to go in with low expectations.)
I did get fannish about Game of Thrones from roughly 2008-2016, then kind of gave up. I got disappointed. It happens. And not being overly masochistic (turns out that I'm not), I gave up and stopped being invested. You have to be very masochistic to love Game of Thrones. Almost as masochistic as diehard Star Wars fans.
Let's see anything else? It's hard to remember. Lucifer -- although that was lukewarm. Vamp Diaries - also lukewarm. General Hospital -- I wouldn't exactly call it die-hard. More just something to pass the time. I like the ladies and gents I interact with on a FB GH spoiler centric fanboard. (Soaps, I get spoilers for -- mainly for my own sanity and self-preservation. They are impossible to predict, and have a tendency to disappoint.)
3. Been following, albeit briefly, the increasingly absurd Twitter Romancelandia War today on Twitter (the parties got a tad distracted by the threat of an actual War with Iran which they are labeling WWIII. Uhm, apparently they've forgotten that we're still at war with Iraq and Afghanistan, so hey why not add Iran too -- they are all next to each other...before long it can just be called the Persian War. Also, the parties involved don't know as much about the Iran infraction as my mother does -- who felt the need to tell me the entire history and all that was involved in detail over the phone tonight, just after we discussed the soap opera and each other's days.)
Anyhow...as you probably have guessed by now with all my posts, I've been following the battle between the RWA and Courtney Milan et al since roughly Christmas on Twitter. To date it's really just between Courtney and RWA's forms, emails, and responses to members -- since RWA has not tweeted on its site since December 26. Took me while to figure it out. Still trying to. Once I did, I can't help but think that none of the people involved have handled this very well -- and maybe if they could talk face to face and not via social media, it would have been resolved by now?
The latest? Apparently the Ethics Complaint had nothing to do with Twitter or Milan's behavior on Twitter but something else. Which no one knows about or understands. And is private or top-secret, according to a form letter sent to a someone who'd entered a RWA contest and withdrew, requesting a refund. No one else had gotten the letter, and she posted it bewildered that she had -- but no one else had. (Really RWA?)
If I were to guess, I'd say it would have something to do with the woman who lost a three book contract/deal with a publisher (which is a huge thing by the way, particularly for a writer in their sixties). That's the part of the complaint that made me wonder what really went down. Because publishers don't tend to yank lucrative three book contracts based on one social media outlet and one author and their following - in this case Twitter. Milan is popular and heavily followed on twitter but she's not THAT popular. No matter how important everyone thinks Twitter currently is -- it's not that important. There are other social media outlets, some far more popular, such as Snapchat.
So what happened that resulted in an award-winning and long-term novelist getting a three book contract yanked from her publisher? That's the one part of the complaint that puzzled me. (I worked in publishing for a bit, and know other people who have.)
Also, if your behavior results in someone losing a lucrative book contract that means you can be sued for defamation and libel. Because the way the law works -- if you actively interfere with someone else's financial gain without good cause -- well. OTOH - Courtney Milan is a lawyer who specialized in contract, ethics, copyright, and defamation laws -- and clerked for a Supreme Court Justice (Kennedy). So...I can't imagine she'd do anything that could come back at her on a legal front.
(A lot of genre writers are former lawyers -- mainly because nobody really likes to practice law and it's a lot more fun and far more lucrative to write pulpy genre for a living. Or they are like me and were frustrated writers to begin with and just did the law thing to ensure they didn't starve. Starving writer didn't appeal to me either, obviously.)
There's so much that isn't clear here. And it's not helped by the fact that the parties concerned have dug trenches and appear to be embroiled in a marketing war.
Dragging anyone who gets too close and says the wrong thing down with them. I'm sticking clear of twitter. I tweet maybe three times in a blue moon. Twitter scares me, there are crazy people on Twitter. My work place strongly cautions me to avoid it at all costs - for well it's own reasons. (Very public work place.)
4. I don't really have a four. Make something up? It's been a tiresome two days back to work, not helped by the weather and pesky male project managers who instead of doing what I need them to do, call me for ego stroking and whining. Ugh.
I want sun. Maybe I should take a trip somewhere tropical this winter? Not wait until Spring to do it.
Not sure that works either in the 1800s. Rose Lerner handled a similar plot thread far better, as did Cat Sebastian.
It's not that diversity and racial issues can't be handled well in romance novels -- they have been and are -- I just felt the author was either burnt out or overly self-conscious? Meredith Duran, Sherry Thomas, Alyssa Cole, and various others have handled it better somehow.
What Milan does do is drop the physical descriptors for the most part -- which is key. Now if she'd just scale back on the annoying internal monologues.
Anyhow, I've jumped back to Julie London's A Dangerous Gentleman, which I may or may not stick with.
I'm bored of the books I'm reading at the moment. I tried a sci-fi. I tried a fantasy. I've jumped to various and sundry romances. I just can't find anything that grabs me. I may start reading Crime and Punishment in a fit of desperation.
2. There's a meme going around regarding what "you were fannish about this decade" and I can't remember. Was I fannish? I don't know. I was never your typical fan to begin with...
I kind of dabbled in fanfiction, but never really comfortable writing it. Prefer creating my own characters and world -- don't particularly like having someone tell me what I can or can't do with characters. I'm like a cat -- I'm weirdly territorial about things. And while I don't mind sharing my toys, I'm not overly comfortable borrowing and playing with someone else's toys (particularly without their permission) - it makes me edgy. (Possibly the copyright lawyer in me, raising its ugly head.)
So by dabbled? I wrote two or three pieces. And mainly read whatever I could find in one fandom from roughly 2002 to 2010. Then gave up. One does run out of stories that one has not read or seen before after a while. There's only so many ways people can write the same characters after all. Probably would have been better off if I were more diverse in my fandom tastes and ships, but alas no. I did read a few Farscape fics back then as well.
I think between 2010-2015, I read a few Doctor Song fics, and a Merlin one. But that's about it or all I remember. Oh, I did try to read X-men fanfic -- and god, it's bad. The problem with long-running soap operas, whether they be comics or well, television shows, is that the writers of said soap operas are technically writing fanfic already. There's really no where the fans can go that hasn't already been done by the actual professional writers. Why read amateur fanfic when you can have the professional stuff? I mean, less typos and grammatical errors for starters. Granted you do get porn with the amateur stuff. Let's face it we're never going to see a Cyclops/Wolverine sex scene in an actual Marvel comic. Or for that matter a Jean/Emma one -- although Hickman will imply it. Televised soaps on the other hand...it's a possibility. Daytime soap operas tend to be a little less prudish about sex than comic books.
And I don't do vids or fanart. (Well not entirely true -- I have done it in the distant past, just never felt the need to share any of it. Don't ask -- it's long gone. I didn't keep it.)
No. What I like to do is discuss the thing I'm obsessing over to death. Also hunt down videos and Q&A of actors/writers involved with it and get all the back-stage or behind the scenes gossip about how it was put together, what the intent was, etc.
In short I'm a geeky nerdy meta writer and reader. If I get obsessed over something -- that's generally the direction I go in until I get it out of my system.
I don't want to interact with it. I don't want to play role-playing games. I don't want to put on the character's costumes. I just want to analyze it to death. This tends to annoy most fans. I have to hunt to find like-minded nerdy geeks who are into that sort of thing. Which makes me the atypical fan.
So...with that in mind, was there anything? Eh, not really. If so, they were so short lived and didn't have much of a fandom that was interested in participating -- that it well didn't last long enough to be memorable.
Examples of such flashes? Breaking Bad, The Wire, Game of Thrones...
I tend to do it more with television shows than books -- mainly because there's more content to do it with. Also books tend to be more...detailed, tight and less open-ended.
For me to do it at all -- I have to fall for or get intrigued by the characters. I'd say I need other fans who are similarily obsessed, but considering I wrote reams of meta on Cyclops and the X-men, and absolutely no one cared (this did not curtail me one bit) -- apparently not. I can do this to just entertain myself, the rest of the world be damned. I really don't do anything to please the world or obtain validation from it -- I do it to please me. The world, lets face it, is impossible to please -- best not to try to hard.
So...I think I got the most fannish about The X-men and Cyclops. It really wasn't until the whole House of X/Powers of X, that I got fannish about characters and stories outside of Cyclops. Also I was fannish about the MCU movies. Those surprised me, and they delivered the ending I wanted. I wasn't disappointed -- and I expected to be. (Always a good idea to go in with low expectations.)
I did get fannish about Game of Thrones from roughly 2008-2016, then kind of gave up. I got disappointed. It happens. And not being overly masochistic (turns out that I'm not), I gave up and stopped being invested. You have to be very masochistic to love Game of Thrones. Almost as masochistic as diehard Star Wars fans.
Let's see anything else? It's hard to remember. Lucifer -- although that was lukewarm. Vamp Diaries - also lukewarm. General Hospital -- I wouldn't exactly call it die-hard. More just something to pass the time. I like the ladies and gents I interact with on a FB GH spoiler centric fanboard. (Soaps, I get spoilers for -- mainly for my own sanity and self-preservation. They are impossible to predict, and have a tendency to disappoint.)
3. Been following, albeit briefly, the increasingly absurd Twitter Romancelandia War today on Twitter (the parties got a tad distracted by the threat of an actual War with Iran which they are labeling WWIII. Uhm, apparently they've forgotten that we're still at war with Iraq and Afghanistan, so hey why not add Iran too -- they are all next to each other...before long it can just be called the Persian War. Also, the parties involved don't know as much about the Iran infraction as my mother does -- who felt the need to tell me the entire history and all that was involved in detail over the phone tonight, just after we discussed the soap opera and each other's days.)
Anyhow...as you probably have guessed by now with all my posts, I've been following the battle between the RWA and Courtney Milan et al since roughly Christmas on Twitter. To date it's really just between Courtney and RWA's forms, emails, and responses to members -- since RWA has not tweeted on its site since December 26. Took me while to figure it out. Still trying to. Once I did, I can't help but think that none of the people involved have handled this very well -- and maybe if they could talk face to face and not via social media, it would have been resolved by now?
The latest? Apparently the Ethics Complaint had nothing to do with Twitter or Milan's behavior on Twitter but something else. Which no one knows about or understands. And is private or top-secret, according to a form letter sent to a someone who'd entered a RWA contest and withdrew, requesting a refund. No one else had gotten the letter, and she posted it bewildered that she had -- but no one else had. (Really RWA?)
If I were to guess, I'd say it would have something to do with the woman who lost a three book contract/deal with a publisher (which is a huge thing by the way, particularly for a writer in their sixties). That's the part of the complaint that made me wonder what really went down. Because publishers don't tend to yank lucrative three book contracts based on one social media outlet and one author and their following - in this case Twitter. Milan is popular and heavily followed on twitter but she's not THAT popular. No matter how important everyone thinks Twitter currently is -- it's not that important. There are other social media outlets, some far more popular, such as Snapchat.
So what happened that resulted in an award-winning and long-term novelist getting a three book contract yanked from her publisher? That's the one part of the complaint that puzzled me. (I worked in publishing for a bit, and know other people who have.)
Also, if your behavior results in someone losing a lucrative book contract that means you can be sued for defamation and libel. Because the way the law works -- if you actively interfere with someone else's financial gain without good cause -- well. OTOH - Courtney Milan is a lawyer who specialized in contract, ethics, copyright, and defamation laws -- and clerked for a Supreme Court Justice (Kennedy). So...I can't imagine she'd do anything that could come back at her on a legal front.
(A lot of genre writers are former lawyers -- mainly because nobody really likes to practice law and it's a lot more fun and far more lucrative to write pulpy genre for a living. Or they are like me and were frustrated writers to begin with and just did the law thing to ensure they didn't starve. Starving writer didn't appeal to me either, obviously.)
There's so much that isn't clear here. And it's not helped by the fact that the parties concerned have dug trenches and appear to be embroiled in a marketing war.
Dragging anyone who gets too close and says the wrong thing down with them. I'm sticking clear of twitter. I tweet maybe three times in a blue moon. Twitter scares me, there are crazy people on Twitter. My work place strongly cautions me to avoid it at all costs - for well it's own reasons. (Very public work place.)
4. I don't really have a four. Make something up? It's been a tiresome two days back to work, not helped by the weather and pesky male project managers who instead of doing what I need them to do, call me for ego stroking and whining. Ugh.
I want sun. Maybe I should take a trip somewhere tropical this winter? Not wait until Spring to do it.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-04 11:43 am (UTC)Someone recently did a Twitter thread of Victorian photos of biracial couples.
(Will confess that my own ongoing fictional work includes several mixed-race couples, Regency/early-Victorian.)
no subject
Date: 2020-01-04 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-04 03:23 pm (UTC)I am not sure about 'throughout Europe', but in UK there were no laws against.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-04 03:59 pm (UTC)It's still an issue in certain areas. I was visiting my friend (who happens to hail ethnically from the Bahamas by way of Africa) and her significant other (who happens to be white -- he's very white actually) in Martha's Vineyard. And they both told me stories that gave me pause -- he told me that Martha's Vineyard had 1950s attitudes towards race and relationships. (He's a choir music director.) And she mentioned that she took her Driver's License/ID everywhere - even to the beach. Never left without it.
That's the problem -- the discriminatory practices still exist in the US, and not just on an individual level but also depending on which State you reside, on a systematic and institutional one. New York is very liberal -- and has a lot of anti-discrimination laws in place including one for Transgender. But, it also has a lot of problems with racial profiling -- and stop and frisk, which has become a major issue.
I don't know what it is like in Britain. I know back in the early 1990s, Australia had similar problems and was quite racist in some of its attitudes. And France isn't as pristine as people like to think, although less racist from an institutional perspective.
The problem isn't really just racism or racial prejudice, because honestly everyone has that to one degree or another -- the problem is racial discrimination -- specifically on an institutional level - and that is much harder to fight. We're making progress - but not quite far enough.