Trashy novel update...
Apr. 28th, 2012 09:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatTrashy novel that ate the media update...
Damn this thing is long. I'm reading it on my Kindle, and as the Momster states, you know a book is long, when you keep reading and reading and reading and the percentage thing barely moves. Am a little annoyed. I want to know about the heroine's/narrator's family background, we've gotten snippets. A sort of generalized scope. But there's something weird in there...about her mother's third husband. That's when the heroine was sent to live with her step-father, the mother's second husband. (Sigh, yes, fanfic can read like a soap opera.) Okay I feel like need to draw a ven-diagram now. Or flow chart.
We have Anastasia - she was the child of Carla and some guy who died during a combat accident. Carla marries Ray, who more or less adopted Ana and became her Dad. Carla divorced Ray and marries "dark" third hubby with no name. This guy they don't talk about.
Ana was sent to live in Seattle with Ray during this period. Not clear why, except that
she didn't get along with third hubby and it was a "dark" period that made the mother miserable. Mom divorced him and is now married to fourth hubby, Bob. Interesting.
But heroine claims no harrowing childhood, pure innocence, and no problems. Never dated until this guy. Just guy friends, who adore her, and she's oblivious to. And never experimented with sex at all - I mean at all, no masturbation, no smutty novels - just classical stuff like Jane Eyre, Tess, etc. It may just be a throw-away. But why have a third hubby no one talks about?
Very much the Beauty and the Beast/ Snow Queen trope. It's the innocent girl saves the self-loathing, dark beastly guy with a an insane past. What hits me...is once again we have the old virgin/whore bit going on. Although more by why of Cupid and Psyche/Hades and Persephone than what we normally see - which may explain why women are eating this up. Also, to be fair - the writer is basically subverting that and questioning that in a big way - stating, that it is okay to feminine, to be a woman, to be innocent and worldly at the same time. That it's not clear-cut. She's basically biting her thumb at the societal view.
But why is society still obsessed with the virgin/whore? Why is that? In Cabin in the Woods and Dollhouse, we had it too. What is it about our culture and female sexuality? We're so weirdly puritanical and violent about it. It's like we want to hurt the feminine impulse, whip it into submission or out of us. I studied this in school - the whole fear of the mother, mother-goddess, or inability to handle her in urban legends, folklore, ghost stories, oral narratives, and literature. 20 years later? I'm still seeing it pop up. I want to tell people - get over the Mommy and Daddy issues already. Embrace Father Sun and Mother Moon.
And yes, I can tell it was once a fanfic in good and bad ways. It has the undisciplined repetitiveness of fanfic, the tendency to repeat certain phrases and descriptions ad naseum, and the tendency to go into detail on every little thing. [Examples? the word "holy", the narrator always wants to run her hands through the hero's copper hair, and she's always consulting her inner goddess and subconscious. Methinks the writer has confused subconscious with conscience, and inner goddess with "id" but whatever. It's funny at first, but now it's beginning to grate on my nerves. Details? I've learned a lot about gliders, and BDSM sex - the writer clearly researched BDSM in depth - more than anything else I've read to date.] That said? It also has the wonderful detailed character psychological depth and complexity of fanfic, and the funny moments. We know what songs and movies the characters like. What they do for a living. Who their parents are. Etc. No one does in depth character analysis better than fanfic writers and fans. (To many an original creators considerable chagrin.) Fanfic writers know fans want the nitty gritty. George RR Martin clearly gets it - he goes into nitty gritty detail.
I wonder sometimes about other writers though. Whedon bewilders me. He's a serial writer, who doesn't seem to get that continuity is vital in serials, which is odd, because serial fans and viewers will remember the details. They care. They not only care. They have insane memories for the details. They know the show better than the writer does. Fanfic writers get this - because hello, they are fans. They care about the nitty gritty detail and realism.
Interesting thing about the 21st Century, unlike the 20th, the genre publishers are embracing fanfic writers now. I had a very interesting conversation with a fanfic writer friend of taliamamma's a while back. She told me that the Romance publishing, Science Fiction publishers were actively seeking out fanfic writers who had huge fan bases, because they had a ready-made readership, online presence and would be easier to sell.
Also, this fanbase had already copy-edited and betaed the heck out of their fic, so the publisher's didn't have to do that much. They could just publish it as an e-reader.
Sort of makes you wish you wrote fanfic doesn't it?
Damn this thing is long. I'm reading it on my Kindle, and as the Momster states, you know a book is long, when you keep reading and reading and reading and the percentage thing barely moves. Am a little annoyed. I want to know about the heroine's/narrator's family background, we've gotten snippets. A sort of generalized scope. But there's something weird in there...about her mother's third husband. That's when the heroine was sent to live with her step-father, the mother's second husband. (Sigh, yes, fanfic can read like a soap opera.) Okay I feel like need to draw a ven-diagram now. Or flow chart.
We have Anastasia - she was the child of Carla and some guy who died during a combat accident. Carla marries Ray, who more or less adopted Ana and became her Dad. Carla divorced Ray and marries "dark" third hubby with no name. This guy they don't talk about.
Ana was sent to live in Seattle with Ray during this period. Not clear why, except that
she didn't get along with third hubby and it was a "dark" period that made the mother miserable. Mom divorced him and is now married to fourth hubby, Bob. Interesting.
But heroine claims no harrowing childhood, pure innocence, and no problems. Never dated until this guy. Just guy friends, who adore her, and she's oblivious to. And never experimented with sex at all - I mean at all, no masturbation, no smutty novels - just classical stuff like Jane Eyre, Tess, etc. It may just be a throw-away. But why have a third hubby no one talks about?
Very much the Beauty and the Beast/ Snow Queen trope. It's the innocent girl saves the self-loathing, dark beastly guy with a an insane past. What hits me...is once again we have the old virgin/whore bit going on. Although more by why of Cupid and Psyche/Hades and Persephone than what we normally see - which may explain why women are eating this up. Also, to be fair - the writer is basically subverting that and questioning that in a big way - stating, that it is okay to feminine, to be a woman, to be innocent and worldly at the same time. That it's not clear-cut. She's basically biting her thumb at the societal view.
But why is society still obsessed with the virgin/whore? Why is that? In Cabin in the Woods and Dollhouse, we had it too. What is it about our culture and female sexuality? We're so weirdly puritanical and violent about it. It's like we want to hurt the feminine impulse, whip it into submission or out of us. I studied this in school - the whole fear of the mother, mother-goddess, or inability to handle her in urban legends, folklore, ghost stories, oral narratives, and literature. 20 years later? I'm still seeing it pop up. I want to tell people - get over the Mommy and Daddy issues already. Embrace Father Sun and Mother Moon.
And yes, I can tell it was once a fanfic in good and bad ways. It has the undisciplined repetitiveness of fanfic, the tendency to repeat certain phrases and descriptions ad naseum, and the tendency to go into detail on every little thing. [Examples? the word "holy", the narrator always wants to run her hands through the hero's copper hair, and she's always consulting her inner goddess and subconscious. Methinks the writer has confused subconscious with conscience, and inner goddess with "id" but whatever. It's funny at first, but now it's beginning to grate on my nerves. Details? I've learned a lot about gliders, and BDSM sex - the writer clearly researched BDSM in depth - more than anything else I've read to date.] That said? It also has the wonderful detailed character psychological depth and complexity of fanfic, and the funny moments. We know what songs and movies the characters like. What they do for a living. Who their parents are. Etc. No one does in depth character analysis better than fanfic writers and fans. (To many an original creators considerable chagrin.) Fanfic writers know fans want the nitty gritty. George RR Martin clearly gets it - he goes into nitty gritty detail.
I wonder sometimes about other writers though. Whedon bewilders me. He's a serial writer, who doesn't seem to get that continuity is vital in serials, which is odd, because serial fans and viewers will remember the details. They care. They not only care. They have insane memories for the details. They know the show better than the writer does. Fanfic writers get this - because hello, they are fans. They care about the nitty gritty detail and realism.
Interesting thing about the 21st Century, unlike the 20th, the genre publishers are embracing fanfic writers now. I had a very interesting conversation with a fanfic writer friend of taliamamma's a while back. She told me that the Romance publishing, Science Fiction publishers were actively seeking out fanfic writers who had huge fan bases, because they had a ready-made readership, online presence and would be easier to sell.
Also, this fanbase had already copy-edited and betaed the heck out of their fic, so the publisher's didn't have to do that much. They could just publish it as an e-reader.
Sort of makes you wish you wrote fanfic doesn't it?