Monsterbeard

I can’t help myself.  I refuse to link to this article, but here are some quotes I strongly disagree with.  Outside of enraging me, this article does little but convince readers that the author, Edward Pasteck, is either a rapist or wannabe rapist.

“Parisian women deny or accept these advances with a decisiveness many American women lack.”

Denying or accepting someone groping you has nothing to do with your decisiveness!  Being groped does not initiate the consent decision, it was already made for you by the non-consensual grope.

“This idea of plying a woman with alcohol (something that is applauded by American men in private) often enrages American women because they view it as an assault on their right to consent.”

Ok first, “applauded by American men in private”?  Go fuck yourself.  There is a name for people who applaud getting women drunk in order to have sex with them.  They’re called sex offenders and you can find a list in your neighborhood pretty easily.  Secondly, impairing someone IS an assault on their right and ability to consent.  That isn’t women being uptight, that is reality in the same way impairing someone is an assault on their right to drive.

“‘Consent’ is a weighty term otherwise reserved for elevated, formal, even sanitized contexts. Using the term in regards to sex inherently ties a sexual choice to ethical and legal ones.”

Except a sexual choice IS an ethical and legal choice.  I get to choose who I have sex with, and if someone violates that right, it is ethically and legally wrong.

“I’m not suggesting that a woman have sex with someone she doesn’t want to, but I’m hoping we can start having more guilt-free sex by any means necessary. If we turn the volume down on consent, perhaps we’ll get closer to this kind of liberation.”

BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!  What am I inferring from this?  “I’m not saying women should have sex with people they don’t want to, but I’m advocating not feeling guilty when things get out of hand and the girl I got plastered at the bar is having second thoughts but I’m really into her and I think I should just go for it.”  Thanks Ed, good to know where you stand on the issue of consent.  I look forward to your report on prison consent policy.  I’m sure you’ll be quite comfortable.

Look, I’m not saying Gawker is a whore, except it is and this is disgusting.

filmprojections:

10. Green Zone
9. Jackass 3D
8. Monsters
7. Splice
6. Kick-Ass
5. Takers
4. The Social Network
3. Inception
2. The Town
1. Let Me In

Source

Also known as ten reasons why Stephen King writes books and not movies.

I crossed the 20,000 threshold in NaNoWriMo last night.  Which means as of right now I’m about 6,000 words from where I should be.  Nerdshares suggested that if we’re going to blog about NaNoWriMo, it shouldn’t be just about our wordcounts, and I agree, except, well, the wordcount’s the thing, isn’t it?  That part of the motivation and the pushing and the staying up too late is for reaching The Big 50.

A lot of the time, like when the words are flowing, the wordcount is like a mile marker.  Make it to this next goal, just this one.  And then the next one.  And so on until you finish your first marathon.  Other times it’s the beat of a drum.  Like we are trapped in the mines of Moria and an army of Orcs is thumping along the caverns (We cannot get out!  They are coming!).  The wordcount is our unforgiving but encouraging personal trainer.

But and so I’m writing and free from analyzing my writing, because I simply do not have the time.  Passages and dialogue will rush (ok, not exactly rush) by with the cheesiest of on-the-nose drivel I can offer.  It becomes much easier to justify two characters debating what to do with their afternoon or describe the backstory of a corkscrew.  I don’t know if there’s anything in those moments, but they are words, and words are what drive us.

In the interest of discussing something other than wordcount, I find that in my terrible writing again and again I want the page to drip with pathos and sentimentality and “This, THIS was the moment.”  The problem with over-sentiment is that it quickly becomes cliched and hackneyed and you lose the effect/affect of the sentimentality.  But every two thousand words or so I try so very hard (unintentionally!) to have some signifying (cliche) moment in a character’s existence, something that should in reality only happen once.

Consider this sentence, which I actually wrote, which was the last sentence I wrote last night, a character reliving a kiss: “He felt it on his lips again and again and fell asleep with an easy heart, uplifted by the coincidence of a diner and a waitress and a moment in the dark.” BLERGH!  I mean, what?  I don’t know.  It felt like a right moment at the time.  But in the future this may be the only record the sentence was ever written.

The problem with cliches is that they’re true, of course.  Since I’m an overly emotional pollyanna who pictures every possible moment to be the climax in my human drama film, I eagerly look forward to sneaking them in.  And when I realize what an idiot I am and what terrible writing I’m doing, I turn to cliches, of course.

The most famous and perhaps most true would have to be This too shall pass.  Legend has it that a powerful king wanted a ring that would make him happy when he was sad and vice versa (wikipedia).  In harvest or drought, we can turn to it and remember one of the central tenets of life: change.  It is rare that in our happiness we stop to remember the other side of things, but when we are sad, or low, or feel like we can’t go on, or when I am 6,000 word behind and the words won’t come and I don’t know why I ever thought I could do this, my heart can turn its over-sentimental heart and remember that this too shall pass. 

And then, “Hmm, how can I fit that concept into my novel?”

Because there are a bajillion doctors in this city and the only one I know is Kush.