Attention Writers: Penguicon 2012 Needs Your Help!
So about four weeks ago, I volunteered as the Lit Track head for Michigan’s wondrous con Penguicon, which was in a bit of dishabille. And unfortunately, it looks like I’m up against crushing deadlines and still have a tragic lack of entertaining panelists at this point. And I need to have all of my panels done by, oh, next Friday.
I need this year’s Lit Track to be excellent. It’ll be better next year, when I’ve got more lead time, but I definitely want to make it be notable this year.
So I’m putting out a call to the Internet: Are you a writer who’s going to be at Penguicon? Would you want to be on a panel? I’d consider it a personal favor if you would help me out here – as usual, there’s no compensation, just a reduced rate of $25 instead of $50 if you do three hours of panels. But you do get the fun of spouting off before interested crowds, and plugging your work with restrained abandon.
If you’re interested, email me at theferrett@theferrett.com by Monday morning with:
1) The times you can do panels;
2) What your areas of strength are (novels, workshops, YA, et cetera);
3) Any suggested panels. I’m open to all ideas.
If this works, I’ll have until Friday to get everything scheduled and in the books. I know it’s a rush. Yet looking at everything, though we’ve got enough people to make it a good convention literarywise, I’d like it to be approaching the fringes of awesome.
(If you have contacted me, there’s been some issues with my email – please try again, it should be fixed by now.)
The Hunger Games: A Movie Review that Doesn't Say Too Much (No Real Spoilers)
So here’s the thing about the Hunger Games movie: there’s not a lot to say. They did such a good job converting an already movie-friendly book that it’s hard to find much to complain about. It’s got incredibly tense action scenes, it pretty much has the same plot, it’s well-acted. If you liked the books, you’ll probably at least like the movie and there’s a better-than-even chance you’ll love it. The end.
Okay, if you’re a big fan of the books, you may be asking about Woody Harrelson as Haymitch and Lenny Kravitz as Cinna, two casting choices that raised some fannish eyebrows. And rightly so. In my mind’s eye, Haymitch was fatter and more out of sorts, perfect for a Walter Matthau sort, less obviously effective. And Cinna was a more flamboyant designer type, much crazier.
For me, watching these two roles are like hearing a really good cover of a song you liked. Were they what I imagined? No. But can I buy them? Sure. Kravitz’ interpretation of Cinna has a gravitas that really shines in the scene just before a terrified Katniss heads up to fight to her death, and while this Haymitch is far more obviously a good and effective fighter, Woody Harrelson sells the drunken asshole with such charm that sure. I’ll go with this.
It hasn’t replaced the casting in my head the way Harry Potter movies did, but I’ll go with this.
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss, on the other hand, absolutely owns this movie. Her terror and need to survive comes across in every scene, and it’s a fine acting. As Gini noted, most people tend to approach this sort of role with either an overstated bravado or a fainting collapse, but Jennifer walks that middle line perfectly. She’s scared, so we’re scared. But she’s not going to let that stop her. (And Rue. Oh, Rue.)
Stanley Tucci as Caesar, however, is spot-on perfect. His talk-show host schtick is a pleasure to watch.
Visually, well, the movie’s irritating in the way that it mistakes shakycam for grit. The entire opening in District 12 is shot by a trembling drunk, the camera jittering like it’s trying to tapdance. This style settles down, but kicks up again in a couple of the fight scenes to the point where I wanted to say, “Hey, it’s cool to let us know what’s happening. You don’t have to hide your fight-scene blocking behind a wall of blur.”
That said, the visuals of District 12 were exactly as I envisioned them. Some wags said that for a movie called the Hunger Games, everyone seemed remarkably well-fed… but aside from the stars, District 12 looks properly miserable and downtrodden. Bart Calendar complained that the audiences back home weren’t being held at obvious gunpoint, but those opening sequences show us that they’re watching to find out what happens to their friends, and not out of genuine enthusiasm.
And I loved the outfits at the capital, because the severe over-the-top nature of everyone’s outfits has looped back around to the sort of garish garb that people in 1970s sci-fi movies thought of as The Future. The folks in the Capitol could easily walk into Logan’s Run and start partying, which I very much enjoy.
But overall, there’s a couple of carps – I wanted more flame in the flaming coal outfits, Peeta’s camouflage is too movie-perfect, and I missed the note of ambiguity at the end as to Peeta’s true motives – but the Hunger Games’ power is evident more than ever here. There are scenes we watch as Peeta and Katniss fall in love, and we think this is great fun to watch. Then we realize that the TV viewers back home are also thinking it’s great fun to watch, and we feel a little voyeuristic and slimy for watching. Yet we don’t stop, either.
As it should be. It’s a good film. If you liked the books, it’s a no-brainer to go see.
Writing Female Characters101: The Difference Is Not Biological
My friend was very excited, because his new novel featured a first for him: a female protagonist. He was looking forward to the challenge of writing something long-form that had a different viewpoint character than his other, male-centered, novels. And he was so concerned with getting it right that he’d asked a bunch of us to talk it over wih him.
Unfortunately, he made an error that I think a lot of male writers do. And that error arrived with this statement:
“Okay,” he said. “At this point, she’s been brought to a foreign land, and I need to raise the stakes so that she wants to stay here and fight for this culture. So I think she needs to get pregnant.”
Cue groans from the women in the session.
Now, I’ve observed before in that in fiction, women have one of two roles: to get raped, or get pregnant. And I think, watching my very well-intentioned friend go at it, I’ve finally understood the reason why men do this.
See, in his excitement to write a woman, he got caught up on the differences between men and women. If women can get pregnant, and I’m writing a woman, well, I should immediately start with this biological difference! That’ll be a plot that only a woman can have!
Except it’s a plot that almost any woman can have. In attempting to differentiate your character, you’ve just made her like 95% of other women in fiction.
Plus, pregnancy is just one of a thousand different motivations that can get a woman to do things. If you had a male character, would you define his sole reason for staying as being biologically-based? Of course not. You’d look at all the myriads of motivations that could drive humanity to fight for a cause – love, justice, revenge, obligation, pride, the challenge of starting over again, survival, redemption, hatred – and choose one that was not based on a man’s unique ability to squirt sperm.
So why do you narrow it to pregnancy? Why? To write a woman’s plot? Then what you’re saying, whether you mean to or not, is that women have one role… and I gotta tell you, from the groans of protest I heard from the women, they’re getting pretty tired of that crap.
Pregnancy is just one aspect of a female character. Look at all the emotions that might motivate a woman, and allow that pregnancy is also an option, but let it be just one option among many. Then choose the one that fits this character.
As someone wisely said during the session, “A woman’s character is not formed from biological imperatives. It’s formed from a difference in experience, and that experience is often societally driven. If women think differently, it’s because people treat them differently – but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel all the same emotions that men do.”
And those emotions run the gamut to “not wanting to be pregnant.” Yes, protecting your baby is noble – but as others noted, assuming that I was whisked away to a foreign land consumed by war, my instinct would not be to double down on fighting for this land, but to get my kid to a nice safe hospital back in the States. Pregnancy is a specific event for a woman, yes, but there are lots of abortions and lots of neglectful mothers, and not every character is going to react in the “traditional” way to the news of impending progeny.
In fact, is “traditional” even what you want? I mean, when you’re writing a male character, do you want someone who reacts in the way that men are inevitably supposed to react? Isn’t the point of characterization to give us something surprising? Don’t you want something a little better than the stock-in-trade reactions that have been seen a thousand times before?
So why make pregnancy, that traditional “This is where the woman gets strong” moment, the crux of your novel?
The good news is that my friend listened to the feedback given, and hopefully changed all this stuff before he started. As a guy, that’s the best start you can have – talking to women you trust, and listening to what you get wrong. I sympathize. I’m about to start a novel involving two teenaged girls, and as a guy I assure you I’m going to get it wildly wrong. The female experience is complicated, female adolescence doubly so. The best I can do is to write honestly, and keep listening to actual female feedback to keep me on track.
But when I write women protagonists (which I have in Sauerkraut Station, In The Garden of Rust and Salt, My Father’s Wounds, and The Backdated Romance, among others, each of which features wildly differing characters) I’ve always tried to ensure that their motivations are more than biology. I think that’s the baseline with which to start.
Plugs I Forgot To Give
So, you want some good short fiction? Well, thanks to the lovely funding capacities of the Internet, you can get some excellent ones for cheap!
One I recommend is a Kickstarter for Scheherazade’s Facade: Fantastical Tales of Gender Bending, Cross-Dressing, and Transformation. It’s by an editor I respect, and has at least one author I love (Aliette de Bodard, for the record). A mere $10 will get you an e-book when it comes out, and the idea is good, so why not kick in? God, I love what Kickstarter does for artists.
The second is Mike Allen’s Clockwork Phoenix 2, freshly available on the Kindle. I haven’t read all of the stories in it, since I never bought it the first time around, but the stories I did read were pretty amazeballs, as my girlfriend Bec is wont to say. And Mike himself modestly chronicles the acclaims this sucker got at the end of the year. So for a price of $3.99, it’s quite the bargain! Go get it.
Cleveland Tough
The longer I live in Cleveland, the more I find it a tragedy that I never met Harvey Pekar. Because I don’t think you can truly understand Cleveland without understanding Harvey.
I’d say Harvey was the first blogger, desperately hunting down multiple artists and publishers to comic-strip-ize his mundane tales of Cleveland life in American Splendor, but that would be incorrect. Part of blogging is interacting with your audience afterwards, and Harvey never cared about that. Harvey’s audience actively seemed to irritate him at times.
He just had this burning need to talk about things that nobody else seemed to be telling. Tiny, street-level interactions. The mundanities and strangenesses of life. No superheroes, no grand story arcs, just a tiny, quirky little life lived at sidewalk level.
Yet somehow he made it fascinating. And back in the 1970s, when independent comics were underground, he self-published these weird little tales and found an audience.
Cleveland’s like Harvey: unapologetic, deeply loving of quirky things, the butt of jokes everywhere. Yet we don’t care. Hey, we have three thriving theater districts, one of the best classical orchestras in America, a wealth of fine dining. Did you know that? No? Well, who the fuck cares? You don’t live here. We’re not living our lives to impress you, we’re living it because we damn well like it – and yeah, maybe the economy’s a pisser and we’re all struggling for work and things are tougher than we like, but we’ll get by. We’re survivors, man. But being a survivor doesn’t mean you give up the shit you love.
Just like Harvey, obsessively collecting his jazz albums in his shithole of an apartment. A strange beauty, Cleveland is.
I mean, Harvey wasn’t afraid to open veins. He blogged about his deepest foolishnesses. And occasionally he lashed out in ways that even he considered embarrassing later on, going on strike in David Letterman and confronting him in perhaps one of the most uncomfortable TV moments in history.
But you know, what Harvey did, he never apologized for. He did what he thought was right at a time. Maybe he didn’t know better, but he did the best with what he had. And there’s a strength in that.
I dunno. I see parallels between myself and Harvey, but I could never take on his mantle. And yet, at one my point my girlfriend Bec called me “Cleveland tough” – which may be the greatest compliment I’ve ever been given. To be honest enough to endure the waverings of uncertainty is, in a way, the greatest strength. And to suggest that I’m a hardscrabble survivor, like Cleveland, like Harvey Pekar, is a glory.
I’d be proud to call myself Cleveland tough. For I’m in love with this city. This attitude. This way of being. Who we are is what we are, and maybe you think it’s silly or foolish, but fuck it. You know the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, fuck it, that’s commercial, if you’re distracted by that PR bullshit then you don’t deserve to know us.
I’m gonna watch American Splendor one more time today, and marvel at Harvey. I miss that crusty, unhappy bastard. Yet his legacy resonates still with me, with his city, and that’s something I’m proud to carry.
Here we are, funny voice and all, surviving. Thriving. Improbably creating beauty from the strangest things.