Downpour

The anthology with my (lesbian erotica) story in it is coming out tomorrow! You can take a look and preorder it here:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Downpour-Alexa-Black-ebook/dp/B0145PWE3G
Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/570459
Publisher’s Website: http://www.supposedcrimes.com/products/downpour?variant=5866987201

My story is the first one, entitled “Thunder.”

Kay is a butch lesbian with a magical power: Storms have followed her since she was small. Usually when something's important. But today, she's just going to visit her girlfriend -- and taking some lightning along.

Mad Max

I've been thinking about writing since I saw Mad Max: Fury Road. By which I mean I've been wondering about what writers might learn from it.

I've never been big on the idea that books are better than movies. I don't even default to the idea that a movie based on a book is worse than the book, because I think the two media are different, and do different things. And both of them are Art, and Art is Yay, and we should all want more of it.

And the thing that Fury Road had -- pretty much the only thing it had, if we're really being honest -- was the world it created. And not just that it created, but that it revealed with visuals and with vague hints that the audience somehow understood. (I recall reading somewhere that the movie was intended to be understood without dialogue at all, and that there is actually a silent cut of it. I am not sure if that's true, but I find it plausible.)

I have to admit I got a lot of the detail and nuance from the fandom, and might have missed some of it if I hadn't seen it spelled out. But that's actually what I've been thinking about, and what I want to say.

"Show, don't tell" is something every writer hears ten thousand times. And it's good advice. Very often it's more clear than we might realize it is what a character actually intends, or where in the world they are going, or what they actually mean to do. And Fury Road took this to an intense and magical extreme. It dropped you right in the middle of things and left you to figure out, along with the title character, just what the hell was going on.

But -- I may be damning myself here, but I think there are also times that doesn't work, even didn't work in that movie. I knew how the whole blood donor deal worked because I'd read fandom meta beforehand. I'm not at all sure how quickly I would have caught on otherwise. I found myself wondering, as I sat there, if I'd love it as much as I did if I hadn't gone in with a bit of a cheat-sheet read behind me. (The person who went with me enjoyed it as well, but remarked about how confusing it was. And when I started pointing out nuances -- most of which I caught on to because I'd heard about them already -- he was surprised.)

Which leads me to: I think that when you're writing, at least, as opposed to making a movie, you've got more time to show off your world, in more detail. And I think sometimes that means not only that you can allow yourself the luxury of explaining how things work. Maybe even that you're better off doing that, every now and again. Not every description of technical things in your world is going to be dry.

I think sometimes we take the -- common maxims that all writers hear, and elevate them into a weird kind of gospel. Show don't tell is the big one, and I almost feel like I don't dare pick at it, but when I was younger there were others: Don't use cliches. Use active, exciting verbs. (And the corollary to that last which seems to have fallen out of favor: Don't use "said.")

And I remember feeling like I wanted to do those things. Especially using cliches. I wanted to write whole elaborate tales that would gloriously justify whatever trope or trite little sentence I wanted to use.

And I think that's because -- there are rules, and there are reasons they exist (okay, except the stupid "said" one.) But they don't exist because it's categorically wrong to write certain things. They exist because if you're not aware of them, your writing is more lifeless.

But if you are aware of them, you can ask yourself things like, "Do I want my readers to see the scaffolding of my world? Do I want them to lose themselves exploring its intricacies, like someone playing a side-quest in a game, before I gently shepherd them back to Plot?

"Or do I want to toss them into glorious chaos, with a band of creepy-looking War Boys running after them?"

The Scarlet Gospels

I spent the past few weeks curiously awaiting Clive Barker's The Scarlet Gospels. I was a big Hellraiser fan some years ago and got into Barker's older horror, and it came to influence how I write. He mixes fantastic imagery, violence, and gorgeous turns of phrase in ways that make me feel transported into unique worlds that work very differently from our own.

I liked the visceral violence of Hellraiser, and I liked the way the demons' sadomasochism was laid right out there for the viewer of the movie or the reader of the novella it was based on (The Hellbound Heart, which I also recommend.) But more than that, I liked the way the original novella didn't just tell us "well, demonic tempters would be perverted, right?" It gave us demons whose idea of pleasure differed from our own. They were there to provide the blood and the guts and the scares, yes. But they also did some very clever things.

They tempted humans with the promise of unfathomable pleasures -- so the first thing they did, in the novella, was heighten a victim's senses so they can see every crack in their walls, smell every lingering scent in the air, feel every speck of dust or dead skin on their bodies. Then they begin their mix of pleasure and pain. 

That fascinated me, and drew me in to Barker's writing and to dark fantasy as a whole. I still love the way his early work writes visceral explicit gore as if it's beautiful and elegant, and that has shaped how I write. So when I found out he was writing a new novel about the monster everyone has grown to know from Hellraiser (usually called Pinhead, though this book makes too-abundantly clear he hates it and would rather be called "the Hell Priest"), I was -- mm.

Not quite excited. People change a lot over many decades. But intrigued.

I liked the book. I thought it was good, and recommended it to friends, who seemed intrigued by an officially posted excerpt I showed them. I didn't love it, but I enjoyed it.

The fantastical style I'd fallen in love with shone through most toward the end. The characters are in Hell -- the Hell Priest and his minion having kidnapped a friend of the protagonist, the protagonist and a motley crew of his friends having rushed after them because Oh No You Don't. There's a problem in Hell, though: Lucifer is missing.

What actually happened to the Morning Star is the most fascinating thing in the book, and I'd say really the place where Barker lets himself shine. How would an angel, most beloved of his Father and then sent away for a long-ago act of rebellion, really feel about his life? What would he do with his endless hours of exile? How would he feel about the subjects who worship him in much the same way as the angels still above worship their Lord? When Barker's answering that, he's at his best, making things weird and surreal and yet showing the sense they make. He's created a new character (or at least, one I never saw) and let himself run with the idea, and his Lucifer is a wonderful take on a few bits of loose mythology that make what's probably the richest character in the book. (Sorry, Pinhead. Sorry, Harry D'Amour.)

The rest of the time, unfortunately, I think he's a bit hamstrung by his characters. Pinhead and Harry are characters he invented a very long time ago, and Pinhead especially feels... stuck between the past of the character everyone knows and the future that Barker wants to make. He's desperate from the beginning to break free of the narrow box (heh, heh) that Hell has put him in, experimenting with human magic in an attempt to grow more powerful. He uses this forbidden magic (forbidden, I guess, because us filthy humans came up with it) to slaughter his fellow Cenobites in one fell swoop with a fascinating "working" -- a Writ of Execution delivered to Hell's monastery by animated origami cranes.

But if anything, he succeeds too well in breaking free from what he was. In the original stories, the fascinating thing about the Cenobites was the juxtaposition of pleasure and pain, the way they tempted people with heightened sensation and only once the gate to Hell opened showed them what "heightened sensation" really meant. In this book, he carries his usual implements of torture on his belt and uses his usual hooked chains, and we're Told But Unfortunately Not Shown many times how skilled he is at slow agonies. But most of the time he's using his newfound magic, and the few times he does stop to deliver a beating, usually to Norma, the old, blind woman he's kidnapped (a powerful medium with a wonderfully ascerbic wit, so not just a victim by a long shot), he does it with fists and feet, or commits a rape we don't see. (Which I'm grateful for, but which also seems odd from someone famous even in Hell as a sex demon.) It feels so far distant from what he once was that the evolution is hard to see.

It might just be that I miss the version of him in my head, but I don't think so. I think just a dash more connecting Pinhead Then to Pinhead Now would sell the long evolution in him over countless human lifetimes.

I think that's the biggest problem with the book. I read some bits of interviews that hinted that the original draft was more than a thousand pages -- and the volume in my hand (okay, okay, my iPad) was 360something. It felt like huge chunks had been gouged out of it, and a lot of those chunks had been character development it wouldn't have bored me at all to see.

The protagonists were similar. I felt I had a good sense of Harry, the hero, and the way dealings with the supernatural had shaped his life from the time he was young. His gang of friends/Harrowers of Hell (another odd nickname; they go to Hell, but they don't pardon anyone or sanctify them) are all similar in their connections to the supernatural. One tattoos magical wards on most of the others' bodies. One follows prescient dreams. One finds herself frequently possessed by ghosts. Norma is blind to the everyday world but has seen ghosts all her life.

Each of those things is unique, and could offer an interesting way for the character's experience of similar "stuff" (the supernatural) to vary from the others'. But we get so little detail that they start to feel like copies of one another. These three have tattoos. These three are "a magnet for the supernatural." But only Harry and Norma were drawn in much detail, which made the story suffer.

Similarly, I loved that three of the Harrowers were gay: two, a couple that convincingly (and adorably, amid all the blood and guts and despair and general apocalyptic everything) fall for one another as the tale progresses, and one a big strong butch woman who I found a refreshing break from Fainting Horror Girl. But the two lovebirds often sounded like one another to me even though they were supposed to be different. 

And the butch, who I was elated to see because characters like her are so darned rare in anything at all, was perhaps the most sketchily drawn character of the whole book. Sometimes, she seemed like the group's muscle. Sometimes she seemed far too easily terrified to have ventured into Hell voluntarily. (This could have been done well -- "she's tough outside because she's been used as a vessel so often by malevolent ghosts" -- but it wasn't clear enough, if it was the intent.)

(I also feel obligated, since I'm talking about LGBT characters right now, to mention that there's a brief appearance by a trans woman, who is quickly revealed to have villainous intent. I was glad to see her, but I felt like the narrative didn't treat her particularly well. The heroes mock her identity when they find out she's betrayed them, which is realistic in that... actual people being sold out to demons would probably be mean in any way they could. But since she was the only trans character, it made me wince.)

And that nagging bit of disappointment sums up my reaction to this book: It seemed unfinished.

Reading Barker's older work, I felt almost like Barker was compelled to share the horrifying and brutal, yet mystical and beautiful, worlds his imagination dragged him to. Reading this, I felt like he was driven by a different, but still intense need: to draw things to a close, to share how age and time had changed him and the people in his head.

Which didn't give the reader quite enough time to learn the names and histories and shapes of all these people, much less their particular links to the dream world their lives are all so closely woven with.

So I recommend the book. I like it, as the closing chapter it's meant to be. Barker was very clear that Pinhead Dies In The End, and this book makes that feel right, not cheap.

But I want to know so much more about so many of the characters, and so many of the places. Including how Pinhead got where he ended up.

Neuromancer and "Writing Strong Women"

Some months ago I finally read Neuromancer for the first time. I'd always heard it was good, and friends had always recommended it to me. I enjoyed it a lot -- though it took two thorough reads to fully understand -- and meant to blog about it, but somehow, that didn't end up happening.

I want to talk, though, about the character of Molly Millions, who appears to be the foremother of characters like Trinity from the Matrix and a bunch of other ass-kicking sexy women in science fiction.

I've seen a lot of talk lately about the limitations of "writing strong women." The idea seems to be that authors, particularly male authors, assume that a "strong woman" is a woman who fights in battles, has a no-nonsense attitude, and probably looks amazing in skintight leather. (In a way that doesn't look "too muscular" for insecure straight fellows who would find a very buff woman "ugly" or "unfeminine.") People who critique "writing strong women" say "write women instead." Which is meant to encourage authors of all genders to write different kinds of women characters.

And to just plain make sure our stories include enough women that one major character doesn't get taken as "what we think of women." Because if there are lots of different women in our stories, they're easy to take as individuals. But if there's only one woman in the main cast, it looks an awful lot like she's what we think women should be. Like we're trying to make some kind of statement about Women that we're usually not making about Men, because there are usually more men than women in our cast of characters and they usually do lots of different things for lots of different reasons.

And I get that. I do. But at the same time, when I was young, I looked up to those "strong women" and yearned to be like them. I didn't key on the sexualization or the pandering to male fantasy. I'm sure I sometimes noticed it and sometimes disliked it, but it wasn't a big deal to me. Being queer, I probably thought "ooh, pretty," with a few "that's unrealistic" or "how does that stay on, exactly?" or "she must be really agile to fight in that and not have lots of scars" caveats. But mostly, I looked at these characters and saw fearlessness.

I wrestled with anxiety as a youngun. And I had limitations due to disability that made me scared to do a lot of things other people did all the time. Those characters were an escape for me and a source of hope for me. In them, I saw something I wanted to be.

So I get the critique, but I'm biased in favor of those characters, despite their flaws.

Which brings me to Molly, and the things I like about her. One, that she's one of those kinds of characters. And two, that she does, in fact, have a flaw.

Or at least, that she does, in fact, fail.

Those of you who've read this book will know what I'm talking about. She's the muscle for a group of... I'll just call them hacker-thieves, to avoid doing too much explaining. Toward the beginning of their mission/adventure, she sneaks in to a corporate warehouse and steals a digital copy of a dead hacker's personality.

And catches some heat and breaks her leg.

And for the whole rest of the novel, she has this broken leg to deal with. It's repaired, and she goes about her badass business, but it hurts and it limits her and, in the end, her Crowning Badass move when she finally confronts the antagonists fails. Not because they're more badass than she is, but because her leg can't take the strain and breaks again.

At first, I didn't like that. At first, I found it frustrating as all hell. She's already a supporting character, as so many Badass Ladies are, and she's foiled by a broken leg that wasn't set right? The guys have to come save her? Bull pucky!

But the more I sat with my frustration, the more I liked it, because it made her human. She wasn't just wish fulfillment, whether for the male author who wanted a sexy badass to drool over or the me who wanted someone to want to be. She was a person, who did lots of amazing things, and who had a dumb setback at the end for dumb reasons. Just like so many of us do in real life.

So what's the connection I'm drawing? How would I like other people to write women? How do I want to write women myself?

I'm not entirely sure. (And honestly, there are some passages in Neuromancer where for some reason I think Molly sounds "too much" like a man. I can't quite say why.) But I think they're connected because, personally, I don't want to see the Badass Lady die. (I'm not sure anyone else does either. I'm just saying.)

I guess if I want anything, I want to see her change. I want to see things happen to her that no one expects, and I want to see how she handles them, and how others support her, whether male friends or female friends or male love interests or a sweet homebody of a wife she really wants to go home to at the end.

And weirdly enough, flawed as it is, I think this one old example has a bit of what I want to see in it.

Leslie Feinberg and Stone Butch Blues

I've been thinking a lot about Leslie Feinberg's death. I'm one of the many people who read Stone Butch Blues and was... mm. How do I say it?

Profoundly and intensely glad that it existed.

To my knowledge, there's really not that much out there about the particular slice of queer life that book deals with, and there's a lot of history of misunderstanding that community. People get strange when people defy gender-related expectations. And I do believe that certain kinds of queerness are more misunderstood than others. Gay people who don't "come off as gay" as much are more accepted. People "who are in your face" are taken to be calling attention to themselves, sometimes even to be gay in an unhealthy or poorly adjusted way.

So.... that book. I loved it, and I was thrilled to see it acclaimed for offering a glimpse into a side of gay life and trans life that doesn't get talked about as much.

But I also don't think it was written well.

I feel bad saying this. I have no interest in speaking ill of the dead, especially very important dead. I don't want to belittle Feinberg's legacy by saying this.

But I don't think that ze was first and foremost a writer, and I think it shows in the work. Parts are beautifully written, but parts are repetitive and slow. Parts feel a bit like "the gay Forrest Gump" to me, because the book uses a similar device, showing the main character grow as history happens around her.

And that makes me wish it wasn't the only book about a butch protagonist I can think of. I wish I could sit here and go "Start with Stone Butch Blues for its impact and importance. Then when you want something more finely crafted, turn to X. For a speculative fiction adventure, have a look at Y. If you're looking for a YA story about a young butch struggling with her identity as an adolescent, you'll cry your way through Z no matter what your gender and sexuality are."

I'm hoping that this is just a fault in my knowledge, and that this post will immediately be deluged by comments about the many books I need to immediately go and read. But I worry that it won't.

And I guess what I want to say is this: That I hope that writers, whether gay or straight, trans or cis, will look at and think about more than just "I want to write about a gay or trans protagonist." I hope they'll think about cultures and how they work -- even if butches from Alpha Centauri never had a bar scene or trans dragonriders in the land of magic and sorcery they've created are defying a forty-three gender system, not a binary one.

I don't think books have to be about those cultures the way a novel like Stone Butch Blues is. But even mentioning them in passing, I think, makes a story richer and makes representation feel more real.

Mockingjay Part 1

I saw Mockingjay Part 1 earlier today, and I really enjoyed it. I actually liked it more than I liked reading the book. I thought the book was good and had an important message, but I had a hard time feeling invested in it, and I didn't have the same reaction to the movie at all. I've been thinking about why.

I've had a similar response to a couple of other famous books, most notably some of the Harry Potter books, especially Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix. And I think I had those reactions because those books were just so unrelentingly depressing that I started to feel I'd lost the tension of the story. In Order of the Phoenix, I remember wanting so badly for Ron to succeed at Quidditch just because I wanted a little gilded moment to make me feel there was a reason I was still here. A reason I was still rooting for our heroes even when everything became hell. When he got out there and failed, I felt crushed -- and not crushed in a good, "damn this book and the glorious ways it hurts me" way, but crushed in a "why am I reading this?" way. I didn't give up on the book, but I slogged through it feeling like I was hurting myself, desperate to find the payoff somewhere.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I don't like dark. I just finished saying I liked the movie version of Mockingjay, after all, and it was very bleak. I enjoy stories set in dystopias, and there's creepy weirdness going on in a lot of the worlds I create. One thing I love about speculative fiction in general is that it can dial the weird up to 11. Monsters. Dictatorships. Wars. Intrigue. Devastation. I love it all.

But to me, when a story is dystopian or has realistic monsters behaving realistically, it's vital that the writer not drown her reader in the morass of horror. A sad story needs to be sad, but a story also needs conflict and excitement to keep it moving. To keep the reader feeling invested in the tale that's unfolding, even if the adventure is a dark and terrible one.

There's probably an official term for this that I don't know yet (and please enlighten me in the comments, if so), but when I'm writing, I think about mathematical graphs of waves that go up and down. Even when I'm writing a story where part of the point is that the protagonist faces terrible odds and will pay a devastating price for every gain -- I want there to be gains. However small, they need to exist. Because they keep the story going.

I feel like Mockingjay the movie did this better than Mockingjay the book. Mockingjay the book was an amazing, harrowing look at what PTSD really would do to a character, without sanitizing or romanticizing it as a hero story. Katniss constantly ran and hid, or reminded herself of basic facts about herself and her surroundings to ground herself. That's all realistic and impactful, and drives home that no war story can be the story of an action hero.

But it fell apart for me after a while, because it stopped feeling like a story at all. It felt so fragmented and so bleak that I just wondered why I read past the point where I understood the toll the violence took on Katniss.

The movie was harrowing too. Horrible things happened. Only a few of them were seriously toned down that I noticed, and I spent most of the movie feeling like I was going to scream, hide, or cry. It got me, and it got me good, just like it was supposed to. And it showed those little details that made Katniss's PTSD feel real, like her hiding in a closet and her repeating facts about herself to keep herself from slipping away.

But the movie cut out enough repetition of those things that it didn't belabor the point. It allowed them to have more impact for being rarer.

That let the viewer see the plot for what it was, and follow it, and want to know what happened next.

Maybe I'm just confirming the opinion I already held here, but that just drove home the importance of "the wave." I'm working on something now that's set in a dystopia, and a bunch of violent things have to happen. But this reminds me to keep the plot moving. To keep the protagonists winning one every now and then, whether they get their happy ending in the last chapter or not. To make sure there are a few black jokes when they lose.

To keep it feeling real on the one hand, but to keep it tense enough that it still makes for an exciting story on the other.

I have created the thing.

...I believe I am obligated to include the phrase "Hello world" in this post.

Hello world.