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Book Review: Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders

5/30/2018

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Book Review:
 
Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders: A Writer's (and Editor’s) Guide to Keeping Historical Fiction Free of Common Anachronisms, Errors, and Myths
 
Susanne Alleyn
 
2012, Spyderwort Press
 
B-
 
The Basics:
 
A guide to common historical errors made and perpetuated by fiction writers, and how to avoid them.
 
The Downside:
 
One gets the clear and early impression that Alleyn has read How Not to Write a Novel (as should everyone, incidentally — it’s a useful and hilarious guide to fiction writing in general), and thought, “Hey, I’ll bet I can be even snarkier than that!”
 
Unfortunately, that snark does not come accompanied by all of Mittelmark & Newman’s wit or knack for helpful analysis. Instead of laugh-out-loud, over-the-top caricatures of a systematic list of general errors, followed by discussion on exactly what's going on and what could be done better, we get repetitive ramblings, calling out specific authors (often by name) for the very specific errors they’ve made that particularly annoyed Alleyn, usually related to the French Revolution.

There are many points when the whole book feels like an excuse to vent these annoyances, in better English but with comparable pomposity and unnecessary meanness to an Internet comments section, cloaked in a line or two of lip service to the cover’s promise of constructive advice. This constructive advice generally boils down to the true but unhelpful “do more research.”
 
The Upside:
 
Underneath the off-putting tone, there is some good general advice to be found here as well, particularly about common areas where errors are made, and therefore good targeted starting points for some of that research. There are sections on things like money, noble titling conventions, the availability of certain goods and technologies throughout time and space, origins of common phrases, and traditions (like permanent graves) that are newer and less ubiquitous than many people think.
 
Other advice — such as choosing time periods you’ll actually enjoy researching, anticipating the different mindsets of people with different experiences from your own, and distrusting the accuracy of movies and historical propaganda penned by the victors — should be fairly obvious to those with some existing background in either writing or history, but are certainly valuable pointers for brand new beginners.
 
For more seasoned writers/historians, the most useful part of this book will likely be the appendix, detailing rich and underutilized sources of historical information.
 
Altogether far from a comprehensive guide for beginners (or anyone else), but worth adding to a large stack of introductory books for a hopeful future historical fiction author.




Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)!

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The Prospero Chronicles Announcement

4/2/2018

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​Okay, looking at that headline, you’re probably asking yourself at least one of a few very specific questions, so I’ll do my best to answer them with all due haste.
 
Q: What are The Prospero Chronicles again?
 
A: Ha, ha. I know it’s been a long, bumpy road of publishing, unpublishing, republishing, re-planning, hiatuses, and all other manner of business and creative drama that can befall a story, but you guys still remember Mina and Ben pitting their mismatched friendship against the forces of the ancient interdimensional monsters they call Splinters, right?
 
Q: Oh, yeah. Wait… is there going to be a screen adaptation?
 
A: Not so far, but ten points for optimism.
 
Q: Is there finally a release date for book four?!?!?!
 
A: No, not quite, but more on that shortly.
 
Q: But the ending of Slivers…
 
A: I know, I know.
 
Q: You sadist! You can’t just bring this up again and keep us hanging on that ending! I have to know what happens to Ben, and Aldo, and…
 
A: You will.
 
Q: Sure, like I’ll someday find out the non-TV ending of A Song of Ice and Fire?
 
A: Ouch. No, really, you will.

Q: Is the series dead? Give it to me straight, doctor!

A: No! In fact that's the opposite of what this announcement is about.
 
Q: But no release date?
 
A: Not yet.
 
Q: Then what else could you possibly have to announce?
 
A: Here goes. Matt is going to be withdrawing from The Prospero Chronicles, and I’ll be writing the final installment solo.
 
Now some of you may be asking a different set of questions.
 
Q: What? But don’t you guys write separate characters? How can the series go on without him? Why isn’t he coming back? Is he okay? Aren’t you still an adorably married writing duo?!
 
A: Relax. Matt and I are fine, personally, professionally, medically, and in whatever other ways you might be thinking. In fact, we’ve got a superhero noir novel coming out in August from Talos Press, and a post-apocalyptic dieselpunk indie series we’ve been working on together for later in the year as well. It’s just The Prospero Chronicles specifically that Matt’s splitting away from.
 
Q: Wait, is this why, at the end of Slivers, Ben is-
 
A: Hush. No spoilers yet, in case anyone needs to catch up. And the answer is… not consciously? But it does make my job a little easier now. What luck!
 
Q: But why isn’t he writing it with you?
 
A: Matt’s been wanting to work on other projects for a long time. We’ve tried several times to schedule a period to work on the final Prospero book together, but it’s become clear that it’s not really a question of timing; it’s just not where his focus and passion are now.
 
Matt and I have both grown and developed a lot as writers since we first started working on The Prospero Chronicles together. I’ve always had a fair bit of room to stretch within The Prospero Chronicles, but Matt’s generally been stuck playing the straight man. He’s proud of what he put into the series, especially the world building and creature design, which were almost entirely his baby. He’s also going to go on helping me in a consulting capacity, so that I don’t get lost in the territories of Prospero that have only been charted in his head. But in terms of putting words on the page, he can’t stay. The voices of his other characters in other worlds are calling.
 
Q: Aren’t you going to feed us a line about how this is a good thing?
 
A: Believe it or not, it really is. As awesome a writer as Matt is and as great a team as we make, no story is going to benefit from being churned out while its creator’s heart is elsewhere, no matter the reasons or the talent involved.
 
We realized that either we could write a long-procrastinated final book with adequate skill but half the spark missing, or I could write a full-sparked final book in the course of a few months.
 
I believe we made the right choice not just for us but for The Prospero Chronicles themselves.
 
Q: Did you say a few months?
 
A: Well, yeah. That’s what I’m working on right now, and in spite of the way the book’s been restructured to play to my solo strengths and wrap things up in one installment instead of two, I’ve had the essential beats of how this story has to end bottled up for so long that they’re spilling out at NaNoWriMo speed. Editing, cover art, and release day scheduling and planning will take a bit longer, of course, but it’s looking like a 2018 finale might still be within the realm of possibility.
 
Q: Is that all we’re going to get now?
 
A: No! Just to whet your appetite, and maybe a little bit to prove that I’m serious, you get a preview from chapter one of Stitches, book 4 of The Prospero Chronicles.
 
Note of course that this is a draft in progress, subject to changes and corrections, and naturally filled with spoilers if you haven’t reached the end of Slivers yet.
 
Enjoy!



1. The Drip
 
Mina
​

It was Haley who told me.
 
There was a competitive cooking show playing on the TV that evening in my med center room, and one of the contestants was yelling about how the other team had ripped off his method for perfectly searing parsnips while I watched the Occupation guards out in the hallway pat her down for weapons. From the way she stood there with her arms spread, half impatient and half dreading the moment when she’d be allowed across the threshold to see me, I knew enough to make me dread it too.
 
The drugs wouldn’t let me feel the full, visceral twisting of that dread, but no doubt it was occurring anyway, somewhere in my distant-feeling innards.
 
One of the guards raised an eyebrow at the contents of Haley’s backpack but eventually returned it and waved her inside. She extended my brutal stay of enlightenment by treading the four feet to my bed as if they were a rickety balance beam.
 
She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were bloodshot, and her voice came out raw.
 
“There’s been an attack.”
 
I waited, and finally the blow came, in an economical croaking of syllables.
 
“Kevin’s dead, and Ben’s missing.”
 
My breath quickened, and I found that her raw, blunt voice was more than I could match.
 
Aldo replaced. Kevin dead. Ben missing.
 
Responding with words was like trying to slay a dragon with a toothpick.
 
Kevin. Kevin who never wanted to fight. Kevin who was going to Berkley and then into politics to save the world the other way. Kevin who forgave me for killing his brother, who’d saved my life at least twice over, who was there from the very beginning, even when I was too preoccupied to thank him, which was always.
 
One little jab of the toothpick.
 
“How?”
 
I didn’t want to hear the words, and Haley didn’t want to say them, but somehow, inevitably, the ritual of exchanging them demanded to be observed.
 
“Officially, hit-and-run.” This part came out in a sharp breath. “Unofficially, they beat him up and broke his neck.”
 
Her breath retreated back in just as sharply, and then started the cycle over again.
 
“And when his parents challenged the coroner’s report…”
 
“Dead or replaced?” I asked.
 
“Replaced, both of them. I mean, we didn’t capsaicin-test them or anything when they suddenly changed their minds two hours later, but-”
 
“I’ll take your word.”
 
“We found this next to him,” she reached into her backpack and pulled out a Ziploc full of stiff, bloodstained fabric, “but there was only one body.”
 
I had to turn the plastic-sealed bundle over twice in my hands before I recognized the shredded remains of Ben’s ‘3 of a Kind’ baseball cap. Something had clawed straight through it.
 
I grabbed my phone from the bedside table.
 
“Don’t,” said Haley.
 
I pushed send anyway. Ben’s number went straight to a voicemail message that wasn’t his. The sing-song recorded voice of Robbie York cut clean through the drug haze and squeezed my stomach up toward my throat.
 
“You’ve reached Ben Pastor’s phone. He belongs to the Queen now. What’cha gonna do about it, huh Mina?”
 
I hung up and threw the phone at the end of my bed, where Haley stopped it from falling off the end.
 
“We don’t know that it’s the Shard who replaced Robbie last time,” Haley said without conviction. “They could have given his body to a new Sliver, or even made the real Robbie record the message, just to hurt you-”
 
“It’s him,” I said.
 
It was, without a doubt. The Shard who had tried to make me kill myself last winter wielded Robbie’s vocal cords with a smug venom all his own. Besides, now that the local Splinter Council was down for the count, and with them the agreement we’d made to keep that Shard out of our dimension, his mind-altering powers would make him one of the first weapons the Slivers would want to put back on the table.
 
“I was going to warn you,” said Haley. “It was just-”
 
“Too much,” I finished.
 
Aldo replaced. Kevin dead. Ben missing. The nightmare Shard back in town.
 
It was all the very definition of too much.
 
“I kissed him,” said Haley.
 
I’d already charged the dragon the moment I opened my mouth, and there was nothing to do now but keep stabbing at the smallest, loosest scales I could wedge the verbal toothpick under. This one looked as likely as any other.
 
“You kissed Robbie?” I asked.
 
Haley shook her head.
 
“Kevin?” I guessed again, only half hoping. “Were you back together with him when-”
 
“Not Kevin,” she said.
 
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
 
I pushed the morphine button.
 
“At the going away party, I kissed Ben, and I’m so sorry, not for the kiss, exactly, it was stupidly innocent, but-”
 
“I don’t care,” I lied, lowering my voice against the guards outside. “I just need to think. I need to make a plan.”
 
Never mind the fact that I’d spent the last week trying to think and plan and getting nowhere.
 
“I wanted it to be there,” she went on. “The spark, the magic, I wanted so much for it to be there, waiting to surprise us, but it just wasn’t.”
 
“Maybe you should talk to someone else about this.”
 
“It wasn’t there, and I think that might be why Ben and Kevin went off on their own afterward,” she persisted miserably. “I think it might be my fault they were alone when they were attacked.”
 
I shook my head. “Ben was only there in the first place because I told him to go.”
 
I felt like a dog snapping and yanking at scraps of culpability, but here in this bed, waiting for my bones to set around the new pins and plates, guilt was the only thing strong enough to drown out the helplessness. I couldn’t let Haley steal it all for herself.
 
They might not have been ambushed if she hadn’t kissed him.
 
And they might not have been ambushed if I’d kissed him instead.
 
“How much blood?” I asked.
 
“A lot, but not a certain death lot,” Haley answered readily. “I looked it up.”
 
“No trail?”
 
“No.”
 
That probably meant Ben had been taken away in a vehicle or wrapped in Splinter matter, for what little help that was.
 
“And it’s all Ben’s?” I asked.
 
“We don’t exactly have a forensics lab on our side here,” said Haley. “But Kevin wasn’t bleeding.”
 
And their attackers wouldn’t have bled real blood.
 
“No sign of a Sliver-Ben walking around?” I asked.
 
“Not yet,” said Haley. “Is that… good?”
 
“It’s not anything,” I said.
 
I wouldn’t have wished replication upon anyone, but if we could be sure it had happened to Ben, we’d at least know where he was. This hadn’t done much good for Aldo; we hadn’t been able to find his replication pod in our last invasion of the Sliver Warehouse, I’d landed myself here in the med center trying to take on the Queen, and now with so few of us left and the Occupation watching over everything, I didn’t know how we’d ever pull off another attempt, but it was almost worse, not knowing.
 
Ben might be in mid-replication right now, or he might have escaped and gone to hide in the woods until he could find a safe moment to make contact. The Slivers might be holding him for some other purpose more horrible than we could imagine, or he might already be dead.
 
I didn’t need to voice any of these possibilities to know that Haley had already gone over them all herself.
 
Haley stepped closer, past the foot of the bed. Her hurt was contagious, and maybe mine was too, and I found I had to roll away onto my side to break the feedback loop.
 
“Are you crying?” she asked.
 
“No.”
 
Her voice cracked. “May I join you?”
 
I scooted forward to the edge of the bed, leaving room for her to curl up behind me.
 
The sunflower and carnation bouquet on the table next to me was still as fresh and cheery as it had been when Ben had brought it to me in the morning on his way to Kevin’s party, when they had both been all right, and for a moment I hoped to see it grow fangs or tentacles or the faces of dead people, or some other surreal nightmare manifestation oozing with the Shard-Robbie’s personal style.
 
Having him tampering with my thoughts again would be bad enough on its own, but I could almost have welcomed it if it meant hoping that the rest of this day, this week, and this news, might all just be part of another cruel illusion.
 
The flowers, the room, and Haley’s weight on the mattress next to me remained mercilessly unembellished reality.
 
On TV, a frantic man with a neck tattoo was grating a piece of ginger into a pan of simmering soy sauce.
 
I pushed the morphine button again.


#

I should have said that Haley was the first one who told me.
 
Before the night was out, Mom called to check on me, and refrained from saying “I told you so” about the fact that, after three years, I’d finally finished destroying the Brundle family.
 
Then Julie texted, with a few hollow words about how none of the fallen would want us to give up.
 
Then Courtney sent me the new password to a dropbox she’d set up for the undiscovered surveillance feeds she’d been able to salvage.
 
Sometime around ten at night, after Haley had gone home, Patrick arrived and stood in the doorway for eight minutes before asking if there was anything he could do for me, and then for another three before going away.
 
They all flickered by, like tides coming in and out over a pier, while I lay there watching the flowers.
 
That night, I exceeded my drip’s programmed dosage limit for the first time since all my surgeries, no longer bothering to self-moderate for the sake of maintaining any mental clarity, and when I ran out of drugs, I took hits of guilt instead, running a fine-toothed comb over every move I’d ever made to bring us all to where we were.
 
The tines always came away full, making me wonder why I’d bothered fighting Haley for a few traces.
 
My guilt drip turned out to be unlimited, and yet my tolerance for it, already founded on a lifelong habit for the stuff, spiked even more sharply than my tolerance for the morphine, until even my newfound cocktail of the two became an inadequate masking agent for the absence of action.
 
So when the morning came, I sat up, shoved the morphine button over the side of the bed, picked up the vase in the less broken of my two arms, and threw it at a guard’s head.



​

Want more sneak previews? Titchenell & Carter patrons at the Telepath level get early access and behind-the-scenes peeks at all our upcoming indie projects, currently including the full first chapter of Stitches and a complete download of my upcoming YA Paranormal title: Out of the Pocket.


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Out of the Pocket Cover Reveal + Patreon Unveiling

2/11/2018

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So many exciting things going on right now! I'm honestly having trouble keeping up. Let's start with two exciting things in particular:

Exciting thing #1: I'm releasing a new book on April 24th, 2018, called Out of the Pocket.

It's a YA Paranormal story with -- like many of my books -- a darkly meta twist and a lot of toying with genre assumptions.

Are you torn between laughing and gagging every time you hear someone call the Fifty Shades series "romantic," or see one of those bus posters for its Valentine's Day release, not because of its frankly underwhelming kink, but because of literally everything else about the relationship it glamorizes?

Yeah, me too. Out of the Pocket is for people like us.

Do you find yourself loving obscure stories that no one else seems to know or get, because they explore weird, cerebral, genre-defying concepts that confuse people with very specific expectations?

Ditto again. And good news: publishers hated Out of the Pocket.

Oh, they liked the writing style fine, but the fact that it looks like another neatly quantifiable paranormal romance and isn't? No one knew how to market that. And the way it actually digs at some of the roots of social gender inequality and the assumptions that feed those roots, instead of paving them over and pretending they don't exist, well, apparently that approach is embarrassingly passé in the traditional publishing world at the moment.

...But I digress. Anyway, if you want to be the hipster-est hipster in your book club, take a leap through this thoroughly un-mainstream meta-paranormal rabbit hole today.

Wait, today? Didn't I say it wouldn't be released until April 24th?

That leads us to the other exciting thing.

Exciting thing #2: Matt and I are launching our very own Patreon account!

What's a Patreon account? I'm glad you asked.

A Patreon account allows fans to subscribe on a monthly basis to support an artist's work, in return for exclusive bonus content. Our patrons, even at the bare minimum $1 level, will get early access to all indie titles by me, Matt, or both of us, as soon as they're on preorder.

Right now, that means you get Out of the Pocket instantly. Patrons can unsubscribe at any time, so if you wanted to, you could pay just $1 to download Out of the Pocket early -- instead of $3 to get it on release day -- and then unsubscribe and be on your merry way, but we hope you'll stick around. We're going to have a very healthy lineup of pre-releases coming up for you this year, especially if you like post-apocalyptic dieselpunk full of badass ladies!

At slightly higher patronage levels, you'll also get behind-the-scenes content, like snippets of works in progress. You'll be the first to know about the status of the fourth Prospero book as the situation evolves (yes, that's still happening).

Oh, and I'm considering inventing the novel audio commentary. Have you ever listened to an audio commentary for a novel? I haven't, but I think they'd be cool. With enough patrons on board, we'll all get to find out :)

So, seriously, if you love our work, and you'd like to help us spend more time making more of it -- or if you'd just like to peer into the crazy that goes on during the process -- it'd mean the world to us if you'd become one of our very first patrons.

Of course, if you'd rather pre-order Out of the Pocket the old fashioned way, I've got links for that too, right after this gorgeous cover...


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For over a century, the town of Green Beach has frightened its children with the tragic legend of Joshua Thorne. He’s the reason it not only locks its doors at night but nails its windows shut. Steeped in romance and revenge, his is the kind of story Angela Ironwright lives for.
 
When the specter of Joshua appears to her, insisting she’s the only one who can help him piece together the fragments of his own murder, she follows him without a second thought into a place he calls the Pocket, a beautiful hidden world of jumbled memory and imagination. But the Pocket holds more than magic and mystery. Before long, its other reclusive inhabitants begin to call out to Angela, warning her not to trust Joshua and begging for her help to escape his dark power.
 
Angela’s sure there must be some misunderstanding, and she’s determined to set it straight. Otherwise, finding justice will mean betraying the only boy who’s ever liked her.
 
Smart and genre-savvy, Out of the Pocket is a dark, honest, subversive take on the modern paranormal love story.


Coming April 24th, 2018

Preorder links:

Amazon (Kindle)

Barnes & Noble (Nook)

iBooks

Kobo

Google Play

Smashwords

Indigo

(More options coming soon)


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Book Review: Fangirl

6/24/2017

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Book Review:

Fangirl

Rainbow Rowell

St. Martin's Press, 2013

A+
​
The Basics:
 
Cath is a fanfic writer beginning her freshman year of college. She's absolutely terrified to be away from home for the first time, especially after her twin sister and best friend, Wren, refuses be her roommate, sticking her with a stranger, Reagan, and Reagan’s perennial hanger-on, Levi. The only place Cath feels at home is in the world of her favorite author, Gemma T. Leslie, spinning new stories for her pre-made characters. She’s not sure she’ll ever be ready to create new characters out of her own deeply private thoughts, let alone open herself up to the uncertainty of feeling something for someone new who doesn’t live inside her head.
 
The Downside:
 
Levi can be condescending in ways I found slightly too easily brushed off at points, and the excerpts of Cath’s fanfic can run a bit longer than they need to be in order to complement her story and give insight into her mind, yet not quite long enough to have the chance to suck in the reader in their own right. The book also seems to run out of pages just before the story ends, something I can appreciate in an intentionally ambiguous ending, like Eleanor & Park, but in a story this wholeheartedly hopeful, I could have gone for a bit more closure.
 
The Upside:
 
Enough griping.
 
Fangirl might be the most stunningly accurate depiction of social anxiety I’ve ever encountered in any medium. Cath’s mental patterns, defense mechanisms, and fear of unfamiliar people and situations are presented in a level of vivid yet unembellished detail that anyone who struggles with social anxiety -- or who has ever struggled to understand someone who struggles with social anxiety -- should read.
 
Cath’s relationship with her father is a major highlight, brimming with mutual love, respect, and support, complicated by the fear that Cath may be inheriting her father’s mental health challenges along with his intensity and wit.
 
The subjects of fiction writing and fan culture are handled with great care as well, presenting both defenses and criticisms of the concept of fanfiction while discussing the great and worthy challenges of originality. The irreplaceable necessity of connecting with other thinking, feeling people outside the safety of fictional fantasy is a major theme of Cath’s story, yet it coexists harmoniously with a celebration of the positive power of fiction, to inspire, communicate, and even bring people together.
 
And of course, every one of the many themes Fangirl touches on, from family to first love to creativity to learning styles and the unpredictable uniqueness of each human mind, can be found woven through poignant yet laugh-out-loud blocks of sparklingly quotable dialogue.




​Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Love, Books, and Protest

11/12/2016

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Fellow equality-loving bookworms, what is it we’ve been shouting for the past few months?
 
“When they go low, we go high.”
 
We still can.
 
Sorry to be cheeseball in this time of mourning, but the cure for hate and oppression is the same as it always has been: compassion and education.
 
Peaceful demonstrations are a nice gesture to show off how much we care, but if you really want to stick it to bigotry, here’s a list of organizations that can help you put your passion and skills as book lovers to constructive use right now, helping the people who need allies most.
 
So consider protesting in the form of…
 
Helping ESL immigrants study for the citizenship test:
 
http://www.montereypark.ca.gov/264/Literacy-Citizenship
 
Mentoring girls on their way to becoming authors, and making their voices heard through storytelling:
 
http://www.writegirl.org/join-us/
 
Mentoring girls in underserved areas on their way to a college education:
 
https://moste.org/want-to-join/be-a-mentor/
 
Helping homeless students pursue better futures as an afterschool tutor:
 
https://www.schoolonwheels.org/volunteer/
 
Helping low-income kids reach grade-level reading proficiency and fall in love with books early:
 
http://readingpartners.org/volunteer/
 
Volunteering at your local library to read to kids, help them with their homework, or tutor adults who want to improve their literacy level:
 
http://www.lapl.org/get-involved/volunteer
 
 
Most of these organizations are LA-based, but a few are nationwide, and there are more like them wherever you happen to be.
 
I chose them for their ability to put reading and writing skills to good use, as this blog is mainly for readers and writers, but there are many other ways of helping groups currently under attack through methods as simple as filing and answering phones.
 
There are options for people who want to dive in headfirst, and options for people who have a couple hours a month to spare, or who prefer to make monetary donations.
 
If you have other suggestions for worthy ways to contribute, feel free to post below.
 
Peace, love, and books, my friends <3


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This. Is. Wrong.

11/9/2016

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What I’m about to say is worth losing Facebook likes over:
 
If you voted for him, you are wrong.
 
There. I said it. And it shouldn’t have been this difficult or taken this long.
 
You may have noticed an uncharacteristic amount of silence from me in the weeks preceding yesterday’s election. That’s in large part because I couldn’t bring myself to carry on talking about coffee and zombies as if the question of whether this country could yet pass a test of basic human decency was not on the table, or as if this question was not important.
 
I also couldn’t bring myself to speak openly about that question itself, because of the standard industry wisdom that a new author should not discuss politics, should not discuss anything that might offend or alienate anyone.
 
The wisdom that while we can write diverse and revolutionary stories in our books (because who’s going to read what’s in a book anyway?), we should not be publicly seen to discuss anything of substance.
 
I accepted that wisdom as a necessary evil, until yesterday, when a man who says whatever vile thing pops into his head – no matter how objectively offensive and wrong – went up against a woman who is polished and politic to a fault, and won the White House.
 
I’m tired of being quiet and polite about everyone else’s opinions while a man who can’t be polite about other people’s basic human rights is lauded and rewarded for “telling it like it is.”
 
He’s wrong. If you support him, you are wrong.
 
I don’t care if that’s impolitic to say. It’s also impolitic to label an entire ethnic group rapists while bragging about your own history of committing sexual assault. And it’s so much more than impolitic. It’s wrong.
 
Yes, everyone has the right to an opinion. Everyone has the right to express that opinion out loud and in writing and, in the case of adults who aren’t convicted felons, with a vote. These are sacred rights that must be protected. Thoughts and information are far too important and powerful for any person or organization to be trusted with controlling and regulating them.
 
Everyone has the right for their opinions to go uncensored. Yes, everyone.
 
This does not mean that those opinions have the right to go uncriticized, or that every opinion is equally valid, or valid at all.
 
Everyone’s vote deserves to be counted. I’m not suggesting (in spite of the unethical and wildly illegal suppression of key voter demographics he’s openly admitted to orchestrating) that he didn’t win enough legitimate votes to be elected, or that those votes shouldn’t be binding.
 
I’m saying, America, you voted wrong.
 
You voted for racism. You voted for sexism. You voted for homophobia and xenophobia and religious intolerance.
 
These things are wrong. I will not take that back. I will not waffle and qualify that remark with placating pleasantries.
 
They. Are. Wrong.
 
These things are the essence of social injustice, of evil itself, of the worst of human history that good people have worked so long and so hard to free us from.
 
And yesterday, this country demonstrated that those good people remain the minority of the population to this day.
 
It’s not that I don’t understand how people fall into the trap of bigotry. I do. When you’re born into an arbitrarily lucky category, it’s tempting as hell to cling to any rationalization for why you deserve your special advantages, and when you’re living a less than charmed life, it’s even more tempting to cling to any rationalization, however arbitrary, for why you belong on top of someone else, anyone else. Power corrupts, and poverty and ignorance turn people on each other.
 
I understand these concepts. I can see the nurture aspect of what turns people into bigoted assholes. I believe that changes to people’s environments can reduce or even eliminate these arbitrary prejudices, and that’s why I will continue to vote and advocate for anything that improves the average person’s living conditions, educational level, and access to communication with other people of diverse backgrounds.
 
It’s why I will continue to create and advocate for art that challenges the long-standing bigotry rationalizations of the straight-white-American-male-centric media, rather than reinforcing them.
 
I want to be a part of creating a future world that respects equality and diversity, and I believe nurture-based changes can do that.
 
But I do not excuse anyone from responsibility for his or her own bigotry.
 
Bigotry is the shameful heritage of every culture and every individual on this earth, and the only way things ever get better is through people standing up, in defiance of whatever prejudice they’ve been taught, and saying, “No. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
 
It is the responsibility of every individual to reject the darkness of the past, and if you were one of those who failed in this responsibility yesterday, it doesn’t only speak to your upbringing. It speaks to your character.
 
And if you are one of those who did your best for justice and equality yesterday, I beg you to join me in seeing this as a wakeup call.
 
We are not safe. Inequality and ignorance will not fix themselves. Good people are desperately needed right now.
 
Do not be quiet because you fear being less “liked,” in any sense of the word.
 
I’m still working out my next moves. I’m currently lucky enough to be able to manage some spare time on top of my full time work creating art brimming with protest and anti-stereotyping. After yesterday, I’m looking to put some of that time toward volunteer work, hopefully helping to get more books into the hands of more kids, in the hope of a more thoughtful, understanding, and enlightened future.
 
Your options for helping will be different from mine, but do something. Something other than joking about running to Canada. Something to help make this country and planet a little better, a little kinder, a little fairer.
 
Today, I’m starting by no longer being too afraid to say something so radical and obvious as this:
 
What happened yesterday is unconscionable. It is indefensible. It is wrong. And we have a lot of work to do to recover from it and keep moving in the direction of what’s right.


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Guest Post: Johnny Worthen on Finishing The Unseen Trilogy

7/25/2016

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Last week, I shared my early review of David, the final installment in The Unseen trilogy by Johnny Worthen, which will be released at long last on August 16th!

(You can preorder it here)

This week, I get to welcome Johnny Worthen himself back to my blog to celebrate! As a fellow author of series fiction, and having yet to see publication of a final installment myself, I knew exactly the question I had to ask today...

How does it feel to be finishing The Unseen series and saying goodbye to the characters?


Releasing books is always an emotional event. One of my coping mechanisms has always been (not surprisingly) to write about it. I’ll be posting “Letting Go of David” on my blog when it gets closer and I feel the full emotional impact. Probably next week or the one after. It’s coming. I can feel it building up.

Until that critical mass outburst, I can at least say that this book does indeed feel different from my others. I wrote the Unseen trilogy many moons ago. I had the entire series written before the first book, Eleanor, hit the shelves back in 2014, so the process of creating the series is now dim and colored by its success. It’s been a part of my life for a long time now, my claim to fame, my best-seller, my most talked about. Those are the feelings that are beginning to bubble up, but in the meantime, I have to say that reading the series again as I have, I feel the ending of the series as a fan would.

Just outside my control, beyond my recollection of creation, I read these characters as old friends and rejoice in their triumphs and mourn their defeats. 

Change. It’s all about change. The theme of the series. The painful but necessary evolution of character and idea and lives. Survival at cost, affection at debt. Experiencing the end of the arc carries me through the gambit of emotions as I hope it will others. 

Eleanor’s adventures in David are different from the previous books’. A necessary adaptation, as is only proper. Eleanor’s changed. The world has changed. The hated are loved, the loved have betrayed. 

It is a bitter-sweet ending. A culmination of the promises made throughout and the direct descendant of first chapter of the first book. The rise, fall, and rise of a broken, flawed, suffering girl, inhuman, lonely and lost.


This series always stirs me, has been known to bring me to tears. David is no different. Having an ending now only sharpens the edge. But it’s all good. An ending is change and change is inevitable. And if Eleanor has taught me nothing else, it’s that change though painful and terrible, can be noble.

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About David:


"You and no other."Flames and blood – the story of Eleanor's existence.

How can she recover? How can she go on? How can she stay away?

Eleanor survives, it what she does. But at what cost? She learns her past and sees the terrible and tragic history of her kind, the wreckage of fear and necessity spread across generations of innocent lives. It is enough to show her she is toxic, a cause of pain and destruction. For everyone’s own good, she will disappear forever.

But first, one last visit to Jamesford.

The sleepy Wyoming town mourns their lost child. The unremarkable girl who in life wanted only to be ignored is a celebrity in death, a tourist attraction, a legend. A mystery.

But not everyone thinks she’s dead. While some wait in hope for her return, others wait in ambush.

Click here to preorder!
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About Johnny Worthen


“I write what I like to read,” says Johnny. “That guarantees me at least one fan.”

Johnny Worthen is an award-winning, best-selling author, voyager, and damn fine human being! He is the tie-dye wearing writer of the nationally acclaimed, #1 Kindle best-selling Eleanor, The Unseen. Among his other excellent and very read-worthy titles are the adult occult thriller Beatrysel, the award-winning mystery The Brand Demand, and the genre bending comedy-noir The Finger Trap. And of course the continuation of The Unseen Trilogy, with Celeste and David.

Trained in stand-up comedy, modern literary criticism and cultural studies, Johnny is a frequent public speaker, teacher and blogger. He’s an instructor at the University of Utah and an acquisitions editor for Omnium Gatherum, a publisher of unique dark fantasy, weird fiction and horror.

You can find him on his homepage, on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Goodreads.


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Why Trying to Measure the Darkness Is Holding Superhero Movies Back

6/20/2016

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Okay, fiction rant time:
 
Can we stop arguing over whether superhero movies are too dark or just dark enough, as if level of darkness is a single defining aspect by which these movies can be quantified and catalogued?
 
Can we please talk instead about whether these movies are good?
 
I don’t demand that superhero stories make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. I don’t demand that they make me feel sad or disturbed. All I ask is what I ask of every story:
 
Make me feel something. Well, something other than bored, insulted, or ironically amused. Make me feel something on purpose.
 
You want to tell a superhero story that will make me laugh? Make me laugh. You want to rip out my heart and drag it through the mud? Do it. I dare you. I will thank and respect you for it if you can.


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Nope, that’s not it.

Man of Steel and Batman V. Superman utterly fail in this attempt. Why? Because they pile up the mud as high as they can, and they pull with the power of a freakin’ locomotive, but what are they pulling on? It’s sure as hell not my heart, because no part of these movies ever bothered to put the hooks into it first.
 
You can knock over as many imaginary buildings as you want. No one’s going to shed a tear if we haven’t had the chance to care about anyone inside them. You can put Superman through an endless gauntlet of public scrutiny and criticism, but if all you ever show us about your version of Superman is how much he has it coming, who cares?


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One shot of playfully falling fully clothed into a bathtub does not a character make.
 
Deadpool works because it knows what it wants to be; a smart, biting, R-rated meta comedy, and that’s what it is. It goes all out with its humor and does it well, but it lets in the darkness where the character development calls for it.


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Ditto Kick-Ass.

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Ant-Man
and Guardians of the Galaxy work on a similar principle, starting with the fun and letting in the dark when it fits.
 
Civil War manages to make it mostly work in reverse, by starting with a very serious storyline, but still taking the time to show us some of the lighthearted, banter-filled friendships that stand to be destroyed by said storyline, making the darkness mean something.


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Plus a lighter new heart.

Different people have different tastes when it comes to ideal level of darkness, and an argument can be made that certain existing characters, like Superman, aren’t compatible with the dark end of the spectrum without losing their inherent spirit. That’s a valid criticism, but it doesn’t come anywhere near covering what’s wrong with the new big screen Superman. Take any pre-existing attachment to any particular ideas of Superman or Batman or comics in general out of the equation, and these still aren’t good movies.
 
Darkness does not equal substance. Absence of darkness does not guarantee fun. Darkness does not correlate or inversely correlate with quality. Darkness is one dimension among many that make up storytelling, and when it’s the only dimension your formula accounts for, guess what? You get one-dimensional stories.
 
So that’s your answer, DC movie makers. Your problem isn’t that you need to make your movies darker or lighter. Your problem is that you need to stop fixating on that dimmer switch and make them better.

Rant complete.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!


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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #1: The Glass Lampshade

5/30/2016

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See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

Fiction Pet Peeve: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!


Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Am the Parent, Therefore I Disapprove."

This is a simple one. It’s that moment when a character points out and possibly even protests the terribly insulting thing the plot is doing… to no effect.
 
Example? Why, I’m glad you asked.
 
In the final season of Angel, a series of shifts in the show’s focus and one actress’s pregnancy resulted in the main lineup of evil-fighters looking like this:


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That’s five men (the green demon is a white actor underneath if you’re keeping score on that front) and one woman. The woman, Fred, is brilliant and thoroughly lovable but also the only member of the team without either superpowers or some level of combat training, making her the go-to damsel.
 
In the lead up to the series finale, Fred gets implanted with a demon, which is slowly killing her as it gestates and prepares to take over the world.
 
Desperate to save both the world and herself (because who wouldn’t be?), Fred works long hours in her laboratory looking for a cure, in spite of her deteriorating health. When Wesley, one of her many doting male associates, comes to tell her to rest, she objects with, “No! I’m not just the damsel in distress!”


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“I’m better than that!”

Yay! Fred’s reclaiming her agency! Surely the writers have noticed how they’ve been treating her and are about to rectify the problem, and-
 
Oh, wait, no.
 
****Spoiler Alert****
 
Fred’s attempts to save herself come to absolutely nothing, and her soul is eaten by the demon who takes over her body, providing lots of angst for her many admiring male survivors.
 
****End Spoilers****
 
This peeve isn’t about the general practice of pointing out problems with fiction from within the fiction (known in storytelling jargon as “lampshading,” hence my little title joke).
 
It’s a technique that can do wonders under the right circumstances, ideally when the story pointing out the writing sin is a work of meta-satire that successfully manages to be smarter than most stories that commit said sin.
 
Sidney in Scream makes a complaint of this sort that works, because her respective story takes it to heart, when she tells Ghostface that she doesn’t watch horror movies because the victims are an insulting bunch of busty blondes who “run up the stairs when they should be running out the front door.”


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I really AM better than that!

Sidney says this shortly after Ghostface finishes with his busty blonde first victim of the movie (played by Drew Barrymore), but Sidney herself remains competent throughout, outsmarting and outmaneuvering Ghostface, at one point running upstairs to escape through a second story window only after he blocks her attempt for the front door.
 
Even that opening scene with the death of Casey subverts the tradition Sidney is calling out by actively desexualizing the violence. Casey remains fully clothed in a baggy sweater throughout, and as soon as the scene transitions from flirty meta-banter to physical threat, it turns deadly serious, focusing on audience sympathy for Casey over the more typical creative dismemberment.


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This part of the scene is not FUN.

Lampshading can also work when it’s used to write off a practical issue that’s standing in the way of the best possible story.

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“Hey, didn’t we used to be a delivery service?”

In the case of this Futurama joke, the show is completely guilty of the sin it’s pointing out, that is, inconsistent accounting for how the characters spend their time and make their income. It works, though, because the strength of Futurama comes from the variety of its zany, episodic plotlines.
 
No one’s mourning the fact that we don’t spend more time watching the cast delivering packages. This isn’t something that’s central to the point of the story, and there’s no real-life social context attached. It’s an oversight that doesn’t ill-use or insult anything except, mildly, the audience’s long term memory, so once we receive this nod of acknowledgement, we can move on to enjoying the crew's more interesting spacefaring hijinks, satisfied that our intelligence is respected and the creators aren’t trying to slip anything past us.
 
The lampshade only becomes pointless, worse-than-nothing glass when a work of fiction commits a more real-life serious or story-integral sin and then points it out without doing anything to remedy it, apparently with the mistaken belief that pointing at the problem is the same thing as fixing it.
 
There’s a scene in City of Bones in which the Shadowhunters have to sneak into a church to raid a secret stash of anti-demon weaponry. So as not to imply that Christianity is the only viable avenue for fighting evil, Jace quickly explains that all organized religions are secretly in on the cause.


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“We could just as easily have gone to a synagogue or a mosque.”

Yeah, but you didn’t though, did you, Jace? The lampshade line is there, but Christianity remains the only religion we actually see involved in fighting evil.
 
Okay, religion is an extremely delicate subject, and if an artist doesn’t feel qualified to represent a real-life culture in fiction, steering clear can sometimes be the wisest course of action, so maybe we can give that one a pass.
 
Not so much this little gem of a moment in the Twilight book-verse:


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“You know, I saw this story on the news last week about controlling, abusive teenage relationships.”

Jacob throws this out there in Eclipse, the book in which Edward disables Bella’s car and physically prevents her from visiting other friends. The joke of this line is presumably intended to come off something like, “Ha ha, Edward and Bella sure are easy to mistake for an abusive relationship, aren’t they? But they’re not, though.”
 
Except they completely are, and this lampshade does nothing to change how unhealthy they are or how reprehensibly the story romanticizes that abuse.
 
Should we even touch how bad the Marvel movies have gotten with this lately? Eh, why not, we all know these, right?


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Remember that party scene where the Avengers men all acknowledge that, back in their solo franchises, most of them had love interests? They talk for a while about what the ladies are up to and try to one-up each other with stories about how smart/independent/tough/generally awesome their girlfriends are.
 
That’s really sweet, guys. It’s great that you’re so supportive. Sounds like some of those women are having pretty cool adventures!
 
…Which we’re never, ever going to see any of, are we? Not a snippet of any of them ever doing anything remotely relevant to any movie that we’re actually watching, ever again. Nope, the narrative follows the men, and the men alone, wherever they go.
 
But at least we’re going to get some new costumed women soon who might get some narrative focus of their own, right?
 
…Right?


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“It’s about damn time.”

So sayeth Wasp when Hank Pym, her movie-universe father, finally bestows on her her mother’s supersuit, indicating that he’s done being demeaningly overprotective of her.
 
Yes, Marvel. It is about damn time Hope’s father acknowledges her power (see last week’s peeve). And yes, we get the meta-joke that it is about damn time Marvel movies likewise acknowledge female supers collectively.
 
It was "about damn time" a long time ago. It was "about damn time" before this post credits tack-on in Ant-Man, and it continues to be "about damn time" far more urgently and dramatically than a 2018 release of a movie titled “Ant-Man and The Wasp” (emphasis mine) can come anywhere close to addressing.
 
Lampshades alone don’t make problems go away, not if the problems are big enough. Self-deprecatory humor can only buy you so much leeway. Sometimes the only patch for that insulting plot is to just do the thing right in the first place.



Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #2: I Am the Parent, Therefore I Disapprove

5/24/2016

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See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

Fiction Pet Peeve: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!

As this is a list of fiction pet peeves, and we're approaching the top, it’s probably not necessary to start out by noting the intensity of my loathing for this habit of fictional parents, but I’m going to anyway.
 
Hate it.
 
Swinging at it with a red-hot mace hate it.
 
Okay, let’s get on with this.
 
I’m talking about those fictional parents who unilaterally and selfishly disapprove of their children growing up and pursuing happiness in any way (especially romantically), while asking us, the audience, to sympathize with their pathologically unreasonable dehumanizing of said children, who often aren’t children at all.


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Pictured: A disapproving father and a goddamn assistant district attorney superhero!

Let’s just say it, one of the biggest problems with these fictional parents is that they’re almost always fathers obsessing over maintaining control over their daughters.
 
This assumption that girls have less of a right or desire to make their own choices and mistakes in the pursuit of adulthood (and sex) than boys do, or that it’s somehow cute and fitting for fathers to feel a sense of possession of their daughters that doesn’t apply to sons or mothers, is a massive real life issue of inequality that fiction more often than not plays for cheap laughs.


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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.


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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.

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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue laugh track.

Oh, wait, I decided I like my adopted daughter’s husband after all. Guess I better musically sign over the lease and title. Cue the awwws.

Shudder.
 
This kind of parental disapproval also gets used, bafflingly, in attempts to make villains sympathetic by supposedly proving that they “care” about someone other than themselves, in spite of the fact that their possessiveness usually demonstrates the exact opposite.


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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue conflicted sighs.

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I am the dad, therefore I disapprove. Cue conflicted sighs.
 
And as horrible as the gender stereotyping is in all these, that’s not to say that the mother-son, mother-daughter, and father-son versions don’t exist, or that they can’t also be hugely problematic.
 
Lois’s behavior toward her sons on Malcolm in the Middle, for example, is notoriously nightmarish.


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She disapproves of almost everything any of them do, including most of their relationships, plans out each of their lives from beginning to end down to the smallest detail, and applies techniques banned by the Geneva conventions to make them comply with her vision. And yet, Lois as a character is not only played for laughs but played for sympathy, with her actions repeatedly excused and justified as tough love.
 
As with many overused and oversimplified fictional motifs, there’s of course a tiny grain of truth in here that occasionally gets explored with some actual care. It’s no secret that parents and their children fight, or that parents (ideally) want to protect their children. Sometimes parents are overcautious or slow in recognizing their children’s maturing capabilities and needs, or they project their own experiences on their children beyond the point where it’s helpful, and often parenting mistakes are made with the best intentions.

This is all real, exploration-worthy stuff.


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Edna from Hairspray is a perfect positive example of a disapproving fictional parent, one who tries to veto her daughter’s ambitions in an attempt to shield her from reliving her own disappointments, but who eventually learns to trust in her daughter’s self-confidence, becomes her biggest cheerleader, and comes out of her own shell, inspired by her daughter’s example.
 
King Triton from The Little Mermaid follows a similar pattern.


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He certainly crosses a major line when he destroys all of Ariel’s stuff, but he doesn’t do it out of a blanket disapproval of the concept of his daughter growing up and falling in love. In fact, when he first hears the rumor that Ariel’s in love, he’s thrilled for her and can’t wait to meet the object of her affections. There isn’t even a mention of any political restrictions on whom Ariel should marry, being a princess and all. He doesn’t break out a shred of disapproval until he finds out that Eric is human, at which point he flips out over that very specific prejudice, instantly feels horrible about it, and ends up growing to accept Ariel’s choice and celebrate her happiness.

Parents placing a different level of value or different expectations on boys and girls is also a very real issue that can be depicted responsibly. Park's parents in Eleanor & Park are a great example of fictional parents who do this but ultimately learn to accept and respect that their son isn't what they once assumed he should be.
 
Of course, not all fictional parents have to work out their issues and end up supportive allies of their children by the end. Real life sadly holds truly terrible parents as well, parents who exert control over their children for entirely selfish reasons, without wanting to see them grow into self-reliant adults with happy romantic relationships and full lives. Fiction has a place for those parents too.


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Ahem.

That place is not smiling in the opening credits of a show about a heartwarming, would-be appealing family.
 

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The Secret Life of Bees does the extreme negative of the gender issue well, because even though Lily's father is given a slight, grim sort of pity toward the end, he’s fully acknowledged as a bad father. Treating a child as a possession rather than a budding human being due to gender (or for any reason), is bad parenting, and he’s a bad parent. No arguments there.

There’s nothing wrong with unhealthy relationships in fiction, as long as the work doesn’t ask us to believe that they’re anything else.
 
The point where the disapproving parent triggers this peeve is where a story shrugs off this kind of bad parenting as “just the way parents are,” or, more commonly and insidiously, “just the way fathers with daughters are.”
 
I’m looking at you, Arrow/Flash/Legends of Tomorrow TV universe.


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If you’re a dad with a daughter on these shows, you automatically hate any man she might be romantically involved with. You hate any possibility of her doing anything dangerous which, given the superhero universe, means doing anything at all. In fact, you usually hate the possibility of her ever hearing about the existence of anything dangerous or meaningful or plot-related in any way, unless, in the case of Merlyn, you need to use her for some part of your own scheme which you’ll later claim had something to do with loving her. You fully endorse the use of guns and dishonesty to keep her under control.
 
Oh, she might call you out on it on occasion, but don’t worry, less than an episode later, she’ll tell you how right unconditionally forgiven you are, because you were “only trying to protect her.”


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Then you’ll make a condescending, off-the-shelf joke about how all fathers want to keep their daughters helpless and isolated forever and you just can’t help it and couldn't possibly be expected to.
 
…Bull…. Shit.
 
This dysfunction is not inevitable. It is not healthy, and it is not cute. Respecting your adult daughters as human beings is not too lofty an ideal to aspire to. There are plenty of wonderful, supportive parents in the real world, who want their children, daughters included, to chase their dreams and their dream partners and live real, adult lives.
 
This is what good parents want for their children. The same things they’d want for themselves.
 
There are even a few of these parents in fiction, though not nearly enough.


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Know what I think, Lance, West, and Merlyn? I think if you couldn’t be motivated by disapproving of everything your daughters do for no reason, your shows wouldn’t know what to do with you.


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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