Category: writing

Following up

I am under the weather and under the deadline gun today, but I wanted to post two quick links clarifying the record on various things.

First, Christian posted a long explanation of the “If you meet Ianto Jones on the road, kill him” buttons. That search string directs a lot of people to this journal, but those interested in that, should visit him. I loved this essay like burning and it let me roll around in a lot of fictional joy and grief. Christian has also cross-posted this at his Livejournal, where a lot of great discussion has ensued.

Second, in what may be the last addendum to the “Buffy bullying incident at Gally,” I just got a comment providing more information on What Really Happened. Which is to say, not a minor (sorry about that; I look really young for my age too, and I know that while people tell you it’s flattering, it can also be annoying, so my apologies!) and not, apparently and thankfully, someone who wound up upset by what happened. All of which underscores that fact that when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me; but also that stuff that isn’t meant to hurt can hurt people, even people on the periphery of the situation, like myself. It’s given me, and I hope all of us, a lot to think about. The comment is fantastic both as a followup and in terms of considering some other fannish phenomena. If you’ve been following this story, I urge you to click on the link.

it’s raining (and not snowing!) trash day

It’s trash day and I’m in the middle of moving offices. In the rain. Pray to your gods for me, as long as they’re not evil.

Last night I booked Patty and I for San Francisco. I’m super excited, as I haven’t been in about four years. SF, is, for me, one of those towns I feel like I could never live in, but that resonates for me pretty intensely emotionally. Anyone out there have any recommendations for gluten-free restaurants (particularly in Chinatown) or bakeries? Also, I need a rec for the high-end hot restaurant that we just have to try. Giant redwoods, yes? Never done it. Combined with a tour that drops us in Sausalito for an afternoon with a trip back on the ferry? Speak to me. This will be my first trip there that’s not for business or visiting elderly relatives.

But enough of where we’re going, since that’s not ’til August. Let’s talk (briefly, one more time) about where I’ve been. The Whedonistas launch was rad (here, I make the thoughtful face); the books were snapped up, and the reviews (all good) are starting to trickle in. So yay.

And despite various logistical difficulties and the “but wait, wasn’t it a Doctor Who convention?” factor, a few pictures of my cosplaying Arthur from Inception did happen and are floating around Facebook. Main lesson there: everything takes longer than you think, and despite Arthur being really the perfect cosplay for me in terms of him being slight and not super tall, I carry myself like I take up a lot of space, far more so than Arthur does. Ah well, always Jack at heart, I guess.

In news of the world, which, as usual, you should really be paying attention to, things in Libya are a heartbreaking bloody mess that’s absolutely a legacy of colonialism and the US’s willingness to make nice with terrible people if it provides even an illusion of guaranteed access to oil at prices we deem marginally tolerable. While CNN hasn’t been particularly good for what’s going on in the big picture, and their analysis is spotty and US centric, I can’t say enough about some of these phone interviews Anderson Cooper’s been doing. Really heartbreaking. As usual, remember this stuff isn’t happening in just one country. Protests continue throughout the region.

Meanwhile, things in the US are pretty intense too. Aside from the war on women with bills aimed not just at legalizing violence against abortion providers, but federal level bills that seek to eliminate funding for women’s health and family planning services, the biggest news story is arguably coming out of Wisconsin, where union issues and the right to collective bargaining are front and center.

I’ll be frank; I’m both a union member (SAG now, and I’m a former CWA member) and someone who hasn’t been following this story as closely as I should be. But the right to organize is critical even if modern unions don’t always function how I personally want them to.

So, one of my readers asked me to link to some stuff. This includes videos (and transcripts) as well as links to various roundups. This isn’t just Wisconsin anymore, either, but has spread to Florida, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

Let’s also not forget that New Zealand has had a terrible disaster. Here’s some words from someone there on what it’s like and how you can help.

Meanwhile, in the realm of people making stuff and how you can help, PodCastle is looking for voice actors. Additionally, while I’m not much for comics, if I were, I’d probably be a huge fan of (or making something like) Baritaria Historicals – The Assassination of King Valliet and The Birthday of the Princess. Check it out.

Oh, and that reminds me, both the empires in the book Kali and I are working on finally have names now, a fact which, while unimportant to my day to day life at this particular moment in time, helps me sleep better at night.

See you from the other side.

today’s acafen problems

These may amuse you, because even as I grapple with them, they are amusing me:

1. I realize that Jones is a ridiculously common surname, especially in the UK and especially in Wales. But generally when I’m writing academic articles, I mention the character’s whole name the first time I refer to them, and then refer to them by their last name throughout the rest of the article. Which is all well and good, until you’re writing an article about the Whoniverse that necessarily must mention both Harriet Jones and Ianto Jones and may mention Martha Jones, and I don’t really want to go traipsing about in scholarship being all familiar with these folks and calling them by their given names, but the constant use of their full names is remarkably awkward (although probably what I’m stuck with — I simply cannot refer to even a fictional prime minister by her first name). Meanwhile, on Twitter someone tells me that in Wales it is common to deal with the problem of Joneses by referring to them with reference to what they do. So, Jones the companion? Jones the … whatever it is we think Ianto does at Torchwood? Jones the PM? Somehow, that gets even more awkward in terms of construction, despite being infinitely more hilarious.

2. The Face of Boe presents a similar problem. Do I reference him continually as the Face of Boe, or do I, after the first mention, shorten that? And if so, do I shorten it to the Face or Boe? If I shorten it, I’m leaning towards the Face. That said, on Twitter, this provoked amusing levels of varied opinion and raised the issue of appropriate pronouns for the thing/person/tentacle monster/Face/Jack. Help me, Internets, help me!

3. Apparently, according to the Sherlock commentary tracks, everyone does this, but I keep writing (in a different article than the DW one mentioned above) “Sherlock and Watson” when I meant to write “Holmes and Watson.” This is an entirely aggravating up-hill battle that I shouldn’t even need to be having.

I have these sorts of problems a lot, and recently felt sort of embarrassed that on some of the HPA stuff I’ve been doing about gender and bullying I keep referring to Snape as Severus, as if he’s an old friend. But of course, for me, fictional characters are old friends, even if that’s inappropriate to disclose in most scholarly settings (of which the HPA isn’t one).

I even tried to determine if I get the most antsy about first name/last name issues around characters about whom I’ve done transformative work (fanfiction, for those of us who aren’t being delicate about it), but that really doesn’t seem to be it either (although, it’s surely the case regarding both Snape and Ianto Jones). I suppose that it’s just, as it often is in my writing, mostly about cadence.

For the other folks out there doing scholarly work, what weird problems do you have of this ilk? Because it surely can’t just be me. And I need some amusement while I stare at the 50 pages I need to write in the next few days while also moving my office.

the activism trap

Being an activist can really suck. Let me show you how.

I’m engaged with anti-bullying efforts for a bunch of reasons. This includes the fact that I was severely bullied as a kid, as a teen, during university, and periodically as an adult on the wonder that is the Internet; that I find working on anti-bullying initiatives healing; and that I believe my way with words and openness can help the cause.

But at core, the reason I want to stop bullying is so that people who are awesome have the space to do awesome stuff. It’s hard to make art, do research, be an awesome friend, teach kids, help animals, strive for political reform, provide awesome customer service or do whatever it is you do if you’re being bullied and recovering from being bullied. The best reason to support anti-bullying is so that more people have the space to be the most awesome versions of themselves they can be.

The thing is, when I spend all my time talking about stopping bullying or anti-gay harassment or sexism or transphobia or whatever thing I feel its critical to speak out about (and feel capable of speaking out about — there are lots of issues I support where it’s probably better for me to let other people speak while I keep learning), I don’t have time to do my awesome stuff. And then it’s a little bit like the bullies have won, because they’ve forced me to abandon my agenda and will for the purpose of responding to their actions and arguments.

This really sucks. And it’s emblematic of something I think most activists face at various times. From feminist advocacy to fighting poverty to stopping racism — when you have to be an activist all the time, it’s easy to lose the benefits you’re supposed to enjoy from that activism helping to make the world better. Balance is key, but, in a cruel world, pretty hard to come by.

Which is why I really want to stop talking about the Buffy thing (here, have a summary from someone who was there and isn’t me), because I feel that particular activism trap closing in around me. But, that said, there are a few remaining things I do want to address.

First, thank you for keeping it civil. While a few comments here have made me angry or upset, and while I disagree with some opinions I’ve seen expressed, no one really crossed the line in discourse here. That’s awesome, and I totally appreciate it.

Next, about that argument where you say, “Well, I want to take this person at her word, but she sounds awfully emotional, and therefore I can’t.” — That argument is a misogynistic rhetorical device that often gets pulled out against women who are upset and not against men who are angry. It’s happened in various branches of this discussion (which is now happening across Whedonesque, several blogs, and Livejournal). It’s an effective rhetorical device due to the way we treat women in this world, but it’s not actually good argumentation. It’s also angry-making. Please knock it off.

Additionally, I am really trying to avoid making a post about the whole “toughen up” thing and why it’s so problematic, as, again, I don’t want to get sucked into the negative self-impact activism trap I described in the opening of this post. However, it’s important to me that you understand the following things: First, there is no universal standard of appropriate emotional feeling; just as the Goblin King asks Sarah in Labyrinth what her basis of comparison is when she declares, “It’s not fair,” I would ask you what yours is when you say someone is over-sensitive. Second, it is my sensitivity that allows me to do what I do for a living — writing stories, examining pop-culture, performing, and eroding the artificial boundaries we’ve set up between scholarship and sentimentality. (A theoretical excess of) feeling, just like anything else, can be a tool, an advantage, and a weapon; it’s certainly one of mine. Trying to stamp it out or devalue it, isn’t just nasty, it’s illogical.

Finally, stop with the “free speech” and “censorship” noises. I’m a trained journalist. I give to the ACLU, and I am, like Rachel Maddow, an absolutist about free speech in the legal sense. Wanting to have as little government regulation of speech as possible is not, however, inconsistent with wanting people not to be egregious to each other; encouraging people to be civil in public; telling people to knock it off when I’m offended; and using the tools I have available to me to manage speech in the online venues that I host. Arguments to the contrary are disingenuous, and beyond this statement, I will not engage them.

What would I love to see going forward? I’d love to see more discussion, in general. Just hearing all these viewpoints (which are not split into two camps, but run a wide gamut) is, I think, valuable to everyone. I’d also like to see, as Chip from Two-minute Time Lord and I discussed late one night at this year’s Gally, con panels that have historically been about fans behaving badly branch out into discussions of how we can make things better.

I would also like to see discussion from activists of all stripes talk on how we can work hard, avoid burnout, and reap the benefits of the change we are trying to create in the world while continuing to be activists. It’s hard stuff, and we’re all still learning.

Now I’m going back to explaining why Sarah Jane Smith’s status as a journalist proves that the Doctor is real.

tell me that you’ll wait for me

Every year, without fail, my favorite thing about Gallifrey One is the closing ceremonies. I know that’s a little strange, but I have an innately melancholy nature, and I’m also very cognisant of the degree to which it is often the case that it is only in loss that it is acceptable to speak of love.

Doctor Who is about a lot of things. It’s about the wonder of the universe. It’s about ordinary people getting to be heroes, sometimes at extraordinary cost. And it’s about love, often in ways that are remarkable; Doctor Who often decouples romanticism from sexuality and tends not to privilege any particular type of relationship (familial, friend, business, romantic, sexual) over any other.

All those things make the Whoniverse deeply appealing, not just for the narrative of the the Other reasons much SF/F is often popular, but specifically because it’s often a direct acknowledgment of the complexities of family, longing, and ambition that many other properties simply don’t address (Buffy and Harry Potter, for example, may both be choose your family properties but they are less successful at focusing on interpersonal narratives more often ignored).

But Doctor Who is also about melancholy. It’s about loss. It’s about the wonder of the universe being wonderous because you won’t have it forever. One day, you’ll die. Or the Doctor will leave you behind. One day, all that you’ll have left is longing. And memory. But, just as Doctor Who doesn’t inherently privilege one type of interpersonal relationship over another, it also doesn’t inherently privilege one experiential relationship over another. The moment in which you remember the time you saved the universe is just as important on Doctor Who as the moment in which you saved the universe. That moment in which you long? In which you regret? In which you cry in fondness for a love or adventure or friendship or person that once was, is as valuable as the moment you first discovered all those things.

All Times Are Now, my writing partner and I say. Part of that is about our world-building philosophy and the ways in which we like to tell stories — events echo not just forwards, but also backwards, in time. But part of that is also a sort of emotional worldview that tells us a moment of absence can be just as keenly beautiful as a moment of possession. In fact, they are, quite often, nearly the same thing.

I do a lot of creative and scholarly work about mourning. Often, that feels like the most beautiful thing in the world to me. Sometimes, though, it’s just miserable, or a burden of responsibility for holding other people’s stories I am inadequate in the face of.

Doctor Who often provokes me in me the most wonder when Sarah Jane Smith speaks of the life she once had, when Jack Harkness looks for guidance from the man who once abandoned him, and when Amy Pond tells the Doctor just how long she waited for him.

Some stories aren’t exactly real, no matter what the philosophy of my creative work is, and no matter how hard I try to will them into being. I may still check the backs of wardrobes for portals to Narnia, but it is likely I will never quite believe hard enough to find my way into the snowy forests of the White Witch. The Doctor will, I know I am supposed to know, never come for me.

And yet, the Whoniverse tells me that that’s okay. That my life is no smaller for its terrestrialness, for all the things I’ll never get to do, for all the moments that have passed, and for all the things I’ve lost. Which is why I love the closing ceremonies at Gally. Love. Because more than any other moment at the event, they embody exactly what Doctor Who is about.

cons are awesome

The thing about cons is no matter how much you wake up feeling as if you are in a world of hurt, someone else is way more in a world of hurt than you. That said: jet lag, strange bed, odd hotel temperatures, travel food woes and a bit of alcohol (and, okay, to be fair, gluten-free oreos for breakfast) and I am not really at my best right about now.

Con is excellent. I went went to some programming, which is not something I always get motivated to do. Guest banquet was also fun. Have heard some small trivia regarding the new season of Torchwood that is probably profoundly not important to most people, but that I’m utterly satisfied with. But, clearly it is too early for me to be blogging; I seem low on adjectives and high on adverbs. But I am listening to that Prodigy/Enya mash up. Again.

Today is the exciting Whedonistas launch. I’ve already got my contributor copies in hand. If you’re here at Gally, please drop by at 3pm in the Atlanta room. You can pick up your copy of the book in the dealers room and an autograph session will follow the panel in the autograph area.

Thanks to Christian, many of us are wearing buttons that say If you meet Ianto Jones on the road, kill him. I think we all have different sentiments about them (from philosophical to the mere need to preserve the time line), but they’ve been sort of universally been about love, not flame bait, and that’s been lovely, and, in its own way, deeply sentimental. I suppose it’s a little like agreeing to shoot someone you love in the head if they get bitten by zombies and turned.

Less philosophically, my favorite ribbon of the con, provided by Tony Lee, says, Show me on K9 where the Time Lord touched you.

Meanwhile, I spoke to Patty last night. She may be on her way to another location by the time I speak to her next. All is well at the dig, and she has informed me that it has been decided that the dig that she is a pirate queen and her little assistant that the other girls insist on calling a demon (and Patty calls the assistants in the other trenches demons as well — it’s some competition all the girls started over who can be called a demon the most or something) is her General. No, I don’t know. But it’s very awesome. She sounds very happy, but I really, really miss her. I remain somewhat surprised by how grueling I’ve found this whole travel/away thing we’ve had going on since the fall.

Right now, though, I really, really need some scrambled eggs.

All things are possible. After breakfast.

HPA guest blog up

While I’m at JFK enjoying airport time (and if any can tell my why my Mac randomly jumped to LA time while I’m sitting in the Soho Bistro in terminal 8 in NYC, let me know), my guest blog has gone live over at The Harry Potter Alliance. While you read, I’m going to sit here enjoying my celiac-friendly burger without a bun while having massive nostalgia as this place blasts Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn.” Now that was a different life.

leaving on a jet plane

Since I’m getting on a plane for Los Angeles tomorrow and have way too many things to do, not just between now and then, but between now and the end of the month, I thought I’d get a little bit of administrativa out of the way while it’s in my head.

First, please don’t forget about tonight’s Livestream from The Harry Potter Alliance on stopping teen bullying, preventing teen suicide and raising awareness about various gender identity topics as relates to learning how to make things better for LGBTQ kids.

Next, it’s Gallifrey One!

Let’s start with the official stuff: Please come check out the Whedonistas launch on Saturday at 3pm, followed by an autograph session at 4:30pm.

On the unofficial front: I’m basically not cosplaying this year (the exception being briefly for a friend’s Inception photo shoot; if you should see me dressed like Arthur, please don’t mistake me for Ianto, because I don’t know what my response will be, but I suspect neither of us will enjoy it). There are myriad reasons for this, mostly odd, personal and complicated. I don’t ultimately know if it’s going to be a decision I’m happy with, but it is what it is.

Next, my recall of names and faces is poor. While I can think of a good couple of dozen people I will recall by name and face at the con, I can’t promise it will be you. Please don’t take this personally, please do remind me of who you are. I hate that I’m like this, but it seems to be a somewhat immutable fact.

I should also tell you that I am deep into writing two academic articles that are due at the end of this month. I may well be writing them in the lobby at the Marriott, because background noise is good for my soul. Stopping by and saying hi is fine (and good and awesome), but if I stick my head back into my computer, this is why.

If you see me Wednesday night when I get to the hotel, I will only have two priorities: putting my crap down and getting to In-and-Out Burger before it closes. Wait ’til I have burgers until you say more than hello. I am not even kidding.

If we haven’t met before, I look forward to meeting you.

Almost finally, on the subject of an entirely different con, after much hemming and hawing, Patty and I have decided that we’re taking a year off from Dragon*Con so that I can take her to San Francisco, something that’s been on our to do list since we first met. I just got the vacation time approved today, so now seemed like the time to share. I haven’t been in about four years, and it’s a place I really do adore visiting (although I’ve never particularly felt like I could live there). I know we know a lot of people out there and so we’ll make a plan for group socializing for one night when it gets closer, but I think otherwise we’re not going to do the running around and seeing people from the Internet thing, because if we were, we’d just go to Dragon*Con.

And last, but not least, because it’s always fun to end a post on a note about the end of the world, here, have an article about New York’s legal guide for handling the apocalypse.

talking about bullying and gender identity

The Harry Potter Alliance is an organization that uses parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize young people across the world toward issues of literacy, equality, and human rights. Their goal is to make civic engagement exciting by channeling the entertainment-saturated facets of our culture toward mobilization for deep and lasting social change.

A lot of the issues the HPA is engaged in are near and dear to my heart. These include fighting bullying and advocating for the rights of LGBTQ people.

Recently, after a discussion that involved gender identity concerns on a Harry Potter mailing list went a bit awry, the HPA and I wound up in contact about issues of bullying and how they impact people who are gender non-conforming.

As part of their current campaign to stop bullying against LGBTQ kids and to highlight how that bullying can lead to the acceptance of human rights abuses like those against queer people in Uganda, I’ll be participating both in their blog (with one piece going live soon, and another after I get back from Los Angeles) and in a Livestream event they’ll be holding tomorrow night, February 15 at 8:30pm. You can participate by visiting the Livestream channel at http://www.livestream.com/imaginebetter. The agenda items include youth bullying, depression, suicide and awareness of transgender issues.

I may be a Slytherin, but that doesn’t mean I’m on Voldemort’s side. For me, it’s about being ruthless and ambitious, and, having seen the dark, choosing the light.

Please take a chance to check out the HPA, and I hope you’ll join us on the Livestream. I’ll update this post with links to my blog entries there as they are posted.

Thank you!

reporting for an audience of one

I was 17-years-old when the Berlin Wall fell. It was my senior year of high school, a year, during which, I had hoped to study abroad, largely to escape the bullying and awkwardness I felt at school and the secrets I was beginning to understand the need to keep at home. But, when I had broached the subject with my parents the year before, it was a subject that had gotten squashed quickly.

My mother, who is Jewish, was uncomfortable with my desire to study in Germany or Austria, places that fascinated me because of her own love of their art — I grew up looking at women painted by Gustav Klimpt and Egon Shiele, women who looked like me and seemed like home.

In truth, looking back on it all, it may just have been the first thing that it sprung to her mind to say; my parents’ objections were probably more likely about money or my being off somewhere far away from their rules. But with my mother’s reaction being what it was, I didn’t ask a second time. Like all things I longed for, I merely stared at it from afar, lingering on travel ads in the newspapers I was raised to read daily as civic duty, hoping my desire would be obvious and, somehow, magical.

So I didn’t study abroad, and a month after my seventeenth birthday I wasn’t in Germany. I watched the Berlin Wall fall from our dining room table during that surprising week where I was allowed to have the television on during dinner. And each night, as I watched those events, I thought of two things: David Bowie’s “Heroes” (a song which kept me going in high school and that is deeply and complicatedly enmeshed with Berlin Wall mythology) and how I could just get up at 4am, take the can of cash I was hoarding out of the bottom of my closet, steal my mother’s credit card, grab my passport out of the second drawer on the left of her roll-top desk, take a cab to the airport, and run away, to Berlin, so I could be there as the Wall kept coming down.

But I had no nerve. And while I don’t know if it would have worked, I have always regretted that I never tried. 21 years later, I have still never been to Berlin.

Patty is too young to have particularly strong feelings or recollections about the fall of the Berlin Wall. She did not grow up afraid of nuclear war. In terms of scale, her Berlin Wall moment was, probably, sadly, 9/11. And here is this moment in Egypt, and she’s in India, doing what she loves, living without television and without radio she can understand. The news she gets comes on her mobile phone, from me, from friends, from the calls the other people on the dig get.

My academic degree is in journalism, a profession I selected for a host of foolish reasons: needing a respectable job-possible major to get parental assistance (and permission, I was 17) to go to college and wanting to be a war reporter because of fictions (V, the original version) I had loved as a young teen.

I was never a war reporter, but I did work for the AP for a few years in their Computer Assisted Reporting unit back in the mid-90s. When I write non-fiction now it’s scholarship, criticism, analysis, personal essays, or, in the hey-it’s-a-paycheck category, light lifestyle pieces for various online media.

But when I call Patty tomorrow, it’s my job to be a reporter, even if I’m just reporting all the news I watch both because it is my nature and because it is a requirement of my analysis work. I’ve been doing it since the beginning, starting with the Giffords shooting and then since the time I paged her in the middle of the night about Tunisia and Yemen and the beginnings of Egypt. The page didn’t go through right, and she, puzzled as to why I was frantically texting her about Yemen, called me on her lunch break, and I ran everything out as fast as I could.

Since then, it’s been hard to keep up the excitement and intensity and confusion and fear and hope of what’s been going on in Egypt. I’m just one person, without video or images to show her, without direct information, and with a great deal of fatigue from how much these events have upended my own working life. But it’s so important to me that I do a good job, that when she plays Where Were You When games she’ll have more for this than “I was in India, so I sort of missed it.”

I’m a news junkie. Maddeningly so. It’s not just work. It’s a compulsion. Sometimes, she has to tell me to change the damn channel because I’m about to watch the same episode of Rachel Maddow twice in the same evening. She puts up with this with a great deal of amusement, and she’s certainly into current events herself, just in a way that’s a bit less odd. So I hope I’m doing okay. That I’ll do well tomorrow. That she’ll be able to say in response to this entry in the Where Were You When game, “I was in India, and my girlfriend had to tell me about it on this crappy mobile I bought, and we kept getting disconnected and it was like two tin cans on a string and it seemed so strange.”

To me, who has the news on all the time, often on multiple screens and channels, it doesn’t seem like enough. But it sure does seem like something, like paying a debt for the way I once did, and still do, dream of Berlin.