Twilight, again. Yes, really.

I'm going to do that annoying thing bloggers do, and say something we're all thinking. In response to these rumors ricocheting around the Internet (notably this io9 article) that Twilight fans are attacking people who express their dislike of the book...I'm calling half-truth, half-bullshit.

On the truth side, people really are that unstable. People get assaulted over sports games; it's not unreasonable to think books would get a similar treatment. People find some strange things to fill the vacuums in their lives, and really, who is more likely to feel empty and rudderless than teenagers, who make up the bulk of this book's target audience? I had serious temper problems in high school, and I personally know, off the top of my head, four people who self-injured on a pretty regular basis for a good chunk of their high school careers. It's not hard to believe that they might both find solace in a book and react violently to those who tell them their chosen anchor is somehow lacking.

On the bird-food side, though, we are talking about teenagers. Teenagers (really, a lot of people, but especially teenagers) deal with their feelings of confusion and chaos by seeking attention. There are plenty of ways to do this (professionals call it "acting out"), but when the Internet gives you a nice shield of anonymity, why not seek some attention via the good old-fashioned method of becoming a victim?

This is not to say that people, kids included, have not gotten punched or whacked with books or otherwise assaulted over this. But I suspect that less than half of the more extreme stories are actually true, or are only based on a true incident with far less dire consequences; I particularly find the signal rocket story to be a bit more than credible, if only because it sounds like a scene from Cliffhanger. If I'm wrong (and please tell me if you have actual corroboration on these events, other than io9 and the Twilight Sucks forums), I apologize, and my heart goes out to the kids who have gotten abused like this.

A note here, though: people getting assaulted over a book is not new. People on Yahoo Answers are getting that (first response to the OP, you are welcome for me rending my IQ by tracking that down for you). I'm not blaming teenagers for being upset about being attacked or exaggerating what happened to them—that kind of insanity is part of being sixteen—but I am blaming people who are acting like this is somehow worse or more newsworthy than any of the other beliefs people get burned, beaten, shot, etc. for on a regular basis. People will get violent over stupid things; Twilight is only unique in that enough people hate it to make the stupidity seem more evident.

And in case you were wondering, I don't hate Twilight. Hating something requires it be capable of raising an emotional reaction.

No-One's That Stupid

Just in case you were concerned, Mattel is not, in fact, spreading the word of Allah. Please put down your pitchforks and torches. Thank you.

Considerations

I am not sure if dealing with a doctor's appointment is what triggered an introspective mood, or if it had more to do with being near the beginning of Bourdain's Kitchen Confidental and reading references to being twenty-two, or if it was simply happenstance; but something led me to stay up until five in the morning yesterday, staring at what little streetlight got absorbed by my ceiling and working through the timeline of the past nine years with one of my oldest friends. And while it may seem like a trite conclusion to arrive at, one of the principal things I came to understand via that conversation was how fast life really moves, and at the same time how slow.

I don't mean in some pessimistic sense, with depressions and car accidents and cancers leaping down on you out of nowhere; just in terms of, really, how quickly a situation can develop, shift, and deteriorate. My first quarter of college was ten weeks long, and in that time I acquired, befriended, and lost someone I at the time considered my best friend; over the course of the next quarter I floundered through a deep depression and watched my social circle totally fragment.

When I assess when things occurred--this particular party, a LARP I enjoyed, a major argument--I am always mystified to discover that simultaneously, the event that seems so distant is only two or three years old, and is surrounded by a multitude of major events that all occurred so close together that my life feels prickly with steep highs and deep lows. When I analyze how one particular event or issue played out I find it was a matter of days, and within those days, single moments: an entire string of events starting with one email and playing itself overdone and mute within a week.

It stung here and there to discuss, and occasionally made me angry; but mostly it made me really consider how interesting my life has actually been, even if not full of the kind of travels and literary and fiscal successes I would like to have to my name. It also makes me (to tie this back to the point of this whole blog) think about the way plot flows, and wonder if this is what I sensed beneath the surface back when I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or perhaps more topically, if this is why I liked Tim Powers' The Stress of Her Regard more than I liked Last Call: The way that the stories in those two books flow is incidental, sometimes coincidental. Things start with a single action, not even deliberate and in one case not even informed, and balloon out into a a sort of conceptual beast that the protagonist can only tie a rope to and hope to hang on until the end. It makes me, unfortunately, turn an eye toward Eyes of Stone and its layout again; but perhaps fortunately, it makes me consider that the strange, sudden, sometimes chaotic way the plot seems to develop and spool out is exactly the sort of naturalistic anarchy that I see in works I appreciate. Much as it makes me anxious, I enjoy the way life will just keep throwing in twists; and I can't help but want literature to be the same way.

By "Content-Rich" We Mean "Total Failure"; or, the issue of Truth in Biography

Saturday morning early, and a cup of coffee in my hand. Last night was the press and heat and crush of two good friends' rehearsal dinner, and today is the calm in the center of the storm before tomorrow's full-fledged ritual experience. And also, I have a post for you.

Like many people who fight for the title of "author", I subscribe to Publisher's Lunch. Some mornings it's just another piece of mail in my inbox, sad to say, and sometimes I just browse for a couple seconds to see if they've added California to their health care plan; but a few mornings ago, I received this, and immediately wished I had said it--if perhaps with a bit more flair.

Journalist Malcolm Knox--who uncovered the lies in Norma Khouri's book--worked with Sudanese refugee and one-time boy soldier Cola Bilkuei on his book COLA'S JOURNEY and was asked to verify the book's accuracy. (Just published in Australia, it is not available elsewhere for now.)

"So what are we left with? Aside from boy soldiers, a priest and a lawyer who knew Cola in Africa, we have the assurances of the Australian government, which gave Cola his first passport and checked on him through cousins who already lived here....

"Ultimately, though, between what could be verified and what lies on the pages of Cola's book, there will always remain a margin where we must simply take his word. Some will ask why any author's word should be trusted. My answer is that if we take such a hard line, we will deprive ourselves of all oral history, of every story that is one person's recollection.

"If we did that, winnowing history to what is documented on official records, swathes of human experience would be lost. What we must do is check what can be checked, then extrapolate from it."

So, I worked in a bookstore during the Oprah-fueled popularity of A Million Little Pieces. For those of you who weren't following, it was lauded as an amazing and disturbing little book, dealing with a man's recovery from multiple addictions. I have not read it, I cannot say anything else authoritatively. Oprah loved the book, and had James Frey on her show to promote it--when it was added to her Book Club it received the expected upsurge of rabid purchasing fever.

Then it came out that James Frey had made some bits of it up.

At this point it devolves into rumors and sound bites--I can't know for certain what is true, and my time in college keeps me from really wanting to stick my neck out on a spurious source. All I know is that the outrage became ridiculous--I remember being nearly slapped in the face with a copy of A Million Little Pieces by a woman shrieking at me, insulting my intellect and chanting "This is not a memoir!" with a variety of different enunciations.

And again, I leap to the defense of a book I haven't read and don't really plan on reading when I say: Please.

It seems certain at this late stage that James Frey embellished. But before we knew that everyone was talking about how vivid and brutal his prose was. And now, it turns out, some of it was fictional. So what?

He was an inspiration to addicts to get off drugs. That's truly wonderful. But I know people who have drawn inspiration from, among other things--Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which I pray was fictional in places); the poetry of Emily Dickinson (hypnogogic even when you understand it); Tim Powers' Last Call (urban fantasy); and any one of a dozen classic and canonical texts. If someone falls back into their old ways because an author made part of their book up, how fragile was their inspiration in the first place?

I am primarily a reader of fiction--I break into little internal wars whenever I try to read nonfiction--so perhaps that is why I am having trouble understanding. But what does the grounding in total fact have to do with anything? Why is this applied to books but not to biographical films, which certainly dramatize aspects of the story (see: the presentation of John Nash's condition in A Beautiful Mind; the final scene of Man On The Moon)? Is this an outgrowth of the constant geek tap-dance of reality and physics equations that marks our tearing down of whichever Star Trek iteration we hated? Are we just a culture so divorced from the written word that we have to fact-check everything?

I for one go with what Mr. Knox had the courage to say there, but I take it one step further. Our oldest and most primal stories do not speak to a truth that can be checked; there aren't any footnotes for cosmogony. In an autobiography, you should be concerned about speaking truthfully--but you should be just as concerned about speaking deeply. Frey's story, from my encounters with it, touches the deeper truths of addiction and recovery--and gives us some ghastly little scares to boot; similarly, the story of a boy soldier has a right to focus a little more on the tragedy than on the minutiae. Journalism is, of course, a different animal--but that, like so many things, is for another post.

My Grocery List

New posts two days in a row. Must be a slow week.

So, I said, perhaps cryptically, that I would post today about perception and celebrity, and why it's so awful to not have the latter. I don't really have a witty preamble for you, so let's get started:

I do not react strongly to celebrities.

This is probably because my father is one, albeit not on the same level as a Sarah Palin or a (God forbid) Kid Rock; he was, however, a musician in a famous band, and that meant that my perception of the situation was different than others. To keep it simple and boast-free, I grew up around famous people--not as family, with the exception of my father, but as people who stopped by, who called on the phone, who we complained about at the dinner table the same way anyone else complains about their friends or their boss. The veneer of mystery was off them. They were just people.

Oh, sure, I get nervous around celebrities, but I don't know if my pulse pounds any louder than when I have to talk to a stranger that someone I know thinks well of; it's not so much the aura of Very Famous as it is the concern that I'm going to say something embarrassing to someone smart. If anything is different when talking to celebrities it's the desire to not appear to be just another fan; trying to find the point between complimenting and gushing, the place between being excited and being Screaming Fan #6,778. It's the desire to treat them like normal people with great talents, not gods, that drives any unusual chemical activity celebrities might conjure in my brain.

I say all this both to pad my daily word count, and as a lead-in to my real point, which is, basically, that it's harder to maintain a blog when you're not some kind of famous; and that in some ways, on some blogs, being famous can be a way of cheating.

Now, please do not hear me trashing weblog culture. I have Warren Ellis's blog on a feed; I read Neil Gaiman's blog with respectable frequency; I even check out what Wil Wheaton has to say now and then. And I doubt anyone has missed the link somewhere to the right advertising the Cabinet of Wonders. I don't think celebrities (or at least these celebrities) intentionally leverage their fame to allow themselves easy, content-free blogging. But I do think that fame, Internet-based or otherwise, makes the job of maintaining a blog much, much easier.

For instance, look at Warren Ellis. Alright, now that you're certain someone on this planet thinks you're a bit daft, look at his blog. Read what he posts there, and if you can, read it like it's something being posted by your good friend, rather than a Very Important Author you enjoy. What do you see?

Most likely, you see a few advertisements for his new creative efforts (especially Freakangels, though that may have disappeared of late). But then it starts to get pretty jejune. You see photographs of interesting places. You see compiled tweets. You see him asking you to turn him on to new bands. With the exception of his ads and his World Wide Week idea (which I think is pretty brilliant), his blog probably looks pretty similar to, oh, yours. Yet, Warren Ellis has something that, most likely, you don't:

Comments.

Maybe this is just because I tend to run pretty low on the comments on my blogs, but it seems to me like once you get to blogs being hosted by actual adults, the distribution of comments is dramatically uneven. Warren Ellis has no difficulty getting into double digits and often hits triple, and political blogs can get similar volumes. Even allowing for double posts and for the number of responses that are going to be "yeah" and "LOL" and "/signed", that's still a much higher volume than most. This is, of course, barring highly polemical posts; I got some pretty intense traffic when I was 20 and dumb enough to openly slam one of my friends on LiveJournal (let's not even get into it...).

So, what's the difference? Well, it's two-fold.

One aspect, to be perfectly honest, is that Warren Ellis is a good writer, and a good writer without a track record of writing abysmally. People read his posts because they can count on acerbic wit, news on works by a writer they love, and maybe even something new to read or see or hear. In short, his is a blog that does deserve traffic.

But the other aspect, and you knew this was coming, is that Warren Ellis (and Wil Wheaton and Neil Gaiman and whoever) is a Very Famous Man. People are tempted to comment on blogs by Very Famous Men, because (or so I perceive it) those comments are imbued with some greater potency because they stand a higher chance of being read by a Very Famous Man, or even (gasp!) replied to by them. Certainly, I was electrified the one time Cherie Priest responded to me, so I don't think I'm entirely off-base here. And it's not merely about wanting a pat on the head--plenty of people disagree with Ellis (Wheaton/Gaiman/etc. etc.) as well, but even that can be its own sort of attempt to garner social prestige: you could be The Person That Showed Warren Ellis What's What. And how cool would that be?

This is the thing I don't entirely get, even given my brush with Cherie Priest. But this is not the thing that bothers me. The thing that bothers me is something deeper that this is just a little glimpse into--the problem is closer to the surface here because the presence of a celebrity guarantees the whole situation greater exposure. And that issue is the desire to be Internet Famous, and the tendency to measure yourself by your comments.

People want comments. I want comments. Comments are what keeps a blog a live, because ultimately, a blog post is the opening of a conversation. Unfortunately, it's a conversation that is alternately much faster than a face-to-face, and much slower. Blogs and blog readers demand their own peculiar schedules, and if comments or new posts fail to conform, the comments will go unanswered, or even worse, the blogs will die. Most bloggers can't even get away with taking a hiatus without their comments vanishing into thin air--I admit I panicked a little when I realized I'd totally missed last week's post. So naturally, the desire is to find a way to (a) update on some sort of regular, relatively acceptable schedule, and (b) make your comment bucket overflow. Sometimes this desire just results in frustration; but more often, this can result in the manufacturing of Internet fame.

We've all encountered a blog that was clearly doing the moral equivalent of post-count whoring: the unnecessary misanthropy, or the constant link-spam with witty little comments, or the recycled political punditry without anything new in the way of viewpoint or research. Whether or not the people writing these blogs are doing so consciously, what they are doing is trying to be someone famous; to fake being famous, because on the Internet it's really easy for fake to become real. This isn't even one or two people, or a dozen people; this is a large percentage of blogs. Really, I think this might be part of the driving force behind the posts we've all been guilty of (including yours truly) that are basically just us rehashing our days and our grocery lists in a grandiose fashion; not that there's anything wrong with those blog posts, but unless your friends don't see you very often those are probably not the things people want to read. But then, Neil Gaiman manages to write about driving kids to school and beekeeping and get a lot of readers, so maybe our banal posts are the things that will win us some accolades...

Really, I have no conclusion here, except that fame does strange things, and even more so the desire to be famous. The Internet just accelerates the cycle, and probably makes it a little harder to burn out on drugs. If I were to conclude, it would be to wonder how to patch the gaps in my posting schedule and the times when I am not inspired to write anything that would make anyone think--and to wonder if by "make anyone think" I really mean "make anyone comment". Is it possible that even the Internet is being powered by the human love of being the one with the biggest (or at least best) number? Unfortunately, I think so.

"I'm Okay!"

Apologies for missing a week, my hypothetical fan base. And apologies for thus having to address this subject.

It is, to those of us in the United States, September 11th; and that's a day we aren't really allowed to forget about. I've sleepwalked through the majority of that day once or twice, realized what day it was only near the end; I've counted myself lucky that I didn't lose anyone; I've watched clips from media suddenly gone serious and I've remembered my "Where Were You on 9/11?" story, which mostly consists of IMs from my girlfriend and one of my closest to let me know they had survived. And I will say, somehow, be it miracle or just classy company, today is the first day I encountered a September 11th joke. It was topically good, but funny only for its horror; it was the sort of thing that cuts a laugh out of you instead of tickling it out.

I have my opinions about September 11th; they're not particularly frothing on any one political point except that I feel things like that shouldn't be turned to the kind of politics they have been. It's been used to divide where it should have been used to unite and that to my mind is unforgivable on all fronts. And on that subject, I have nothing more to say.

There will be a post tomorrow, about perception and celebrity. Possibly also some complaints about the instant-gratification, constant-stimulation culture of comments and me-toos that blogs spawn, and the less obvious and immediate reasons it sucks to blog without fame. But for today, I want to leave you with a prelude, because I just can't write anything about September 11th and then say "Anyway, here's what I really wanted to say". It's our involuntary national holiday; today we take a break from talking about other things.

The joke, by the way, was about World of Warcraft. And it's probably more tasteful (for molecular measurements of that concept) than admitting that makes it sound.

Disarray

This one is a bit less essay and a bit more chaos than my typical posts; if you don't like the format I can assure you we'll be back on whatever passes for course next week.

I did not, shock of shocks, get chosen as one of the top three entrants in the Spam Fiction contest. Unfortunate and sad, but I had to expect that, really.

Except of course, now the Doubt Monkey is gnawing at my brain, and I am starting to wonder if this piece of post-zombie political fiction I'm working on is at all going to pull its weight. My goal: to grit my teeth and make myself finish this draft so I can pull out the boning knife and the cauter-saw and spend next week making it into something I'm proud of.

Love. Hate. Excess. The words a writer lives by.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the issue of narrowcast culture. Science fiction and fantasy are the genres that are famous for the problem, but every facet of culture has people whose social lives and leisure time, and sometimes even time outside that, entirely revolve around one core concept. Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons are infamous examples, but the same issue crops up with reality shows (one or all of them), professional wrestling, soap operas, etc. etc. For every cultural phenomenon of moderate weight there are people who hang their lives on it: watch the movies, watch the shows, read the books, buy the t-shirts.

None of these things are inherently bad, unless you are concerned about social cache in the world at large, but it's common for these hobbies to become exclusionary: people who read only Star Trek novels and spend their downtime at work practicing Klingon; people who invest massive amounts of money in putting a wrestling ring in their backyard, and whose every conversation contains the phrase "The Rock says". People will focus some or all of their energy toward one single thing, a thing which they did not create and which, while it may enrich their lives, is being spread over far more of their lives than it should reasonably be expected to cover. Narrowcast culture: the rejection of all aspects of the human experience that do not relate to a single, specific concept, generally some set of connected media artifacts.

Personally, I find this repellent. I understand some degree of focus--I am, after all, spending at least some part of the majority of my days writing, and even more of it embroiled in words. But narrowcast cultural thinking is like societal inbreeding; it separates people into groups even moreso than they already are and it snuffs out ideas, ideas with the potential to cause very big change.

What sort of brain finds this acceptable? What sort of person doesn't go exploring, even in their head? I doubt it is that commonly-cited issue of social rejection and subsequent embrace of a sense of belonging, only because people who are part of the "in-crowd" do this, too. I don't think it is low-income people, because plenty of people who don't ever shut off World of Warcraft make sensible and more-than-sensible money as tech workers. Is the need to belong really this strong? Do people really feel so incomplete and scared that they only want to explore along one well-trodden path? People, to my mind, are machines for making ideas; and it bothers me that so many of them, sci-fi nerd and jock alike, are happiest when they are only regurgitating ideas handed to them by others.

And Twilight Creeps In

It's happened. Inevitable and inexorable, it's happened.

I'm going to touch on a major, mainstream cultural phenomenon (one apparently equipped with stealth technology, given that it's being likened to Harry Potter and I only actually heard about the series two weeks ago). I'm going to talk about the Twilight series, by one Stephanie Meyer.

(There are some spoilers in here, folks, here and there; I apologize, but they just flowed naturally.)

I should stop here, and say, I'm not going to discuss the books. I haven't read the books, and given what I've seen of the plot summaries, I have less than zero interest in doing so. The phrase "half-vampire fetus" is one that would morbidly attract me in a low-budget film, not a novel. I will be fair, and make that the last actual comment I make on the content of the books--I don't want the terrible karma that could result from denigrating a book I've never even tried to read. Doing so, in fact, could get me in deep philosophical trouble, given that this entire post is born of my feelings about the reactions of Meyer's readers.

You see, for those (like me) who did not know, this young adult series has just ended, wrapping up in the fourth book, Breaking Dawn. Like any series--any single media artifact, really--it has its detractors. It would seem that several of Meyer's "true fans" did not like her last book. That they are in fact incensed about her last book. So much so that they have decided the best way to express their extreme displeasure is to start a campaign to return all copies of the book.

Yes, you read that right (after viewing the somewhat cringe-inducing picture of two people dancing all over the gothic subculture). There is a campaign on to return all copies of Breaking Dawn to the stores where they were purchased.

Yes. That will definitely show her.

But my problem is not with the somewhat strange, perhaps even desperate way of "getting back" at Meyer; no, my problem, and the entire point of this post, is this statement, levied at Meyer as it has been at a great many writers, to be found at the end of the first page of comment on that site: the idea that in some way, Meyer was "not true to her characters".

I'm going to go ahead and gloss over the disturbing and all too real possibility that this statement is born of the idea that the characters of the Twilight universe are somehow real enough that Stephanie Meyer could be inflicting her narrative on them, like lashes to an innocent back; while it's a possible avenue it's not one I think I can usefully address. I'll start prepping arguments for it now, in a separate document, in the vain hope that maybe someday I'll have to deal with that for myself.

Now. Allow me to drop my veneer of intellectualism long enough to say: horseshit.

I will agree that from what little I understand of the series (thanks to the masterful wit of Cleolinda Jones), Meyer threw the audience quite a few curveballs. Maybe even stupid curveballsm though the idea of cursing a werewolf to fall madly and irreversibly in love with a newborn is so stupid that the implications for the character it affects drown in the moron-static.

It is true that ultimately, a writer without an audience isn't much of a writer at all. Writing requires readers, if for no other reason than to provide the money that allows a writer to keep eating and drinking long enough to write some more. But there is a terrible tendency, particularly among the young adult novel set (both young adults themselves and those who get into the books), to mark a series as in some way the "fans' territory"; to make the assumption that in some way, the fans know the characters of the series as well as, if not better, than the author in question.

Let me make this clear: You don't.

I get imprinting on a character; I really do. I quit reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy for over five years (around about ages 9-14) because I couldn't stand what Tolkien did to Gandalf. (No, no-one told me.) I spent most of George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords periodically shouting "Hey!" at the naked page. But I never once felt that I somehow knew better than Tolkien or Martin as to how their characters should be handled, and that's because I knew I didn't have the first clue how those characters should be handled; all I knew about them was what those authors had told me.

If a writer seems to have thrown a huge, rusty monkey-wrench into their portrayal of a character, the truth is that there are two basic options.

The first option is this, plain and simple: the writer isn't very good (or at least, isn't any longer). Inconsistent characterization is not an unusual problem--even great writers can have trouble writing a solid character, and very few writers get to be great. In this scenario, there are no characters to know at all, let alone know better or worse than someone else.

The second possibility is that there is something going on you don't see. The plot twist, the double-cross, the apparent double-cross that's really a triple-cross, the sudden deep fear of lemurs; you know, the things that keep literature spicy and interesting? These are born of characters behaving in unexpected ways, i.e. in ways that aren't in keeping with the characters we "know" so well. And in this case, by definition, that means that the reader does not know the characters better than the author.

To boil it down: You can lambaste an artist all you want. You can hate them, you can return their books, you can even sell a t-shirt cleverly spurning their mythology for another. But do not for a second presume knowledge of a setting, a plot point, or a character that is greater than that of its creator.

Or, to put it another way, please consider this. Have you ever listened to two people debate the particulars of how a Jedi Knight (Luke, Anakin, Obi-Wan, take your pick) used the Force in a particular scene? Have you ever listened to them debate why that should or should not have made the Jedi in question fall to the Dark Side? I'm sure you have, and I want you to understand, that is what you are doing when you assume knowledge above and beyond that of the writer and creator. It may be about vampires or wizards or Victorian girls instead of Jedi, but it's the same basic concept.

Though I'll be fair, George Lucas is a bit of an exception. He did come up with midichlorians.