Caitlín R. Kiernan

Yesterday, I wrote 1,296 words on Chapter Five of Blood Oranges, which puts the word bank at 801 words. Today, with luck and determination, I'll find the chapter's end. But there need to be many fewer distractions today than there were yesterday.

The weather today is warm and damp, with more rain on the way.

readingthedark arrived early in the evening, and the three of us had dinner at Trinity Brew House. I had a very raw hamburger, a thing I was greatly desiring. Back home, there was an hour or so of conversation. Not nearly enough. But sex and tentacles, that came up, the octopoid bauplan as an eight-penised vagina, something of the sort. Prehensile penes, at that. But also cats, shaved heads, energy drinks, open sims, polygon mesh vertices, and book trailers.

I wasn't able to get to sleep until after five-fifteen ayem. The sky was going grey and lavender.

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Back on the 7th, both hollyblack and matociquala wrote rather good entries on the "Mary Sue" problem. The misapplication of the term to fiction that isn't fanfic, and other deeper problems with a very problematic phrase and a concept fraught with problems. You can read Holly's post here, and Elizabeth's here. I found myself agreeing with most of what was said in both, which was hardly a surprise.

My only significant quibble would be with Holly's list of what is used to identify a "Mary Sue." Read it for yourself (don't be a lazy bastard), but it basically comes down to one word that repeatedly appears in her list: unrelatable. For example:

The reviewer believes that the female protagonist of the novel is so perfect as to be unrelatable.

The difficulty I have here may only be one of personal habit and preference. I don't see fiction as something I do expecting people to relate to any character. I only expect readers to read and consider and experience the story, to have individual reactions to the various characters, and to draw whatever conclusions they may. I'm most emphatically not doing something in order for people who don't write stories to project themselves onto. So, to me, whether or not a reader can relate is immaterial. I don't see the ability to relate to a character as a prerequisite for, say, sympathizing or empathizing with a character. Otherwise, yep. Brilliant posts, and thank you.

Oh, this bit from matociquala, which was basically a quick summation of Holly's quote for those too lazy to follow a link: "It's frankly misogynistic to identify a competent female protagonist as a 'Mary Sue' because she's at the center of her story. She's at the center of her story because she's the goddamn protagonist."

For my part, I continue to maintain the term will never have any authentic utility beyond fanfic, and even then...okay, not going to beat dead horses today. It only attracts flies.

A Bit Player,
Aunt Beast

And here it is, the first day of Spring, the Vernal Equinox, Ostara. And I greet it with great relief, that another winter has come and gone.

There was very little to yesterday, except the continued reading and correcting and editing and rewriting of Silk. Many commas and hyphens were added, a few compounderations were hewn asunder. Some atrocious phrasing was made less so. In the end, we did three chapters, though I'd hoped to do four, and this morning the Zokutou page thingy looks like this:

225 / 354 (63.6%)

Going over the novel again after all these years, I remain perplexed that so many readers found the characters so loathsome. Sure, Robin and Byron are a bit much, too goth for their own good or anybody elses, but all in all, I still find the people inhabiting Silk as sympathetic as I ever did, and I do not waste my time trying to write characters with whom I cannot sympathize. I would not know how to do that. But I've heard it from so many people. This person, for example, in an Amazon.com "review":

If you are really into super-confusing, creepy books with self-pitying, annoying, wear-it-on-their sleeve outcast characters-- this might be just the tale for you.

Or this "review":

I had a hard time sympathizing with these pathetic, soullessly conformist waifs.

Or this one:

What bothers me is that I find the characters so enormously unappealing. They're all self-absorbed 20somethings proudly and defiantly wrapped up in their own pain and dysfunction. I couldn't find any sympathy in me, much less empathy, for any of them, not even Spyder, who was horribly abused as a child. Every time Daria lost her temper over her junky boyfriend I wanted to slap her. Every time Spyder evaded the questions of those who wanted to love and help her with vague mumblings I wanted to strangle her. These are people who enjoy wallowing in their pain.

Even now, a decade after the book was first published, fourteen years after I started writing it, these reactions simply mystify me. Much of Silk is awfully close to autobiography, and I was writing about a time and places and people I had known and been. And though I am now someone very, very different, I still do not understand these reactions, this hostility. For me, Silk is a novel about people doing the best they can do, given their unfortunate situations and histories. Yes, many of them are broken and insane and self-destructive, and they usually do not behave like or have the priorities of sensible, down-to-earth, workin' class folks or property-flipping yuppies. But, for the most part, they are true. And that is my first and most important job as a writer, to write true people. Maybe what rubbed these people the wrong way was that I didn't turn Silk into some sort of tiresome morality tale or a cautionary screed: Be careful, or you'll end up like these losers. Anyway...

I did find one extremely annoying error in the book yesterday, one that has made it into print three times now. I refer to the black widows Spyder's keeping as "Latrodectus geomstricus," thereby managing to make both a taxonomic and a spelling blunder. There is no such beast as Latrodectus geomstricus. Latrodectus geometricus, on the other hand, is the brown widow. But. The Southern black widow, which would have been the species in Spyder's care, is Latrodectus mactans. I am at a loss to explain how I made this error in the first place, much less how it was carried on through three editions. People pick on my characters when they ought to pick on my taxonomy.

Like I said, not much else to yesterday. I was up until 1:30 a.m. writing Wikipedia articles, one on Judeasaurus and one on the squamate clade Varanoidea, because that's just the sort of self-absorbed, dysfunctional, pathetic dork I am.