elfs | Annoyed at myself for being annoyed at myself for being annoyed at myself… (Reply)

The other day, I was reading one of my own Journal Entries, trying to remind myself of why I wrote them and get back into the groove of writing them again. Now that I’m doing freelance work, though, I don’t have as much time to write as I used to. I have to produce value, and people pay me more to write code than stories so, well, there you go.

But as I was reading, the love scene started and the characters got into positions and suddenly it turns out, completely unremarked-upon before this, that the woman in the story is black. I was at first annoyed by this revelation: how did the idiot author let the story get this far along before dropping this little bombshell? And then I recalled, annoying myself further, that that had been part of the point of the damn series. Bombshells like that were the fun stuff of the Journal Entries. I had enjoyed tweaking the audience by doing exactly that: dropping in details that the characters themselves wouldn’t have cared about until it mattered, not bothering to announce the color of another character’s skin as an identifier but rather as a source of pleasure, an aesthetic quality independent of personality, or culture, or expectation. I was pleased to note that the trick had worked.

Then I became further annoyed with myself for feeling tweaked by my previous self. I wonder what other annoyances I’ll have to grind away at in the future, to get back to my former egalitarian gorgeous self?

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.