"I have nothing but contempt for you! Buy my stuff!"

The other day, I was tracking down some art blogs (mostly lead by looking at Gaping Void, the blog of artist and motivational speaker Hugh McLeod, who wrote just about the most succinct description of the creative life ever, The Hughtrain, and this wisdom: "Quality isn't job one. Being totally fucking amazing is job one.") and I stumbled upon something similar to McCleod's art schtick but different in a porny way: Naked Chicks on Post-It Notes. Now that's a Project 365 I could get behind (ahem) someday.

I noticed as I flipped through them that the artist had an obsession with an excessively, um, "frontally gifted" pin-up girl named Rachel Aldana (that's okay, I didn't know who she was either). Despite drawing picture after picture of her (until even he admitted that it was starting to get "creepy") he wrote, "I've always seen hatred in her eyes, like she despises us porn surfers. It was us who snatched her from her quiet life of hairdressing, and spread her chest across the internet."

I just don't quite get that. I mean, if you're going to invest time and energy into collecting any given pin-up, wouldn't you rather find one that was obviously having fun? Someone with laughter on her mouth and smarts in her eyes? My principle reaction was, "Dude, go find a healthier relationship, like one with Chloe Vevrier or Danni Ashe." (Wikipedia informs me that Ashe retired from modeling in 2004, which shows how tragically out of date my porn-surfing habits are.)

The Medium Shapes The Messenger: Authorial Voice And The Mode Of Writing

Last night I sat down to write one of the closing chapters of Jera's Quest, a sort-of prequel to the next Aimee novel, and as I was working my way through a critical scene, the first face-to-face meeting of Princess Jera with the long-lost Prince Niav, whom she has just rescued and about whom there is much contention among the Imperial factions, both within her court and within his.

When I first envisioned this scene, I wanted it to be adult-style romantic. Jera has spent the last third of the novel looking for Niav (while dodging multiple conspiracies working at cross-purposes). She had silly teenage romantic notions about meeting him in the beginning of the book but she's grown up a lot in the year since she first learned he might still be alive, trapped in some magickal gaol. Now that she's lived through so much, she's not quite so naive, and some of what's happened to Niav since he went missing is deeply shocking to her. And yet, she finds herself still deeply attracted to him, despite what he's become during his ensorcellment, and by the end of the scene I basically wanted the two of them necking madly.

I have two versions of this scene. The first I dictated into my voice recorder. I like to go walking in the woods behind my house and try and capture the voices of my characters. (I'm sure if someone came upon me while I was doing so, they would think I was mad! Mad! I'll show them! I'll show them all! Muahahahah... ahem) Since this is told entirely from Jera's point of view, I dictate her lines, and his responses, and just enough supporting beats to tell myself what details need to be fleshed out of the surroundings: food, clothes, the room, stuff like that, as well as blocking^[?].

The second is one I set down to write over lunchtime. I'd left my voice recorder at home but I figured that just write it; I remembered enough of the dialogue and I knew what the scene was about.

As it turned out, the second draft is much less sympathetic than the first. While I was writing at the keyboard, my mind was whirring ahead, considering the consequences of everything said, and the way my characters started reacting was much less romantic and more cynical. A lot of my sympathy for their new plight dissipated because they were thinking too hard.

omaha suggested that the first time through, I'm concentrating on the POV character. What the character says, thinks, what comes through the eyes, and so her wants and needs, her immediate desires, and how they've been frustrated and may continue to be frustrated, come through loud and clear. In the typewritten draft I have much spare time to think about what I'm doing, and what I'm setting up, and that's leaking into my characters in a way that ruins their characterization. I think she may be on to something there.

Has anyone ever had this problem, where the mode of getting the story out of your head, be it dictation, long hand, or word processor, has actually shaped the way your characters act and think?

Annoyed at a bunch o' liberal blatherings today

William F. Buckley died today. I, for one, have strongly mixed feelings about Buckley. His classism was, well, first-class, and his attitude towards those with whom he disagreed was always devestatingly polite and politely devastating. Buckley meant what he said more than most, and said what he meant better than anyone.

But Buckley was not a racist, and he has not been one for damn near the past forty years. When Lisa Schiffrin opened her big fat mouth on National Review's The Corner (Buckley founded the magazine National Review in 1956) to portray Obama as the product of a Jewish-Black Communist Conspiracy (I'm not kidding about this, really), Belle (whose blog that link goes to, where she quotes Schiffrin's whole damn missive), wrote, "It's music to WFB's ears. His trembling hand hoists a generous 7:30am brandy and milk to you, Lisa!" My reaction was that Belle was being damnably unfair.

Buckley denounced racism and repudiated his own in the mid-1960s. He became disgusted at the terroist tactics used by Southern whites. More importantly, his Catholicsm and his brilliance led him to understand that the bigotry with which he had been raised had no rational basis or moral standing. He reached out to Black intellectuals and found them worthy of his time and attention. You might find that arrogant, but it was a remarkable and remarkably decent act for a man who mas born racist and classist, and at a time when he, personally, had no reason to do so. He lost a lot of allies who took a decade to catch up with him. His position on race became a firm and liberated race-blindedness: there should not be a group identity, nor official recognition of a group, based upon the color of his skin. He came to support the civil rights act of 1964, and oppose affirmative action and school busing. In a perfect world, his position would have made sense. At the time, the right hated him for giving up his racism; the left have always hated him for his refusal to tolerate less than ideal moral conditions.

I can think of no better obituary for Buckley than the "white culture" rag American Renaissance's article, The Decline Of National Review, in which the writer bitterly complains that "National Review was once a voice for whites." But not anymore.

Buckley's once said that if he were a black man living in South Africa, he'd probably have joined the ANC. Last year his critics dismissed him as "senile" for his statement that invading Iraq was "a ghastly mistake." The man did keep his own opinions, and learn from his mistakes.

Buckley did come to view the people around him as admirable for their minds, not for the color of their skin. He wanted de facto race-blindness, not merely the hodge-podge de jure system we have in place today. Even more to the point, he believed that the price of not hiring the merited for irrational reasons was a drag on corporate economies, and they'd come around eventually without creating deep-seated resentment. (This has actually worked for gays and lesbians; Buckley was right in that respect.)

For that, he was pilloried on all sides. The magazine he hasn't helmed for eleven years, and the website he never had any direct responsibity over, have drifted further and futher into moonbat insanity. Jonah Goldberg (Buckley's hand-picked successor as Editor at Large) is making a laughingstock of himself by claiming that Mussolini was a "librul," and was labeled a facist after the fact by "libruls" who want to dismiss him; Victor Davis Hanson has descended into shrill martial madness, his mind a replay of 300 every night; Ramesh Ponnoru makes the case that the only way the Islamic Teruhrists will stop hatin' on America is if we become more like them and kill all the libruls; D'Souza is a weird Intelligent Design advocate; and you've met Ms. Schiffrin.

But Buckley was a different kind of man, manufactured from a different time and space. He was not "warm and fuzzy." He was hard, he wanted to stand up and be counted. He wanted you to stand up and be counted, too, and he had the decency to cease caring about your melanin production and your epicanthic fold. In death, you could at least give him his fair due on that account.