A Problem of Motivation (I Am The Night)

Image description: A mouth with fangs and shiny blue lips
with a tongue touching one of the fangs.

"I Am The Night" is a series of writing insights that come from my monthly Vampire LARP. I played the game itself on the 27th, and am just now getting to the write up part.

Vampire LARPs would make dreadful vampire stories. And unfortunately most vampire stories also make dreadful vampire stories.

It's not that nothing happens. Far from it. Too far from it, in fact. Shit happens. All kinds of shit happens. So much shit happens that it's a little unrealistic and certainly bad characterization of a creature that by all rights should be able to do the mental equivalent of "thinking about things over spring break" only to find that most of their problems have died of old age.

Between the last game and this most recent one, a bunch of players got together and tried to kill a very powerful character. Most of them involved in the action were killed, including a couple of those played I game with. Everyone I saw about their character's death was very cool (it can be tough and emotional to lose a character you've been playing for months or years), but it still got me to thinking about how human it was to form a strike force and try to go after this big bad.

For humans, finding out the location of some enemy and sending a strike force makes a lot of sense. Probably most humans would send some people (like military forces) who's job it was to do exactly those sorts of things and avoid the risk of death or injury themselves, but they would likely move on it. Human have finite lifespans and will sometimes, if pressed, wager their remaining years against quality of life issues or certain core values.

For players in a game it makes even MORE sense. There's no actual risk (other than a night of whisky sours and listening to country music...the music of pain). Everyone knows that the game will only last four or five years at most, so they have a limited time to do all the neat things they imagine and explore their character's arc. Some people want to get in on anything or anything interesting, elevate their character's station with glory and honor, and many are struggling with some level of character boredom. Human players pretending to be vampires can't really wait twenty years to see if a problem takes care of itself.

Unfortunately, for an actual vampire, this makes almost NO sense. Unless your vampire is a spectacularly burnt out adrenaline junkie, there is almost no conceivable reason that a creature who would live forever (if it didn't die from violence) would willingly put themselves in harm's way. They would find every excuse to avoid violence (beyond predation, of course, but presumably a human they're feeding on wouldn't be able to kill them). They would exhaust every possible solution that didn't involve violence before even considering it. And they would be absolute masters of patiently waiting to see if the problem just sort of went away. A vampire of any age at all probably wouldn't even consider most problems worth dealing with unless they had been going on for years or even decades.

A lot of writers have successfully dealt with this issue. Anne Rice's vampires often DO avoid violence unless it is thrust upon them or they essentially frenzy over some kind of last connection to their humanity being taken from them. Dracula is painstakingly careful to avoid risks and just happens to encounter a human (Dr. Van Helsing) who knows what he is–even then he wisely runs home, but the group follows him to exact revenge for Lucy, and has eliminated his ability to run further by destroying the dirt he sleeps in. (So really it's their human impulsiveness that leads to the final violent encounter.) Some writers give vampires an animal-like instinct that can boil their blood and take over their rational thinking process. Some make the stakes extra high (though the "true love" of a human thing has been way overdone, so be careful of that one). Some make the vampire protagonist very young so that their impulsive humanity hasn't been bled out of them–and sometimes even successfully portray their frustration at the measured patience of older vampires, which they perceive as apathy.

However, a lot of writers don't deal with vampires particularly well. They treat them kind of like superheroes with fangs, gleefully taking risks left and right despite their age because it makes for cool fight scenes or facing down mortal perils simply because a human (probably not even most humans, but maybe a jacked up trained human soldier with a death wish and nothing to lose) might do the same thing with the same risk versus reward. Having a 600 year old vampire who is going to live forever unless it gets ganked go to war with an equally powerful werewolf who is probably going to die in like a "week or two" doesn't make much sense. Why not just report a rash of feral dogs in the sewers to the local authorities and go alternate between the arctic circle with it's six month night and Puerto Williams the other six months for....oh maybe ten or fifteen years? Let the whole thing blow over while your bank account earns compound interest.

These quick-to-violence characters are unbelievable.

No I mean they are literally impossible to believe. They're ridiculous and goofy. And writers writing them this way should try a lot harder to find a reason that they would risk immortality–because a pissing match doesn't make a lot of sense.

If you have a character that sees the world as vastly different than you do (like for example that they are going to live forever if they don't die from violence, or even other things like having no sense of propriety or no concept of property or an overwhelming sense of empathy), you have to work extra hard to motivate them in ways that make sense to their altered perceptions of reality. They can't just be written as humans with a quirk. Not if you want them to be believable.

Don't Forget to Vote (Best Single Story Arc Series)

Image Description: A map of Middle Earth

What is the best single story arc in a multi book series? 

We're already almost half way through March already (oh my god!) and it's just about time to start the nomination process for our April poll, but first I want to remind everyone to vote in March's poll.

The poll description can be found here.

The poll itself is down on the left hand side at the bottom.

Please don't forget that our poll program will only track your IP address for one week, so since I can't stop shenanigans, I'm asking for as much of it as possible. Vote early. Vote often.

A Friday Thing

They are, however, fetch when they do happen.

So for about the fifth or sixth Friday in a row I've reached Friday just a little too exhausted and a little worn out. Thursday (guest post day) is supposed to be where I catch up to write something profound, but it ends up being more like the last gasp where I get behind enough to need the weekend to catch up.  And there's always something going on on Friday. It's chemo day every three weeks, and on off weeks, it's often the schedule of other doctor visits, strange tag ins with The Contrarian, and weekend prep.

I'm still trying to get some low key stuff up on weekends and one solid post a week, but maybe it's time to admit that cancer is making a seven day schedule pretty impossible. 

So if you see me slacking on Fridays until mid-June(ish), that's probably what's going on.

Bethany Brengan

[Everything in italics will disappear the next time there's a post from Bethany.]

Since Bethany has written a couple of posts for us here at Writing About Writing (and has promised that she's got at least a few more on the way), it's about time we got her her own menu for The Reliquary.  

Bethany F. Brengan is a freelance writer and editor. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula and enjoys medium-long walks, tea, and overanalyzing comic books. Before going freelance, Bethany worked for the lovely people at Bluegrass Publishing in Mayfield, Kentucky. Her writing has appeared in The 2015 Poet’s Market, Poetry Quarterly, The Crucible, The Upper Room, Cicada, Scrapbook Business Magazine, etc. She is a contributing writer to Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing and Batman (McFarland Books). 

Information about her editing business—Bethany Brengan, Editing Services—can be found at www.brenganedits.com. 

Her personal blog is www.readingwritingraptures.blogspot.com.

Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder: Scholars and Creators on 75 Years of Robin, Nightwing and Batman can be purchased through both McFarland and Amazon.

Should I hire an Editor?

Your Novel is Boring (Here's Why And How to Fix It)
The Top 5 Mistakes Made By Self Published Authors
In Praise of Libraries
Four Things Your Editor May Not Tell You (But You Should Know)
Where to Submit Your Short Pieces and (Hopefully, Eventually) Get Published  Part 2

But It's Just WORDS.

Today's post is a mostly-rant to the folks over on my Facebook page who decided to participate in an event called "The Triggering" and pretty much dared me to do anything about it.

My banhammer arm is getting quite the workout today over on Writing About Writing's Facebook page. Apparently I'm a target for having the temerity to tell the fine folks who follow me there to let me know if they see anything particularly awful going on. Because today is a day of particularly awful behavior from a certain slimy corner of the troll incubation chambers. (Full grown trolls are much more sophisticated.) These particular troll babies call themselves, apparently with either prescient self awareness or an attempt at irony that they don't realize is a double scoop, the Shitlords.

The Shitlords have, of course, attempted to elevate their churlish campaign of bullying abuse into something noble and cast themselves as the victims of unfair persecution. Because running around spewing hate speech is something that everyone should have to tolerate from them all the time...in every space.  Also because that's what bullies have done since time immemorial to avoid facing the fact that they are getting off from hurting those over whom they have power.

"Here are people on a page about writing, trying to tell a writer (among a group of other writers) that words have no real power."

In this case though, they chose a particularly ill conceived rallying cry: that words can't cause any real harm.

Honestly this is the basis of their entire philosophy and their actions are some kind of reactionary swing against the liberal and "SJW" (which they still seem to think is an insult) spaces for violating their free speech and kicking them out. "How fragile you must be that my mere WORDS can cause you harm!" they say.

I mean sure they've got this whole other facet of their rallying cry about doing it for "freeze peach!" and fighting censorship and shit, but honestly it is so facile that it's not even worth mentioning. If you can't tell the difference between being banned from a Facebook page and government agents silencing you, you don't belong in the big kid pool in the first place.

But really is their other argument any less jejune? They seem to have latched on to the idea that if the sound waves themselves aren't ripping flesh from bone like some X-man's mutant power, that a word has absolutely no power to do anything but offend someone and that offense is just an emotion that people need to get over. Here are people on a page about writing, trying to tell a writer (among a group of other writers) that words have no real power.

Because here's the problem: most shitlords have demonstrated pretty spectacularly that they actually don't intellectually grasp the difference between "offense" and "harm." Dead baby jokes are offensive. Telling them at a wake for an infant causes harm. The idea that no "mere" words can cause anyone harm is spectacularly ignorant of how words work.

As I banned one after another for transmisogyny, racism, sexism, and generally mocking people's ability to handle their bullying (in that textbook way that bullies, when called on being bullies claim they were just playing around and the other person is just too sensitive), I noticed something. Of course I was only looking at user icons, so I don't know for sure what these people looked like, but I noticed that they were ALL young, white men. And I'm talking about banning about forty to fifty people at the time of this writing who were ALL young white men.  (Well except for the Bill Cosby icon whose user sent me a rape fantasy–but I have my reasons for thinking that one might have been a young white man too.) And given how many seemed to have nothing to say other than the fact that there are only two genders, I suspect that they are all CISHET white men as well.

Of course this doesn't surprise me.

I'm sure the Shitlord movement isn't exclusively white or exclusively male or exclusively any demographic but it trends like that (probably upwards of about 90+%) for the same reason Gamergate did or the wankers who were harassing people about Shirtstorm did. Because those who are marginalized tend to understand how words actually work and how slurs strip them of their humanity and make more egregious life-altering discrimination more socially acceptable. They know that there is a direct Rube Goldberg-like chain between dehumanizing slurs and sentiments and the discrimination or even violence that becomes daily events in the lives of those with less social power. Those who understand how this works often even have the empathy to extend this understanding to those slurs that don't target them directly. Not that there's never been a bigot among the marginalized, but at least they seem to have given up on the idea that a word can never really be harmful.

The reason young white men think that words can't harm people is because there are far fewer words that can harm them. No words we have harken them back to generations of racial violence or erase their identity or question their body autonomy. And in an act of narcissistic indifference to the words of others, they assume that their experience as young white men is universal, and anyone who tells them otherwise must be lying. They can't tell the difference between a word that offends them and a word that contributes to their institutional and systematic harm because they have only ever experienced the former, and the intellectual rigor with which to grasp the latter would take at least a few hours and an open mind. So they go right on demonstrating that they don't even actually comprehend what a trigger is or how a slur harms people and mocking anyone who does. If words had no power, the world would have no emotional abuse.

But they go right on suggesting that words have no power.

Ironically these will be the same young white men who go gooey in their hearts and hope to throw knives and karate chop evil oppressors when they see a comic book hero talk about the power of words to start revolutions and unlock perspectives, but let's not be too hard on them. Those fight scenes were awesome.

Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation,
words will always retain their power.
Words offer the means to meaning,
and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.
Uh.....
Except slurs.
Those words have no power, and people are wrong to ever ask you to stop using them.
And um.......er.....
Fuck it. Imma just throw a knife at your face.

Words shape people's world views. They form the basis of prejudice good and bad. They are so intractably connected to how we think that as humans we literally cannot grasp concepts if we don't first have the vocabulary to do so. They are the building blocks of the stories we use to explain literally everything we see and experience. They let us evolve beyond other primates. They shape our loves and hates and root into reactions so knee-jerk that those reactions occur in our brains before our conscious mind has fully registered what it's even perceiving. They form the internal story we keep to describe who is good and who is bad–who is persecuted, and who is oppressive. Words are so fundamental to human experience and perceptions that those few truly without them are the subjects of study.

If we thought for even a moment that slurs had no ability to do harm, we would look around a world and see no correlation between the number of slurs and the social hierarchy or between the prevalence of particular slurs and the violence enacted upon the targets of those slurs. The opposite is true.

The opposite is ALWAYS true. 

There's a goddamn fucking reason that FREE speech was such a revolutionary concept. And those rights are still enshrined even if every damned corner of the internet hasn't provided space and a podium for every last repugnant thought. If speech had no power, people wouldn't be crawling over themselves to defend their rights to use it. But they know it has power and have, with resplendent sophistry conflated their every loss of venue with censorship.  But if the words you are saying are so revolting that the best thing that can be said about them is that they are not technically illegal, and they are doing harm to the other guests, don't be surprised if many whose hospitality you are enjoying show you the door. 

Every genocide, every war, every apartheid, every codified discrimination, every civil rights movement, every marvel of human engineering, every thing we have done as unified front of people...in all the world....in all of history....began with words.

To say that words, any words, are "just words" is to display only the most breathtaking ignorance about human's relationship to language. 

Now if you'll excuse me. I gotta go ban some people.

2016's Best By Month

[Everything in italics will disappear when I come back here in April to add March's best.]

In all the hullabaloo, I forgot to put up January's best post. And now it's time to do February's. So lets do both and get the 2016 Best-By-Month post going for the new year.

Plus I'm way way way overdue (because I keep doing things like "sleeping" and "enjoying a moment to myself" on weekends) getting the new 2015 top ten post up and updating the 2015 by month posts. The top 10 posts have been added to the "Best Of" page, but the job of going through each month and finding the 4th place post to put into the THIRD place slot because one of the top three posts got promoted to the YEAR'S ten best is something of a time sink.

So today will be a bit of housekeeping.  


January
Why I Literally Can't Even Turns out my girlfriend has cancer.
Through: The Only Way Out  For some of us, troubled times are when we write harder.
It's Later Than You Think There's one thing you won't always have more of when it comes to finally getting to your writing. And that is tomorrows. 

February
Your Novel is Boring (Here’s Why and How to Fix It) By Bethany Brengan Our best this month from a guest blogger. Congrats Bethany!!
How Do I Write a First Sentence? (Mailbox) Starting can be tough.
One Last Generous Donation of 2015 In which I admit that those thank you notes are a bit too much with everything else going on.

Once More Unto The Brink (Personal Update)

This is my "Fuck curveballs!" face. 

So believe it or not, my life is experiencing another major curveball.

Can't you just feel my wellspring of happiness gushing up from the center of me over the fact that right when I almost had this cancer shit under control, and was getting my writing back to a steady pace–even around the non-trivial difficulties of chemo, I'm now looking down the barrel of something else. Can you feel it? Can you?

I can. It feels like I just barefoot stepped into cat mess and I'm about to turn the light on and figure out which end of the cat the mess came from. Except, you know, metaphorically.

I'm not going to go into a lot of details right now. Everything is too in flux and whatever I said could be wrong by 5pm. But it's big and it's bad and it will probably change my life.

The good news: when this is all said and done, I'll probably have more time for writing. In fact, that will almost certainly be the case even if one of those fluxed up versions of the whole thing goes down.

The bad news: it's going to happen pretty much right after the last cancer treatment. Like that is currently its precise scheduled date of arrival. So...fuck that.

However, as with every one of those fucking curveballs that doesn't incapacitate me with illness or injury, I'm going to keep on writing. I might lose a day or three along the way, but I do (at least) take my own advice. So apologies for the slow down this weekend. Hopefully our shit will have been gotten into the "together" position now that the initial bump is past.

And sometime in early summer I apologize for what will likely be a bit of a mess (but at least then you'll know what is going on). And between now and then I imagine there might be a few lost posts along the way...due to this or cancer or a two year old with child care that sometimes falls through.

But by god writers keep writing.

And so I shall.