Which was about where I boiled over and climbed up on the twitter soapbox yesterday, and said the following:

When discussing privilege, insisting that the people you’re conversing with stop and acknowledge you as an exception is derailing.

It takes the focus off of the original topic and puts it squarely on you. That’s not being an ally; that’s demanding a cookie.

Cookies: If you have to demand them, you probably don’t deserve one.

This isn’t to say you DON’T experience any -isms in your life. There’s such a thing as relative privilege.

But when the subject is about one kind of privilege & you won’t let it continue until you’re exonerated for having it, you’re not helping.

I wanted to touch a little more on that here, because it’s something I see happening a lot.

Privilege exists. It just flat-out does. When you have it, it’s not because you asked for it. No one is a bad person for having it. I can’t even point to an instance where someone is saying “You have this privilege, therefore you are a horrible, terrible person.”

Unfortunately, that’s what many people seem to hear when they’er called out on their privilege.

That’s about when the needle skips, there’s that awful record-scratch, and the song gets stuck on one line, over and over: But I’m not like that. I don’t do those things. I’ve had it hard, too.

The conversation isn’t allowed to continue until that’s acknowledged: Of course you don’t. You’re one of the good guys.

Thing is, when you have to stop and restart the conversation multiple times to reassure multiple people, it’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. A lot of times, the topic never gets back on track. At the end, the focus gets switched from addressing the concerns of those who don’t have a certain privilege to shoring up the egos of those who do.

See how that’s counterproductive? And derailing? And even, truthfully, silencing?

No one asks for the privileges they have. That doesn’t make those privileges go away. You have them. There’s no giving them back, no way to say “oh, hey, I don’t need this, let’s get rid of it.” The tough thing about privilege is, sometimes other people will confer it upon you whether you know it or not. That’s not your fault; it’s simply an inherent part of privilege.

Saying, “But I don’t want the privilege I have! I’d gladly give it up!” doesn’t make it go away. Really, it’s nice that you feel that way, but it doesn’t fix anything. And, besides, the point of all this isn’t to take advantages away from a group of people, but to make sure instead that everyone can have those same advantages.

Saying, “But I’m disadvantaged in this other way!” doesn’t negate the original privilege. This is not to say those disadvantages don’t count. However, they might not be relevant in a particular context. Hint: if you’re using one disadvantage to minimize the existence of/receive a pass for having another, it’s derailing. Ask yourself, “Am I empathizing or justifying? Does my disadvantage help me to understand how another person is hurting because of theirs, or am I mainly calling attention to mine to shout someone else down?”

For example: I’m straight. If I go into a thread where people are talking about GLBTQ issues, I might, because of things I’ve gone through as a woman, be able to relate to some of the concepts expressed there. Not that my experiences are cognates, but I could be sitting at my keyboard and thinking, “It hurt when someone treated me poorly because of my gender. I can understand why that poster was hurt when someone treated him poorly because of his sexual orientation.”

(It’s probably not the place for me to share my particular anecdote, by the way, unless I’ve been invited to do so, or can talk about it in a way that’s truly relevant to the current topic.)

HOWEVER. If someone on the thread says “Straight people don’t have to deal with <this situation>,” I should not be jumping in and hollering “But I’m female, so I have to deal with <this other situation>, so you can’t say you have it worse than me!”

In that instance, I’m derailing. I’m calling attention to myself when really, if I want to be an ally, I should be listening.

Often, hand-in-hand with the above comes a healthy dose of So the good things I’ve done, my accomplishments, count for less because I’m a straight white male?

Again with the record scratch.

Listen. It’s not a tally. It’s not a race or a game or a contest where whoever can name the most disadvantages wins (and if you think having to fight against injustice on a daily basis is “winning,” maybe you need to sit down and seriously rethink things.). It’s not about comparing your accomplishments to someone else’s and assigning merit based on what you or they had to overcome to get there. If you’ve done good things, THOSE THINGS ARE STILL GOOD. Those things still have value, and still matter.

Remember five or six paragraphs ago where I said I’m straight? Yeah, that means I could get married wherever the hell I pleased, and my marriage is recognized pretty much everywhere in the world.

I got married in Massachusetts in 2002. In 2004, same-sex marriage became legal here in the Commonwealth. Does that mean that the people who finally had the ability to do a thing I took for granted — a thing I was able to do because of my straight privilege — have more worthy marriages than mine? That their weddings count more than mine, or that mine was somehow diminished?

Fuck no. It means that other people finally got to enjoy the same rights as me. That the playing field leveled out a bit. If anything, it makes my marriage even more awesome because hooray for being able to love whoever you want!

“What are they taking away from me?” is the wrong question here. (Also, the “they” there is problematic. That’s called othering, and it’s a whole different post. But clicky if you don’t know what I’m talking about.) It’s not about one person taking something from another. Life isn’t, as others far smarter than me have pointed out, a zero-sum game. I can win and you can win and he can win and she can win and it’s all okay. That, in fact, is what we ought to be working towards.

What I’m saying is, if you think that lifting others up somehow pulls you down, you’re doing it wrong.

Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds is now on that list.

Before you read any further, look at artist Joey HiFi’s amazing cover:

Take a good, long gander. If you want to see an embiggened version, go peek at it on the Angry Robot site. I’ll wait.

Lovely, isn’t it? Lovely and gritty and a little bit scary, which is about how I’d describe Ms. Miriam Black herself. Miriam can, at a touch, tell you how you’ll die. Fate’s not keen on her changing the plan, and in fact, Miriam’s past attempts at thwarting have only resulted in her helping out.

While she’s not keen on exploiting her ability, other people have no such compunctions. She’s dragged kicking and screaming into a hot, bad-news troublemaker’s terrible plan. A pair of shady, totally-not-FBI-agents and their creepy motherfucker of a boss are after her, thanks to said troublemaker.

And as if that’s not enough, a nice man named Louis is going to bite it within the next month. Oh, and he’s calling Miriam’s name on his way out.

Blackbirds is tightly plotted and breathlessly paced. I’ve railed here or elsewhere on the internet about writers using the present tense, but Wendig is one of a handful of authors who pulls it off flawlessly (I knew this going in; I dug the hell out of his Atlanta Burns novella Shotgun Gravy, too.) Miriam’s up against the clock, and we feel the weeks, the days, then the hours and the minutes ticking away as she tries to do the impossible: save a man whose death the universe has already decreed.

Wendig’s style is spare and conversational, almost begging to be read aloud. I am seriously contemplating picking up the audio version of it, in fact. He pulls no punches, kicking the asses of pretty much everyone we encounter along Miriam’s path (I think  maybe a bartender escapes unscathed.) Yet, in the middle of this breakneck ride, Blackbirds makes you stop and think.

How do you cope with knowing what might be the most intimate detail of other peoples’ lives? When do you stop running and tell fate No, fuck you. Your terms suck? How far would you go to stick by that declaration?

Pick this one up, cats ‘n’ kittens.

*Among Others by Jo Walton was the most recent, I believe.

Since I can neither slip one into your pockets nor pluck one from mine to read to you, I figure this is a good spot to put ‘em. (Also, reaching into other peoples’ pockets is weird and sort of creepy. If you’re going to participate, I don’t recommend this course of action unless you know the people very well.)

First up, go clicky over to Tor.com to read Catherynne M. Valente’s gorgeous “What the Dragon Said: A Love Story”

Second, one of my old favorites. John Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”

I should expound a bit about both of them. I could; I will; I might. However, the first reading of a poem is, to me, a personal thing. I don’t like going into them with my thoughts colored by someone else’s analysis, looking for this reference, that turn of phrase, because I was told to watch for it. It doesn’t so much diminish the poem as it takes me out of it, interrupts the flow of words as I would have read them.

So. Go forth and read, and if you like, come back here and tell me what you think. I’ll save my yattering for the comments.

The stoic, impassive Katniss threads her way through the Capitol with the dubious help of a chaperone named Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), whose kooky, fin de siecle style includes white-powdered wigs, candy-colored costumes and rosebud lips, and a mentor named Haymitch Abernathy, played by Woody Harrelson in a soddenly bravura turn that somehow combines his two most recent roles, the corrupt cop in “Rampart” and a world-weary political consultant in “Game Change.”

Read that a couple of times. Doesn’t it sound like Haymitch is part of Effie Trinket’s style? Pull it out a bit: Effie’s style includes wigs, costumes and lips, and a mentor. (Also awkward: the lack of an Oxford comma makes “costumes and lips” a creepy kind of pairing in Effie’s arsenal.)

The simplest way to fix the sentence is to change that last comma in the Effie series to a semi-colon. If you have lists within lists, the semi-colon signals to your reader Hey! We’re back to the first tier of items! I don’t have a fancy way of diagramming the sentence here, but let’s abuse some bullet points to illustrate, shall we?

Katniss has the help of:

• Effie Trinket, whose style includes
• wigs
• costumes
• lips
• Haymitch Abernathy

Little bit clearer?

It could also be accomplished with dashes:

The stoic, impassive Katniss threads her way through the Capitol with the dubious help of a chaperone named Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) — whose kooky, fin de siecle style includes white-powdered wigs, candy-colored costumes and rosebud lips — and a mentor named Haymitch Abernathy, played by Woody Harrelson[...]

Normally, you could also use a parenthetical phrase the same way you’d use the dashes, but there’s a slight problem here. Take a look:

The stoic, impassive Katniss threads her way through the Capitol with the dubious help of a chaperone named Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), (whose kooky, fin de siecle style includes white-powdered wigs, candy-colored costumes and rosebud lips), and a mentor named Haymitch Abernathy, played by Woody Harrelson [...]

The parentheses are a bit harder to work in since the actress’ name is also encapsulated in a pair of them. If you were to stick “Elizabeth Banks” in with the description of the style, the meaning will change all over again and read as though Elizabeth Banks’ style comprises wigs, costumes, and rosebud lips. Even separating them out like I’ve done above (which looks awful to me), I can see why they wouldn’t want to use that particular trick of punctuation.

Anyway, costumes and lips and missing semi-colons aside, the original sentence is, in fact, grammatically correct.

But it could be better.

There’s your grammar lesson for the day, cats ‘n’ kittens.

A large chunk of it was taken up by one of those boring domestic purchases, and the putting-together thereof — my local gym has gained a lot of new members recently, and hoboy is it overcrowded, with no rumors of expansion in sight. That, and it’s apparently become the #1 flirting spot for the girls’ and boys’ high school basketball teams. Strike three is all on me: I’m really good at talking myself out of going when the weather’s bad.

Thus, when the tax return came in, we went and got ourselves a treadmill. Nothing fancy, and it’s possible that when it really warms up here (and isn’t nigh-on sunset when I get home from work) it’ll sit semi-idle over the summer, but I’ve been eyeing one for years. The timing worked out.

Anyway. Brought it home, put it together. Greg and I make a pretty good team.

I’ve had the sourdough going in-between times. It’s on its second rise. We’ll see if I can ever get it to sandwich-bread height.

Dinner’s cooking, too: steak and some oven-baked fries to go with, taking advantage of the gorgeous weather to start the 2012 grillin’ season. I’ll pour a glass of wine when we eat, and we’ll spend an hour or so with some form of Story — probably Once Upon a Time which has its (rather deep) flaws but I’m still digging anyway.

I feel a bit guilty, even though there’s nothing at all wrong with how the day’s gone. I should be writing. I should be building the world for the next book, or gnawing on the story I want to submit for Viable Paradise. I should read one of the books on my to-be-read shelf, or catch up on book reviews for this here blog. I should open that drafts folder and finish one of those gorram half-written essays.

I should take advantage of this free-from-obligation Sunday and do something grand and productive with it.

And maybe I still will. Maybe once the sun has dipped below the horizon and we finally admit it’s still March, so it’s time to disappoint the cats and close the windows, I’ll open up a file and get typing.

For now, though, it’s a pretty afternoon. The breeze coming in smells like spring, and inside, the kitchen smells wonderful. I’m letting myself be a little contemplative, a little melancholy (because that’s what this kind of day does to me, too), and a lot content.

I’m two days early, I know, but I’m wishing it at you anyway:

Happy spring, all.

Internet Shenanigans:

If you’re a Song of Ice and Fire fan, you might want to check out #SXSWesteros, brought to us by Jay Bushman, who ran the super-fun #cthalloween and #talkingdead events on Twitter. Join in! Talk about the panels you’re attending, and what’s going on in the crowd.

Writerly Things:

Five hundred new fairy tales discovered in Germany. Hel-looooo storry fodder.

The World’s First Steampunk Bedtime Story (I’m not sure this is entirely true. Can anyone think of stories they’d consider steampunk for young’uns?

Seth Godin isn’t convinced writers deserve to get paid. I don’t even

Chuck Wendig on 25 Things You Should Know About Word Choice. The right words matter. SO MUCH.

Interesting article on the way genre themes are appearing in literary fiction. Beware, though, the author (Joe Fassler) keeps referring to “serious writers,” as though people who’ve made their living writing genre fiction aren’t. Not sure if this is intended, but boy does it put my hackles up.

More on Paypal asking Smashwords to enforce censorship. Also check out the ABFFE’s letter to Paypal asking them to reconsider this policy.

Kickstarters and other cool fundraisers:

Have some extra scratch? Here are some keen kickstarter campaigns to consider:

Matt Forbeck’s second 12 for ’12 project, Shotguns & Sorcery has a little over two days left to go.

You also have 9 more days to make Chuck Wendig write Bait Dog and more Atlanta Burns stories beyond that.

Help a new independent bookstore get even more awesome. Ad Astra Books and Coffee in Kansas can use your help.

Ron Hogan of Beatrice.com is kickstarting an app full of author interviews. If both his project and Ad Astra get fully funded, there will be even more amazing stuff to come.

Children’s Illustrator R. Gregory Christie is raising money to give his children’s bookstore a makeover.

Check out this video, and let’s help the M.N. Spear Memorial Library build a new space!

Science!

Dust devils on Mars. So, so cool.

What’s got you clicking today, internets?

(image courtesy of ADoseofShipBoy on flickr)

Last night — or, truthfully, this morning at 2:06 — I completed the first draft of Gid.

I’ll do the happydance later when I’m not a total zombie, but for now, I’m dancing in spirit.

When I look back and do the math, I wrote just about 10,000 words from Friday evening through Sunday. That’s nearly a quarter of the book. (This is a middle grade manuscript, for those of you playing along at home.) Now, an average of 3300 words a day probably isn’t all that impressive to full-time writers, but for me, it’s a pretty high output. Especially when you consider that about 6200 of those words were written on Sunday alone.

I’ve had the finish line in sight for weeks now. The last six chapters (or what I’d thought would be the last six) were plotted out at the end of January. Oddly, after that feverish morning of and then! and then! and then! I stalled. Some of it was cat vacuuming, pure and simple: “I know how this ends, so I’ll get around to it later.” More of it was needing to mull over a few sticky bits to make sure I got them right.

Still,  I progressed bit by bit, and late last week realized I was really, really, super-close to the end. Two chapters and an epilogue! Which is not as cool as six seasons and a movie, but still.

At that point, figuring my chapters run about 1200-1500 words apiece for this book, I couldn’t see a reason not to spend the weekend finishing it.

Of course, every time I put fingers to keyboard, the scenes I thought would go quickly ended up taking longer than I’d planned. Were my writing life a Smurfs cartoon, I’d have been hearing “Is it much further, Papa Smurf?” at the end of each section.

And yes, it was much further.

By the end of the day, even the cats had taken pity and left me alone. Thanks to the magic of Dropbox, I was able to write in Word on the laptop (where I’d parked myself so I could write without the siren song of gtalk and my normal goofing-off bookmarks calling to me) and wheel over to the desktop to import the text into Scrivener.

It seems clunky and complicated, I know, but it worked. The change of scenery was a big help.

The scariest moment came at 2:00 this morning. I wrote the epilogue, saved it to Dropbox, and shut down the laptop.

…only to find the document still open on the desktop from three hours earlier. Sans epilogue. It was asking me whether I wanted to save/don’t save, and of course double-clicking on the file in the Dropbox folder only kicked me over to the one on the desktop. I went with “Don’t Save,” closed it, then reopened the file and crossed my fingers (it still showed the last save as 11:24, which was panic-inducing.)

Somehow, though, internet grace looked my way, and those last thousand words were still there.

Anyway, there it is. A finished, compiled draft, that I will print up and start tearing to pieces in a few days.

For now, though, I’m letting it sit. A few days away from it might unstick some of the more stubborn bits from my mind, kind of the way adding hot liquid to a pan frees up those tasty bits of whatever’s been cooking and makes the sauce even better.

I dig my little clockwork boy and all his friends. When I go back to edit it, I’ll be gnashing my teeth and declaring myself such a goddamned hack, but right now, I’m awfully proud of it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find an IV drip for the caffeine.

Huh. Still two chapters and an epilogue to go.

I know better than to rush a story. It’s foolish* to put a hard cap on a first draft, be that an ultimate word count or chapter count. By this time, I’ve learned to recognize when I’m actually adding to a plot vs. when I’m meandering around in search of one. (At least, I think I have.) So, if there’s extra story to tell, a bit of unexpected description or dialogue that feels necessary, I give myself the extra room and let it play out.

After all, if I need to hack for word count, that’s what the second draft is for. Also, if it turns out that what I thought was essential is meandering after all, my beta readers will let me know.

Thus: there is still a bit left to be told in this book. I have an idea of how many words I need to get there, but this time, I ain’t tellin’.

Though I do believe the end is in sight, and tonight I’ll go to sleep dreaming of revisions rather than new material.

Starting word count: 35912
Listening to: “KK and the Steampunk Orchestra” station on Pandora. It plays a lot of dubstep, which I’m now discovering and digging. I know, I’m years behind everyone else.
Tasty beverage: Dunkin’ Donuts, still hot.
Chocolate and other sustenance: Mini-Eggs within reach
Feline desk evictions: Sssssh, Pixel’s napping. DO NOT WAKE HIM.

*for me, YMMV

–

Breaktime update!

Current word count: 37,229
Words taught to Scrivener: “OOOOGAH!” as in, “AH-OOOOGAH!”, bendiness
Tasty beverages: Now-cold coffee, can of diet coke. Come 5:00, I crack the bottle of wine.
Chocolate and other sustenance: Too many Mini-Eggs
Feline desk evictions: Pixel 1, Matthew 5. If I vacate my chair for even half a second, he’s in it when I get back.

We’re not going to talk about how many chapters I am from the end.

–

Gettin’ kinda hungry update:

Current wordcount: 38,711
Feline desk evictions: Pixel 2, Matthew 6
Terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad things done to a character: 1
Unexpected moment of badass from a character: 1

HEY GUYS. If I can get this right, we might be down to ONE chapter and an epilogue!
(Oh god, why did I type that?)

–

Way too damned late update:

Final word count: 42,112
Reason for stopping: FINISHED THE BOOK WOO
Fingers: Can’t feel ‘em.
Tasty beverages: Two glasses of wine and the dregs of this morning’s coffee.
Chocolate and other sustenance: The end of the batch of mango sorbet, at about midnight, while I watched Worst Cooks in America before plunging on to the epilogue.

Sooo yeah. I don’t know if the one chapter and an epilogue bit above was technically a jinx or not. Ended up being 2400 words that I broke up into two smaller chapters.

Tomorrow, if I can do more than drool on my keyboard, I’ll ruminate more on the mad weekend of writifying: what spurred it on, fiddling with fiddly bits that are still fiddly, etc. (That is not dirty.)

Also tomorrow, I will play Skyrim until my eyes bleed. Because I’ve earned it.

Onward!

Aaaaand update:

Ending word count: 35,912
Reason for stopping: End of chapter, plus time for Saturday shenanigans.
Feline desk eviction count: 4

I had thought to continue the writifying when I got home, but there are a few details still sticking, and I know I’ll end up staring angrily at the screen if I try plowing through. Giving myself the next few hours for inspiration to strike, and to see if I can’t prod them into shape during the first draft rather than leaving them marked as “Ohgod FIX THIS” for the second.

My self-imposed “by March 1st” deadline went whoosh, but a lot of that can be blamed on me untangling some knots with the ending.

For anyone who saw me sneakily revise my target down to 35,000 words, you’ll notice over on the sidebar I’ve bumped it back up to 40,000. My original instinct was probably right. There’s always that scene or chapter that sneaks its way in and needs to be told, feels like.

Apologies to Elizabeth Bear, whose novel-finishing countdowns I always watch with fascination.

Thus, here we go:

Starting word count: 32,926
Listening to: Pandora station based off of “KK and the Steampunk Orchestra” (The only thing returned when you type in “steampunk.” Pretty neat stuff so far!)
Drinking: Bailey’s on the rocks. Out of a Sam Adams tasting glass. CLASSY!
Chocolate and other sustenance: Godiva 72% cacao dark chocolate
Words taught to Scrivener: travellers, grey. Leave my British spellings alone, damn it.
Feline desk evictions: 3, all Pixel. He’ll be back.

And away we go!

Update, woo.

Ending word count: 34542, approx 1616 written
Reason for stopping: End of chapter, brain is mush
Feline desk evictions: 5, with cat currently on desk gunning for a sixth.

I feel like I’m always going to be two chapters from the end of this book, but I don’t want to rush anything, either. However, looking at the notes of Stuff That Needs to Happen, I’m pretty sure that this time (I mean it, I do) there are two more chapters and an epilogue to go. Very doable over the next couple of days.