shirl_sazynski recently posted the following piece on foc_u. So blown away by its brilliance, I had to share it here.

And this was supposed to be a "rough draft."



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A rough essay below the cut exploring the power of story to change us-- or reinforce bad ideas and omissions.

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I draw strength from stories. Growing up, stories told me that there was another world, a more authentic life than the plastic religious-tract coated fantasyworld I could never live in handed down three times a week from the pulpit as The Truth. (That need to learn, see and speak the truth is how and why I became a writer.)

Stories gave me hope-- and stories told me that not only was the outside world a terrible place filled with people entirely unlike me--- it was also incredibly good. Stories told me there were others like me, out there in the incomprehensible vastness of a real world where life was worth living for in this moment, today, that this flawed world I was taught to fear was the most terrible thing for a theocrat-- and the most wonderful thing for me-- the real world meant freedom. Like all good things, all things worthwhile, freedom is very costly. Because it is so precious, like love, it is simultaneously one of the most sought after, treasured, misunderstood and feared things in the world.

Good stories carry a heavy responsibility for the writer. Good stories are not true; good stories make the truth, by giving others a voice and listening ear to tell them the things they know but cannot express or have not realized yet they know are true. Choose the wrong stories and they can do terrible, terrible things: reinforcing fear, anger, arrogance, greed, hatred, resentment and falsehoods. Bad stories are the tool of every fundamentalist and idealogue, who uses fiction as both blanket and blindfold from the truth.

Bad stories can tell us we're weak and need to be rescued-- or we're strong and therefore always right. Bad stories say we need the needy and the helpless to feel strong. Bad stories tell us that the world has disastrously fallen from some Great Ideal we never knew-- or that it can never change: that there is no real evolution of societies, planets and ideals toward a better state of mutual survival, and therefore we can insulate ourselves against the constant changes in us. Bad stories don't teach: they numb the reader to the idea that there's anything more to learn. Bad stories absolve us of responsibility. Bad stories pin our salvation on someone outside ourselves. Bad stories tell us the downtrodden got there of their own volition-- or, somehow worse, that they are damned by previous, outside factors to only be who and what they are at this precise moment, forevermore, with no hope of taking their own hand to change that fate.

It's no coincidence that "bad" stories are often poorly written. Badly writing is lazy, rehashing others' words and ideas; the author is either too timid or inexperienced to provide a rich and authentic tapestry of thoughts, or, at the very worst, she doesn't care. The author is lying and she knows it, because the lies provide an expedient evasion from the truth. Stock characters and socially-safe ideas emerge; nothing is questioned or closely examined, so these stories become formulaic and predictable. In creep the stereotypes and tropes: whether it's the selfless black "tank" of Hollywood who dies to save white heroes, bespectacled and socially inept scientist*, or that every "good" key female character in an action film must be the (of course heterosexual) hero's "girl". (*Really? My dad, an industrial chemist was a total wit who loved reading celebrity/political dirt in Vanity Faire and only wore glasses when he got old. Richard Feynman played bongo drums and sketched at nudie bars).

In its starkly visible omissions of complexity, bad writing rings as made-up, too-good-to-be-true-- like sales patter and political smokescreens, these stories fall short of or defy our true experiences.

But even "bad" stories, seen with open eyes, can do something good. Bad stories can warn you of a disconnect: that this sugar-fairy world or bug-eyed horror presented in them is not the world you see. Bad stories can make you ask why the people like or unlike yourself are missing from them (like why a dreamed-up and very popular contemporary fantasy of SoCal could be populated almost entirely by white people, when almost the entire state looks nothing like that! Note: that isn't a judgement against the other strengths of Joss Whedon's work; it's the "elephant in the room" of much of his past writing). Bad stories, looked at properly, can disgust you or make you ask questions or make you admit that you're not all you're cracked up to be if this kind of stuff guiltily appeals to you.

But to see bad stories for what they are, you have to listen to the real world, and also realize, however unpalatable, that those stories represent another truth that must be faced: the truth of a writer and audience's desires. And that requires experience-- going outside your comfort zone and little secure shell to see and talk with and know people, places and things quite outside yourself.

The job of every good writer is to bring these experiences home: for others who can't have them, and for others who have had them, but nobody in their world listens or talks about it. Stories can be the only refuge and comfort for the suffering, a bridge to get them to the point where they can change their world into something better. Stories can give them the strength to stand up for themselves and take risks to get to that point.

The ultimate power of stories is to open doors-- or to close them.

Fantasy has a special and often misunderstood place in this. In its purely escapist form, fantasy provides a balm for those who can't bear reality. The real world carries grief and stress and disappointments that are hard to live with and we all need this escape hatch from time to time. I haven't met anybody yet who doesn't at some point want to be somebody else, even if just for a little bit. Some writers and readers, sadly, never get past this point into making those meaningful changes to feel empowered in their own lives, and continue to live richly through make-believe instead.

But good fantasy does a lot more than that. Good fantasy gives us courage to face what we don't want to look at, by pulling it outside an all-too-painful reality and giving it a different spin. (There's a reason deeper than party politics those "Voldemort votes Republican" bumper stickers cropped up among Harry Potter fans in the USA. People recognized a nasty truth of what we Americans had become collectively as a nation-- and made a joke about it at the expense of the political machine. The snicker took a sting out of what those bumper-sticker bearers had to live with: a seemingly insurmountable foe, rooted in the culture of fear and dominance we allowed to grow. Lest you think I am soft on other political brands, see: Bad stories say we need the needy and the helpless to feel strong. Or, somehow worse, that they are damned by previous, outside factors to only be who and what they are at this precise moment, forevermore, with no hope of taking their own hand to change that fate.)

Good fantasy allows us to paint our fears into something tangible we can grasp and confront-- no matter how difficult. Good fantasy lets us see and admit and fight the dark and weak parts of ourselves... and lets us prevail. Good fantasy gives us a safe place in which to practice conflict where protagonists always prevail-- against incredible odds, stirring our emotions to resist what were once insurmountable horrors in our real world. We see ourselves in those prevailing heroes-- and if it's really good, we see our own failings amplified in the villains as well. Good fantasy tells us that all these things are a part of us-- and that the heroes can screw up, by the way, too.

Everyone, however "little" or "big" in this world has a story to contribute, and things they aren't willing to talk about as part of it. All the things I've said before are true for writers as well as readers. However, creating a story adds more personally to the process than just consuming one. Everyone makes up stories, even if they're never retold or written down. Daydreams and sex fantasies are personal stories. Fiction writers just daydream in more minute and lasting detail than other people.

Writing, and not just consuming stories, allows us to dream up better things for ourselves and other people-- to, explore what we really want, to discover that we're better people than we thought, but also to safely admit in an outside place, through characters, that we're maybe not such fabulous people, either. Writing allows you to practice not just victory, but failure. By telling stories about made-up people we writers get to share ideas and emotions. We learn to maybe go a little easier on ourselves and other people (through the flaws in our protagonists), but also, when we don't write cardboard antagonists, to explore the humanity of the unsavory and frightening parts of ourselves. Good "villains" reveal that we don't always live up to our own expectations, that we are also capable of blindness, greed, pettiness, selfishness and cruelty. When a character changes for better or for worse, it teaches us that flaws and virtues are not simple, static states. Antagonists also give us a very safe place from which to question "the rules"-- all that stuff we were taught to accept as good and proper by other people in life. There's a reason Satan/Lucifer makes such a compelling character in Western fiction. Unconstrained by "the rules", Satan lets us freely and fantastically explore what happens, good or bad, when we break them. (See "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov for an excellent example of this. Written and set in Stalinist Russia-- when it was subversive to write compelling fiction about a philosopher from Galilee named Jesus, let alone the Devil-- it also happens to be one of the finest works of political satire and fantasy ever written.)

Good antagonists let us see the extreme of what we want, admit we want it-- and ask what that means, both for us and other people. Good villains teach us that our choices carry responsibility-- and, therefore, consequences. Between protagonist and antagonist, we get to work out that conflict in ourselves and admit that maybe the winning side isn't always right. We also get to explore that maybe the world isn't such a simple place to "win" or "lose" conflicts, but that life is a process of coming to understand the consequences of our daily choices, how they affect others, and what they make us. And that's really the way we resolve contradictions, conflicts and struggles.

Simon Reynolds is one of my favourite writers. It’s funny, really: I agree with what he writes maybe half the time, at best, but he says it so fucking well, and in such a way that I always have to think about the subject again.

He’s now doing notes on the decade at the Guardian, beginning with a piece on "beard rock." I was, I admit, hoping for a clue as to why I find Will Oldham so inexplicably creepy, but, you know, it’s a fun piece anyway:

…beardedness is tantamount to a visual rhetoric, almost a form of authentication, as though the band are wearing their music on their faces…

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

So, one week later. Copies of SHIVERING SANDS are now starting to arrive with people — I found this on Kat Foisy’s blog this morning:

(If you want to send me a photo of you posing with SHIVERING SANDS? Email it to my dump address at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com, along with your website address or twitter ID or whatever, and I’ll run it and your link here)

A week since launch of the book. We’ve sold, I believe, a little over four hundred copies. Given that the production of the book involved 1) me culling from seven years of jabbering and sticking it all into a couple of RTF files 2) Ariana flowing all that into a single file and spending a couple months’ worth of spare moments fiddling with it 3) Ariana uploading the thing, ordering a proof and spending an hour checking it over… we were well into any definition of profit by the end of day one.

It is, of course, the long game that pays off. It’s interesting to look at the first week, but it’s not defining.

A persistent criticism of my interest in POD has been that only writers at my level of cultural awareness can make any kind of success out of it. And some of them will now be saying, well, even Warren Ellis can only move 400 copies in the first week of a POD project. But, for one thing, it is about the long game. For everybody. The book doesn’t go away. And, for another, if I’m not aware enough of you to order that POD project — whose fault is that, really? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t born with a book deal in one hand and an exclusive comics contract wrapped around my other flipper. Hell, when I was starting out, there wasn’t even an internet.

SHIVERING SANDS is published through Lulu.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

OH MY GOD I JUST CONVINCED J TO CALL DIMA AND ASK IF SHE CAN ALSO DO RESERVE DUTY ALONG WITH ME. I know it's a pipe dream, for many reasons, but it's possible that if J and I get to do it together I might actually explode from sheer awesomeness.

Me: Ugh I have to remind myself that I CAN NOT MISS A WEEK OF SCHOOL to do this.
J: PFFT are you kidding?! YOU CAN TOTALLY MISS A WEEK OF SCHOOL FOR THIS!
Me: WELL NOW YOU FUCKING TELL ME UGH

Ugh I wish more than 20 seconds next to the computer screen at a time. :/

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Hello all! I have this hazy memory, based on a conversation with a Scottish mentor of mine, that the celebration of Christmas fell out in Scotland with the ascension of Knox and his ilk. The context of the conversation was his explaining to me the emphasis on Hogmanay/New Years, and how December 25th was a work day just like any other in the 1950s and 60s when he was a kid.

So, anyone have a rough date (or exact?) for when Christmas ceased to be a holiday in Scotland? (I imagine that before the schisms of the 16th century, the Church mandated some sort of service for the ChristMass at least).

Hello, I noticed this community on one of my friend's journals and decided that it must be a wonderful place. I've been watching for a few days and snagging recipes, and seeing as I made my chili up tonight for the next few days' dinner I figure I'd share it with you.

2 lbs of lean ground beef browned and drained
1 large onion or two small coursely chopped or quartered and split
2 bell peppers (I used red and green, but yellow or orange are nice too) coarsely chopped.
1 jalapeno sliced, seeds in (because we like it hot)
If you like it really hot, add one hot banana (cubanelle) pepper too.
1 can of diced tomatoes
2 cans of tomato sauce
1 can of red kidney beans
1 bottle of Heinz Chili sauce
1/2 pound of white mushrooms sliced
1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
Dried chili peppers to taste
2 tbsp of chili powder
1 tsp of onion powder
1 tsp of celery salt
Pepper to taste

Sometimes I throw in a can of kernel corn as well if there is one in the cupboard.

On medium or low all day (depending on what your "day" length is) and it's perfect, serve with texas toast, garlic bread, or dinner rolls. It's also nice over rice or nachos. This recipe has evolved in my house over the years because i was tired of chili that tasted like spaghetti sauce with kidney beans and chili powder. The flavour is hot and tangy, and it has a chunky consistency. In the crock pot the flavours soak through everything, and it's yummy. Enjoy!

This is what I do with a free day: Dig up fonts to assign characters' handwriting to.


( We don't have to do the tourist thing, really. )

Puzzle: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Like suzycat, I particularly like the puzzles based on works of art: doing them is more time just looking at these most look-worthy works.

San Diego has a walkway dedicated to "The Greatest Generation." More pics of that and the adjacent USS Midway here.

    
more?

Though I am nearly as old as our President, I have loved Sesame Street since I was a little kid (I don't think I know ANYONE who didn't watch Sesame Street growing up), and--of course--I think that Michelle Obama is the most impressive, awesome First Lady certainly in my lifetime.

So, if you put Michelle on Sesame Street talking about eating healthy & planting your own garden, you get very close to awesomeness overload...but it's well worth it!

As you'll see, Michelle not only loves vegetables, but they love her, too! :-)

The only thing I think that would have made this clip any better is if she & Big Bird did the fist bump! ;-)

The NYS Senate apparently has agreed to hold a vote on NY's Marriage Equality Bill sometime before the end of the year. Depending on who you talk to, the votes are either there or not there to pass it, no one is really 100% sure about it.

I am really not too sure this will come to a vote, despite said agreement (words in Albany mean nothing at all). What it basically comes down to is that these children are too scared to go on record supporting or not supporting gay marriage. On the republican side, those that would side with us have been scared off by the vote in Maine and by a pro-gay marriage republican who got more or less got booted out of the party in the 23rd district for not being conservative enough. On the democratic side (the controlling side at the moment) of the aisle, well, all they really want is LGBT money, not to actually get us rights or anything. They will probably hold up voting on this bill, then ask us for more campaign donations 'cause it will happen for sure next session, honestly, we promise.

Meanwhile, the one man in NY who I think truly gives a shit about us, that being Gov. Patterson, is not being vocally supported for reelection by LGBT groups because his poll numbers are so low that it'd be considered a waste of time to support him as he won't make it past the party primary next year (the reasons behind that are another story entirely).

I apologize for the rant. Long and short is that sometime in the next 1.5 months, NYS Senate will vote to allow gay marriage. It's looking like right now anyway that it will fail, but in this state, for the senate to merely function as a voting government body would be a step up.

Back still hurts. Still can't really sit in front of the computer.

Was summoned for reserve duty at the base. FREAKED OUT FOR 20 MINUTES. Reminded myself I am NOT ALLOWED TO MISS AN ENTIRE WEEK OF SCHOOL just to do this. Signed up for the entire 4 days of my weekend instead.

Am still freaking out like HELL. Also have no idea how I'm going to tell my mom about this. SHE is going to have one massive freak out in a very non positive way. Seriously no idea how I'm going to break the news.

Yeah but seriously OW MY BACK HURTS :(

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