A Tale of Two Stupid Commercials

I watch some of the fine programming content Comedy Central makes available through their web page, which unfortunately means I see the same small set of commercials over and over again, ad nauseum (see what I did there?).

There's the regular stuff, happy pastel singing laundry detergent, horrible snide neighbors lording their smart phones over people, a kid who loves bacon so much he marries it (which ends with "you may now eat the bride" and a sickening wet chomp that is the stuff of nightmares). But there was one in particular that bothered me.

The ad follows a handsome, scruffy young man on the prowl for fresh lady-meat, but every time he comes close to one of his victims, flakes of head skin swarm from his rakishly unkempt mop like a swarm of cylon fighters, and the girl's face slow-motion freezes in a look of unnameable, lovecraftian horror before she vaporizes in a puff of cgi dust, leaving her discarded clothes. The young man looks sad to have missed an opportunity for sex, but doesn't seem particularly weighed down by the guilt of constantly annihilating strangers with the mere presence of his weaponized dandruff. He then goes home and shampoos with the advertised brand, and, miraculously three different girls appear (I think they're implied to be the same girls, but I don't think they are) without those pesky clothes that were left behind. They proceed to paw insatiably at his head, with that vacant, slightly bite-y look models wear on the covers of both Cosmo and GQ. "Don't lose girls to dandruff" the sophisticatedly accented lady announcer reminds you, in case you missed the message.

I know, intellectually, that the intended message of this commercial is "buy our dandruff shampoo!" and not "women who do not want to sleep with you functionally may as well not exist." But I went out of my way to be somewhere else when the unskippable ad came on. This one commercial is probably responsible for more clean dishes in my apartment than any two other factors combined.

So then a new ad came into rotation. "Don't you wish you could just make some things disappear?" a young woman in club wear asks, as a rat-like man with an open-to-the-sternum disco shirt seems to sniff at her from behind. She flashes him a disgusted look and he pops in a familiar cgi dust effect that sets her hair swishing playfully at the camera. She then walks toward us with swinging hips as she enumerates the virtues of the particular tampon she's trying to sell us. Across the room, a nonthreatiningly normal looking boy is being chatted up by two women you don't really see well before our off-screen heroine presumably splatters them out of existence with the sheer, horrible force of the obliteration power this new tampon has granted her. She then skips up and begins a happy conversation we can only assume he's smiling and nodding along to out of fear for not only his life, but his very physical existence.

This ad is also stupid, but it doesn't bother me.

And I got to wondering if that makes me a hypocrite. I mean, I like to think I'd also be bothered if the god-murderess of the second commercial were going up to dudes and trying to engage them in tampon conversation, only to vaporize them horribly when they told her they just wanted to be friends. Tampon girl is malicious in a way dandruff boy isn't. Sure, her first murder could be argued to be defensive, or at least provoked, but all those girls were doing was standing next to a boy whose attention she wanted. They didn't deserve to die. Dandruff boy just wanders through a hellscape of unintended casualties (though he's either incredibly callous or really bad at pattern recognition to keep at it). Maybe I'd be upset if the dudes in the second commercial were as objectified as the ladies in the first. Dandruff boy's new shampoo lands him a silent, lustful harem and the implied promise of sex with at least two more women than we assume he has penises; while all tampon girl seems to want is a chance to talk to her boy of choice. These dudes don't have time for much development, but they do at least get "creepy potential date rapist" and "cute but normal boy", while the lady's characters are "sexy, horrified club girl", "sexy, horrified librarian", and "sexy, horrified gym girl", all of which dissolve away into "indistinct, hair-crazed sex-vixen". But those two other girls in the tampon commercial get about the same, and the second ad gives no indication that they will ever be rescued from the icy void of non-existence, not even for group sex with a previously unacceptable stranger.

I don't think I'm having this reaction because deep down I think it's more okay for girls to vaporize boys (and other girls) than for boys to vaporize girls.

But I do have to admit a large part of it probably has to do with the fact that the first ad is, to a certain extent, about me but not for me (girls will totally sex up a guy with a non-flakey head!), while the second ad is, to about the same extent, both about and for me (girls, tampons will make all your life's travails conveniently vanish!). I wonder if there are gentlemen out there, similarly given to pointless analysis, who rankle at the idea of a tampon-powered psychic serial killer cornering them after she brutally dispatches all the other perfectly nice girls. The boy in the commercial doesn't seem to mind, but then again, neither do the bitey towel girls in the shower-seraglio foursome.

I can't get over the feeling that the disparate responses I have to these two ads are meaningful. Telling. It's possible I think this because it's very late at night, I admit, but still.

It probably doesn't bear thinking about.

But I'm going to anyway. 

Outside Over There

I didn't realize how much of my childhood was written by Maurice Sendak until I was an adult. You never pay attention to that sort of thing when you're little. But when my sisters had kids, my mothers and I would tuck them into bed with In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are. I can close my eyes and see the illustrations of a little bear in a cardboard space suit coming home or the melting ice baby from Outside Over There.

There's an amazing feeling, when you open up a book that your parents read to you, as if suddenly the world warps and you're warm in somebody's lap, and the universe is composed of sugary cereals and climbable trees, and problems that the distant adult part of you knows weren't ever problems at all. You remember how much bigger the world looked, and that sense of wonder. And these little things, these incantations of memory- "Ida played her wonder horn", "Max, the king of where the wild things are"- are anchors that keep you from drifting too far away from that part of yourself.

We lost a man today to whom I owe some of the first dreams planted in the garden of my imagination. Thank you, Mr. Sendak. I'll read you to my children, and I hope they will read you to theirs. 

Happy Halloween!

Have a Happy Halloween!

On Imagery

I've actually been asked for an imagery post, so here it goes. My thoughts. As always your mileage may vary, but this is what I think and what tends to work for me.

The most important thing, I think, to remember about imagery is that no word you ever use is a discreet entity whole and perfect unto itself. Let's take the word "cat". Because we're fluent speakers, we understand this particular aggregation of sounds (or in the written form letters) to mean a small furry domesticated predator, with sharp claws and whiskers and a reputation for gracefulness and good landings, sleeping 14 hours of every day, playing sadistically with its food, self-cleaning, arching its back defensively, purring when contented, maintaining an independent ambivalence it its owners if it has any, among other things. We also understand the word to refer to the groups of characteristics the house cats above share with the rest of the felis genus. We also, more distantly, understand it as slang for carousing (catting around) or a sort of beatnik cool gentleman or related to slang for female genitalia (also related to this relation: the phrase "cat house"). We know it can be subdivided into toms and strays and tabbies and calicoes and Siamese and kittens among others. We know its synonyms and related words include feline, pussy, kitten, etc; and even if we don't specifically know it's a term that came to us through germanic roots, but we know it's not a fancy french/latin term like feline. We may think of witches and cat ladies. Visions of yarn and litter boxes and mice dance in our heads. If we've had our own cats, we may think of them, or we may be thinking of some platonic ideal of a cat, or we may be thinking of the horrible smell of cat spray, the feel of shed hair on carpets and furniture. The grand American cultural lexicon gives us Garfield and Lolcats and the eponymous musical.

All of this and more is attached to the word "cat" to varying degrees, and each word used above has its own web of associations that include but are not limited to "cat". When you say "like a cat" you have the freedom to mean any of these things, and the hazard of all the things you're not trying to say. I think being really good at imagery is being able to draw out the threads of connotation around an individual word or concept and tie the ones you want to your subject.

(If you're interested in it academically, there's a whole psycho-cultural-linguistic school of thought called structuralism which examines our cultural foundations and our ability to perceive the world through the lens of our language and where we draw both connections and distinctions between the words that form the building materials of our thoughts. There's also a post-structuralist/deconstructionist vein of thought that is principally about examining how the intrinsic biases of culturally shaped language constrain and warp our ability to perceive. For the later you'll probably want to start the term semiotics and branch out from there)

se·mi·ot·ics

   [see-mee-ot-iks, sem-ee-, see-mahy-] Show IPA

noun ( used with a singular verb )

1.

the study of signs and symbols as elements ofcommunicative behavior; the analysis of systems ofcommunication, as language, gestures, or clothing.

2.

a general theory of signs and symbolism, usually divided intothe branches of pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics.)

Anyway, that got a little more lecture-y than I meant it to, but basically the point I want to get across is that imagery is artfully bringing to bear some or all of the connotations of an unrelated concept in order to describe a thing or create a mood or motif that influences the tone of the larger piece.

I admit, personally, a lot of the time I use imagery just because it's fun and that's the style of writing I enjoy both producing and consuming (I go for baroque). There is definitely something to be said for crisp, uncluttered, Hemingway-esque prose. It's absolutely beautiful for understating action and making it stand out more because it's casually presented. It's clean, it reads fast, it conveys information, and done well it evokes just as much reader involvement because it doesn't overburden the reader with the author's opinions or observations. Imagery-heavy prose, by contrast, can at its best make sure the reader is bringing a life full of memory, culture, and sensation to bear on what might be an otherwise plain scene. It's good for developing the internality of a character- how they see the world and what associations they make. It can paint a neutral scene dark or bright, forlorn or tense, by the way you chose to describe things.

So. One of the points I would like to make is that imagery is certainly not just going "her X was like Y". Sometimes it's just a pretty image and you do it because it's a darling little phrase you want to birth into the world, but every time you tie one thing to another it stays with us. You can't describe the armchair in which your father sits in terms of an electric chair for one line and expect that not to leave smears of doom and criminality (or unjust punishment) all over the father character, and a lingering sense of fear attached to that chair for the rest of your story (assuming it reappears, you may just be trying to describe the father obliquely). If you read a lot of horror stories, you'll notice a pattern especially that things are not white like clouds and daisies, they're white like bones and maggots, because the horror writer is trying to subtly unsettle you the whole way through, to recreate that feeling of being alone in a too-big house, jumping at shadows and seeing murderous intruders when all that's there is your grandfather clock. Likewise, you're probably not going to see maggot white in a love story, because the author is trying to craft a gestalt of want, of desire, of appreciating beauty, sometimes of feeling safe, sometimes of feeling dangerously excited (to the latter end they might describe something like the rush of standing at the edge of a tall cliff and feeling the wind whip against them). Images are great for giving cues, for provoking emotional reaction, or even just for conveying something that language does not have a single adequate word for. (Seriously, just as an exercise, try to describe the feeling of being smiled at by someone you love in a way that lets you know they love you too, and tell me if "good", "relieved", or "happy" really sum it up.)

Any word choice has the potential to nurture a little imagery (I was going to use a different example, but see "nurture" in that sentence? It's not strictly an accurate word. Neither word has volition or needs, but I can animate the sentence by the analogy of word choice gently feeding and caring for imagery so that imagery can grow up big and strong). One good not-strictly-accurate verb is a beautiful microcosm for a larger analogy, and sometimes that's all you really need. You don't have to tell me the salesman was reptilian and predatory toward his customers, if you can just tell me he slithered. Sometimes the lightest touch is absolutely best.

As for giving imagery punch, the biggest thing is just not to use common analogies unless you're really going to push them through to the other side of boring. It's really unimpressive to hear your heroine's eyes shine like diamonds or are as blue as the deep blue sea- unless you're going to carry that analogy further, from blandly pretty (or blandly horrible) into something novel and interesting. "Her eyes were like the deep blue sea; he knew below the surface they were full of sharks". Reversals on standard analogies are actually one of my favorite things to do. We have a lot of stock images that are associated with being wholly good or evil, positive or negative, masculine or feminine, active or passive. How many times have you heard golden used to describe something ugly? How often have you seen snakes used to describe something good? When you use an analogy we expect to conform to one category to describe something pertaining to another, there's an inherent tension that makes the sentence memorable. "His movements were clean, alive, and graceful as a snake new-burst from its skin." This works especially well when the analogy is something that's got a lot whole lot of force and expectation behind it (eg. mother, priest, sex, criminal, money, heroin, infant, lynch mob)

I guess the only other big theory I've got about it is that the analogies you make, whether explicit or implied are kind of a bridge between two things, and the farther those things are apart, the more tense and interesting that comparison is (though the farther apart they are, the more you have to shore them up to keep them from falling apart.) "The strawberries were like raspberries" is not a terribly interesting statement (in fact it's kind of a confusing thing to say because it's close enough it hardly seems like imagery at all), especially not next to "the strawberries were like red dirigibles" or "the strawberries were like can-can dancers" (the latter example is one that needs shoring. Left at that, I'm really not sure what you mean, but if you give me a bit about them being, teasing and succulent, or lined up on top of the white platform of a cake, the bridge is strong enough to carry a reader across, if a little self-indulgent (honestly, possibly enough so to put a number of readers off, but that's a matter of taste.))

Imagery's like spice in your cooking. It's entirely possible to overdo it and spoil the whole thing, but it's worth bearing in mind that some people love plain potatoes and grilled chicken breast, and some of us really dig a steaming bowl of super-hot curry. My advice is play, do what you love, figure out the mechanisms, and understand that there's no absolute way to do it right (though there are numerous ways to do it very wrong). 

Generative Ethnography of the Fantastic

I love me some pretentious titles!

Anyway, I was talking to a couple of friends independently about world building over the last couple of days, specifically about both how to create a world in which to put her characters in one friend's case, and how to tell character stories in a built world, which I think is something we all struggle with in fantasy and science fiction to some extent. So, this is often my process:

1. Big theme, difference, or "hook"

What is the single biggest "not our world" element of your story? Is there a sickness that turns people into animals according to their sins? Is it a future where our smart phones have all become nodes of a global machine consciousness bent on our destruction? Are there psychic alien parasites residing in every bit of aluminum on the planet? More conventionally, is there a world where fairies and humans coexist and fairies are the source of all magic, though humans are slowly appropriating some of it? You know, whatever you like, but this'll be the thing that makes your story genre, and very likely one of the central plot points.

2. Anchor details

I like at least two other big unrelated details about your world or your society. There are rivers full of corrosive hallucinogens, it's a matriarchy, there's been a global war, cannibalism is accepted practice, kids are born by batch cloning, things are modeled on feudal Japan, everyone has a backup heart, the country is on the edge of a revolution because of a powerful anarchist faction, capital punishment is banned and instead criminals are maimed or blinded, graven idols actually grant wishes, family bonds are totemic rather than by blood, what have you. The important thing is that they're things you think would be fun, and they're not related to what you picked in number one.

2.5 Borrowing

My degree is in anthropology and I read a lot of ethnographic, history, science, and trivia stuff for fun. I have a vast cache of information I can plunder from at the drop of a hat, and often my new ideas come from reading the sorts of things above and going "man, that would make a great element in a story". I recommend reading widely and without particular predisposition to anyone interested in world building. Serious, just click the random link of the day in wikipedia and surf on through. When you come across something you're not familiar with, read up. You may end up with a pidgin-speaking wizard with a capybara familiar, and it might just be awesome.

3. Extrapolation

What do your three things mean in conjunction with each other? What kind of society accommodates all three? Let's pick three of the above: the animal plague, the anarchist revolution, and the wishing idols. Because they're a society that can form an anarchist philosophy and stage a revolution, I'm going to say they're pretty sophisticated as far as government, centralization, and dissemination of ideas. In fact, I'm going to say that the fact that idols can grant wishes has led to an economy with very little scarcity, which has allowed technology to flourish, especially since some motivated people were able to wish for faustian level understandings of things, so they actually have some things way more sophisticated than we do (this is a totally arbitrary aesthetic choice I'm backing up with a rationale from one of my three points. What I'm envisioning is something SORT of steam punk, a combination of 18th-19th century style setting and future tech. The point I want to make is at this stage, it's still about what's possible, and what's fun, rather than what's necessary.) I want the animal plague to be something the idols can't fix. The next thought is if anyone can wish for anything, how did we get a centralized system that anarchists would rebel against? And the immediate option I come up with is that there is a single class that controls access to the icons. To me it makes the most sense that they would be priests of some kind, and I love the word hierophant, so our ruling class will be a central religious bureaucracy that has become sprawling, officious, and corrupt. I don't want it to be based on lineage, because that seems done, but I do want it to be secretive and very picky about who it lets in and who it promotes- after all, I'm creating conditions that would lead to popular anarchism and revolution. The animal plague is going to be the spark that lights that whole powder keg, as the priests will start restricting idol access even more when they don't work to cure the plague, because these things are the basis of their power and they don't want them questioned- whereas of course people on the outside will see it as a strike against everyone who isn't bureaucracy.

3.5 Points of conflict

I'm already doing this in the example above, but I think one of the important things to do at this stage is look for points of conflict, because these are where the good stories happen. Is there a massive criminal organization? Does one group have way more power than another? Are there restrictive laws and taboos? Is there a disenfranchised minority? Is there some rare product or material that's necessary for magic or technology to work? Where is a person's social mobility limited? What's potentially unfair? Are there deadly monsters or weather phenomenon? What in this society will get you hurt, exploited, raped, disowned, arrested, or killed?

4. Body stress test

Take a moment and look at what you've made critically. What factors don't work with each other and how can you address them? Important note: I don't think you actually HAVE to revise them. Our world is full of contradictions, and they lend a feeling of lived-in verisimilitude to a fake world. They can be exceptions, rarities, minority group dissensions, or even outright hypocrisy, but you're going to want to be aware they're there. Done consciously it looks nuanced. Done without examining it, it looks sloppy. For example, does your city with high-ranking sacred prostitute priestesses still demonize female sexuality and use "whore" as an insult? If you don't deal with why, it looks inconsistent, but possibly it's a rebellious faction trying to slander them, possibly it's the mores of a conquered people vs. the mores of an invading ruling class, possibly it's the priestesses' own way to undercut and debase any potential competition. Or, you can deal with it by removing either the priestesses or the prejudice for most people. Basically just give everything a once over as a whole piece, look for any glaring errors, and decide if and how they fit into the larger picture.

5. Character choice

Who is least well served by this society? For whom will it require the most conflict to reap the rewards your world offers? In the animal plague story above, I need somebody who is cut out of the political structure entirely- so someone who's no friend either to the bureaucrats or the anarchists. I'll pick somebody who tried to get into the priesthood but failed out and in the process got blacklisted for offending a high level hierophant, so now they get blocked no matter what they try to do, but most especially they are banned from idol wishing, and the anarchists have no love for this person, because they clearly had bureaucracy aspirations. This person has someone they love more than anyone else- I'm tempted to say a spouse, sibling, or child, who has stuck with them and helped them throughout all of this and now has contracted the painful, humiliating, and ultimately personhood-annihilating plague. Maybe they'll win over the anarchists to overthrow the priesthood or maybe they'll beg the priesthood to let them make one wish if they willingly act as a mole. Who knows. The important thing is you've got someone who this world has backed into a corner, and that's when people get desperate and interesting.

Other potentially interesting characters for a longer work, or as an alternate main for a short work, include people who are so thoroughly indoctrinated into one subgroup or culture (or even the main culture) that they can't see the contradictions that inform their daily lives. To borrow from the example above, maybe you write about the specific prostitute priestess whose job it is to defame, punish, and humiliate lesser whores, which she sees as her holy duty because she clearly has nothing in common with these women. These can be great stories of awakening. Often the best people for this are the enforcers or primary beneficiaries of the system, though it's a good arc for someone you want to be an opposition demagogue as well.

You can also, certainly, reverse engineer from this point. Say you've got a fabulous character and their conflict planned out. You can pick their hypocrisies and their points of opposition and build a whole world out of that. Say you want to do a blind seer who falls in love with a prince whose father and kingdom she's seeing dooooooom for. What can you put in to make that even harder for her? Maybe a strict caste marriage system? Maybe all sorts of extra prejudice about blind people and a lingering suspicion that it's communicable by touch? Maybe vastly different vaguely connected language groups that make her seem clumsy and ineloquent to the point of being deliberately hateful to him when she talks, when all she's trying to do is warn him for his own good? And what sort of wars, feuds, or geographic uncrossables would divide two people who previously spoke the same language until they mutated into barely intelligible dialects? You could pick a massive open lava crack that spewed poison and which each side blamed the others' magic for, and across which trade and travel had only just recently been reestablished. The world is your oyster. The best of my advice is to make sure you have fun.

So those are my two cents, which means I appear to be operating at about a $0.000015 a word today.

EDIT:

6. Checklist

This is not as much work as it's about to sound like, you don't have to have an exhaustive encyclopedia on these, but it helps to have at least a vague idea of your fantasy society's:

1. geographical features
2. weather patterns
3. ecology (flora and fauna (also if you have monsters, what do they eat?))
4. local industries including crops
5. trade goods
6. goods acquirable only through trade (what is exotic, valuable, and scary?)
7. food and fresh water sources
8. demographics (population numbers, ages, races, common physical features, birth and death numbers)
9. religions
10. social groups and castes
11. methods of determining status
12. upward or downward mobility
13. gender and age roles (including sex and relationship expectations)
14. cuisine
15. drugs, alcohol, and basically what people do to get high (or at least some segment of people)
16. fashions (including jewelry and body modification)
17. taboos and superstitions
18. local legends, myths, and ghost stories
19. birth, marriage, coming of age, and funeral rites
20. holidays and festivals
21. system of currency or exchange, economics (eg. shells, precious metals, paper money, floating debt, system of gift giving)
22. laws and process of jurisprudence (who is a criminal, how they are judged, and how they are punished?)
23. waste disposal process (including human waste. Seriously. It's important)
24. language
25. writing system and literacy
26. means of transportation
27. methods of communicating over long distances
28. medicine
29. level of technology
30. martial prowess, especially if they have a specialty weapon or style of fighting (eg. Mongol horseback archery)
31. history including wars, allegiances, and treaties
32. knowledge of the outside world (including dead-wrong misconceptions)
33. entertainment, games, leisure activities
34. magical system, if they have one
35. criminal segment, black market, or otherwise illicit industries and activities

And probably more, though I think 35's a reasonable list. If you don't know, don't be afraid to just jot in a quick filler like "cuisine: spicy, lots of rice and peppers" or "medicine: medieval Europe". It's not important what you put, just that you've thought about it- and often, just thinking about it will give you an idea for a good scene. And again, each of these can certainly play off another. For example, if you have a taboo about women showing their hair, the fashion will likely include a lot of scarves and hats.

Enjoy!

Speak Out With Your Geek Out

This post is in conjunction with Speak Out With Your Geek Out week, which is a big round of blog posting to help all those people who have internalized the negative connotations of geekdom, even as we move into an era of computer phones, cloned organs, and widespread pop culture references to hobbits and orcs.

I'm not doing too badly for myself. I'm an emergency medical technician on my way to full paramedic and a published writer of fantasy and horror. I've gotten to travel all around the world, including Belize, Japan, Egypt, France, Mexico, China, and exotic Canada. I've worked on an archaeological dig, jumped out of planes, ridden camels across a desert, climbed cliff faces, swum with sharks, modeled nude, met one US president, and breathed for a cardiac arrest patient.

I'm also a geek on a number of different axises. I've always read fantasy and science fiction, I love and continue to read comic books, I enjoy role playing and boardgames, I love both western animation and anime, I've been in and out of massive online multiplayers since the web connections were pay-by-the-minute, I've made lasting friends through internet fandom, and I have, on more than occasion, larped. I've also met more than one boyfriend through these activities.

Being a geek isn't something that limits you. It's a passion. It's a light in your life that you can hold up when things are looking dark. It's having tried to live up to being a knight or a paladin, even just as an exercise. It's understanding the prime directive and knowing why it's there. It's learning planetary physics because you want to design a city in the clouds. It's knowing that with great power comes great responsibility, and having planned out what you would do if you had the good luck to get a radioactive spider bite. It's about a powerful combination of imagination, enthusiasm, and precision- about being able to ask “what if?” and then provide the answer. It's about an intimate familiarity with a body of work that asks over and over again “what does it mean to be human?” and “what does it mean to be good?”

I'm a lot of things in addition to being a geek, but I could never have been the whole person I am today without having imagined myself as an X-man, without having cried during Ender's Game, without having learned to draw every character in Ranma 1/2, without wearing a shine into my wasd keys in multiplayer games, without learning the mechanics of storytelling by relentlessly picking apart TV shows and putting them back together the way I thought they ought to go, or without the friends I made because we had these things in common.

And that's not all. I have a friend who used to win anime cosplay competitions. Now she does makeup and special effects for Hollywood movies. One friend who played the Star Wars tabletop roleplaying game with me is a practicing lawyer. Another is a professor. The biggest, sweetest firemen I know carries a toy tricorder in his pocket. The first guy I ever fell in love with could demand chocolate in Klingon. I once had a really surreal conversation with the front man for a punk rock band and the giant bouncer at the door about how much we loved dungeons and dragons and the renaissance fair.

If you're feeling down and alone, you shouldn't. There are a lot of us out here, and we're not always who you'd think.

If you're feeling like what you love makes you a loser, you shouldn't do that either.

The stars are the limit.

My Reading Family

My parents read to me very near religiously. They had kids books aplenty- the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Are, The Girl Who Cried Flowers (with Tanith Lee!) and a book I wish I could find called (I think) the Muffin Muncher, which in retrospect was kind of a libertarian parable about how taxation strangles industry, told in the form of a muffin-eating dragon. Dad committed a fair bit of Shel Silverstein to memory- he can still do Sara Silvia Cynthia Stout. Mom read me all the Narnia books, plus the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings (in fact, I distinctly remember being so upset about the part with Shelob that I snuck the book to school the next day and read all during class and lunch just because I couldn't believe that had really happened to Frodo. It was one of the last books read to me before I was reading on my own.)

Mom is probably most directly responsible for my love of epic fantasy, though I'm sure there was some sort of feedback loop that went on there. She gave me the Belgariad and when I spent those years reading Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms she read them with me and we'd talk about them. She never put me in a corner about being a genre fan- in fact she encouraged it so thoroughly I wasn't really aware for a long time that there might be a stigma about it. She's since been a very reliable resource for all sorts of fabulous fiction. Not to long ago she put Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry in my hand and said it had always been one of her favorites. Now it's one of my favorites too. I also read Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake at her request.

My father is no slouch either. He's personally quite a good poet, and his favorites are The Brothers Karamazov (which was his grandmother's favorite when he was growing up), Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard), and the marvelous ouvre of Kurt Vonnegut (his favorite is Cat's Cradle, but I have to go with Slaughterhouse Five). He's also a fan of pithy quotes and humorous essays. I remember for years growing up he'd have a quote of the week pinned inside his office both at work and at home. What I learned from my father and the way he read was to appreciate language, word play, the melody of speech, and proper timing. He can memorize and recite all sorts of things, gives a hell of a speech, and taught me The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus one day just for something to do.

My mother's wife, of all my family, probably reads the most. She gravitates toward women's and queer fiction especially, and more or less all the nonfiction she consumes is highly political. She gave me my first copy of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. She also introduced me to Barbara Kingsolver, and I routinely raid her shelves where our interests overlap(or when I find myself at her house without a book of my own, which is how I read both Ape and Essence and Dogs of Babel). Currently I have her copy of Virginia Woolf's Orlando hostage. Our tastes don't always overlap- I tend to veer away from heart-rending tragedies and she doesn't generally go in for the speculative fiction (with the exception of Atwood who she reads both in genre and out of it- so far I've not had much patience with her non-genre novels, but she writes a fantastic short story). I've recently pushed Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness at her. I hope it sticks. She dug Reading Lolita in Tehran.

My little brother is an extensive reader. His favorites are Hemmingway, Hunter S. Thompson, and Vonnegut (so he and Dad and I can have a pretty lively discussion when we get together). Recently, I've gotten him hooked on comic books, where we both love Millar and Ellis (I've tried to point him at Gail Simone, but her best stuff is generally DC, and he's a Marvel guy right now). He's my go-to for literary literature, as for a while that was all he would take in. He insisted I read the Rum Diaries and I liked it quite a lot. I got him turned on to Tom Robbins and I think he may have read more of him than I have now. I tried to sell him on Neal Stephenson, but it didn't take. I also keep pushing him at Nabokov, which I think he'll like better, even though he's more of a bare prose man (he says he never could get through Faulkner). He's also a Harry Potter fanatic.

One of my stepsisters read a good bit of my penny dreadful dungeons and dragons fiction back in the day when I was doing that. She's since moved on to be a prolific reader of romance novels, which the whole family teases her about, though to be fair I've borrowed a couple of her regency romances and enjoyed them thoroughly if not without my tongue firmly planted in my cheek. We don't necessarily have a lot in common in our reading, but I do try to stick up for her literary choices in my own backhanded sort of way. It doesn't have to be Shakespeare to be fun. Her son is currently reading Percy Jackson the Lightning Thief, and I'm doing my best to cheer him on at every opportunity.

My other two sisters read somewhat less, but we still talk books every now and again. One of them put me to shame by reading Octavia Butler before I did, and we trade recommendations on those intermittent occasions when it's just us. Her husband and I once had a marathon (and slightly competitive) science fiction book off in terms of who of import we'd read and who we had on the shelf just waiting when we got home.

I have no idea what it's like to try to come into this business when one hasn't grown up surrounded by books and people who love them. Books haven't really ever been a lonely hobby to me. They've been something I could share over snacks with the people I love. We've always been able to have conversations about what we thought the point was or how we didn't see it that way, but we could see where they were coming from.

I guess the best advice I can give at the end of this is: if you do have kids, read to them, and let them know you like to read. It will make a huge difference.

Gynofantastique

I recently came across Broad Universe, which has as its mission statement the goal of equal representation and pay of women in fantasy, horror, and science fiction. It's a cool site with great articles, and I intend to be a part of it, but I'm not completely convinced about the urgency.

Women certainly aren't under represented as readers- in fact on the whole I'm pretty sure we tend to read more and buy more of the books. The almost exclusively female romance market makes up about 40% of all fiction books sold. And any metric that shows how women are excluded from genre fiction feels like a kind of tautological privilege of the areas of the genres that are male dominated. Sure, The Hunger Games might be one of the best selling dystopic sci fi series on the shelves, but that's Young Adult, not hard or military science fiction. Big virile man authors like Martin and Erikson are dominating epic fantasy, so obviously we don't need to acknowledge the fantastic work women like Kelly Link, Kij Johnson, Catherynne Valente, or Vylar Kaftan are doing in slipstream and postmodern fantasy. Regardless how one may feel about all the sexy vampires and sorceresses of urban fantasy, Stephen King is probably the only horror author who beats them out in sales.

And even within the boys' treehouse genres, you've got ladies like Ursula LeGuinn, Mercedes Lackey, Tanith Lee, Poppy Z. Brite, Robin Hobb, Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Robin McKinley, Storm Constantine, James Tiptree Jr. and Andre Norton off the top of my head.

Sometimes it feels like the question people are actually asking is “Hey, why aren't women writing Heinlein?”

Well, because we're not Heinlein, obviously. Only Heinlein was, and he was a product of his gender and his time, as we are. Women do have a thing or two to bring to the table as far as telling stories about the battle hardened group of space marines dropping onto an alien planet with guns blazing, the orphan farmboy who finds a magic sword and saves a kingdom, or the serial killer on a spree of rape and murder. We have some things to add about what it means to be a man, because it's both different and the same as what it means to be a person. But I suspect we have a lot more to add about what it means to be women. It doesn't preclude space marines and gunslingers and magic swords; rather, it includes things that may have been overlooked when folk were putting those things in the center of the stage: menarche and child birth, rape as more than a galvanizing force for the avenging hero, clever princesses and subversive witches, what it feels like to be objectified and denied agency and to overcome that, and romance. Romance from insipid and silly to heart-breakingly complex.

Not that men haven't said, and continue now to say, great things on those topics too. I don't think anything's off the table. Rather, I think we all benefit from the conversation blossoming in all directions.

I don't feel like women aren't getting a fair shake right now. Everywhere you look, ladies are taking home hugos, nebulas, book contracts, and movie deals. J. K. Rowling and other lady authors have initialized their names and James Tiptree Jr. took on a male handle completely, but Tim Pratt and other men have also written under initials, and men who write romance routinely do so under femal pseudonyms. We do come from a legacy of male domination in all literature, perhaps especially so in the speculative fiction genres, and I know there are a few pockets of boy folk hanging “no girls allowed” signs (demanding all science fiction be Heinlein, and all fantasy be Howard), but in all my interactions that feels to me like it's an attavistic minority. If anything, it feels like there's a really healthy cross-pollination, where men and women will cite each other as important, formative influences. I do think it's important for all of us to take a moment and make sure we're giving each other a fair shake, and not to assume what we like or what we already know is the only valid way to do things.

And I feel like right now, we're doing really, really well at it.

It's possible my optimism about this stems from the fact that I am a native of "a more enlightened time". Both of my parents were feminists. No one in my childhood told me my options were limited by my chromosomes. My father's favorite writer is Annie Dillard and his favorite musician is Joni Mitchell, and he taught me square roots several years ahead of the school schedule because he felt I had a talent for math. I never had to swim upstream. I don't remember all the hurt and pain commensurate to being raised to believe I was worth less.

It's probably impossible to have a completely objective view of the gender and accomplishment landscape, but from where I stand and look, it's a beautiful time.

Fantastical Holidays

Writing Excuses did a podcast on second world holidays, which I quite enjoyed. My personal favorite was Mary Robinette Kowal's advice never to "take a real world holiday and just file off the serial numbers."

I had some thoughts and they are as follows:

Some common themes in holidays, many of which overlap in single holidays:

Celebrations- something has gone well and the holiday commemorates that. Or sometimes, like Mardi Gras, it's merely a celebration of life. Birthdays, harvests, Independence days, the day Guy Fawkes didn't blow up parliament, Girls' day and Boys' day in Japan (where they celebrate basically having healthy, living children), Christmas (where Christians are celebrating the birth of a savior), wedding anniversaries, weddings themselves, the festivals for the favorite local crop (hundreds of southern US towns have peach or watermelon or strawberry festivals), and so on.

Elegies- remembering what has been lost. Memorial day, Dia de Los Muertos, more recently in the United States the 11th of September, Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand (which is in memorium for the dead from the Gallipoli campaign in World War I).

Fertility- both human and harvest. Planting celebrations, spring dances, Valentines Day, Honen Matsuri (or Japanese national penis day (you probably shouldn't click that link at work)), Mayday, etc. Generally these tend to have a lot of plant and flower themes and decorations, even when they're not about the harvest, and chances for young men and women to show off for each other.

Memento Mori- reminder that life is fleeting and death will eventually come. This used to be a bigger thing in Western culture than it is now, but you can still see some of it in Halloween, All Saints' Day, Dia de los Muertos, and in Japan it's nominally the reason to contemplate cherry blossoms for the few days they bloom every year (hanami). Memento Mori holidays tend to be in winter.

Proving and Rites of Passage- holidays can be a time to display one's mating plumage, one's wealth or beauty, or one's readiness to be an adult. I found this article looking for the annual Vanuatu land diving festival, and it's got some good rites of passage in it, including the Ethiopian one where they line up all the village cows and have the young men run across their backs, which was the other great one I knew. A lot of festivals may have beauty pageants, strength or athletic challenges, cooking contests, riddles, puzzles, hunts, or even just lotteries (proves you're luck/blessed) with prizes and recognition for the winner.

Historical commemoration- probably the one we're most familiar with, honestly, celebrating historical people and events. Independence day, Martin Luther King Day, Cinco de Mayo, Veteran's day, Christmas (for Christians, this is a very important bit of history), any Saint's feast, President's day, Juneteenth (also known as Emancipation day), Bastille day, and so on.

Commitment to Ideals- when we pick a specific virtue we're supposed to be practicing year round and recommit ourselves to it. Lent and Ramadan (piety, temperance, and self-denial), Yom Kippur (atonement), Thanksgiving (gratitude), Mother's day and Father's day, Valentine's day. These can be some of the most important holidays in their respective cultures, and in religious cultures they often come with a hefty dose of church.


Which is a point worth bringing up. A society will celebrate its tradition generally in a way that's within the bounds of what's important to that culture. Holidays in the US almost all involve a big meal and buying things. Holidays amongst strictly catholic cultures almost always involve a special mass. Holidays in a community that's very interdependent will tend to involve at least a potluck if not an actual potlatch. Think about what's important to your society and that will help you determine if they're going to have a Ramadan or an American Valentines day.

Another major and excellent point the podcast brought up was that not everyone is going to be excited about or on board with your holiday. Plenty of people hate Christmas. It might make them feel alone, or poor, or simply stressed out by all the obligations. Fake holidays will mean different things to different people, the same as real ones do.

The best holidays I have written have tended to be made from one or more isolated pieces of real world holidays remixed and tailored to the society, with a few arbitrary decorative nods that give it the feel of specific tradition. For example, let's take something easy like gift giving from Christmas and strip away all the Christmas off it. Our holiday is primarily just the gift giving, and lots of it. Then, rather than making it a celebration for family and people you get on well with, let's toss some Yom Kippur into the mix- these are gifts of atonement and they are given to people you have wronged. For an arbitrary element, let's pick the color orange- the gifts are always wrapped in orange cloth or paper, or at least have an orange ribbon, so much so that in our society orange has this pervasive conotation of shame and wrongdoing. Picking a time of year is trickier, because it changes what the holiday means depending on where it goes: put it in fall, at harvest time, and it becomes a message of "you are in a position of excess, you should be generous and balance your accounts"; put it in winter and it not only takes on a memento mori quality, but it means people who have been wronged are getting gifts and help in the coldest, darkest part of the year, when they likely need it most; put it in spring, and the emphasis seems naturally to be new beginnings and putting old feuds behind. All of these are great, and there's a hundred potential stories that can spring up: a person who has seriously wronged someone but does not have the money to get them a sufficient gift, and must risk wronging someone else to do it; someone who holds a grudge for something serious, but receives no present or one too small to satisfy their sense of justice; someone who doesn't think they've been wronged at all, but suddenly finds themselves the recipient of a lavish anonymous gift that indicates someone did something terrible to them that they don't know about yet.

So those are my thoughts on made up holidays.

Mythic Fidelity

One of my favorite complaints people make about the Twilight series is: "that's not how real vampires are!" I giggle every time someone brings it up. Twilight's vampires are still far outside of my personal tastes for the undead, but I recognize the vampire legend is pretty mutable, even if Ms. (Mrs?) Meyers does seem intent on neutering them.

That said, I get an involuntary eye twitch at the word "wereleopard". Data supports that if you just called them something different, rather than using a specifically northern European term for it ("wer" for man, also related to terms like "wergeld" for what you had to pay for having killed someone) I have far less problem. All sorts of societies have shapeshifters who take on animal form, and they generally have native, non-germanic names for them. (As another etymological nitpick, I'm bothered by the shortened term "lycan" as it splits the root word "-anthropos" (again, man) rather than dividing on the sensible break between the two).

My point was that I believe if you put everybody who cares at all about legends and myths in a straight line, could make a continuum of where one author or another has diverged too far from the source material for the work to be pleasurable for them. I know one writer who cringes every time someone talks about plural minotaurs as if a mommy and daddy minotaur get together and make baby bull headed monstrosities, rather than it being a very specific curse from the gods. His Dark Materials and Anne Rice's Memnoch the Devil played way too fast and loose with their Christian source material for me. I've been witness to mind numbingly passionate discussions about how fairies ought to be depicted (nevermind spelled! "faerie" indeed.).

Though by the same token, some of my favorite works ever include a re-imagining of seven world myths in terms of physics, a book where Pan has a conversation with Tarzan, a series in which Ishtar the goddess of lust works at a strip club and Orpheus' dismembered head is a character, a story in which very real angelic miracles are a common and well known occurrence that lends no more understanding or meaning to the lives of people, and one where the Greek muses are alzheimer's patients in southern California. And Tolkien, which has several convenient lifts from a number of European mythological sources.

I think how you deal with well-documented outside source material is especially important in a short story, where your reader's enjoyment of the piece may rest heavily on their familiarity not only with the original myths and legends, but the subsequent debates and controversies surrounding them. (In one of my favorite books, in utter frustration, a wizard says "or maybe I could turn you into a rhinocerous, which is how this whole stupid unicorn myth got started anyway." The character he says it to is, in fact, a unicorn). Being able to drop a single name, or a precise phrase, and have it conjure in your readers minds a wealth of myth, culture, and drama is a beautiful thing (Try the word "Ragnarok" and see how much pops into your head).

But if you want just the classics, the place to go is the actual classics. The difficult trick is to put a new spin on something that summons that wealth of story, keeping it familiar enough to feel like you haven't cheaply stolen a name or face for your own nefarious agenda, but also keeping it fresh and new enough that a reader who knows the legend can still be surprised and delighted.

It's a thin tightrope at the best of times, and the terrible truth of it is, each reader's rope will be in a different place that you won't be able to judge until you've already put your weight on the forward foot, and there's either a rope there, or there isn't.

Anyway, those are my scattered thoughts for the moment.

Anatomy of an Edit

It's always bothered me that there aren't more resources online regarding editing stories. There seems to be a pyramid, at the base of which are near limitless numbers of articles and resources for planning and starting fiction. There are many, but noticeably fewer resources for getting out of a stuck point int he middle and keeping on task. There are a handful of resources on wrapping everything up, and then there seem to be a scant number of available helpful guides about how to edit once you get there.

It was pointed out to me- and I think my friend is correct in this- that part of the reason it's hard to do a general guide is that every story requires something different.

That said, the following is a case study of an edit I've been working on.

Phase one: read through and identify serious structural problems. In this case I had a beginning that was very heavy on exposition, and an ending in which the characters did not have as much agency as I would have liked. I decided the beginning needed to be character driven dialogue and tweaked the end a bit so that it came because of deliberate character actions.

Phase two: I took a moment to step back and decide what kind of story I was trying to tell. The story in question was built around an image of tiny people riding war rabbits, and it kind of straddled that line between being something goofy and adorable, and being something sort of weird and dark. After thinking on it, I decided to go with the latter.

Phase three: I wrote myself a little four sentence summary of the plot, which I found helpful as a guide for pacing, since each one marked an important point in the story.

Phase four: I wrote out what I saw as the main conflicts of the story, and tried to decide what I could change to best address those. I decided to elevate a bit character as a foil to the main character in order to externalize one of the main conflicts. I wrote up a quick set of points I needed this new character to accomplish.

Phase five: I went in to rewrite the beginning and quickly realized that the pace had changed and while the middle was mostly alright, I wasn't just going to be able to tack it on. The story needed a top to bottom rewrite, which I had hoped to avoid. Still, it's a much better story now.

Phase six: More or less satisfied with the structural level, I took a long break, then came back to the story on the level of word choice, sentence structure, grammar, and style. I tweaked a lot of the dialogue to make characters stand out from each other more. Cleaned up a lot of repetition, though less than there was in the first run through, which I guess is an advantage of the rewrite.

Phase seven: going to send it off to a beta reader (is it still beta at this point?) and once I get the okay, I'll start sending it out.

This story was really more work than I was expecting. It was a lot of fun when I wrote it, and I was expecting it to stand up better to close inspection than it did. But it was the one on the list, so you do what you've got to.

Anyway, have a lovely week, all of you out there in blog land.

One Hundred Things

The following is a writing exercise I do on occasion in pursuit of better description. When it was introduced to me, it was just called 100 Things, and I assumed most everyone writing had heard of it. I mentioned it to a friend and he was so delighted by it, I thought I'd share it.

The goal of 100 things is to pick an adjective. Take any you like, or use this list: red, white, blue, green, black, sticky, sharp, large, small, soft, stinky, hard, cold, hot, fast, slow, etc. Simple descriptive things you find yourself wanting to embellish.

Take your adjective. For this example we'll use green. Make a list of 1 to 100, and start listing things that are green/hard/hot/whatever you picked. Your first ten or so will be banal.

1. trees
2. emeralds
3. snot
4. avocado
5. moss
6. grass
7. sour apples
8. algae
9. lime
10. mouthwash

The point is to get the trite ones out of the way early. "Her eyes were the color of emeralds" is a sentence so done it becomes painful. "Her eyes were the color of antiseptic mouthwash" has a bit more bite to it.

You'll have to stretch as you keep going.

11. caterpillars
12. grass snakes
13. the dumpster behind the apartment
14. army fatigues
15. packers' jerseys
16. punk rock hair
17. "go" lights
18. jade
19. old bottles
20. neglected teeth
21. modem lights
22. cats' eyes
23. bathroom tile
24. agave plants
25. radiation
26. The Hulk
27. infected puss
28. parrot wings
29. dragonflies
30. grasshoppers

And so on. Each description will give a different flavor. Play around with them. Take the analogy one step further. It doesn't have to be fabulous, just get used to the idea of having fun with free association. "The fruit, covered in morning dew, was the reflective green of cats' eyes, and it seemed that every tree glared down on him as if it was full of predators swishing their tales" and so on.

Obviously you should still be writing actual stories, but this is a fun game to help get you in the mood, if you're into that sort of thing.

How Writing Doesn't Work

I've had to explain to a few people recently how writing doesn't work. I blame Hollywood for the bulk of this misconception, because writing in practice isn't exciting enough to make much of a movie out of.

As near as I can tell, many people I know believe that writing works in the following sequence:

1. Be a naturally talented artist (Ideally played by Ewan McGregor)
2. Struggle with the implacable demons of boredom and writer's block (Ideally taking time to dramatically clasp your unshaven face over a beautifully cinematic yet empty old-school typewriter. Bottle of vodka optional)
2b. Potentially produce something laughably bad, because you lack a muse.
3. Get drug out into the world where you lose yourself in a fast paced whirl of drinking, drugging, wild and memorable misadventures, and talks with utterly fascinating characters whose speech and mannerisms will later populate your novel.
4. Meet an attractive and quirky member of the opposite sex who bonds instantly to you and provides you with a goal and a grounding during said madcap adventures (Ideally played by Natalie Portman).
5. Have a fight with your quirky muse, make terrible but easily reparable mistakes.
6. Come home to that typewriter you haven't touched in long enough for the audience to forget it's there.
7. Spend exactly one montage typing. (This should take about one verse and chorus of a recognizable song, ideally Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen (I'm just saying, it's been in more movies than Kevin Bacon)) Create a thinly fictionalized recounting of steps 3, 4, and 5.
8. Cut directly to a bookstore. It has perhaps been long enough for the author to have a new haircut. Your book is either selling as if it were made of pure cocaine or receiving the enthusiastic accolades of the top critics and gushing fans alike (possibly also the praise and understanding of your previously distant parent)
9. Roll credits, assume a happily ever after.

I'm not per se finished becoming a successful writer, but here is a more accurate layout of the process as I understand it:

1. Read and enjoy the written word.
2. Practice writing. Write a great many terrible things.
3. Through constant practice, improve on a variety of skills including characterization, pacing, narrative structure, point of view, and general language dexterity.
3b. Take classes, read instruction manuals, attend seminars, and join discussion groups to guide said practice.
4. Write better things. Edit and submit them. Wait, on average months, to receive mixed responses, the overwhelming percentage of which are rejections. Continue writing while waiting for responses. Repeat step 4 as many times as necessary.
5. Sell pieces. If you are very lucky, receive 5 cents per word for short fiction or a $2000 advance for a novel.
5b. Make any edits demanded by editors.
6. Wait. Sale to print on a book may take 18 months. Sale to print for short fiction may take several months. Continue writing while waiting.
6b. If you are lucky enough to sell on spec or be solicited, write with an eye to deadlines.
7. Promote your work.
8. Continue to repeat steps 3-7, hopefully to greater effect each time.
9. Continually reassess your career to make sure you're not alienating your original fans, while still broadening yourself enough to draw in new ones. Try to provide enough familiarity to inspire loyalty with enough novelty to stave off boredom.

Which, as I said, doesn't really make for a good movie.

The other thing I don't seem to be able to explain to people is that hoping to be the next J. K. Rowling is very much like hoping to be the next Elvis Presley. We'd all like to be rock stars, but most of us are just the guys playing at the bar for beer because we love to sing. Maybe we're even really good, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to get a record deal, much less radio air time.

Ah well. There's always dreams and ambitions.

On Horror

A while back I wrote a science fiction piece that centered around cannibalism. Some of the people who initially read it, including my dear friend John, told me that it was nice, but it was really more of a horror story than a science fiction one, which took me completely by surprise. Yes, I'd put some kind of graphic bits about dismemberment into the piece, but I'd done my best to present them through the eyes of a character who saw absolutely nothing weird about it; within the context of the story, almost no one was bothered by it. The point was to highlight the desensitization and play it against a pretty innocent adolescent love story that provided the bulk of the action. None of the characters were in any jeopardy, or even had any particularly intense moments outside of love sickness. Folk seemed surprised to learn that I hadn't thought of the story as horror at all.

I have some ambivalence about horror. Actually it's the exact same ambivalence I have about comedy, when you boil it down. Both genres are working to elicit a very specific and subjective emotional experience: respectively terror and a good laugh. It's a very tricky thing to do. Tastes vary and presentation is at least as important as content. It's a smoke and mirrors show in which surprise is a vital factor, and it's easy to get disastrously wrong. A story that isn't funny or scary runs the risk of being everything from banal to obnoxious to downright offensive.

Add into that mix that what constitutes "horror" in fiction is a wide and varied rainbow of dark stories. I tend to like the Lovecraft flavored horror best, because so much of the real menace happens out of sight- just flashes in the corner of your eye of something huge and horrifying- and because I dig the fundamental terror of a universe that is at best apathetic to human concerns, and at worst openly hostile. By contrast, there's a vein of horror that tends not to do much at all for me, in which a main character will go about being as terrible as possible a person, and then in the end get their just desserts through some supernatural means. On the one hand, it's not necessarily my bag because I tend to dislike the main characters enough that I don't want to follow them long enough to see them get killed, but on the other, this feels less horrific to me because the basic premise is that there's a just universe, and bad things ultimately happen to the people who deserve it. It's a bloody but comforting thought- one that doesn't instill in me a sense of disquiet and uncertainty. I feel like the best ghost stories make you a little afraid, somewhere in the back of your head, that the ghost could be coming for you. That it doesn't matter if you're good, or if you do what you're supposed to- or if it does, it takes only the tiniest slip to make yourself vulnerable. Perhaps I have an unduly high opinion of myself as not deserving celestial vengeance, but it's that potential for random unmerited terror that gets my blood racing.

But as I said, tastes vary.

That's true too of the level of gore. For me, how much ripping flesh and rotting viscera makes it onto the metaphorical "screen" doesn't directly correlate to being scary. You can write a good menacing yarn without any of it, or you could stuff your story to the gills with gore and actually have it achieve the opposite effect. The blood and trauma can become desensitizing and almost slapstick, if they're hung on a frame that isn't sufficiently robust to hold their weight.

It's certainly not something I have down to an exact science, or even a concise thesis (as you can probably tell from this post). These are my best guesses for what makes good horror for me:

1. Evil will triumph. Even if your character escapes momentarily, something fundamentally antagonistic to clean, decent humanity is going to win out in the long run.
2. There is a sense of menace to the reader, however hypothetical or indirect it may be. It certainly doesn't need to be spelled out in "La Llorona comes by the night for children who walk unsupervised by the river" terms but perceived safety undermines the feeling of horror. And if it's not a warning about the thing that might be under your bed, then your story's just a record of things that happened.
3. It incorporates a problem far out of the ordinary. Ordinary problems can be solved rationally. You can get your head around them. The problem need not be paranormal- there's great psycho horror- but it can't be normal.
4. It plays off fundamental and universal fears, as much as that's possible. Darkness, violence, the unknown, tight spaces, falling, blood, jeopardy to loved ones, clowns, whatever you like. People have visceral buttons and part of the fun of horror is having them pushed.

Anyway, those are my genre thoughts. I don't, in practice, consider myself a horror writer per se, but that's where the money's coming from, and I'm as happy to wear that hat as anything else, I suppose.