Inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places...

A trip you aren't looking forward to.  An overheard argument in a grocery store.  The way light reflects of the water.  A girl in a lime green formal dress and no shoes running to catch a bus at a historic landmark.

Or, in today's instance, a poem.

Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light

Tell me what you see in it :
The pine tree like a Rorschach-blot
black against the orange light :

Plant an orange pumpkin patch
which at twelve will quaintly hatch
nine black mice with ebon coach,

or walk into the orange and make
a devil's cataract of black
obscure god's eye with corkscrew fleck;

put orange mistress half in sun,
half in shade, until her skin
tattoos black leaves on tangerine.

Read black magic or holy book
or lyric of love in the orange and black
till dark is conquered by orange cock,

but more pragmatic than all this,
say how crafty the painter was
to make orange and black ambiguous.

~ Sylvia Plath

Photo licensed through Creative Commons. Some rights reserved by flatworldsedge.

"You just need one really good death."

At least, that's what the writers of Smash seem to think. They mention it in one of their episodes. I've been thinking about it ever since.

I've also been pondering the difficulty of creating a well-told tragedy. And before you say anything, I recognize that one of the first things most writers will say is that it is harder to be funny than sad. FN1. But a truly great tragedy, one that is more than just another sad story like one sees on the news and then breezes past, is unbelievably difficult to tell. Too sad and the reader will simply stop reading and move on to happier pursuits. Not sad enough, and it fails to possess the kind of gravitas that separates the run-of-the-mill sad story from the transcendental tragedy.

I will state for the record that I have not yet nor am I currently writing a true tragedy...unless I am. Sorry, can't confirm or deny after all. As Dr. River Song would say, “Spoilers.” But writing in general makes me think about reading, or television watching, or film viewing, in a way that I didn't before I started writing. Also, let's be honest, I've been lately obsessing over the Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, and that is one epic tale of tragedy.

Strictly Ballroom aside, Luhrmann's Red Curtain collection seems to cement his reputation for trafficking in tragedy:

• Romeo + Juliet, a retelling of a tale of woe from perhaps the world's greatest tragedian Shakespeare;
• Moulin Rouge!, which opens on a scene that let's you know right out of the gate – this will not end well; and
• Australia, which was criminally overlooked here in the U.S. But is a beautifully melancholy story that, while not exactly a tragedy, certainly has it's share of misery.

The setting and story for Gatsby feels like a good fit for Luhrmann, particularly given the tone the narrator has in the books combined with Lurhman's sense of hyper-reality in visual storytelling.

The other thing I've been watching is a lot of Dr. Who. Now there's some tragedy for you! A man who is the last of his race because he committed genocide of his own kind to save the universe. A man, traveling through all of space and time in a blue box, who lives practically forever, but always alone. Someone who is often loved, but who must maintain an emotional distance to keep those he loves safe. And every companion, they gain something amazing from their adventures with him, but the lose, too. Family members, careers, even their memories. The Doctor's stories so rarely end well. That's what makes them good, though. Even when they are terribly sad – The Girl Who Waited, Turn Left, The Girl in the Fireplace – the stories are so compelling.

Why do we love a good tragedy? What does it take to tell a compelling sad story? What is the right balance of bitter and sweet, sad and happy?

It's an interesting challenge to consider....

_____________

FN1. I would argue that it is harder to be transcendentally funny, as in funny for the ages, than sad, because so much of comedy is cultural context. Either way, though, both are hard to do.  

Everyone likes it better when you just shut up.

On fear of being a woman in the virtual public sphere

As I sit here writing this to you, dear reader, I have a confession: there are reasons I have not written in a while. Even as I sit down to write you this, I have cracked open my very last bottle of beer I carried back from Kigali just to find the will to say what I am about to say.

It has gotten really scary to be a woman on the internet lately.

This is not new. Frankly, it's always been a little scary being a woman doing anything in the public sphere that people disagree with. I've worked on political campaigns, I've done public speaking engagements around issues like abortion, I've even written things on this and other blogs that have brought threats and harassment to my virtual door. I play online games; I attend gaming events like Quakecon and Blizzcon, and gaming isn't always the most female friendliest of hobbies. I've worked to prosecute domestic violence offenders and stalkers, many of whom by virtue of my work knew my full name as well as my work location and hours. And I've been personally stalked and harassed by a former partner.  So I get what it's like to have the inescapable dragnet that is modern technology used against me, to get me, to make me feel sad ans scared and miserable, even from thousands of miles away.

But in doing all my various work and activism over the last decade or so, being a vocal woman in the virtual public sphere has never felt as...fraught as it does now. I don't know how else to explain it. And I am not someone who is easily scared or who tends to shut up because people want me to. (Let's be honest; if you know me, you know I'm more likely to yell louder if someone tries to take my voice away.)

So when I tell you there's this undercurrent that I keep bumping up against, even in my generally carefully manicured and limited interactions with the web, I hope you will hear me, and not dismiss it. There is a relatively new (past couple of years, I think) and more virulent strain of hatred toward women on the internet, something I didn't always feel and now think about every time I tweet or post on Facebook.  It is real. It is palpable. And it is working as a silent and insidious form of censorship in all sorts of ways.

There are a lot of contexts in which I could talk about this. I could talk about #GamerGate, and my experiences as a gamer from my early teenage years, and the various women who have been attacked in response to #GamerGate, to the point that frankly I have been afraid to write about it at all. I could talk about what it's like to work a tech company and make my living working on the web as a woman, and the daily wear and tear of that even in a progressive, wonderfully decent and well-intentioned company like mine. But what I actually want to talk to you about is something that happened recently to a Young Adult author, Stacey Jay.

A lot of people have been writing about Stacey Jay's Kickstarter campaign and the backlash against it. Stacey wrote about it on her blog. My friend, Marni, who knows Stacey, wrote a pretty good critique of all this on her blog as well. Additionally, if you want to read a rather impassioned piece, you can check out The World in A Satin Bag's response which - profanity aside - sums up my feelings about this pretty thoroughly and also shows some of the critique tweets about the Kickstarter.

The TL;DR is that Stacey got dropped from her publisher due to weak sales, but had fans who really wanted a sequel her recently released (e.g. a few weeks ago) novel, Princess of Thorns. She decided to set up a Kickstarter to fund writing the book and get it into the hands of the fans who wanted it. I will note here that Stacey writes a lot, and has a number of published books under her belt, mostly with female protagonists, many of whom are strong and smart and kicking butt all over the place. 

But back to the Kickstarter: In exchange for things like getting a digital copy or hardcopy of the follow-up book to Princess of Thorns and some of the other usual perks that come with a Kickstarter, Stacey asked for enough money to support her for about 90 days while she wrote the book. To justify the amount she was kickstarting for – the princely sum of $10,500; $3000 going to cover editing and artwork and the rest for living expenses – Stacey demonstrated her need for her income to what I feel was an astonishingly high degree. FN2. She talked about how much it would help her support her family, how it would compensate for the time she might be writing other projects that would generate income, how she had calculated the amount, and how it was reasonable given her familial and financial responsibilities for things like gas, her mortgage, and heat during winter. Extravagant, I know.

$7,500 for three months of work. That's not a lot of money, particularly when you are talking about a proven author who has been published several times and has a record of being able to produce a real product. She was going to create something she knew there was a market for, and all she asked was to be compensated in return.

Now there are people out there who have criticized Stacey for using Kickstarter when they feel she should have used Indiegogo or GoFundMe. And there are those who think her price was too high. All of these people had the right to simply choose not to fund her. But today we live on the internet, and that's never where things stop when people get angry anymore.

Instead, people have harassed Stacey to the point that she has completely exited social media and says she will not be publishing more books under the name Stacey Jay. They talked about how much she was asking for, criticized her for asking to be compensated at all, and even went so far as to discuss the costs of living and median mortgage rates in her zip code. From her blog post, in which she explains why she took down the Kickstarter and then went on to apologize for ever posting it, it seems clear that she has received some rather harsh and personally scary responses as a result of all this. All because she was a person on the internet with a product she knew had a market and she had the audacity to ask people to pay for said product, which largely consists of the time and effort it takes to create something out of nothing, an entire world out of the weird and scary meanderings of a human brain.

As a writer who aspires to get my books out into the world, this really upsets me. While I have a good job, I dream of being able to write full time. It's not inconceivable to me that, if one of my series got dropped, I'd want to finish it and be able to give it to the people who loved it. And as a reader, I know how upset I am when I end up never getting to the end of a story I enjoy. I personally really like Stacey's books. Princess of Thorns is on my “to purchase” list. As someone who enjoys her storytelling, I want her to be able to finish that story.

But beyond that upsetness I feel as a reader and writer, I find myself feeling afraid of the internet as a tool for promotion and social interaction. Whether you're talking about Zoe Quinn making and reviewing games and then, after an ex-boyfriend turned the trolls of the gaming community against her, having to flee her home in fear, or you're talking about Soraya Chemaly's article on “The Digital Safety Gap and the Online Harassment of Women," the internet is a scary place for women, and the threats feel like they're increasing on all sides. (If you want to read a truly terrifying read, check out Amanda Hess' ”Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet.”

And here's the thing – women are treated differently, both online and in the real world. And we have a reason, when someone threatens us online, to fear that might become a reality. And whether you are Zoe Quinn, or Stacey Jay, or even a barely read no one like me, you never know when the thing you want to do in the virtual space might suddenly catapult you into the web'o'sphere and gather a lot of attention, for good or ill.

Fear of women in the public sphere is not new, particularly when women choose to speak and act as though their voices matter. It's a historical and global challenge that continues for women everywhere, everyday. To walk down the street without being verbally harassed. To have equal access to physical space on the subway. To speak without being threatened. To control their own money, their education, their own lives, their own bodies.  The message women get is clear and consistent: everyone likes it better when you just shut up.

And though I am sure there will be readers among you that see my ties between #GamerGate harassers and Stacey's Kickstarter kerfluffle as tenuous, or will assert that this isn't a gendered issue, I will simply point out to you that 1. some idiot got kickstarted for five times what Stacey asked for to make potato salad, and no one threatened him; and 2. no matter what reason people show up in your inbox, direct message on twitter, or other social media to threaten or shame or harass you, it all feels the same -- awful. And the through-line in the worst of cases seems to be uniformly that the worst of the internet's hatred and vitriol is saved for female-identified persons, and that the response will be even worse for you if you are (a) trying to create something of your own or (b) critiquing something a man made.

In a world where death threats and doxing have become normalized, where one site's trolls can turn your life to terrifying shambles, it's hard to want to write or blog or tweet or really interact with people. I spent most of the last few weeks of 2014 just hiding and considering how much, if any, I wanted to be part of social media. But I refuse to be scared off. And I refuse to shut up.

So here I am, writing about the very things that might invite trouble into my life and my home. Because at the end of the day, I refuse to be silenced by fear.

And hey - if you like Young Adult novels, Stacey Jay has quite a few good ones. You should check them out.  I personally recommend Juliet Immortal. If you need me, I'll be out buying some of her books, including Princess of Thorns, and showing the world that we could use more people like her, and that no one deserves to be forced out of the public sphere

_________________

FN1. It's a Virunga Mist for any of you with knowledge of Rwanda. My last full day there, I was challenged to drink one of every type of local beer so I could determine what my favorite was to bring home. Virunga Mist was the winner by a significant margin.

FN2. Seriously, it was one of those moments that reminds me of that moment in 1952 when President Nixon and his wife went on television to disclose a lot of information about their financial situation in an effort to beat back some accusations about campaign finance stuff during his VP run with President Eisenhower. This is historically known as the “Checkers” speech, the name of Nixon's dog, who sat with him and his wife through this very personal and, probably somewhat humiliating, speech. PBS has a transcript posted if you want to read it.