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athenais didn't like it over much, and thought Vincent and Angelo weren't very interesting characters. Fair enough, and I've got no quibbles with anything she says (I mean, most of it is personal aesthetic, and dude, not only is she entitled to her aesthetic and her opinion, I fully support her having it.) Except there's one assumption that rubs me the wrong way on a personal and political level, rather than an artistic one.**** There's a way she phrases something that echoes a construction a couple of other reviewers have also used--the SCIFI.com reviewer in particular. What I'm talking about is the attempts I've seen to define the novel as slash, or yaoi, or something, because one plot element is a m/m love story, kind of bothers me. *****
It's just a love story.
There are two of them in the book.
One ends better than the other.
That's all. It doesn't, to my mind, need to be categorized any differently because one of the love stories is same-sex and the other is opposite-sex.
Yanno, when I said earlier that some of my books have sex scenes and others don't, I was maybe a little disingenuous. Because I don't write romances, really* at least, not in the HEA sense. But I think every novel length book I've written contains some kind of love story. A love story isn't a romance, in a technical sense.
I was bothered by the assumption that the Jenny books were some sort of polemic for polyamory, and I'm bothered by this description of Carnival as slash. Not because I have any problem with homosexual erotica. But I dunno, if two page-long m/m sex scenes turn a 120,000 word book into slash, then that's suspiciously close, to me, to the "one drop" criteria of determining race. And it seems to me to reveal a pretty profound heteronormative assumption--and I suspect it's a societal assumption rather than one that's particular to these two readers. Because I think if Vincent had been a girl, say, and there were as much relationship content in the book as there is, nobody would be calling it a romance.
But, yanno. I'm guess I had better get used to it, as I knew when I was writing it that people were going to worry at that particular thread, and Whiskey & Water is going to get Teh Gay on people too**. (OMG! LESBIANS!)
...okay, so those lesbians are the only sane and healthy couple I've ever written. And all the actual smut in the book is hetsmut.
****Well, I mean, I think Angelo and Vincent are interesting people, especially in comparison to Lesa and each other. Their sexuality doesn't have much to do with why I find them interesting, though. I like the ways in which all three of them hide and reveal themselves.***
*****And god, I Spy slash? Oh, god, no. The concept of Bill Cosby with his pants off is a little too much like finding out your grandparents had sex for me.
*a few things come closer than others--I mean, okay, "Follow Me Light" is a Lovecraftian category romance. But I'm using the romance tropes to dissect some of the ickier racist implications in Lovecraft.
**although not as much as Ink & Pen will. Or, dog help us, A Companion to Wolves. And the Eddas. La.
***and I'm still really sad I didn't get to make Angelo eat a caterpillar. Because I was gonna, and it was really the worst thing I could think of to do to him.
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Comments
I take it this would have happened during the,ah, jungle sequence, yes?
I really wanted to. But he just wasn't out there long enough.
Zing.
*Although, to be precise, I have a kink for any kind of smoochies. Does it stop being a kink then?
Though I'm bemused that het relationships are just standard plot while same-sex relationships are kink. Meh.
See?
I have kinks, personally. ;-)
Normally, I would say that people's kinks are their own business. And yanno, I have no problem with there being I Spy slash in the world. But please God don't make me think about Bill Cosby with his pants off.
You see, neither David McCallum nor Robert Vaughn have that "America's grandfather" air about them. Neither of them did Picture Pages with me when I was a kid, yanno?
Like, I suspect the kids fifteen years younger than me will have a similar reaction to the idea of Levar Burton with his pants off.
As for the other--dude, I have *published* Man From UNCLE slash. And gotten a Year's Best Honorable Mention for it, in fact. "Botticelli," which is in The Chains that you Refuse.
Yanno, actually, since I suspect that the actors themselves were working pretty hard to give the impression that Napoleon and Illya were More Than Just Good Friends (I've at least heard them joke about it in interviews), I would have to say that Man from UNCLE slash is, well.... probably not the sort of thing anybody should complain about with a straight face.
That is all, thank you.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Well, if it helps any, I'm pretty sure my grandparents weren't even CONDIERING your needs at the time.
*grins, ducks, runs for bus*
I'm going to go commune with my TV boyfriends and girlfriend on Criminal Minds now, thank you.
That's the point of slash. It is not a synonym for "homosexual."
I think the problem may be that there's been so much attention paid to the slash scene right now that it seems hip or trendy or something.
Bleh.
Yes. In the much same way that the presence of "Girls Gone Wild" in the world means (to some) that all queer girls are "just trying to be trendy." And the assumption's offensive in both cases, IMO.
But okay, let me look at why I said slash. I played fast and loose with the term; sloppy writing deserves to be called down and examined.
I used the term because the specific relationship seemed extraneous and self-indulgent. To you, this love affair mattered; the story required it, you wanted to write it, that's who these characters were. To me it did not matter. And to me slash is self-indulgent an awful lot of the time. Thus, the shorthand for "You wrote a love affair, but I didn't feel it and I didn't go there with you as a reader." I think now it's because I wasn't invested in either Vincent or Angelo.
Would I have said fic if it had been a male/female pairing that I didn't particularly buy into? No, I have to say that probably would not have occured to me. I wouldn't have. So I'm guilty of using the term disparagingly in regards to a same sex relationship in fiction.
Damn, I hate finding out I'm a jerk. My apologies.
(I also can't imagine B&I working without Seeker and Whiskey's relationship or Elaine & Keith's relationship, to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.)
Sorry it didn't work for you, however. (I'm not going to treat you to my list of reasons why I did it that way, because yanno, nothing stupider than writers arguing with critics. *g*)
But yeah, yanno, they came that way.
And, in fairness, I was just blogging about Robert Culp's shoulders. *g* But he didn't do Picture Pages with me when I was a kid.
I will say this: I didn't care all that much about the two main guys, true, but I still absolutely had to read the whole book. Those relationships had to be there; I only thought they didn't because I didn't know how to express why one relationship didn't work for me. Really, because I don't know how to express myself very well about fiction, I think.
Anyway, Lesa is too, but she's got the relationships with the kids to crack her open. Vincent and Angelo only have each other--and eventually Lesa.
And frankly, neither one of them are nice men. Angelo's a classic borderline personality, and Vincent's about one step of empathy away from being a very well-socialized sociopath. *g* It makes them challenging to identify with.
but you know damned well that i have a mirroring/symmetry kink in writing, so go ahead and ignore me.
Also, there's absolutely no reason for them to do some spoilery things they do unless each one of them is as important to the other as their ideology is.
Then I'll know what you're talking about.
[1]okay, I do know that the answer is, when a woman's writing them. I do know what people sometimes mean by saying that a canonical relationship has a slashy vibe, but I think a good half of the time or more, all they mean is that a woman wrote it.
When the book with the hot girl on girl action comes out, I wonder what people will say.
And then there's the one with the girly lavender strap on.
I strongly suspect that you're right.
If there's one thing that drives me spare (and there are, in fact, several), it's that automatic hetero/male assumption that leads people to ask things like "Why did you make the therapist bisexual?" or "Why did you make the judge a woman?"
I recently wrote something which included the line: "The doctor meant well, but she had no idea what things were really like out here." Someone actually called me on the fact that I had used the 'wrong pronoun'. When I explained that "she" referred to the doctor, I was told that I should've made it clear that I was talking about a female doctor, because otherwise the sentence didn't make sense.
Why am I supposed to write silly things like "female doctor" and "female judge", when no one would ever expect you to say "She went before the male judge"? I think it just shows the underlying gender bias that still exists.
Of course, things like the fact that The Discovery Channel Store has different gift suggestion lists for boys and girls don't really help much either.
::bounces::
I can't wait for these to come out in hard copy! (Kink, moi? *mwah!*)
I have Carnival. I have not read it yet - saving it for Xmas holiday downtime - but I have it. I fully intend to enjoy it, love stories and all. *g*
I wrote a short story for a workshop once that had two women kissing in it, a scene that was all of a half-page long, and I swear nobody could get past that kiss. It wasn't even a sexy kiss! I couldn't get anyone to talk about the story as a whole or whether it worked. They were all fascinated and disturbed by THE LESBIAN SCENE. And it wasn't even a freakin' lesbian scene. Two women kissing once does not equal two lesbians, a fact I could not seem to get across to anyone. *Sigh*
Well, anyway, I didn't read your Jenny books as some kind of push for polyamory. I thought you were being imaginative when it came to human relationships in the book on ALL fronts. And I appreciate that.