Now, the vast majority of people who get offended by stuff are reasonable, helpful people who really would like the world to be a better place for everyone, who are serious about training people to identify stereotypes, and who are a benefit to all of us. And then there's the 3 % who are professionally offended, and by whom you can really never do anything right, and who will use their pet cause as a bludgeon to demonstrate as much drama as possible anywhere.

It seems to me that one of the major problems we find in dealing with racist/sexist/looksist/queerist/classist/ismist assumptions in fiction (assuming for the moment that we are the sort of persons who would care to deal with these issues instead of sweeping them under our privilege) is that in some ways, there is no win. In other words, the accusation of (x)ism is enough. It's indefensible. Because what happens is not generally a statement of "I found x element of y work offensive because I saw it making these common genderist assumptions," but "X element of y work *is* offensive because of--"

And against that, there's nothing one can say. Other than "I'm sorry my work offended you," which is nice and all, but still winds up not making the person who made the accusation any happier, and, in the long term, involves a silencing of the artist. Because she's sure as hell not going to try to write a black vigilante drag queen vampire again after THAT shit. No way!

And the counterproblem is that the people who are set in their bigotry are not going to be put off by outcry. They're bigots. Sexist men do not care what women think. Homophobes do not care what dykes think.

The people who are going to wind up being silenced are the ones who mean well and are trying. Perhaps trying ineffectually, and needing guidance. Perhaps trying hard, and attracting the Professionally Offended. Perhaps just wanting to be told they are good people, which is unfortunately common. (And of course it's not about being Good People, or getting what oyceter calls your gold star for not being a bigot. It's about addressing a systemic problem.)

And I think I have a partial solution.

The clearest example of how this solution could work that I can think of off the top of my head is the so-called magical Negro, which is a phrase used to describe a situation where the (white) protagonist has a (black) mentor figure who is inevitably snuffed in the third reel. (You may substitute the Other of your choice in the magical Negro role, above: Apache shaman, wise old Jew, creepy witch woman, Inuit medicine man, cute nonthreatening gay best friend... you know the character, right?)

And I know exactly how that stereotype/archetype got established. It's because some poor schmuck of a scriptwriter or an author looked at their cast and went "God damn, that's a lot of honkeys. Let's fire one of these crackers and find a sympathetic role for a black character."

And the main sympathetic non-protagonist role is, of course, the mentor.

Who inevitable gets killed off or incapacitated in formula fiction, no matter what color he is, because he hast to be got out of the way so the protagonist can protag for the last half hour of the movie. (If you were a Wesley Snipes movie, you might colorswap your participants.)

In other words, the difference between Ben Kenobi and a magical Negro is that Ben is not Other to everybody else in the film.

And that's also the solution, right there. Because if you only have one of something, it automatically becomes a poster child. You only have one black guy in the movie? Oh, man, we know he's gonna die. Same thing with one queer guy (Heroic gays always die! It's a law! It's how you know they're heroic!). One woman is the love interest, and she will either stand by her man or betray him. And she might also die.

But you know, you start getting enough of those Others into things, and they become People. If the protagonist is also black, somehow that black-mentor-gets-killed thing seems less... well, icky. And more like maybe the author has been watching too many Hollywood films and needs to branch out a little to some new plotlines.

So you have a cop shop in your book. What if you don't look around and go, Hmm, black cop, WASP cop, Polish cop, Latino cop, maybe an Asian woman because everybody knows they're tough. What about two Asian women? What about two Asian women, a black woman, three Latinos (one Cubano and a couple of Mexicans?), a couple of Polacks, and two interchangeable Minnesota blonds that not even the duty sergeant can tell apart? Throw in two queers! Have them not be sleeping together! It happens! It really happens!

Real life, in other words, doesn't look like a "Three guys walk into a bar" joke.

So why does so much fiction?

I am mighty. Okay, the laundry did not get done. But the kitchen is nearly clean, and the hallway is cleaned, more or less, and the old desk is in the basement. And the area behind the old desk, which was a terrifying morass of dust, cat hair, cabling, and cookie crumbs, has been cleaned out.

Which means that I had to take apart Phred (just as well, because the inside of his case looked like a dust bunny farm) and then put him back together again. My favorite game of all: "Which AC adaptor do you suppose goes to which component, now?"

Anyway, he's back together and working (though I am writing to you now on Ethel, because Phred is sort of set up around the area where his new house will be as of tomorrow, and thus not very convenient to work upon.)

Okay, and neither printer is set up yet, nor are the desk lamps, because I need the desk in place to do that. But still.

Ahh, cabling. I love the part where you get everything hooked up and tied down, check to make sure that the mouse and keyboard cables are in the right place, push the case back out of the way and... discover that the mouse and keyboard cables have somehow migrated under all the other cables. Amazing.

Also, I am growing components. I have discovered that I am up a cross-connect cable, an audio micro cable, and an AC adaptor. tanaise says this means I should leave it and see if a set of speakers appears next.... pity, because what I could really use is a flatbed scanner.

Sometime this week I plan to do some real spring cleaning, and like scrub the walls and clean out closets and things. But for now, I think I have accomplished enough for one Sunday. Now I am going to play guitar and do some math and watch I Spy.

And tomorrow, I will have like, all real furniture.

I'm not sure I know how to handle that.

---

Put a twenty dollar gold piece on my watch chain
So the Lord will know I died standing pat

So, not too long ago, I outed myself here as learning-disabled (I was diagnosed with discalculia when I was 21, after many many awful years trying to brute force my way through math with varying levels of success.) Since one of my projects for adulthood is patching the holes in a formal education that could best be described as spotty (like most of my family, I'm pretty much self-educated: though I did spend four years in college, it didn't go well, for a variety of reasons such as lack of support, lack of emotional maturity, and Unresolved Personal Issues), I just bought an algebra workbook and self-teaching guide. 

The guitar study is also part of this process. Once upon a time, I was something of a promising young polymath. And then there were ten fifteen twenty Bad Years, and I feel like--other than the last five years of writing--I've overall wasted myself. Oddly enough, apparently a side effect of more or less finally having my shit together is the urge to do more with my life than I have been. (I've also been thinking of seeing what it would take to renew my long long lapsed CT domestic violence crisis counselor cert, and seeing if Interval House would take me back as a volunteer a couple of days a month, but I'm not sure if I'm emotionally ready for that yet.)

(Not that writing science ficion and fantasy is easy, mind you. But it is focused.) And I am bloody well going to get them back. What's the point in being allegedly multi-gifted if all you do with it is sit on your ass and eat bonbons?

This sudden urge to OMG LEARN THINGS again also tells me something I suspected, which is that I'm reaching a point with my writing where it's no longer productive to bend my entire will upon it, but rather that I need to practice my art mindfully and follow where it takes me. Which means, well, I need something else to sic the brain squirrels on.

Besides, if I keep doing the same stuff over and over again, I am going to keep writing the same stuff over and over again, and that is so not on.

So. I will be attempting to teach myself algebra, and if that works we'll see how we do with geometry, trig, and--I shudder even to name it--calc.*** And when I mentioned it to cristalia, she double-dog dared me to blog about it.*

Ahem.

We'll see how this goes. The eventual goal is to get far enough into calc to make more sense of astrophysics and geology than I currently can, but don't expect those results next month.****

Eventually, I'm also going to have to sign up for those language classes I keep talking about.**

---

*the "bearmalion" tag is her fault.
**A conversational French refresher, dammit, and I do want to learn Russian. I've become monolingual through disuse, and it annoys me.
***because if you aren't growing, you're being cut back.
****this also may mean less fucking around on the internets, which can only be good for me in the long run.

In the past week, the windshield wipers on my truck quit, the laptop kicked the bucket in no uncertain terms, and just now, in the tub, the soap dish on the shower wall literally came off in my hand when I was tucking my scrubby into it.

Dear Internet:

Is there anybody you'd like me to slap, just to see if something falls off them?

I'll get on it right after I call the management company.

Love,
Entropy Lass

How is it that my apartment continues to get dirtier when nobody is in it and all the windows are closed?

---

NB: I never mind when people disagree with me, or comment negatively on my work, or my blogging habits, but please don't do it anonymously. That annoys the hell out of me.

Anything somebody can't say to my face, I don't want to hear. And I will turn off anonymous commenting if it continues. Which will only annoy the people who don't have an lj ID and do sign their posts.

I mean, I probably won't have much of a response if you really dislike something I do, other than, "Sorry it wasn't to your taste, please feel free to do better or to avail yourself of the work of another writer," because I am over here doing my best and falling on my face as honestly as I know how, and there are very few ways to politely answer public criticism--but I am always happy to answer honest questions.

---

Progress notes for 20 April 2006:

Undertow

New Words: 1024
Total Words: 7,206
Pages: 36
Deadline: August 1
Reason for stopping: Spooks break

7,206 / 100,000 (7.0%)

Stimulants: chamomile and Red Zinger tea.
Exercise: still recuperating, no exercise
Mail: nomail
Today's words Word don't know:  eeled, unaugmented
Words I'm surprised Word do know: n/a
Mean Things: 'splosions. air pressure change. ear poppy ow!
Tyop du jour: n/a
Darling du jour:

"It could have been a nuke."

"My eyes hadn't melted."

Books in progress: Wendy Moore, The Knife Man; K.M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck
Interesting tidbit of the day: truepenny on Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Exactly. Here's an old post of mine on writing koans. And a post on unpacking "show, don't tell."
Other writing-related work: Finished the Chains galleys last night