Selling the genders to each other

There's a chain of restaurants called Twin Peaks, and their major advertising point seems to be their waitresses, who have to fit within a very narrow ranges of measurements, including weight and bust size. (my wife confirmed that the first time we ate there, asking our server) We've been there twice now, and both times I was surprised by how good the food is.

The décor got us talking, as most things do. What, we wondered, would a a restaurant focused on the opposite demographic look like? If someone wants to lure in the average Jane Q. Public, what do they use as bait? A catchy name, to start off with. Maybe 'Brawn.' That's short, easy to remember, and lets you know what you're in for. How about the servers? Men, of course, but where Hooters and Twin Peaks each have standard uniforms, Claudia and I thought a little variety would be in order. After all, when you're castle-building, you may as well go in for the deluxe model with all the frills.

We came up with some good candidates, like a lumberjack (a direct steal from the ladies around us at the time), a stereotypical brawny Scott in a kilt, your classic Hollywood barbarian, and a sampling of the different types of gladiators that the ancient Romans used to organize for fights in the local arena. So far, so good.

We were pretty clear on what our target market was, your average straight woman and your average gay man, and part of my interest in the conversation was getting a better idea of how to write stories that have appeal across the gender lines. I've had good reactions from women to my stories, but understanding exactly why person XX liked story GB is something I need to be better at. Um, did you just mutter, 'Control freak?' Where on earth did you get that idea?

But halfway through a dish of queso, I started having some doubts. The generic concept is so obvious, why hadn't someone come up with it before? A quick Google search for 'Male version' popped up with 'Male version of Hooters' as the second option. There's lots of discussion on the topic, loads of jokes, and even a Youtube video of a skit done by a comedy troupe. But no websites for open businesses.

Further discussion followed. I offered the observation that men seem to be more visually oriented, and hence the constant sight of lovely ladies is more incentive to come spend their money than the reverse would be for women. I was told that my observation is outdated, and a bit of minor research done later suggests that this idea has been called into question recently. Then the conversation moved into an uncomfortable area, and places like that are where most of my stories come from.

Maybe both men and women are equally connected to the input from our eyes. But there's connection, and then there's comfort. Imagine: it's late at night, on a deserted street in a non-residential neighborhood, when a man and a woman pass each other on the sidewalk. Just as they're side by side, one gives the other a smile that says, 'I'm really enjoying looking at you.' If the man smiles at the woman, is this the opening scene for a romantic comedy about love at first sight, or for a very dark thriller about infatuation and madness? How about if the woman smiles at the man?

Of course you can't tell. Each setting could go either way. But if you know this book or movie was written by some high-school dropout who's never taken a writing class in his life, which would you expect? More to the point, if you're the man in our scenario, would you give that look if you knew the woman was armed? Ladies, if you were in that real-life situation, would you want to be armed?

Classic models about desire and gender are being reexamined, but a very ugly truth has been more or less constant since we started hanging out in groups to fight off the lions and other meat-eaters. Men are more likely to be a threat to women than vice-versa, usually that threat is linked with our sex drives, and those facts are more well-known among women than men. I've got my own thoughts on the first two and believe me when I say that sooner or later you'll see them in print. But that third one, in my opinion, is the most relevant. If you can't see how that's relevant to our hypothetical restaurant, ponder this. Would it be on the mind of the very last customer of the day? The woman who's alone in a building with twenty well-built men who have had to smile and be nice for the last eight or more hours?

Now take all that, and apply it to whatever you want to do. Think about it when you're writing a story for an anthology with a female target audience, or a screenplay for a cable channel that focuses on women's issues, or if you just want to make your female characters seem like they're not just guys who put on make-up at the beginning of the day.

Also, I do want to specify one thing. This is a blog post, and as such it's a focused discussion on a particular topic. My full feelings on subjects like this are very involved, and constantly evolving. As this topic is more sensitive than a nitroglycerin milkshake, please don't assume I've given you a complete opinion.

Still writing.

Relaoding

Welcome, 2015! Come on in and make yourself at home. Never mind the mess. The last tenant was a bit lax on the housecleaning. We've got plenty of space for improvements, built in connections for new ideas and more power, and I think that back room would be perfect for new achievements. Oh, wait. You didn't bring any baggage, did you?

So less then a week into this new year, I've already got a lot on my plate. I want to touch up Roja, then stick it on a hook and toss it into those murky waters to catch an agent. I have 'In the Dark' making rounds, including to the fantastic person who did most of the proofing on Roja. There's one short story getting rewritten, and another getting written again because the original was on paper only and that paper is somewhere in nowhere land. Oh, and I need to finish The Red Man Burning this year, too.

Aside from just being psychotic and ambitious, there's a point to all this, of course. This is what I want to make my living at. To do that, I need to produce. Production = Money. Money = me riding around the house on a gyro-balanced unicycle on Monday mornings instead of going to my current job. Well, in theory anyway.

That's the point.

Side note, good news. It looks like 'Penny Dreadful' is going to be returning this year. Chills and shivers for everyone. Possible good news? There is talk of a Space:1999 remake. I will reuse what I posted on Facebook when the subject came up.

“Everyone repeat after me: Please don't suck.”

Writing, and will still be writing when this year closes.

No news like bad news

When you create horrible events and want your poor, unsuspecting reader to gasp and shudder, you need them to know the people who have all those terrible things happen to them. Watching 'Alien,' we cringe when the helmet is cut away and we still can't see John Hurt's face, and we squirm in our seats when that very Freudian alien pops out of his chest. Why? Because we've spent the last thirty or so minutes getting to know him. Yes, his best scenes come after the facehugger drops off. But by the time that 'leathery object' opens up, we at least have a good idea of whether or not Kane would be getting a Christmas card from us, and whether or not we could kill some time with him over a bottle of beer and a conversation about politics.

That's part of how we get involved in a story. Relating to characters, seeing and understanding how they relate to other characters. It's not the only way, just the most well-established. There are one-person plays, and movies and stories with only one character. But even most of those have phone calls or letters or whatever so that we know that our hero is not the last human on earth. Maybe one of the great masters can do it, but fortunately for me there aren't enough of them to give the rest of us regular competition.

That caring is important, because it's what keeps us reading the story or watching the film. It may or may not be set up as such, but the tale is a recording of that character. A slice of their life, and maybe the last one.

You can argue with me, but my humble opinion is that bad news connects us with characters like good news never will. Most of us achieve a kind of equilibrium in our lives, and if we're climbing whatever ladder we're on, we climb it one rung at a time, according to plan. To us, 'normal' is either continuity or slow progress. When we're introduced to Bob and his wife Jane, who are getting started building a life for themselves, we get to know them pretty quickly. New beginnings are a blank slate, one that we often read our on lives into.

In a book or a movie, when someone wins the lottery or has their rich uncle leave them millions, most of us scream 'plot device.' Now, everything is a plot device, because if it isn't, it gets edited out (or it should). But if our heroes move into the creepy mansion not because they inherited it, but because Dad lost his job or Mom is blacklisted for blowing the whistle on the local PTA's cocaine fundraiser, and it's the only place they can afford, then we understand that they're having hard times, and hard times are something we can all relate to. We can give a family who's in a middle of a run of bad luck some sympathy, because we hope that someone would give us a bit of sympathy when we find ourselves in that same situation. A person or family living high on the hog only makes most of us feel envious, which is why you don't see a lot of millionaire protagonists. I remember the hero in 'Bag of Bones' was worth quite a lot, but King is a lot better at this than most of us, and even he had to kill off the man's wife.

Maybe part of it is selfish, too. Empathizing for people in need makes us feel good about ourselves, but envy is a false comfort that only makes us colder. Everyone is a hero in their own mind, and the good guys don't wish a bus would run over their lucky neighbor. Only flesh and blood people do that.

This isn't strictly a random post. Some people that I'm close with decided to call it quits recently. Again, it's a bit selfish, but it seems there's a little less happiness in the world right now. Time moves on, and life changes. It doesn't ask how we feel about the changes, either.

Boy, sounds like the perfect set up for a horror movie, doesn't it? Maybe I'll write something and put one of the characters in a similar situation.

Picking up the stick again

Okay, the break's over. Time to hit the keys again. Way back when, when I was stationed at Camp Lejeune, I used to head to the base library on weekends. We didn't get every weekend off, and even during the ones we did get off someone had to sit in the duty office and answer the phone. But when I could, I spent twenty or so Saturday or Sunday afternoon minutes walking across the base to that one building that smelled of age and paper, and found the dusty table where a single typewriter sat. What makes me uncomfortable is the fact that I'm not sure whether or not it was the first typewriter I ever used. I wrote a small game module when I was younger, based on the ridiculous exploits of the gaming group I belonged to in middle school, and I have a half memory that it was typed and a half memory that it wasn't. But that old chunk of metal on base is what I think about when I picture typing. Carefully feeding each sheet of paper in, hitting the lever when you came to the end of a line, and keeping a few pieces of correction paper close by and living with the fact that the whited-out letters never completely covered up when you hit a 'w' instead of a 'q.' You couldn't just touch the keys and expect the lever to make it all the way up the paper. You had to pound on those fuckers, like you were Bruce Lee rupturing some villain's spleen by poking his earlobe. That's how I write to this day, wearing the letters off the keys of my keyboard before I need to replace my computer.

It's time to get back to treating this like my primary business.

Sort of fitting that I'm currently reading something from Stephen King. I like his stories, and they roll across your brain at a smooth, easy pace that's so comforting that you don't notice when they pick up speed. You can sit down to read a few pages before bed and when you finally close the back cover you have to say, 'Oh hell.' Not because the story was that good, which it (probably) was, but because you now have about twenty minutes to sleep before it's time to get up and go to work.

I have also dragged my poor wife into the dark world where the series, 'Penny Dreadful' takes place. I bought the first season a while back, and we finally sat down to watch it together. One episode became two, which then became three and 'Oh hell, I need to get to bed.' I don't expect the rest of the season to last much longer.

So it's back to horror, back to fun things like mental isolation, subtle xenophobia, and what the devil might look like as he tries to seduce a medieval nun. Time to think about bad childhoods and the cold-blooded bastards they sometimes produce. This is the now of the whisper in the dark when you're alone, and the dying sigh at sunset. Know what?

It's good to be back.

Gobble gobble. It's done.

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Now all the remaining turkeys can come out of hiding, weep over the dead, and start plotting their revenge. Sure, what do you think they do all the rest of the year? Turkeys have long memories, too.

Claudia and I had our traditional pasta, as neither of us really wanted to go through the ritual of bird immolation. I like to think that the pilgrims would have approved.

Oh, and we also shared a bottle of wine. In celebration. At about two in the afternoon, I typed two words at the bottom of a file that I've been pounding on for over a year. The End.

What did I do then? I cackled like a junior mad scientist who's just invented his first death ray. That was one of those moments when I wish I owned a camera that could have been pointing at my face, just so I could see the sort of dazed, manic expression that I was probably wearing. Then I wandered around the house, probably working on odd chores like loading the dishwasher or putting a load of laundry in, though I can't day for sure.

Then came time to print a copy for Claudia to read. I've been holding off replacing my printer cartridge, even though the few times I've had to print something I get a pop up saying something like, 'Warning! Anti-matter explosion immanent!' I got the first fifty pages of 'In The Dark' out before a newer, simpler message appeared. 'End of cartridge life.' My mental rendition of “Taps' turned into the theme from 'Psycho' when I took out the old cartridge and compared it to the new one that's been sitting on the floor still in it's box, collecting dust for a while. They didn't match. Not even close. Remember that crazed laugh? Picture it turning into the guttural scream that the Predator releases as it clamps it's wound shut. I feel like a fool for having to admit that I didn't realize the printer uses a hard plastic 'sleeve.' The sleeve pops put of the printer, and the cartridge pops out of the sleeve. The problem wasn't really solved, because it never existed in the first place. I had to replace the cartridge on my old one so many times that my hands knew how to do it all by themselves. Time marches on.

What now? Now I beg, borrow and steal all the friends I can find that are willing to beta-read for me. Now I put a bit of extra polish on Roja and look for an agent. Now I get my website built.

I've also started rewriting a short story that I've had on the back burner for a while, a really nasty one. I've also started writing my next book, 'The Red Man' burning.

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Please get out and vote. It may not seem like it matters, but low turnout just makes each one that gets cast matter that much more.

Spooks' night out

So another Halloween has come and gone. I hit the hardware store the day before for some wood and paint, and one of those megastores that pop up this time of year for a kind of fake flaming cauldron that I'm going to be putting to good use for years, and did some minor redecorating to the outside of the house. The day started out warm, which to my mind is not really a good thing for trick or treating. Most costumes involve a layer or two of material, and down here heat builds up on a body a bit faster than in other places. Luckily it cooled down, and soon there was a nice breeze.

Sadly, there was a pretty thin crop of kids this year. I have a suspicion as to what caused it, because last weekend Claudia had a booth open at a convention up in Irving, and due to the panicked attitude people have about a certain virus, attendance was light, a lot of the guests canceled, and the ones who didn't cancel adapted a 'no-contact' policy. They wouldn't pose with people for photographs. Yes they would still sign autographs, but the people paying good money had to select the pictures from pre-made stacks, and wouldn't get to handle them until after the guest had signed them. I can understand caution, but that's over reacting.

Makes the fact that I dressed up as a plague doctor seem tame, doesn't it? No? Oh well.

Still writing.