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Archives for : Inspiration
“The flame might be gone, but the fire remains
And I’m stuck on a path to my own ruin
Did you see me behind the wheel?
Did you see me behind the wheel?
And the flame might be gone, but the fire…
-“Remembered” by The Dear Hunter
Sometime in the middle of last year, I heard the premise for American Fiction (2023) and thought it sounded like an absolutely genius concept completely relevant to not just my experiences as an author, but the experiences of a whole bunch of POC that I personally know. Lo and behold, upon viewing it, they knock most of it out of the park (I don’t like the final act, personally; I think it doesn’t feel cohesive and satisfying enough to end what was a REALLY good story in the first and second acts). Enough that it’s why I felt like I wanted to blow the dust off my blog for an entry. I think this movie is going to give us a lot of cud to chew as a society, and that it’s definitely a conversation worth having among black authors in particular.
Let’s get into it. Before we start, spoilers for American Fiction (2023). At the time of this post, it is still in theaters so if you want to get the juicy details, I recommend you pop out to a theater. Its theatrical run was extended thanks to the Oscar nominations.
American Fiction is about a struggling black professor named Thelonious “Monk” Ellis who is vexed by the fact that his work is actually quite good, but it doesn’t sell because it’s complex and not palatable to the masses. After a lot of misfortune, he gets the idea to write a book that’s both pandering to urban fiction readers and is a middle finger to the industry that puts out books that basically (in his opinion) reinforce harmful black stereotypes and sends it to his publisher under a different pseudonym, laughing that he will get reviled reactions to writing tripe. Well, the opposite happens! Immediately, a huge publisher says they want the book and to offer him friggin’ $750,000 for it. Monk is gobsmacked, but since his sister just died and his mother was just diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, he reluctantly decides to take the offer. Things get even more complicated when the book blows up as a number one bestseller and he gets a movie deal, despite his chagrin and embarrassment, and he struggles to reconcile the fact that the worst thing he’s ever written is now his most successful book.
So, in my family, my older brother and have a running joke about the fact that I am a fairly good writer (or at least I feel that I might be one; none of the good writers ever know it or believe it even when given evidence) but I make nothing off my books because I don’t write to market, and if I just sold out and wrote bad smut or books for basic bitches, I’d be a millionaire.
You can see why I went right out to see this film as a result.
American Fiction’s biting sarcasm and relentless exposure of the faults in the publishing world and the black community is definitely going to be remembered by all relevant parties. This film shines a light on something that the average person, regardless of race, ethnicity, and nationality, probably doesn’t know. Way too many people don’t know how the writing and publishing world works, and this film does. It truly gets it. It gets what black writers go through and it gets what the mainstream publishing world sounds like. Whoever wrote it definitely has either experienced this crap directly or is intimate with someone who does, because everything in the film proceeds exactly how it does in real life, for the most part.
And that’s what got me thinking.
If I had to sum up American Fiction (2023) in a word, I’d say it’s about responsibility.
So in the story, one of the reasons Monk decides to write the most base and pandering piece of crap novel is after having to endure watching a book seemingly just like it blow up by a black female author named Sindra. It inadvertently puts him on edge every time he has to be somewhere and see her book, given that the book just panders to every black stereotype since that is the genre expectation for urban fiction. Finally, in the third act, he and the author are in the same room and he asks her why she considered his book (keep in mind, she has no idea he wrote it) pandering, yet hers doesn’t count. She fires back that she’s writing to market and that it’s not her fault if white people or other people think that all black people behave the way they do in urban fiction. The film is basically examining personal responsibility as an author and in particular, as a black author.
And I can say for certain that is going to ring through the halls of history as relevant for decades to come.
The film has a very intelligent argument and I appreciate the living hell out of it being in a big production movie that is now an Oscar nominee. Now, don’t get me wrong—fuck the Oscars. Yeah, I said it. They’re archaic, antiquated, and utter crock. Most of the time, if a good movie gets an Oscar nom, it’s a fucking coincidence. The Academy in no way is interested in awarding the “best” movie anything; this is a room full of people that wanna be pandered to, and the harder you pander, the more they’ll pat you on the back, which is why damn near every year is the same fucking movies getting nominated. It’s aggravating as hell and it’s why they are continuously losing the public’s attention. People are tired of unknown garbage getting attention, especially since the Academy is who’s being lambasted by the very same film they nominated. The Academy doesn’t want to hear shit from POC unless it’s a story about their pain. Every once in a blue moon, you’ll get competent and joyful films winning like Everything Everywhere All at Once, but largely if POC are nominated, especially black people, it’s because it’s talking about our pain, not our triumph, and the Academy seems to think the only relevant stories we can tell are about our pain, which is exactly what is discussed in this film, and it’s handled rather well.
But I do take a departure from Sindra’s argument.
Sindra’s argument boils down to “people enjoy what I write and I’m not wrong to write to that market; it’s the responsibility of white people to not believe nothing but stereotypes.” That’s a good, solid argument…but I disagree. I understand the argument completely and I think I agree to an extent, but my problem with what’s discussed in the film is more of a long term, wider scale problem than an isolated one.
The reason that I dislike that type of writing is that it reinforces negative stereotypes about black people that affects things outside of just the reading world. What I’m concerned about is the long term effects of writing that kind of fiction. Sindra is correct; it is the responsibility of society to not reinforce negative stereotypes, but I argue that authors hold some of that responsibility too. It is for this very reason that you see a lot of popular white authors either never writing black people (even if the character LIVES IN THE MIDDLE OF FUCKING CHICAGO NOT POINTING FINGERS OR ANYTHING BUT YOU KNOW WHO THE FUCK YOU ARE) out of fear that they’ll “get something wrong” and offend POC or they seldom write them and cheat readers out of what could be an interesting character and story. If these white authors don’t have POC in their lives, first of all, that’s sad and they need to get their shit together, but second of all, they feel like they’re too scared to write POC because all they’ve ever seen are Tyler Perry movies and Worldstar and Eric Jerome Dickey books, so they have zero frame of reference for the black experience, so they skip it. While that’s an isolated problem, it’s much bigger than that. The problem I have with Sindra’s argument is that when you endorse this type of writing, there are real life consequences.
I’ll give you an example. Let’s say there is a job opening for a front desk clerk at a dentist’s office. The hiring manager has two candidates that are the same age, have the same level of education, and have the same level of experience needed for the job. Both of them have great interviews, too. One is black and the other is white. For the sake of the argument, let’s say this hiring manager is white. Now, here he sits with two resumes of identical people. How does he make that decision? Well, if this hiring manager has seen nothing but Tyler Perry movies and reality TV shows, what are the chances he starts thinking about his black potential candidate as being a problem? More than likely, it’s gonna creep into his head and influence the decision, so he passes on the black candidate based on falsified evidence of what black people are like. That’s my problem with Sindra’s argument. This is of course a small situation and I’m sure that black candidate doesn’t want to work for someone who would turn him down based on him believing an incorrect stereotype, but that’s my point.
Opportunities can be taken away from black creatives based on negative stereotypes. And that isn’t just black people, too—people of color in general have to struggle with the fact that the white population is still in control of most of America’s working parts, and so we have to contend with extra stress and problems that they don’t necessarily have based on race. This is of course not to say white people don’t have problems; of course they do, they have the same problems except for the fact that when white people act out, no one blames the entire race. And that’s what black people—and POC in general—have to contend with on a daily basis. I cannot tell you how many micro-aggressions I’ve had to endure being a black woman in the South. It’s truly maddening how differently you’re treated as a black woman in America, but the South really can get under your skin and make you frustrated with how they handle everything down here. Sindra’s argument, to me, is too idealistic. I would love to live in a world where stereotypical behavior is not viewed as blamed on an entire race of people.
But that’s not the world we live in.
Someone once said that being a woman is like ballroom dancing backwards in high heels, and it is. But I would argue being black is very similar. We can’t just be as good as our white counterparts—we have to be better in every way, and even when we are better (though to be fair, better is a very subjective term for this argument), there is still an enormous possibility that we get nowhere because the person at the gate is someone who looks at us and sees nothing but negative stereotypes. We have to work ten times harder for the same reward that would’ve been considered on normal merit had we not been a POC. That’s why I don’t agree that there is no responsibility with us as black writers. I think we have to pay attention to what we’re putting out there because even if it seems like no one cares and no one’s watching, someone certainly is and they can unknowingly affect the outcome of a black person’s life based on their experiences. I’d love to say that we can get there as a society, but I’m not confident in our ability to understand complexities.
But that’s also what I like about the film. It is a complicated argument with plenty of support for both sides and I love that someone wanted to have this conversation at all. This is exactly what all low-to-mid-level black authors go through at some point, especially the indie and small press crowd. I certainly don’t feel negatively towards urban fiction; who the hell am I to judge? If y’all saw my Browser History on AO3, you’d have plenty of stones to throw into my little glass house. But what I am saying is that I think it’s still our responsibility as black authors to think before we write something that might have a Domino effect down the line, but we also need to call out the people who make shitty decisions based on stereotypes at all times. We can’t let up on that. It’s ridiculous to sum up a whole race of people based on a 90 minute movie or a season of a reality show. We shouldn’t do it to each other and we shouldn’t do it to other races, nationalities, and ethnicities. Hell, that’s how we’ve had a resurgence of fucking Nazis in America; instead of punching them in the face, people said “we should hear them out” and now we’ve got a whole ass third of the country insane enough to storm the fucking Capitol to assassinate the Speaker of the House and the goddamn former Vice President. This. Stuff. Matters.
And yes, I know that’s a huge example for such a modest film, but that’s why I feel so strongly about the argument the movie presents. It’s surprisingly the small stuff that can make a difference in the writing world. I also think that every writer, no matter how successful, should be fostering friendships and relationships to help each other out. We are not in competition. All of us should reach down and pull the person below us on the ladder up, not pull the ladder up behind us so they can’t reach out of fear. We have to uplift if we want things to change. We have to keep having these conversations to eradicate as much of that learned hatred as possible.
And I really think films like American Fiction (2023) are how we get closer to that goal.
So thank you to everyone who had anything to do with making it. Even though I didn’t feel the ending was right, I really had a good time with the first and second acts and I hope they get to bring home the (irrelevant) gold just because it would be good for America to find out just how fucking rough it is out here for black authors.
But we persevere.
Here’s to you, American Fiction. Knock those old bastards at the Academy dead when it comes time.
Kyoko
I am happy to announce that I will be appearing on this week’s Authors’ Corner hosted by ConCarolinas TV! Please join us at 7:30pm EST on August 24th, 2023 where we will be discussing science fiction. Details are in the poster above. I look forward to seeing you all there!
Edit: ICYMI, here is the link to watch the recording on YouTube:
Looking for low cost ways to market your book? Or know someone who is? Then tune in to this free podcast interview where I discuss the best and most cost-effective ways to market your book.
Episode 61 – Book Launch on a Budget: Low/No-Cost Tips and Resources
One of my earliest memories as a child is watching Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. It came out all the way back in 1993 when I was just five years old, so I have to imagine either my parents took me or we rented it on VHS. I remember being a wide-eyed youth, precocious and probably too young to understand everything, but what I did understand was the following scene:
Even at that young an age, I was captivated by Kevin Conroy’s performance as Batman, particularly this moving scene of Bruce begging his parents to forgive him and let him out of his vow and promise because he unexpectedly fell in love. It is one of the most beautiful things ever created that relates to Batman and to Kevin Conroy.
I met Kevin Conroy at a con back in 2013. I was so nervous that my hands were shaking as I walked up to his table and greeted him. I told him that his portrayal of Batman was the definitive one for all time and that his Bruce Wayne and his Batman were figures of my own struggling mental health. Whenever I became suicidal, the only thing that would stop me from killing myself was imagining Bruce Wayne telling me to be strong and live through my trauma to be a better person and a good soldier. Kevin Conroy was visibly moved by hearing that and offered me encouragement and gracious thanks before being kind enough to take this photo with me.
Later on, I attended the panel that he had and I asked him what his performance as Batman has taught him over the years. He gave the most beautiful, eloquent answer that I’m so blessed to have witnessed:
For my entire life, Batman has been my constant. He has been my pillar of strength given that I struggle with depression and anxiety. He has been my touchstone, as odd as it sounds, and Kevin Conroy is why. He is our Batman. He is the sole embodiment of good and justice and kindness and strength and love. I loved him with all my heart and I will mourn him for the rest of my days. We were so blessed to be a part of his life, to love him and support him, to share his amazing work and the work of the DCAU team. We were so inspired by the way that he lived his life. The world has lost a beacon of light and decency. It’s so hard saying goodbye to such a good man. He lived a life that was an example of the best that a man can be and we will miss him always.
Thank you for what you’ve given us, Kevin. Thank you for giving me the strength not to end my life. Thank you for inspiring generation after generation. We love you so much.
I love you so much.
Rest well, beloved.
Ever wanted to see visual approximations of the dragons from the Of Cinder and Bone series? Here’s your chance. Each dragon also has a little factual tidbit beside the illustrations. This list includes the named and seen dragons in Books 1-4, so beware of spoilers.
This is NOT for sale and no profit will be derived from this post. All artists that I was able to identify are credited in each illustration.
Have fun!
Update 7/26/22
It’s officially been three months since the release of my new novel, Of Claws and Inferno! I’m ripping the spoiler tag off and now it’s time to meet the new dragons featured in Book Five. Peruse at your peril.
Disclaimer: Do not go any further if you have not read The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, but especially not if you have not read Book 17, Battle Ground. I mean it. You’ve been warned.
So. Y’all know I adore Karrin Murphy, right? So much so that if you literally Google the character (at the time of this post, anyway), my website shows up on the first f@#king page of results for the character. That’s how much I fervently love this character and what she’s meant to the Dresden Files and to Harry Dresden himself. It’s for that reason that in light of her untimely, stupid, unsatisfying fate in Battle Ground that I am going to take time out of putting a curse on Jim Butcher and his entire line to talk about her in depth. Because she deserves to be honored before I put this series to bed for good.
And yes, I mean that. I quit The Dresden Files thanks to Butcher’s bullshit move to unceremoniously force this incredible character out of the narrative in the most disrespectful manner possible. If you need reasons, find them here and here. Warnings for foul language. (Note: it’s also worth it to read the comment threads for the latter post. There’s a whole lot to unpack about just what in God’s name Butcher was thinking and how utterly betrayed he’s made so many of his fans feel. But I digress.)
How do I love thee, Karrin Murphy? Let me count the ways.
Back in 2014, I attended a Dragon*con panel for Jim Butcher and worked up the courage to approach the mic with a question. I asked him if he had always planned for Harry and Murphy to get together or was it something he noticed as he continued writing the series. He answered that while it’s true he never truly planned out Harry Dresden’s love life to the letter, he felt it was probably always inevitable given that even their first interaction in the first book is playground teasing. You see, Harry (at least back then) had this thing about being chivalrous and Detective Karrin Murphy was a modern feminist, so she hated it if he tried to hold the door for her. The first scene with them together is of these two full grown adults racing for the door to the crime scene and Harry getting there first to open it for her, wearing the most shit-eating grin, as this is a frequent competition between the two of them. He does it just to annoy her and that was probably the first indication that I was going to love both him and her.
It’s difficult to know where to start with why I adore Karrin Murphy. I guess in the simplest terms, Murphy is exactly the woman that I wish I could be. I honestly probably idolize her as much as Harry Dresden does. If I didn’t have a mental illness and self-confidence issues, Murphy is the kind of woman that I would aspire to be. When I think of powerful, worthwhile, well-rounded female characters, she’s always been the frontrunner. It’s not about the fact that she’s a sharpshooter and an aikido champion and a badass wielder of a holy sword—it’s that she’s all of those things, but she’s also her own person in a real sense. She knows herself. She knows Harry. She knows that he is worth protecting, so she protects him. She knows that he does so much good solving cases and preventing murders in Chicago that it’s worth it to make sacrifices for him, because he would do—and has done–the same for her in a heartbeat.
Murphy is courageous, but realistic. She’s ruthless in her pursuit of justice for her city and for the victims whose murders she has to solve, but yet she is capable of being vulnerable. She is fearless, but flawed. She is so many complicated things, but all of those things add up to an exceptionally written person. She is arguably as well written as Harry Dresden is, and that’s saying something considering how he too is a layered character with so much to offer.
I think I also love Murphy because she’s also very much like the best women in my life, like my mother, my sister-in-law, or my cousin. These are dynamic, intelligent, inspiring women who have always been those same great things that Murphy is. I’ve been lucky enough to be surrounded by positive female role models since I was a kid, so Murphy is also a comfort to me because she is so much like the family members I’ve known my whole life. One of the reasons the Harry/Murphy fans are theorizing that maybe Jim Butcher based Murphy on his first wife and the divorce made him turn on her character is because it’s shocking that a white straight male author was even capable of writing a woman this nuanced and this close to what real great women are like. It may be why she felt so real to us—maybe he was drawing directly from aspects of his own marriage and that’s why Harry and Murphy’s relationship and love felt so powerful and genuine. Maybe that’s why she was so inspiring to read, is that he really did have that influence in his life.
I love this character because she embodies all the best parts of what women have to offer. She made Harry a better man and yet that wasn’t her only role in the story; she had her own path she walked as well, but it simply ran parallel to his and it never felt like she was just a tool for him to use to accomplish a goal. Harry’s inner monologue has so many instances where he’s just in total awe of her, not in a pedestal sort of way, but in a respectful, appreciative sort of way. He can’t believe he’s lucky enough to bask in her sunlight, and he made us feel the same way about her through his narration and through their adventures together. She is such a worthwhile character that it’s why I can’t fathom why Jim Butcher would coldly and callously toss her aside in the manner that he did. I’ve read and watched enough fiction to know the difference between hitting us where it hurts for the good of the narrative and a man who has turned bitter against his own creation and decided to systematically destroy it.
For now, I guess I can just take comfort in the fact that if Murphy were real, she’d break Butcher’s arm in three places so he couldn’t write anymore f**king tripe.
I’m still hurting. Quite a bit. That’s why it took me so long to sit down and write this out. That being said, I think I owe it to Murphy in her original form to get past this and forget Jim Butcher. There’s a line in the movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang where the narration—coincidentally, the main lead’s name in that movie is also Harry—is talking about Harmony Lane’s favorite set of detective novels that inspired her to become an actress but also escape her abusive father, and the author of those books later came out and said they were bullshit and he hated them and just wrote them for the money, and the line goes, “He was just the writer.” It is possible to separate the art from the artist. I think I owe it to Murphy as this phenomenal character to not let Butcher’s bullshit choices ruin her legacy and cause me to feel this way about who she has been to me and what her love story with Harry has meant to me.
Hell, it’s what Murphy would want for me, I think.
And that damn sure is more important than one sorry ass writer.
“What’s it like being a self-published author?”
So. 2020, amirite?
The most that I can say is at least we’re still here. I know that these annual posts recap 2019 through the current date, but woof. It’s hard to for me not to talk about the first half of 2020 while discussing the time between now and my sixth year post. And hell, we thought 2019 sucked. We had no idea, did we?
Sadly, thanks to the pandemic, I don’t have a cute pic of me hugging any celebrities. 2019, as mentioned above, was an unkind year to me, same as most people. I did manage to catch up with Charlie Cox and get my Playbill to Harold Pinter’s Betrayal on Broadway signed, but Mr. Hiddleston stood me up this time around and that is a summary of 2019 and 2020 in a nutshell: me, standing outside in the freezing cold, staring at a door that won’t open, my dreams held within it. Melodramatic, but true.
Well, you’re not here for my open wounds, you’re here for what semblance of advice that I can give you, so let’s get to it, shall we? Here’s what I’ve learned in my seventh year of being published.
Expect the unexpected. I know it’s impossible, but there is a lesson to be learned here for 2020 throwing everything at us but the kitchen sink. You can’t prepare for everything, but you can learn how to adapt to an unprecedented situation. No one thought we’d end up where we are now, but in spite of that, those of us who have survived are still here and doing our best to stay afloat. No one ever wants to find out what they’re made of in a worldwide plague scenario, but it’s here and so we’ve all had to tighten our belts, toughen up, and support each other as best as we can.
This sentiment is to remind yourself to appreciate what’s in front of you, for you have no idea what’s coming. All you can do is try to build a foundation that will remain standing when the world winds up a brick and hurls it at you. You have to keep an open mind and be ready for change. Sometimes it’s voluntary change and other times it isn’t. Identify the best way to proceed and set a new course. It’s alright to mourn the things you lost along the way, but nothing kills you faster than refusing to let go. Trust me, I know that from personal experience.
Try to work by your own standards. This past year, someone started a hashtag on Twitter that was about how much published authors make and it was extremely eye-opening for many people, both those in the industry and those outside of it. Truth be told, the publishing world does not like to accurately portray itself to the rest of the world. That hashtag revealed that a lot of us are just tiny fish in the pond, desperately searching for breadcrumbs. There are far more of us who grind out books and cannot support ourselves on writing full time than the reverse, but that’s not what the publishing world wants you to think. They want the world to see us as Stephen King’s, thinking we make money hand over fist.
It’s tough to find the motivation to spend hours writing if your sales suck. That’s the hard truth of the matter. Many of us are busting our asses to make good fiction and still see little to no results. The other truth of the matter is that we’re holding ourselves to an unfair standard. We see these big names raking in the dough and try to match their sales when it’s not realistic. Sure, it would be wonderful if everyone sold millions of copies and secured movie deals with creative control, but it’s not going to happen for a majority of the writing world, both traditional and independent/self-published. That’s the cold, hard facts.
So now what do we do?
Find your spot and plant your feet.
It’s okay if you’re not making thousands of dollars a month off of your fiction. It’s wonderful if you are, but the numbers say that most of us aren’t that fortunate. Instead, focus on what you ARE able to accomplish instead. Break your goals down into something more achievable and take it a day at a time. Often what prevents us from writing or being productive is that impossible standard hovering over our heads and you have to kick it to the curb. Find goals that satisfy you and do your best to meet them as often as possible. At the end of the day, your opinion of yourself and your work is the most important, not that of everyone else’s. They aren’t in your situation, so it’s fruitless to wring your hands trying to emulate them.
Change is scary, but sometimes unavoidable. Some of you may already know, but I originally finished the first draft of my upcoming fourth novel in the Of Cinder and Bone series, Of Fury and Fangs, in early 2020.
And I hated it.
Really. I’ve never hated anything I’ve written before. It was a strange feeling for me to pick it up and slam it back down, sure that it was the worst trash to disgrace the face of the Earth.
I took some time off. I worked on my mental health and managed to get a handle on the fear and anxiety, and then consulted my writing sensei with my problem. He was thankfully able to help me reaffirm what was wrong with the book and helped me develop a strategy to fix it.
And again, that had never happened to me before.
Sure, I’ve hit walls. I’ve had long periods of not writing. But I’ve never written what I felt was a bad story, or rather, written a good story incorrectly. This time, oh yeah, I totally did. I think that the stress of the 2019 to 2020 period had gotten to me and so I was pushing myself to write when I didn’t quite have everything together. I was pushing the wrong angle, so I had to regroup and understand what was needed to fix it. At the time of this post, the revisions for the second draft are roughly half done and the book’s pre-order is live, so I’ll have everything ready by the release date.
Still, this was one of the first times I had to admit my own failure and take things back to the drawing board. It’s also a byproduct of this series being so different from The Black Parade series, which for the most part was planned from A to Z. I knew the plots, but all the things in between were genuine surprises. Of Cinder and Bone was much more off the cuff for me. The stories generate themselves out of thin air rather than being so carefully planned. It may be why I was off the mark in the original draft, but thankfully, I wasn’t so off that I had to destroy most of the book; just retool it and save some of the content for later.
What did end up taking me so long was my own stubborn refusal to admit the first draft sucked. Or, rather, to be brave enough to find a way to fix it. I definitely wanted to give up on the book at a few points, but slowly, I regained my confidence and went after it.
Naturally, most experienced writers know this is totally possible and prepare for it, but to any newbies out there, this is a terrifying feeling. It’s okay. Sometimes you just have to get it on the damn pages and then worry about fixing it later, when you have at least a teaspoon of your sanity back.
Reflect carefully and as often as possible. It’s no surprise that with the pandemic, unemployment is as high as it was during the Great Depression and everyone’s miserable, scared, and broke for the most part. As a result, pretty much across the board, everyone’s struggling to make money. My June sales were sadder than Requiem for a Dream. Well, unfortunately, writing is the same as most businesses: you have to spend money to make money. I’ve had to get awful creative in my attempts to promote Of Fury and Fangs without breaking the bank. Keep in mind, just blitzing social media with links and photos doesn’t work. Don’t believe anyone who says it does. You have to do better than that, as the average person’s ability to simply filter out advertisements on the Internet is very developed by now.
While doing so, I happened past some of my older methods of marketing and promoting, using free or low cost options like digging to find sites that let you post for free or writing guest blog posts. While time consuming, it is helpful for the overall SEO for the book in its early stages to spread the word. It’s not all about mailing lists and expensive site postings. There is value in doing the small stuff that can add up over time to get your work out there to people.
Is it a pain in the ass to produce more content like author interviews or guest blog posts? Totally. But it’s just as valid as the other methods as long as it’s allowing your further saturation. It doesn’t matter how you get yourself into a reader’s vision, just that you get there and reach them in a meaningful way.
Be good to yourself and to others as much as you can. This should be a no-brainer, but it ain’t. Especially not for me. I am my own worst enemy. Always have been, always will be. However, therapy has helped me recognize the impulses that I have to treat myself poorly and while I’m still doing it, the awareness means that I have a chance to do better.
The pandemic has made a lot of us realize that many of the things we used to do to decompress or find happiness are no longer possible. That means doing a bit of soul-searching and finding alternative ways to be at peace, or if you’re lucky, happy. It’s unfair and extremely difficult, but it’s worth doing for overall mental health. To that end, many authors have been stressed out thinking that they should be writing some magnum opus during quarantine. That’s simply not true. It’s okay to just get by. You don’t have to become some award winning author and write the next great novel. The most important thing is to keep your head above water, which does not happen if you’re constantly yelling at yourself for not writing. 2020 is ungodly stressful. If you find a way to weather the storm, go with that. It’s great if you can also help others. Give yourself a break.
After all, 2020 sure ain’t gonna do it for you.
Well, that’s all the time I have this time around. Sisyphus has got to get back to pushing her boulder up the mountain. I hope I’ll see you guys back this time next year. For God’s sake, be smart, be careful, and be diligent. Here’s to seven years.
Like a lot of folks, being indoors more often due to the coronavirus sometimes leads one to rewatch TV shows to try and fill the hours. Instead of, you know, writing a novel or anything. *sweats nervously* So a couple weeks ago, I decided that I had a hankering for what used to be one of my favorite shows of all time, FX’s Justified (2010), starring the delicious Timothy Olyphant as the unforgettable US Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens.
Upon revisiting the show, and keep in mind, I hadn’t seen it since its disastrous final season in 2015 (which I in no way acknowledge except to tell you it doesn’t exist in my mind), I realized a whole bunch of very interesting things that I hadn’t noticed when the show was still premiering on TV. One of the biggest things I realized was that Justified is one of the only shows portraying Southern white men in such a way that it’s not buying into the very popular “oh, you poor Southern white man, your life is so hard, no one understands you but I do” that a lot of fiction has fallen prey to before. You would think that a show centered around conservative Southern white men would have lots and lots of problematic material, but in a fascinating twist, Justified doesn’t pander to that mentality. It’s shockingly amazing to be knee-deep in it, but yet it’s very clearly shown that the writers’ room does not sympathize with this demographic and in its own way, that’s pretty damn progressive.
ICYMI, Justified is about US Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), who is the literal definition of a cowboy cop, all the way down to the snakeskin boots and an honest to God famous off-white cowboy hat. Raylan’s reckless ways reach a zenith when he confronts a mobster in Miami, whom he gave 24-hours to leave town or he would shoot him on sight. The mobster, Tommy Bucks, scoffs and doesn’t believe him when Raylan sits down at his table at a popular restaurant and tells him to either leave or die in his chair. The mobster pulls a gun on him and Raylan shoots him dead in front of everyone. Naturally, the shooting was justified (“Roll credits!”), but it lands him in so much trouble that his superior reassigns him to Kentucky, which is where Raylan is from. Raylan begrudgingly returns to Lexington, and subsequently, Harlan county, and continues kicking up an unholy amount of dust.
To give you the skinny, Justified only has three kinds of characters: lawmen, criminals, and victims. While this is a bit limiting, the show does an excellent job characterizing all three of these kinds of people over the course of the show. I bring it up because basically, any person who is not either a lawman or a victim in Harlan county is portrayed as a huge, steaming pile of racist crap.
But here’s where things get interesting.
For example, one thing that I never noticed when I used to watch this show is that every criminal we visit has a big fat honkin’ Confederate flag on the wall of his home or place of business. And I do mean every single one of them. There may be some blessed individual on the Internet who counted them up, but I kid you not, you see that wretched flag in every last episode of Justified. Therefore, you’d think that the show would pause to have one of those really frustrating conversations with conservative white Southerners that you see all the time, where the Southerner who owns the Confederate flag proceeds to explain why the Civil War wasn’t about slavery and it’s not racist to own it and it’s just them being proud of their heritage. (My sympathies to those of you, like me, who have sat through this explanation.)
Well, guess what? There is no such conversation throughout the entire six seasons of the show.
Now that gets you curious, doesn’t it? Why would a show that features the Confederate flag in every single episode not have a discourse about it?
Because the show does not mince words about how it feels about these racist pricks.
Justified makes no bones about the fact that these are nasty, uneducated, pea-brained simpletons. What’s more is that it doesn’t just take shots at trailer trash, either. It comes after the Southern elite racists as well. There’s an episode that I still think deserves so much credit for one of the best takedowns of the Neo Nazi movement that I’ve ever seen. Raylan and his boss Art Mullen are working on seizing the assets of a rich criminal who collects Hitler’s paintings, and they run into a man who is interested in buying them, but it turns out that they are fakes. Raylan and Art are immediately disgusted by both of these men, but the buyer insists that after he helps them cooperate in solving the case that Raylan come to see his collection of Hitler paintings. Well, cue the twist. The buyer’s father turned out to be part of the Nazi party, going so far as to doing some of Hitler’s dirty work directly at times. The buyer has spent his entire life accumulating wealth so that he can buy Hitler’s hard-to-find paintings one by one…and burn them. He has jars and jars of ashes in his office of Hitler’s paintings and he intends to find them all wherever they are and burn every single one until they’re all off the face of the Earth.
I mean, wow. That’s fantastic writing, if you ask me.
Now think about this for a second. Who is the key demographic for a show like Justified? Typically, it’s people who like westerns, right? Whether it’s spaghetti westerns or modern westerns, that’s generally who you assume would be watching a show like Justified, and yet this show is very anti-Confederacy and it makes it quite clear it has zero patience for anyone sympathizing with racists. For instance, in that same episode, the wife of the mobster whose assets are being seized is quite pretty and blonde—which is sadly one of Raylan’s weaknesses—and she and Raylan are talking for a while, pleasantly, maybe even flirting a little. Then the wife makes an anti-Semitic comment. Raylan is instantly turned off and abruptly leaves her company, and he makes it so clear to her that she even comments on it, whining that she thought he was “a good ole boy.”
Consider how much that flies in the face of who you’d think would like this show, and the balls it takes to make it so apparent. Most of the famous westerns of the bygone eras do not have very nice things to say about people of color due to the time period when they were made. Often, they portray the South as brave rebels who didn’t like to be told what to do by the North. It would be very easy for the writers of Justified to make Raylan a good ole boy, as the racist wife said, and yet he is shown to be staunchly against even the slightest hint of racist behavior by the criminals he apprehends or anyone in his presence.
In particular, US Deputy Marshal Rachel Brooks (Erica Tazel), is a young, gorgeous black woman and easily the most competent member of the marshal service in their office. She’s often at Raylan’s side apprehending criminals in Harlan county, which puts her in the middle of the usual racist bullshit. She even asks Raylan to come along during an assignment to help smooth things over because the moment the residents of Harlan county find out she’s a marshal, she’s a “black bitch.” The show does a good job with showing that Rachel knows how to handle herself—and boy, does she prove it on a few occasions—but that it’s tiresome for her to come up against that kind of a wall doing her job. Raylan agrees to help with no qualms at all because he understands how tedious and painful it is for her to put up with that while she’s working. It’s a great angle of solidarity that Raylan is using his handsome looks and white Southern charm to reduce the amount of harassment aimed in her direction. There’s also a more subtle thing I enjoyed, which is if anyone does say something racist to Rachel, Raylan is entirely intolerant of it and often tries to make sure they get their comeuppance if they’re stupid enough to mess with her. It’s a great understanding of how he chooses to be an ally to her, when he very well could hang her out to dry. They build a significant amount of trust and even a bit of affection for each other over the course of the show. Rachel also isn’t afraid to call him out on his shit and occasionally smacks some sense into him when he’s being ridiculous, which he often is. Rachel does end up being underused overall, but when we do see her, it’s made clear that she is by far the smartest, most likable woman on the show, and I think that is also pretty interesting all things considered.
The other rather excellent commentary on the white supremacists is none other than the infamous Boyd Crowder. Boyd Crowder is the series-long arch nemesis and frenemy of Raylan Givens. The two dug coal together as teenagers and have had a very hateful but friendly relationship with Raylan being on the side of the law, always trying to nail Crowder for his infinite list of crimes, and Crowder doing his absolute best to thwart Raylan’s attempts to land him in jail for good.
To be honest, if anyone made a list of the best written villains in the last 20 years, I’d happily throw Boyd Crowder on it. What’s great about Boyd Crowder as a villain is his progression from a loud, greedy Neo Nazi psycho into an insanely smart crime boss for Harlan county. Boyd starts out as one of those utterly perplexing Neo Nazis who uses Bible verses to insist the Bible wants the Jews dead and that people of color are all animals and the white man is supposed to rule them all. In truth, it’s just a smoke screen. Boyd is aware of the fact that the white supremacists LOVE to use the Bible as an excuse to be horrible pieces of shit, so they happily do his bidding because he parrots the things they want to hear. However, Boyd has a brush with death, finds religion again, but then loses his faith and decides to simply embrace his evil and crawl his way on top of the rogues gallery of Harlan county.
Boyd Crowder is certainly a cool villain, but while the show takes the time to flesh him out as a character, it never glorifies him or his lifestyle. Boyd is the perfect foil for Raylan, as he is a selfish, heartless bastard who will use anyone and anything to get what he wants. The show certainly shows off his skills and Walt Goggins utterly slays the performance itself, but at no point is there a Tyler Durden problem. For those who are unfamiliar, a lot of stupid men walked away from Fight Club completely missing the point, which is that while it’s not great to be controlled by society and suppress your Id, it’s also an incredibly stupid and reckless idea to give into your Id completely and let it control you. If you ever meet a guy who idolizes Tyler Durden, run in the opposite direction until you’re safely elsewhere.
Boyd is a monster. He’s a cool monster, but a monster nonetheless. Justified does not ever try to turn him into a Woobie or insist that you should like him as a person or want to be anything like him over the course of the show. One of my favorite moments is in the first season where Boyd tries to use an ambiguous Bible verse to insist that it’s about the Jews being “mud-people” and Raylan just stares at him like he’s an idiot and calmly tells him he’s just using the Bible to justify doing whatever the hell he wants regardless of what it means, which is a callout of epic proportions. My other favorite moment is that when confronted with someone who insists that times were best when Boyd used to run his Nazi “commandos” out of the church, Boyd confesses that he’s never even met a single Jew and was just regurgitating things his racist father and the people around him had instilled in him in order to get approval and procure the things he wanted. I mean, wow. Seldom do you see someone self-aware enough to admit they’re hating an unseen “enemy” just to fit in and get people to do what he wanted them to do.
In the end, what I’m getting to is the fact that Justified had some of the most unconventional writing in regards to white Southern culture. It actively called these people out on their shit and didn’t attempt to sympathize with them just so it could get better ratings or have appeal to that demographic. Most of the time you will see shows like Atlanta breaking down the fallacy of the Southern Confederate sympathizer, yet here, a show that knew its key demographic would likely be white men, they went for the jugular. I have to say that while Justified had a lot of problems before it ended, this was one of the best aspects of the show that I noted during the rewatch and I think it’s pretty commendable that the writing team decided to go against the urge to pander. To be honest, it’s one of the reasons that I like FX in general. They are very willing to go out on a limb and try something different or risky in the pursuit of a great story.
If you’re ever in the mood for cowboy shenanigans, I can give my highest recommendations for the first three seasons of Justified. Sadly, it begins to steadily decline in seasons four and five, and I personally tell people not to watch the final season unless they want to hate the show and the writers. I wish it ended better, but I believe it deserves credit where credit is due. In this day and age, there are a lot of writers rooms not willing to confront the unhealthy aspects of white Southern culture, and as a black woman who grew up in Georgia, I have to say that Justified’s writing in this regard was a breath of fresh air.
“Feuds are never about hate. Feuds are about pain.”
Who would’ve thought a mini-series about two aging Hollywood actresses feuding would have turned out so damned good, if you ask me.
Honestly, if I just say it out loud, FX’s 2017 mini-series Feud sounds like a boring melodrama. It’s not. Somehow, it’s not! It’s a tightly written, brilliantly acted, compelling character study of two women I’d literally never heard of before the series and now that I’ve watched and rewatched it, I have to say that it’s probably one of my favorite things I’ve seen in the last several years of frankly disappointing TV. I’d like to take a moment to shine the spotlight on why I found this mini-series so compelling and decided to pick back up on the topic of writing as well.
Spoilers for FX’s Feud, naturally.
However, unlike my other Things X Taught Me About Writing, because Feud is somewhat obscure and today’s 2020 world probably like me wasn’t really in the know about the divas of days past, I’ll give you a bite-sized recap. Feud is about the famous feud between actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. The two starred in the Oscar-nominated 1962 film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Decades of resentment, problems on set, and meddling third parties all contributed to the feud and the series takes real life events and firsthand accounts from their feud and builds a story from it. What’s neat is that the series really does try its best at recapping the events of bygone decades. If you look up the events of Bette and Joan’s lives, they do in fact line up with what is portrayed in the series. Keep in mind that this is going to focus on the series itself and we’re not assuming that everything that happens is an accurate representation of their lives. Instead, we’re analyzing how the show decided to depict them, so remember, I am not dishonoring the memory of either actress. We’re treating this as fiction, same as anything else. Let’s dive in and see what worked as well as what it has to teach us about writing.
Character matters. The focus of the series is on the many intricate, complicated motivations and lives of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. What fascinates me about the series is that it manages to frame both women as completely human. They are both clearly talented women, but their faults are so enormous that it causes them to butt heads even though they certainly share similarities. At the same time, the show never loses focus on what is most important. Each actress is given more than enough time to show us who she is.
Joan Crawford is larger than life. She wears furs and diamonds and needs to be seen at all times no matter where she is. However, that larger than life persona is hiding a vain and insecure woman who has never felt respected and never felt like she was taken seriously despite her hard work at her craft. By contrast, Bette Davis is a hard-nosed roughneck who cares about one thing and one thing only: her work. She is brutally honest to the point of being insulting and would happily dismiss anyone who dares to cross her path, which makes her very lonely. She is also plagued by not being conventionally attractive by Hollywood’s standards, so she had to fight twice as hard to become an actress since we all know Hollywood is a thousand times harder on women’s appearances than men.
What works so well in this series is how it dives deep into the problems in their personal lives and then compares it to what made them clash on set and even in private. Neither women is seen as better than the other. Neither woman is seen as worse than the other. The series helps us understand the best and worst parts of Bette and Joan. It does it so well that you’re captivated with every new development of conflict, whether internal or external. It’s a reminder that it doesn’t matter what the hell the story and plot is about: if you write compelling characters, your audience is going to stick with them through thick and thin. And Bette and Joan’s lives are nothing short of a rollercoaster. You see their highest highs and their lowest lows. You see every facet of their personalities and their performances. The two are just as much alike as they are different and it all adds up to a phenomenal story.
Hubris is a bitch. As mentioned above, the show is excellent at portraying hubris. Joan’s biggest flaw is a mixture of her insecurity and her arrogance, which is a lethal combination. It causes her to act out and lose her temper many times, often resulting in self-sabotage. She destroys several opportunities for herself because she is so unwilling to let go of her vanity and her ego because she needs to feel appreciated and loved. Bette’s biggest flaw is that she is uncompromising in any area and unwilling to forgive or admit fault due to being so prideful. She bulldozes right through anyone at the slightest provocation, thereby escalating her problem of being isolated and lonely. The two of them are already powder kegs and working on the same film together just lights the match and lets you watch that wick burn down until it’s time for the grand explosion. The two gleefully take shot after shot at each other, building and fueling their resentment for one another as they continue to associate with each other over the course of filming the movie, and then again when they try to team up for Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte.
Character flaws are vital to any good character. No one is perfect, and if they are, hell, even that can be considered a flaw, for it means no one can understand them. Bette and Joan’s flaws pull you into the story more and more as you see them start to unravel as they’re at each other’s throats. You can understand why some of the people in their lives might have thought they should have been friends, for the struggles that they come up against are real and scary and often sympathetic. Even though they are both famous Hollywood starlets, it gives them an angle for you as the viewer to understand them.
Female-led stories have a different focus than male-led stories for a reason. One thing I truly applaud this mini-series for is that it very much feels like it’s written by women for women. It’s in everything. It’s the performances, the backstories, the dialogue, the settings, the clothing, the supporting characters. There is a distinct way that it feels when a female-led story has a good writer who truly understands the way a woman experiences the world, but especially Hollywood during this decade. The series takes place during the 1960’s. It’s not a politically correct world in the slightest. Women were still expected to be homemakers or subservient to their husbands. Actresses were—and certainly still are—supposed to be beauty queens who gracefully bow out once they stop being “attractive” and they’re also put through hell by the sexist powers that be in Hollywood.
The series shows some of the ugliest sides of the moviemaking business, from directors cheating on their wives to snotty actors refusing to cooperate with production. What’s more is that the lens is still clearly focused on what is important to Bette and Joan, and it’s very reflective of the things that women have to put up with in our daily lives. It sounds crazy that the average woman would at all relate to two Hollywood starlets in their later years in the 1960’s, but it’s honestly quite easy.
Joan was a beautiful woman in her youth and therefore is unable to adjust to being in her sunset years. She became so accustomed to getting what she wanted out of men that once that power was gone, she couldn’t cope. She had to provide for her children as well during a time when she was struggling to get any roles, and those roles were dissatisfying to her as well. Seeing how Hollywood turned its back on her is very harsh, as fame is truly a cruel and fickle mistress. We all have seen stars who were household names one day and then vanished in the blink of an eye and then forgotten. Joan had to fight and claw her way to become a star and yet it’s taken away from her by what usually defeats us all: time.
Bette is a hardworking actress who had to hone her craft due to not being conventionally pretty, so she has an outer shell that is as thick as concrete. She never wants to let anyone get close to her because her work comes first. It always comes first. Even at the cost of her personal and professional relationships. She’d quickly toss someone aside for the chance at a role that could be worth it in the end because she needs to feel appreciated for her work more than she needs to feel loved by others. Any working woman can sympathize with that, but especially creatives. So many of us have sacrificed things in order to make our art as great as it can possibly be.
What hits hardest is seeing Bette and Joan struggle against so many things being women of that era, where men do not want to give them power but instead want to manipulate them. Jack Warner of the Warner Bros Studio in particular is a good example of what actresses of the era had to come up against. All he cares about is money and appearances. Nothing else matters. Having to answer to someone like that must have been hell and we see the effect it has on the two of them. It’s a sign that the writing is focused on the right areas. Often, women are unable to advance their own careers or even their own lives because of men of power, and sometimes, men who should in no way be in that position of power. It’s a dark reminder that while things have certainly gotten better, it’s still tough in general working while female, as the #MeToo movement has revealed. I have to say Feud is one of my favorite feminist portrayals of women to date, and feminist in its true definition, not the warped one that some of the fakers use to justify their hatred of men. Bette and Joan advocate for themselves and each other, wanting to be held in equal regard with male actors in Hollywood. I think it resonates with many women facing the same double standards and unfair rules in place to stop them from achieving their goals. It’s damn good writing, if you ask me.
I also wanted to give a quick shout out for the supporting characters of Hedda Hopper and Mamacita, who both manage to have their own miniature arcs and are important for carrying along the story and conflict in unexpected ways. Hedda Hopper is a viper and you’re not meant to like her one bit, but you have to admire how vicious she is in going after what she wants no matter what. Mamacita’s no-nonsense attitude and strict demeanor manages to come across as charming and subtle at the same time, as you see how deeply she cares for Joan, but she shows it in a rather particular way. Both women have motivations and ambitions that women share and understand as well, and it’s a nice contrast to Bette and Joan’s as well.
I know Feud certainly isn’t for mass consumption and won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. I give it credit where credit is due. I’d say if you’re a fan of character introspection and stories heavily based on personal conflict, give it a whirl. It did manage to win two Primetime Emmy awards and was nominated for a bucketload of other things (some of which I definitely think they should have won, but I digress.) If any of the writing lessons above sound good to you, I encourage you to check it out, and maybe even give the life stories of the real Bette Davis and Joan Crawford a look-see as well, for there is much more to them than meets the eye.