Tuesday Ten

1. It’s snowing. Nothing is sticking though.
2. A few days ago they were calling for some decent snowfall today into tomorrow, but it’s not going to be cold enough for that. This makes me very sad.
3. Today is the release day for Jim Butcher‘s Cold Days, the newest installment in the Harry Dresden series. Whee!
4. Today is also the release day for Ilona Andrews‘ Steel’s Edge which is the final book in her Edge series. Also Whee!!
5. I will be making a trip to Barnes and Noble this afternoon in order to acquire both books.
6. There are just 36 hours left to donate to the Help Revitalize Books of Wonder IndieGoGo campaign. Won’t you please consider donating?
7. This Saturday night I’m going to be seeing Neil Gaiman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Neri Oxman all on one stage. You have no idea how excited I am by this.
8. I’m not familiar with Neri, but she sounds like an amazing woman and I can’t wait to hear her speak.
9. Thanksgiving was last week and I haven’t even started shopping for gifts yet.
10. I foresee this being another year of scrambling to get everything done at the last minute.

Tuesday Ten

1. It’s Thanksgiving Week and we’re having my in-laws over for dinner this year.

2. That means I’m going to be busy for the next couple of days cleaning and cooking.

3. After we eat dinner here, we get to head to my mom’s to have another meal with my family.

4. I feel full just thinking about all that food.

5. I will NOT be shopping on Friday or Thursday evening. I abhor the idea of Black Friday and people mauling each other in order to buy cheap “stuff”. It makes my stomach churn.

6. I’m looking for urban fantasy books which feature a female protagonist who doesn’t end up in a romantic relationship of some sort.

7. It’s proving a very unfruitful search.

8. I can find plenty of urban fantasy male protagonists who remain single throughout the entire series, though.

9. The gender disparity is particularly irksome to me, so I may just have to keep romance out of the Alex series on principle.

10. And, finally, if you have an extra three hours to spare, here’s a modern adaptation of Hamlet from PBS. It features both David Tennant and Patrick Stewart.

 

Short Story — The Anniversary

My husband will be home in less than an hour. It’s our anniversary, so I need to make sure everything is perfect. I give the chicken in the oven one last peek before running upstairs to tidy my makeup and get dressed. I throw on the little black dress I wore on our honeymoon to Bermuda. Rick loves that dress. I fix my hair up just right – a beautiful updo that leaves my neck and shoulders exposed. The only piece of jewelry I’m wearing is my wedding band. The symbol of our love and our commitment to each other. The physical embodiment of our vows to love, honor, and cherish each other as long as we both shall live.

Staring at the ring brings up a welling of emotion in me that I don’t quite understand. I struggle to keep myself in control because crying will smudge my makeup and I don’t have time to re-apply it.

When I’m sure that everything about my appearance is ready, I go back downstairs to await my husband’s arrival. It seems like only minutes have passed before I hear his key in the lock. He opens the door and I can’t help but notice how haggard and worn he looks. His shoulders are slumped forward and the sparkle in his eyes is gone. My heart goes out to him. He must have had such a rough day at work.

“Happy anniversary, honey,” I say as I walk over and give him a hug and kiss his cheek.

His skin is cold to my touch and he shivers. I don’t feel any temperature difference, but perhaps it’s colder outside than it looks. I reach behind him and slam the door closed. The bang startles him and he jumps.

“I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean to scare you. Please come in and sit down. Supper is just about ready.”

Rick surveys the dining room, taking in the table set with our nicest china, the candles waiting to be lit, the two glasses of wine. He shakes his head and walks silently into the living room where he sinks into the couch. He rests his head on the back of the couch and closes his eyes.

“Karen, you need to stop it. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” He raises his head and opens his eyes, slowly looking around the room. There’s sadness in his eyes. I don’t know what happened to put that sadness there, but I’m determined to take it away. I go to him and caress his cheek.

He sighs. “Actually, I do know how much I can take and I’m at my limit.”

I hear the kitchen door open and I go out to investigate. Four people walk into my kitchen, their eyes appraising everything they see. They take great pains to pay absolutely no attention to me, but they nod to Rick who’s walked up behind me.

I’m so angry at him right now. This was supposed to be our anniversary dinner. A special night for just the two of us. How dare he bring friends home when he knows how much I’ve been looking forward to this.

“Mr. Stevenson, are you taking everything with you?” The tall, dark haired woman asks. She’s holding a clipboard and making notes on it. At first I don’t understand what she’s asking, but then two more people enter behind them carrying boxes.

“Yes, pack up everything. I’ll sort through it at the new place.”

He’s moving out on me. The bastard is leaving me on our anniversary. I didn’t even know anything was wrong between us. Why didn’t he say anything to me? We could have worked it out. Gone to therapy. Done something to save our marriage. It had only been three years. Had I been such a horrible wife to him?

I grab one of the glasses of wine off the table and fling it across the room. Everybody jumps back, staring around fearfully.

“Pay no attention to her,” Rick says. His voice is bland and emotionless. “She’s just pissed that I’m leaving.”

“She?” The tall woman seems to have regained her composure before everyone else. They’re all huddled in the center of the room, their eyes darting around.

“My dead wife.” I hear what he’s saying, but I don’t understand the words. I never knew my husband spoke a different language. What other secrets was he keeping from me?

“Your dead wife?” One of the bulkier men laughs, but I don’t know why. It’s a nervous laugh which cuts off abruptly. He’s speaking the same language as my husband. The language seems to be similar to English; if I concentrate, I can almost make out what they’re saying.

“Yes, she died a year and a half ago on our anniversary. A freak heart attack the doctor said.” Rick rubs his hands over his eyes. Eyes which are surprisingly damp. Is he feeling guilty for leaving me? Serves the bastard right. “Every few nights she recreates our anniversary dinner.” He sweeps his arm toward the set table.  “Which reminds me…”

He goes over to the oven and turns it off after looking inside. He didn’t even have the common decency to ask me if the chicken was done yet. Tears streak down my cheeks as I realize that the man I love more than life itself is leaving me. That he doesn’t care about me anymore.

“I always have to check to make sure there’s nothing in there. She nearly burned the house down a few months ago when she put a pan of chicken bones in the oven.” He finally switches back to English.

Is that what this whole thing is about? I had made a mistake, one I didn’t even remember making, and he was leaving me for it? I pick up the other wine glass and fling it at his head. He ducks just in time and the glass hits the wall, shattering and splattering white wine everywhere.

“She sure is one angry lady.” The man carrying a stack of boxes sets the boxes against the wall and rubs at a wet spot on his pant leg.

“Angry? Of course I’m angry, asshole. My husband is leaving me. Why the hell wouldn’t I be angry?” I scream as loud as I can, trying to scream the pain out. As if on cue, the chandelier over the dining room table shakes and the lights flicker.

They all continue to ignore me.

I want to slap Rick, but I restrain myself. With all of these people here who are obviously on his side, I would probably end up getting hurt myself.

Rick sighs as he walks over to the sideboard and picks up a pretty white abalone shell filled with what looks like herbs. How had I not noticed that before? Was he doing drugs now? My heart breaks in my chest at the thought. I’d tried to be the best wife I could be, but it obviously wasn’t enough.

“I haven’t found anyone able to fully exorcise her from the house, but I can make her go away for a little while.”

He lights the herbs with a lighter he picks up from beside the shell. The smoke rising up from the dish smells pleasant, but it makes me very sleepy. I try not to breathe it in, I have no idea what kind of drugs are in there and I want no part of it, but the smoke seems to follow me and cling to my hair and skin.

“Karen Stevenson, you’re dead. You don’t belong in this world any longer. I beseech you to move on to the next path of your journey.”

The room is growing darker. I can barely see the dark figures who are starting to move around the room, touching my things. Finally, I can’t see anything at all.

**********

My husband will be home in less than an hour. It’s our anniversary, so I need to make sure everything is perfect. Rick had the entire kitchen remodeled as his present to me so I need to make sure this night is absolutely right.

Tuesday Ten

1. It seems like every time I make a commitment to post more life decides to get in the way.
2. I survived Hurricane Sandy and the subsequent Nor’Easter with absolutely no damage at all.
3. My area of MA didn’t get anything other than some heavy wind and a bit of rain.
4. At least my office is thiclose to being done. We just need to sand the floor and other assorted woodwork and then slap on some paint. Whee!
5. For good or ill, the elections are *FINALLY* over. Now maybe some of the crazy on all sides will settle down for a bit…
6. Yes, I know… but I’m gonna keep dreaming that it’s possible.
7. There’s a total solar eclipse happening as I type these words.
8. I can’t actually see the eclipse in person because it’s viewable only in certain parts of the Southern Hemisphere, but I’ve got a live video stream of it up.
9. It’s quite disconcerting to see the bright sun shining through my window and know that at the same moment, in another part of the world, it’s being covered by darkness.
10. Very creepy, yet kind of cool at the same time.
11. I’m going to try and keep up with at least a weekly Tuesday Ten, but the way things seem to be going, I can’t make any promises.

Tuesday Ten

1. I went out for a Girl’s Night Out last night with two of my best friends. We went to this great little Mexican restaurant for drinks and desserts.

2. I really needed that intelligent, adult interaction with other people who are not my husband.

3. Even still, I didn’t sleep well last night and woke up cranky and in a stabby mood. Not a good mood to be in the morning after a Presidential debate. I just want to bitch-slap the stupid out of people.

4. To make up for that, I saw the first trailer for Iron Man 3!

5. As awesome as the movie looks, I am extremely disappointed with their decision to whitewash Mandarin. Ben Kingsley may be a phenomenal actor, but are there really no Chinese actors who are just as phenomenal?

6. I am making sesame ginger marinated steak for dinner tonight.

7. I just started watching David Tennant‘s run as Doctor Who after buying the giant Tenth Doctor set of DVDs on Amazon. I really do need to get with the program when it comes to watching really good television when it actually comes out instead of years later.

8. My office is getting closer to being done every day. This makes me extremely excited.

9. This post on Murderati made me sniffle a bit because I’ve definitely been feeling like continuing to write is a pointless endeavor.

10. I really don’t have a ten. So, instead, have some pictures of a cat in wigs via The Bloggess.

 

Deep Fried Spam

I seemed to have reached the point where the spam comments here have taken on a weirder, if more coherent (and more hilarious) form. Rarely now do I receive comments which are just a list of links. Oh no.

Now I get such gems as these:

From my post Interesting Things Live Inside My Walls –

While the vagina is actually a structure with side and back walls, women can get panic stricken when an item seems to get lost or is not retrievable. We get requests on our Community Board for help in getting things back out of the vagina. Similarly, as a clinician I would sometimes find “lost” objects during a speculum exaam.

Mrs. Winchester headed west to build a home for herself and her ghosts. She bought a six-room farmhouse on 162 acres in California and set to work building, a task that would occupy her until her death 38 years later. But how did she end up with such a weird house? Why did she construct stairs that went nowhere and doors that opened into walls? Find out on the next page.

And from Praying For A Fellow Writer (the post I seem to get the most spam comments on) –

Clearly you have never flown Business or First Class with Singapore Airlines……….now THAT is a totally different and unqiue fab experience ..and puts CP, Emirates, Air France,? JAL and even Quantas to shame.

Or from Manic Monday –

Its such as you learn my thoughts! You seem to understand so much approximately this,
like you wrote the e book in it or something. I think that you simply could do with some
percent to pressure the message house a little bit, but other than that, this is excellent blog.
A fantastic read. I will certainly be back.

I really do wonder at the thought processes behind the use of these types of spam comments.

Wherein I Weigh in On My (Conflicted) Feelings About Gawker’s Outing of a Redditor

There’s been a lot of talk about Adrien Chen of Gawker outing the personal information of one of Reddit‘s vilest contributors, ViolentAcrez. I’m seriously conflicted in how I feel about this. John Scalzi has a great post up about this whole mess and reading both it and some of the comments over there is what really crystallized my thoughts.

On one hand, I despise men like ViolentAcrez. From everything I’ve read, he’s a bully, a troll, racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. And he has a serious case of “Anything I do to others is fine, but I’m gonna cry like a fucking whiny brat if it happens to me.” I do not feel sorry for him. I have no sympathy for him. I have no pity for him. He is a pathetic excuse for a person who is finally learning that actions, even those that are supposedly anonymous, have consequences. He’s also learning that our actions affect not only ourselves, but those people whose lives are entwined with ours.

However, I’m uncomfortable with this situation as well because not too long ago, a website called Stop The GoodReads Bullies outed the private information of at least one reviewer who posted negative reviews. Like ViolentAcrez, Wendy Darling had done nothing illegal. She had simply done something which the people at STGRB found distasteful and wrong just as Adrien Chen found Violentacrez actions to be distasteful and wrong.

Both Wendy Darling and ViolentAcrez have had their meatspace lives impacted by their online actions. They’ve both received hate mail and death threats. ViolentAcrez lost his job.

So here is where I’m conflicted – I feel no sense of outrage over what happened to ViolentAcrez. As I said above, he is a vile, disgusting human being who delights in degrading and shaming those who aren’t him or like him. In fact, I’m perfectly okay with Adrien Chen having outed him. And I’m perfectly okay with him being fired over it.

But I’m not okay with what happened to Wendy Darling. In fact, I was extremely outraged by it.

So the questions I’ve been asking myself are – Where’s the line? When do we get to decide that a person is deplorable enough in their online persona that their meatspace life becomes fair game?

With so much publicity surrounding this issue, I can’t help but wonder when we’re going to see more such outings. What happens when somebody who finds homosexuality morally repugnant and a sin decides to publicly out an online homosexual gay-rights activist? What if that activist lives in a place where his/her life could be at risk if people knew s/he was gay? Or an equal-rights for women activist is outed as living in an extremist country?

We never mind when the negative consequences affect “The Other Guy” because he obviously “Had It Coming To Him”, but what happens when those same tactics are used against “Our People”? Can we really cry foul? Can we really condemn it without being hypocritical?

Thus my dilemma.

 

Tuesday Ten

1. It’s been a rough couple of weeks, but things are starting to look up.

2. I’ve barely written anything all month, but thanks to a brainstorming session with one of my CPs, I think I’m getting back on track.

3. I’m not big into handbags, but I would get quite a bit of use out of this one! (h/t to C.E. Murphy for the link)

4. This weekend we bought all of the drywall supplies for my office. It’s almost done!

5. I also spent the weekend with both my older sister and her kids and my sister-in-law and her kids. It was tiring, but very fun.

6. I baked chocolate chip cookies last night.

7. I now have six dozen chocolate chip cookies screaming my name. I think I need to give some away before I devour them all myself.

8. Saturday was my birthday. I am now officially 32.

9. Hubby bought me The Avengers!

10. I bore myself sometimes. I’ve started and deleted about half a dozen posts over the last week or so because none of them seemed interesting enough.

 

Tuesday Ten

Because all the cool kids are doing it (namely two of my writing partners)…
1. It’s October. How the hell is it October? Wasn’t it just June? *sadly waves goodbye as the warmth slowly seeps from the earth* At least it being Autumn means fresh, local apples and warm mulled cider.

2. I want to go apple-picking this year. I’ve never been and for some reason I have the urge to do it. One of these weekends.

3. I fell back into my old habits of just sitting on my butt in front of the computer all day. Now more of my jeans don’t fit. This means it’s back to letting Jillian Michaels kick my butt again.

4. At least I’m eating better and drinking more water. Today’s lunch was baby spinach with feta cheese and walnuts and just a little dash of balsamic vinegar.

5. Speaking of food… I made lemon-raspberry bars the other night. OMGYUM! They’re not the healthiest snack ever (a full cup of butter and nearly 3 cups of sugar! YIKES!) but they are so delicious and so flavorful that only a small piece is satisfying.

6. Speaking even more of food… It’s a cold and rainy day so think I’m going to make some corn chowder in the crock pot for dinner tonight.

7. Autumn is generally when my husband’s job gets super busy. This means he’s been working seven days a week for at least 9-10 hours a day. Having the alarm go off at 5am (or earlier) every morning is really throwing my sleep schedule off and I’m certainly feeling the effects.

8. I also haven’t seen him very much and I kind of miss him.

9. Because of the continuing wangst surrounding negative reviews I’ve decided not to continue rating my 52 books in 52 weeks list. I’ll still add the books I’ve read to the list though. If anyone wants to know what I think of certain books, definitely feel free to ask and I’ll be more than happy to tell you.

10. My birthday is coming up. I’ll be 32 this year. I seriously do not feel that old.

Bonus 11. Halloween/Samhain is also right around the corner. This makes me ridiculously happy.

The Trouble With Supernatural

My husband and I just got into watching the TV show Supernatural this year. Yeah, yeah, I know, we should have started watching it years ago, but we’re ALWAYS late to jump on the bandwagon because we really don’t watch a lot of television. Don’t ask me how many years it took me to finally watch Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer because you’ll be very disappointed with me.

I love Supernatural. I really do. It took me a bit to get into it, but once things clicked and everything started to gel, I fell in love with it. Pretty boys in a sweet car hunting monsters? Yes, please! There are also definite parallels between Supernatural and Rob Thurman’s Cal Leandros Series and that’s always a plus in my book. Most of the episodes that don’t relate to the main plot and most of the episodes of Season 3 (the year of the writer’s strike) are pretty cheesy, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Cheese can be a whole lot of fun.

There will be spoilers after this point, so please be aware that you read this at your own risk.

My main problem is their treatment of women in the series. Specifically strong, capable women. We’ve only made it to the end of Season 5, but every single strong, capable woman has been either killed off, is a villain and is killed, or starts off ambiguously good before being revealed to be a villain and then killed off.

I’m going to say first off that I like that they (FINALLY!) redeemed the murder of Mary Winchester (at least a little bit). Up until the beginning of Season 4, her murder as well as the murder of Sam’s fiance Jessica were yet more examples of the Stuffed in the Fridge trope. For those who don’t want to click on the link and get sucked into TV Tropes, the Stuffed in the Fridge trope is where somebody close to the main character is killed either to simply hurt the MC or as impetus to move the plot forward. The victim is usually a woman and they’re generally nothing more than plot devices. The woman Stuffed in the Fridge has no motivation of her own and her only reason for existing is to die.

But in Season 4’s “In the Beginning” we learn that Mary agreed to let Azazel (the yellow-eyed demon) into her home years down the road in exchange for John Winchester’s life. It’s not a perfect redemption because everything she does revolves around the men in her life, but we get to see Mary as a fully-realized character who has hopes and dreams of her own. And that made me feel a lot better about her.

Unfortunately, there is no such redemption for Jessica. She was specifically introduced to Sam and then killed off just to hurt Sam and get him to do what the demons wanted him to do. Jessica could have been completely cut out of the series without there being any noticeable difference. Well, except for the fact that Sam wouldn’t be quite so much of an emo boy during the first couple of seasons. When you can cut a character who has such an emotional impact on an MC without it changing the structure of the story one iota, that’s a sign of lazy writing.

And then there’s Meg who starts off as a quirky character and is then revealed to be possessed by a demon. Azazel’s daughter, no less. The boys are able to exorcise the demon, but Meg ends up dying from injuries sustained while possessed. Her ghost later returns to torment them and relay the sob story of how her younger sister killed herself due to Meg’s death.

Then there’s Madison, the werewolf Sam falls in love with and has to kill. It’s obvious she was never meant to be a recurring character and she was always meant to die, however she’s the second love interest of Sam’s who has died simply to get an emotional reaction from him. Chalk this up as another one Stuffed In The Fridge.

And Bela, the amoral thief (yawn, how predictable!) from Season 3 who does nothing except muddle things up for the Winchesters. She is eventually killed by hellhounds and it’s revealed (without any foreshadowing) that she’d made a deal with a demon ten years earlier and her time was up. She’s another character who could be entirely cut without changing the structure of the story.

And Ruby who starts off as one of those ambiguous characters whose true motivations are unclear, but who helps the Winchesters out when they’re in trouble. When she was first revealed to be a demon, I thought it was pretty cool and I was hoping that she would add some dimension to the demon mythos by truly being good. Alas, her return in Season 4 killed that hope. It was apparent only several episodes in that she had her own agenda and Sam was simply a pawn. She gradually corrupted Sam by pushing him to use the powers he gained from drinking demon blood to kill demons. Of course, at the end of Season 4 she’s revealed to have been working with Lucifer and Lilith all along in order to bring about his return. Ho-hum… saw that coming a mile away. After Sam kills Lilith and inadvertently frees Lucifer, Sam and Dean kill Ruby for her treachery.

Let’s not forget Anna. Lovely Anna who we’re introduced to as a mortal woman who can hear the angels. We find out that she’s really an angel herself who willingly fell from grace (by removing her Grace). Yay! A rebellious woman! Anna’s character motivation in the few episodes she’s in is erratic and she seems to flip-flop quite a bit, but there’s no denying that she’s smart and capable. So, of course she has to die. Her last episode seems to have been written solely to kill her off.

Pamela, the psychic blinded when she looked at Castiel’s true form is killed off during her third appearance. And Bobby’s wife, Karen, has been dead for years, but is resurrected only to be killed off once more. For crying out loud! After looking at the Wikipedia page for Dean, I see that he has a daughter who is also listed as deceased.

Then there’s Ellen and Jo. I think I’m the most put out by their deaths because they had such potential as recurring characters and they ultimately died for nothing except the personal grief of Dean and Sam. Their deaths were supposed to give Sam and Dean the chance to kill Lucifer once and for all, but they couldn’t. So, it felt like these two strong women were killed off simply to get them out of the picture.

It really says something that I was extremely surprised when, during Season 4’s episode Sex and Violence, the female coroner who has sex with Sam isn’t the siren they’re hunting. The siren is actually the male FBI agent Nick Munroe.

It seems that the only way for a female character to remain alive is to a) not hook-up with Sam and/or b) only appear in one episode. And that’s not even a guarantee considering how many unnamed women die over the course of the episodes.

Yes, Supernatural is ultimately a story about Sam and Dean and their brotherly quest for vengeance so adding in long-term love interests isn’t necessarily a good idea. Yes, the over-all storyline is about war and the Apocalypse and people (men and women both) die during war. But criminy! Can’t we have just one recurring female character who is strong and capable who doesn’t end up dying after only a few episodes?

I still love the show, but writing up this post just depresses me. Yes, I’ll admit that most recurring characters on this show die, both male and female, but the four characters with the highest number of episodes are all male. Sam and Dean are a given, but why couldn’t one of the other two be a woman? Why can’t there be a non-love interest character introduced who is smart, strong, capable and FEMALE who doesn’t kick the bucket sooner rather than much later?

This just renews my resolve to write strong, capable female characters who kick ass, take names, and don’t die simply for the emotional turmoil it causes another character.