Monday, June 26, 2006

Rant(s) of the week

There are, in fact, various things I could rant about, and the trouble is to choose between them.

I could, for example, rant about the online writers' workshop of which I am a member, and how irritating it is that they do nothing to guarantee any particular number of critiques in any particular period of time, so that I post a story and wait and wait and wait, and after long waiting get maybe one crit, which usually is unhelpful. Adding to the irritation is the fact that one can see how many people have viewed the story how many times, and these numbers make clear that *the majority of the viewers* have viewed the story more than once without bothering to leave any comments at all.

I'd really rather be paid for my stories before they are used for someone's reading pleasure.

I could rant about the insensitive, or at the very least poorly phrased, recent complaints of two commentators on TVG that handicappers had been "considered last" in the decision made by Hollywood Park to install an artificial surface. Are we to believe these commentators would like the convenience of handicappers to preempt the safety of jockeys and horses? Or the financial, time and emotional investment of trainers and owners? Or the image of racing in the eyes of the public? Surely that was not what was meant to be implied. And surely people who present themselves to the public as expert handicappers should not be afraid of a challenge.

(Hints: watch, don't bet, for a month or so; stick with turf races; stop fucking whining.)

Or, OK, I could rant about faux kink in fiction. I just read a book -- a very long book -- in a series that enrobes itself in a mantle of Gothic fantasy kink.

The brooding, handsome, absolutely fucking tedious main character spends the entire VERY LONG book brooding handsomely about the Darkness In His Soul.

In the scene meant to impress this Darkness upon our shrinking senses (or our heaving bosoms), he gets into some BDSM Lite, soft leather thongs, safewords, yadda da yadda, with a hooker who is enthusiastically consenting (like all the hookers in this wish-fulfillment world for the Gothy young.)

This is not kinky. This is not dark.

It's fake, silly and pretentious. And it's really, really irritating (and LONG). In addition, the book has this sort of fake "gay--friendlyness", because, MY GOD, the protag kisses a guy once and, well, people make coy references to gay sex and stuff. This is particularly irritating because the heterosexual scenes are graphic -- so, in other words, the text is pretending to be liberated and unprejudiced when in reality the gay stuff is off taking place somewhere in, you know, a closet.

Lord, people, it's 2006. Get over it.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Writing update

Except there's not much to update.

I'm trying to sell a couple of short stories. TRIB'S WAR and STEALING THE SUN are with my agent. RIDER: A NOVEL is awaiting one last reader's examination before I send it along to him.

I've been writing stories set in the modern day, at Bay Meadows racetrack. Which is going to be torn down and developed for condos and stores some time in the next few years -- just another victim of the eternal profit motivation.

Anyway, it's frustrating. It's frustrating to get rejects in the first place; it's frustrating when they contain cryptic comments that you go crazy trying to decipher; it's frustrating when they have the rejecting editor's own (not very impressive) sales attached as a .sig file.

And it's particularly frustrating to go back to something I wrote in 2002, tried to sell, and couldn't, and realize that not only is it not good enough to sell, it's not even in Standard Manuscript Format.

Sigh.