Category: Writing

You’re Misunderstanding Batman

April Daniels6 Comments

People like to say that Batman’s Rogue‘s Gallery is iconic because they’re all dark reflections of himself. This is bullshit, and I’ll tell ya why–it’s because they’re actually all dark reflections of American culture writ large.

Killer Croc has nothing to say about an old money white boy with parental abandonment and rage issues. He’s got everything to do with America’s fear of backwoods people. Similarly, Poison Ivy is about when militant ecofeminism gets real, Two Face is about the arbitrary and unjust nature of the American justice system, and Clayface is about the hollowness of celebrity culture. Harley Quinn is not the most popular female character in comics because she’s a twisted echo of something inside Batman; she’s popular because lots of women identify with being in an abusive relationship–notice how she’s become steadily more sympathetic as the writers embraced the implications of her backstory. And it keeps going. Scarecrow? Drugs. Mad Hatter? Date rape. The Joker? He’s about the most fundamental American fear of all. The fear of unbridled chaos, a problem that basically never exists, but which all white Americans are taught from birth to fear, and what White America fears sets the national agenda.

Admit it: nobody really gives a shit about Calendar Man. Nobody gives a shit about Man-Bat. Hush got boring fast. Why? Because none of these characters have anything to say about America. This is not to say that the scores and scores of creators who have worked on Batman-related titles over the decades were setting out to do a long-form collaborative deconstruction of the American id, far from it. I’m simply pointing out that the villains who have staying power, who matter at all to people outside the hardcore fans who love trivia? These villains all have something in common: very obvious symbolism about the American condition. Often, characters don’t pick up this extra layer until they’ve made multiple appearances and developed an extended motif, but you’ll notice that the villains who keep coming back decade after decade become less and less like people, and more and more like symbols.

Now if only I could figure out what the hell Mr. Freeze is supposed to be.

Milestone!

April Daniels

Hey guys, awesome news! Yesterday I signed a two book deal with Diversion Books to publish Dreadnought and its sequel, tentatively titled Legion. Dreadnought is scheduled for publication in 2016.This is a huge step for me, the culmination of more than a decade of work, or about a third of my life to put that in perspective. I am excited and eager to see what comes next. I hope you’ll all pick up a copy of Dreadnought when it is available.

Cannibalism

April Daniels3 Comments

Lateral violence is when people within a marginal community take out their rage on each other. If you’ve witnessed an activist circle meltdown, you’ve probably seen it. The egos, the pain, the venom, the hurt. It boils down to a radioactive sludge that poisons everything it touches, until once vibrant communities become digital ghost towns, low-rez tumbleweeds blowing through ancient and abandoned threads.

(My blender has a metaphor mixing setting, and damn if I don’t enjoy it.)

At the beginning of 2014, there was a real sense of hope in the online feminist communities that I hang out in that we’d make real progress in confronting lateral violence. That didn’t happen, or if it did, it only seemed to be the results of an effort to circle the wagons against the screaming hate machine that erupted later that year. The root of the problem wasn’t pulled up; if anything, we’ve only become more insidious with each other.

But let’s get specific. What do I mean by lateral violence within marginalized communities? I mean points-scoring. I mean witch hunts. I mean the way the word “problematic” has been weaponized into a scarlet letter. I mean the way our social justice discourse has necrotized into a filthy ethos that encourages us to point the finger early, point the finger first, lest the finger be pointed at us.

I mean the way it’s strangling us.

Over and over we demand more representation, more marginalized creators, more voices from the edges. And these are good demands. We need more movies by women, and people of color, and queer folk. We need more books by women of color and trans folks. We need music by gay dudes and paintings by lesbians. We need more art from the edges, so that the kids at the edges growing up today will know they’re not alone. To see themselves embodied in all aspects of life, to help them find the strength to thrive in a world that too often wishes they weren’t around.

I cannot overemphasize how important this is to me. I wrote Dreadnought specifically so a scared trans girl could stumble across it on a library bookshelf and have something that, at least for a few hours, would help her feel powerful and important and worthwhile. To help her imagine a world in which she’d decide to stick around long enough to see what her twenties would be like. The money is secondary for me, as it is for many marginalized artists. We do this because we can’t not do it. Because we know what it was like to grow up with only a few scraps of culture that even acknowledged we existed, and because we want to ease that pain for the kids who come after us.

That’s why it breaks my heart that I can’t think of a single marginalized artist, writer, or creator that I am familiar with on a personal level who hasn’t expressed fear that someday they’re going to put a foot wrong and then—

–and then the mob will come for them.

We’re not talking about Gators when we have these hushed conversations. We talk about Gators and their ilk loudly, and in public. The conversations I’m talking about are hushed, as often as not. DMs, face-to-face, Gchat. Sometimes Twitter. Sometimes blogs with all the names stripped off. But very, very frequently with one eye over our shoulder, we speak about how our allies and compatriots sometimes scare us to death. Sometimes it feels like any friend can become an accuser. Any finger can be pointed right at our hearts, right through our chests, right down to our soul to damn us eternally in the eyes of our community. You know what I mean. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve seen it happen before. I say lateral violence because it’s precise, but what I really mean are social hit jobs, and they are especially devastating to members of marginalized communities who, once ejected from their support network, may have nowhere else to go.

Not only are the consequences more severe for marginalized people, but the chances of this happening seem to be higher, as well. The moment you stake your claim out as a queer writer (or a writer of color or a feminist writer or any other marginalized voice) you are stating your intention to become part of a tradition. It’s a proud tradition, and a vital one. It’s a statement that yes, there will be politics in your work, and you won’t shrink from that. It doesn’t demand that you write nothing but polemics or didactic just-so parables, but it does demand an awareness of who you are and where you’re writing from, and to my mind it can create some of the most beautiful art we have available to us.

But the blade has two sides. Because now, as a queer writer, you’re also expected to be better—for some value of better­ that varies from reader to reader, community to community, sometimes self-contradictory and always in flux—than those other writers, those plain old writer-writers. It’s okay for a writer-writer to fuck up, or if it’s not okay, there are allowances to be made. Sure Popular CisHet White Dude Author X makes all his female fans cringe when he writes chapters from a woman’s point of view, but hey, his plots are zippy and the dialog is fun, so we’ll ignore that. But should a self-identifying lesbian writer screw up a chapter from a gay man’s point of view, she cannot expect the same mercy. She should have known better. And the more marginalized groups a writer belongs to, the higher the standards she’s held to. We love to eat our own.

So not only are the consequences of lateral violence—both emotional and professional—more devastating, the very same forces that make marginalized writers and artists marginal in the first place make this lateral violence far, far more commonplace for us.

I do not know of a single writer who I know in a personal context who hasn’t expressed, at least privately, some doubt and fear that someday they will say something careless and be ruined for it. Or that something they write will be taken out of context, and they’ll be called to be “accountable” for it, whatever the hell accountability is supposed to mean in this context. Or even, yes, that someone who is an oversensitive ninny could decide to take out their insecurities on them. It’s happened. Don’t think it hasn’t. And the more marginal you are, the greater this fear tends to be. I know that it’s my biggest fear as a writer.

I’m not worried about never getting a fat contract. I don’t spend a lot of time twisting my apron over the fear that I’ll never leave a WorldCon with a rocket in my luggage. Sure I think about these things, but they don’t scare me. What scares me is the thought that one of my human flaws will be excavated from the deep sedimentary layers of the Internet, ripped from context and history, and spun out into a reputation-destroying dagger planted right in my back by someone I thought valued me as a member of their community. I think we can all think of an instance where we saw something like this happened. And if you can’t—well, have I got some bad fucking news for you!

This kind of thing is horrible enough when it isolates people from their social groups. People have been traumatized, ruined over this kind of thing. But when it destroys writers and artists personally and professionally, it contributes to the impoverishment of our culture. It pays the bullshit forward to the next generation by strangling our clearest marginalized voices before they can do their best work. It contributes to that blasted cultural wasteland that so many of us struggled to survive in when we were younger and still looking for our people.

For a long time, I resisted using the word violence to describe actions that don’t involve inflicting physical harm on people. In some ways, I still wish we had a better term for this, one that distinguished this kind of harm from bloodshed. But the anxiety I feel over this—that all my writer friends who aren’t straight, cisgender white dudes feel over this—doesn’t seem like it would come from something as innocuous as a few dirty words, a few unpleasant conversations. This is a poison right at the heart of our communities, and it makes me sick to think how many voices—perceptive, beautiful, lively voices—we’ve lost before we even got to hear them simply because some people decided it wasn’t worth the risk of seeing if anyone wanted to hear what they had to say.

I don’t yet know how we fix this.

But we need to admit that it’s a problem.

This Is Not The Supergirl We Asked For

April Daniels

Watch the trailer here. Try not to cringe too much.

My main problem with this Supergirl trailer is that they make her ephemeral, weightless. She’s got no emotional mass, just a silly little girl who above all must not be allowed to threaten male egos. She gets put down by that military dude and just sort of takes it, crumples up and starts to cry in her apartment. Are you fucking kidding me? She can arm-wrestle a jetliner out of the sky, but some military dude being mean to her makes her want to quit? That’s absurd. Ridiculous. Insulting. I could totally see a man treating her like that; I don’t at all see why she should let it get to her. Except of course she does, because a man needs to have power over her, at least once in this trailer. (Well, several times, actually.) Because that’s Hollywood. Because that’s what they think we mean when we say we want female superheroes. Because they can’t conceive of a sympathetic woman who also takes life on her own terms and accepts no bullshit.

The only woman in this trailer (well, short film, to be honest) who is allowed to have emotional power, drive, and confidence is her unbelievably bitchy boss who is clearly coded as a negative character. I’m not saying I want a grimdark Supergirl, but come on, can we have someone who can bench press a tank–and has known this about herself for years–maybe not be a neurotic insecure mess for no reason? Can we have her be confident, and embracing her attempt to live a “normal” life as just another challenge she knows she can overcome rather than a way to undercut her and make her look nonthreatening? What’s wrong with having a Supergirl who has a zest for life because she knows she can fly and fight and save people, who revels in her power and her ability to help people, and who chooses to live as close to normal as possible because it helps her relate to these funny little mortals with their frail little bodies who she loves so much?

BUT NOPE! Gotta have her be insecure coffee girl with mountains of hesitation. Gotta make her “relatable.” Not threatening. Not awe-inspiring. Yeah, sure, she’s basically a literal goddess compared to the people around her, but let’s not focus on that. Let’s focus on her not being able to fly around corners quickly without wearing a cape! Ha ha! So cute and endearing! Let’s focus on her accepting a crappy job when she knows she can be so much more. Let’s focus on her unaccountable hesitation to experiment with her powers throughout her entire adolescence so that she only knows for sure that she can fly when she’s forced to do so. Let’s pretend that a girl who can get herself up into orbit just to enjoy the view would decide not to for no good reason, would decide to let her cousin handle all the heroics and test his powers, but not want to join him, the one other person on the planet who could really understand what life was like for her. Above all, let’s do everything in our power to ensure that the male viewers don’t feel inadequate or threatened by a power fantasy that they can’t explicitly relate to, because that, my friends, would be the worst thing ever.

This is not what we mean when we say we want female superheroes. Her interiority has been completely sacrificed on the alter of making her “relatable.” Her motivations are muddled, her characterization hamstrung. Would we accept this from Arrow, or Flash? Would we consider it an acceptable interpretation of Batman, or Superman? Even (to cross continuities) Peter Parker, the poster child of “superheroes with problems” isn’t hollowed out so thoroughly. A character who is predicated on POWER is not allowed to have any that isn’t safely contained and wrapped in a treacly candy shell of girls-are-so-neurotic bullshit.

More Thoughts

April Daniels

Checking all the Progressive boxes is not more important than doing something raw, and honest, and true.

It’s possible for something to not jibe with the current social justice discourse consensus, and still be brilliant, and beautiful, and valuable.

Do not measure artistic quality by how closely it aligns to the latest political vocabulary pack. Get over rough language. Move past being anxious about speaking to everybody–it’s hard enough to truly speak to yourself.

It’s braver to be deeply honest about one facet of the world than it is to try and get nothing wrong about everything.

I feel like there’s something coming, some idea I’ve been groping towards for months. Feeling around the edges until I find enough of a grip to heave it up out of the mud.

Fuck The Representation Debate

April Daniels

These are unformed thoughts that I’m still working through, but I want to get them out there:

Can we please move past the tedious circle of arguing about the need for greater representation of women and minorities in fiction? It’s important. There. That‘s a solved question.

What’s more important, and far more interesting I think, is what you do once you’ve decided that your narrative defaults are going to represent the world as it is–a place where white men are a global minority. It’s actually a real easy switch to make, and there’s no excuse not to.

But once you’ve done that, where do you go from there? Can representation be an artistic goal in and of itself?

NO. NOT EVEN FUCKING CLOSE.

You know what happens if you make diverse representation your main artistic objective? You get the left-wing equivalent of the runny gruel that passes for Evangelical Christian “alternatives” to mainstream culture.

At this point, I think it’s more feminist to make art about women that’s grungy, rude, painful, and raw than it is to pound your chest about how many times you pass the Bechdel Test. Having representation of a diverse population is literally the very least you can do–letting it be your gold standard is to embrace mediocrity. It should be a prerequisite, not an achievement.

Twenty Years On

April Daniels

Undersecretary for the Minister of Magic Hermione Granger-Weasley unlocked her front door and shut it behind her with a sigh.

“How was work, honey?” asked Ron from the living room. He was always in the living room, transfixed by the television. Hermione regretted buying it; she should have made a clean break from the Muggle world. At least she’d managed to keep her mouth shut about the Internet.

“Beastly. The Americans are making noise, and I think the French are getting ready to back out. This summit is going to be a disaster.” She let out a breath, and with it as much stress as she could. “How was your day?”

“I made sandwiches,” Ron announced proudly.

Take Your Advantages Where You Can Find Them

April Daniels

So, I’m not a published author. In fact, I’m given to understand that my lack of publishing credits means I shouldn’t claim to be an author, but a writer instead. Being an author is something I’ve wanted so bad I can taste it, and for so long I can barely remember what it was like before I had this ambition. Raymond Chandler allegedly said that to be any good at this, you’ve got to write a million words of crap. In my (very rough) estimation, I’m probably at the 750,000 mark.

127,000 of those are included in the manuscript I just finished, which is a sequel to 118,000 other words I wrote two years ago. In between, I wrote 87,000 words in Dreadnought, and 18,000 words of a sequel to Dreadnought that I abandoned in favor of my most recent project. A few years prior to that, I wrote probably about 70,000 words total in a project that I never completed before shelving it for being too ambitious. So all together, that’s about 402,000 words. Then add what I imagine is about 300,000 words of Mary Sue infested Star Trek fanfic that has been blissfully lost in the foggy depths of the Internet, plus another 50,000 or so worth of various other scribblings.

By the strict “million words of crap” metric, I’m not ready for prime time. For a while, I thought that  I was too good to hold to that line, too clever and talented to need to use my full million. Lately, with the perspective that comes from finishing at least the first draft of three manuscripts, I’ve started to re-evaluate that position. On top of that, there’s the fat stack of rejections from agents and editors that I’ve collected in the past year and a half of querying for my various projects. I’ve gotten close a few times, but never quite far enough, and that has a humbling effect.

So I’m not going to be the Next Big Thing by the end of the year, in all likelihood. Or the end of the next one, I imagine. Even if an agent where to call me up in the middle of drafting this sentence and beg to represent me, it’d likely still be two years or more before I debuted as a modest new name in a crowded field with little or no fanfare to boost me. I’ve got friends who are at or near the top of their respective fields in publishing, and they haven’t passed on any illusions about easy success. I am going to keep writing, because it’s what I love to do. But professional success is off the menu, at least for the time being.

Which is fine. I’ve decided to take it as a blessing. My life, thus far, has been harder than most of my peers, and easier than some of my friends. One of the things I’ve learned is that you don’t get to pick your circumstances. Oh sure, you’ve got to put in your hustle. The only time good luck matters worth a damn is when you’re already pushing with everything you’ve got. So you’ve got to push, and keep pushing, and get comfortable with pushing because you’re never going to be able to stop if you want to keep going forward. But even with all the effort in the world, you still need that luck. The circumstances of a life are, in large part, not of the making of the people who have to live it.

So one of the things you’ve got to do while you’re pushing that boulder up the hill again and again is learn to see what parts of the circumstances you’re living with right now can be turned to your advantage. So it looks like part of my life right now is that being published is not on the horizon, no matter how much I want it.

Okay, that sucks. But–

But that means that I’ve got years to get better at this than I am now. Even after a tall order of humble pie, I still think I’m pretty good at this. Or, I have potential, anyhow. In general, people enjoy the things I write for them to read. And with every manuscript I finish drafting out, with every revision I polish up, I get better. I can see how my most recent book is better than the one I wrote  before it, and how that book is better than the one that came before it.

My first book has a big mushy middle where the two lead characters sort of hang out getting to know one another for 70 pages. Given that I’ve got half a mind to serialize it online, this is a huge problem since a serialization model requires each installment to end on a note that will compel the reader to check in next week to find out what happens next. I’m mulling over the idea of hiring a freelance editor to take a look at how we could tighten up the middle of the book.

My second book, Dreadnought, doesn’t have that problem. From word one, everything that goes on in that book happens as a direct consequence of what came before. There aren’t any segments where characters sort of wait around getting to know each other while the plot takes its time arriving. But, that middle segment is carried on the shoulders of a supporting character who sort of drives the action for a while until it’s time for Danny to take up the mantle of Dreadnought and save the day. Given that this supporting character is easily a favorite among my beta readers, and that she and Danny are supposed to be equal partners in crime-fighting, this isn’t a huge problem, but it’s there. I notice it. (Or, at least now I notice it, with the benefit of more perspective.)

My third book, a sequel to the first one, takes the structural lessons I learned from Dreadnought and improved on them. It also managed a greater synthesis between the emotional/character development of the protagonist and the plot. At this point, I can turn out a pretty damn good first-person narrative that’s heavily driven by the protagonist’s emotions. Some time down the line, I’ll likely be able to see where this book’s big flaw is, but right now I’m too close to it, too proud of completing it.

So now I’ve got to figure out what I’m going to do for my fourth manuscript. Remember that sequel to Dreadnought that got sidelined? I was planning to go back for it, but I don’t think I will, at least not right now. Both Dreadnought and my other books are first person stories with deadpan narrators who go through a big change. I’ve written three of these kinds of books, I’m kind of running out of lessons to learn from the form.

Now, if I was a published author, there would either be pressure to turn in a sequel to something that sold well, or a lot of anxiety about how they’d never publish me again after I wrote something that bombed. And here’s where we come back to finding advantages in your circumstances, even if they’re not what you’d have chosen. I’m not published. I don’t have any contracts to live up to. I don’t have a readership to cement. I’ve got nothing but time and a word processor.

So I can write whatever the fuck I want.

One of my other projects I mentioned, the 70k project that got shelved, had some good ideas in it that I can salvage. In the years since I put that project away, I’ve learned more and gained new ideas about life. Combine these all with a plot bunny that latched onto my ankle yesterday, and I’ve got the makings of a new book, something radically different than anything I’ve done before. The plot itself is going to be a fairly workmanlike adventure yarn that I’m trying to keep as simple as possible because there’s a lot of other problems that I’ve never had to deal with before that I’ll need to come to grips with. This is also the first book where I’m going to do significant worldbuilding before I sit down to start drafting, because that seems like a skillset a genre writer should have.

This book may never get published. It might be read by 15 people total. It doesn’t matter.

I love doing this. I love getting better. And if I’m not going to get plucked from obscurity any time soon, then I might as well use that obscurity to improve my craft as much as I can. Push, push, keep on pushing to be better, so that maybe, someday, when I finally sell a manuscript, it will be the best work I can do.

Or maybe I’ll go another direction, and start self-pubbing. Stop waiting for someone to hand me a golden ticket and start digging for one myself. Maybe I’ll spin up a constellation of pen names and jump from one wildly divergent project to the next. I don’t know yet. That’s the best part: I don’t have to know yet.I just have to keep writing.

Cascade Writers Workshop Writeup

April Daniels2 Comments

So I just got back from the 2014 Cascade Writers conference, held this year in beautiful Kent, Washington. Wonderful, glorious Kent, where they have a Denny’s and a Mitzel’s.

But aside from the wonderful (not really) location, the conference itself was quite lovely. I met some new people and cemented some friendships from last year. I went to pitch practice and accidentally brought down the house with a better than expected pitch that later nabbed me a pair of manuscript requests when I got to try it on actual agents. My writing plans, so fuzzy and unsure before I departed have now solidified into solid game plans for the rest of the year and beyond. I’m going to finish the two sequels I’m currently working on, and then start on a new, unrelated project that’s an expansion of the short piece I submitted for workshop this year.

Also, I have become the Twitter goddess for the conference, and am now in control of fully half of the Cascade Writers convention’s social media presence. My reign of terror shall know nothing but triumph, I am sure. Next year we’re going to have the convention at a much better location, and will hopefully have both larger attendance and a functioning hashtag. (This year’s tag got crushed by a wielder’s conference that was about a billion time’s our size and using the same tag.) By that time, I should have the new project’s first draft finished, so we shall see what–if anything–I submit from it next time. If I still haven’t picked up an agent by then, I may pitch for the new project as well.

All in all, a successful trip.

The Worm Has Turned, Gentlemen!

April Daniels

I’ve been struggling through the early segments of Dreadnought 2*. When I was about eight thousand words in, and I realized that nothing had really happened in the story yet, and worse, I was writing a description of a glorified committee meeting. I got very sad. My outline, which had seemed such genius when I first knocked it together, now seemed like a horrible slumping mess.

But I keep going. It’s the beginning. I’m always horrid at beginnings. I always come back to change them. As long as I got the pieces I need established all in a row, I could come back and mix and match. If it was still a hopeless slog by word 20k, I’d step back and re-evaluate, but I didn’t think that was necessary. Even if it’s not fun, I just had to get it out there, get it down. You wanna be a writer, April? Stop whining and write. Take your medicine. Eat your vegetables.

And then, in the space of two or three sentences, everything changed. I can’t say what, since I’m still in drafting, but it’s one of those things that happens on the page that, in retrospect, I should have seen coming. It blew up what I had planned for the rest of the chapter, but in the best way. Immediately I could see a new path to the end of this segment of the story, and even better, this early bit stopped seeming like a chore I needed to get through and come back and rewrite later, and started looking an interesting scene all on its own. It’s dramatic, mysterious, it draws the reader in and immediately establishes the tone, stakes, and themes of the book.

In other words, I’m feeling like a fucking genius right now, and dashing out these quick words to brag about it before I turn and get back to drafting before the high is gone and I feel like an incompetent dilettante again.

*Working title, obviously.