In Which, In Which, Oh, I Don't Know, Make Up Your Own Which

18 August 2003

Err, does anyone know where Tempest has gotten herself to, in terms of the net? The e-mail and webpage I have don't work. (I also can't seem to send e-mails to C.J., but I'm more likely to talk to him soon than anyone who reads this website, so asking for your help wouldn't get me far. Ah well.)

None of you have been forthcoming with further suggestions on what to eat that isn't acidic and tangy and lovely and good. (Err, no bias there. I think we see the problem clearly.) I'm going to blithely go on the assumption that that means you weren't reading over the weekend and have to catch up with all your lovely food suggestions that won't hurt. (It's getting better, it really is. But still, it'd be nice to know; I do this to myself periodically, and then tomatoes haunt my dreams. And I am in such need of cranberry peach goodness...sigh....)

So very tired. Unghhhh. Don't know why. I slept a decent amount, and it felt like it was quality sleep at the time. It seems to be going in waves. I'm not sure what happened to yesterday. Looking at more houses, sure, and talking on the phone to family, and reading a bit of the McKinley, and catching up on some e-mails, and working on a short story...I guess it does all add up eventually.

I've been thinking a lot about Beauty and the Beast, reading Rose Daughter, and I'm trying to figure out what dynamic it would have to have for me not to find it totally unpalatable with a male Beauty. Maybe my notions of unpalatable are too strict, but I feel like the message can so easily go awry with this story that if you're changing it significantly, you have to keep a sharp eye on it so that it doesn't become a New Age sermon or a Cosmo fantasia or something of the sort. Themes. You have to watch them like a whole mess of hawks, because they just get squirmy and tricksy.

And I really hate Making Statements About Gender, when that's almost never what interests me in a story. Occasionally I can deal with books that are All About Gender, but mostly they make me roll my eyes. It's not so bad when science fiction or fantasy stories About Gender manage not to be about the way gender roles were handled when the author was in junior high. Not so bad, but also not so common. I would have been mostly fine with Gregory Benford's treatment of it in Cosm (the rest of the book, eh), except that he had to bring up race and gender issues specifically to dismiss them, and the way that he had his main character dismiss them rang false to me, and was also a bit offensive. The book on the whole was not really about that topic at all, so...why open the can of worms there? "Look, I'm throwing the worms out the window! There go the worms!" Err, but there was a bit of draft, and now there's a worm on your head. Not so good.

Maybe I shouldn't switch the gender of a Beauty character at all if I'm not looking to Make Statements About Gender. That may be the simplest solution. It's just that the character himself was so clear, and a bit insistent, that I'd like to know what he's up to at least. Even if I'm going to ignore him for a few months minimum.

Why is it that whenever I'm in a stressed-out mood, other people keep wandering around being so wrong all the time, on webpages and in other discussion forums? Why can't they be loudly wrong when I've got nothing better to do but sit there making posts showing them the error of their ways in great detail, instead of ignoring people I don't actually know and going on about my life? Oh why?

Possible explanations abound, of course, starting and possibly cycling back to the plot to restore the French monarchy.

Right. Okay. Time to get organized. Work time. Enough staring off into space and not adding to the journal entry. Also no more French monarchy time. I'd like to say no more French monarchy time ever, but I've seen my own library list, so the likelihood of that seems vanishingly small.

Back to Novel Gazing.

And the main page.

Or the last entry.

Or the next one.

Or even send me email.