Thought for the day.

What would you do if you believed your focused attention was a precious resource?

Sustained focus is renewable, but it is not infinite during the course of the day. How would you treat yourself if you knew that ?

I think I'd be a lot kinder to myself about not being able to write for eight hours on end.

And you?

Who do you base your characters on?

Of course, every character in a story has her or his roots in the writer's own psyche. I once had a dream about a serial killer who carved mathematical equations into his victims' eyelids. I don't want to think too closely about what that says about me.

(I've never done anything with that character, so if you want him, feel free!)

I also pick up names and quirks from my friends. One of my exes had a last name that meant "storm". So I gave a character the last name of Tempesta.

One of my dear friends is named Coral. I based a character on her personality, and called that person Amber.

Yes, I tell my people when they make an appearance in a story. :)

How do you find your characters?

Ain't nothing but a party, y'all.

(Bonus points to anyone who knows that song quote!)

After all my passion (and typos) of yesterday, today seems a good day to celebrate and feel playful. Maybe make some new typos. ;)

This time of year is especially important for me to feel the playful. I have a mixed relationship to the holiday season. I don't like Christmas songs. I am not much of a shopper.

Instead, I have decided to create as much of a fun, light-hearted atmosphere as possible instead of stressing. This is not easy for me - I have advanced degrees in fretting/stressing/worrying/you name it.

This year, let's make December as fun as possible. :) Write something that you shouldn't, dance to silly pop music, watch this video a lot (Is it wrong of me to find these typeface geeks kinda attractive?), and generally find the fun.

Twilight, one last time.

(How funny is it that Lady Gaga's Bad Romance came on my Pandora channel just as I got started!)

Today, I'm going swipe ideas from one of my favorite books about romance - Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, edited by Jayne Ann Krentz.

Several themes emerge from the essays in this book. First is the one discussed a couple of days ago: Twilight and other romances are fantasies. To quote Krentz's introduction:

[T]he readers are no more confused about this fact, nor any more likely to use their reading as a substitute for action in the real world , than readers of [Robert] Ludlum, [Robert] Parker, [Dick] Frances, and [Anne] McCaffrey. (p. 5)

'Nuff said.

The second theme of the book is a shameless song of female empowerment. In a romance, the woman lives. How many times do women die in male action movies because she found a man attractive and acted on it? How many great female characters in literature are punished for daring to act on her own ideas?

Not only do the women live, all of them win. Again, Krentz:

With courage, intelligence, and gentleness, she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees. More than that, she forces him to acknowledge her power as a woman.

A cursory glance at the statistics of the causes of female death reveal the radical nature of these ideas.


Finally, for me, the most outrageous theme of romance (and Twilight) is the discussion of Male and Female. Long before Twilight came out, Laura Kinsale discussed the real truth of romance.

[For] a woman, a romance may be a working-through of her own interior conflicts and passions, her own 'maleness' if you will, that resists and resists giving in to what is desired about all, and yet feared about all, and then, after the decisive climax. arrives at a resolution, a choice that carries with it the relief and pleasure of internal harmony. (p. 39)

Long before Edward came along, Linda Barlow described the romantic hero. Sound familiar?

Dark and brooding, writhing inside with all the residual anguish of his shadowed past, world-weary and cynical, quick-tempered and prone to fits of guilt and depression. He is strong, virile, powerful, and lost. Adept at many things that carry with them the respect and admiration of the world (especially the world of other males), he is not fully competent in the arena in which women excel- the arena of his emotions, which are violently out of control.

Is this the sort of woman most women want? Of course not....[A]lmost from the beginning, I identified with the hero. I saw him as Self, not Other. And I dimly recognized him as one of the archetypical figures in my own inner landscape.

The romantic hero is not the feminine ideal of what a man should be. The romantic hero, in fact, is not a man at all. He is a split-off portion of the heroine's own psyche which will be reintegrated at the end of the book. (p. 49)

This is why Twilight is popular. We are endlessly attempting to claim and integrate our power. It's not about falling in love with the endless git that is Edward.

It is about understanding the parts of ourselves that are dark, angry, and dangerous.

Whew.

I've got one more post on Twilight on the runway and then NaBlogWriMo is done!

What do you all that? The endless blogging a success? A wincing nightmare of self-indulgent ranting? Weigh in!

In Defense of Twilight, even though I hate it; Part--Oh,who cares what part it is.

Just letting you know that, yep. Still hate Twilight. But I still much to say!

Related to my entry two days ago, this entire article treats girls like they are stupid. Except for points 13, 18, 19 and 20, which are actually funny.

Second, I think one of the things Twilight does do well is explore the beauty, intensity, and untamed nature of a girl's sexual awakening. I might roll my eyes at the overblown language when I read about Edward sparkling in the sun, but that's exactly how it feels. I'm about to be heterosexist for a while - forgive me.

When a girl looks at a guy's chest (ass, crotch, arms, hands, back - you get the idea) and gets her first nose full of hot testosterone, your entire being flips around. Trust me when I tell you that Bella's rhapsodizing about Edward's crystalline skin is pretty damn tame compared to the things girls think about when they discover just what that turns them on.

Fiction allows us to revisit the cathartic, life-changing moments of our existences. A woman's first flush of arousal is so amazing, so overwhelming, and so important that we read to reinforce all the lessons we learn from it. We get to find that wonderful, ripe, glorious feeling of sexuality, of power, of delight in our bodies, without the negative side effects of judgment, dissatisfaction, or shame.

I think reclaiming that moment of pure ownership of our senses is something all humans must do. The chills, the excitement, the way the hormones made you feel like champagne flowed through your veins instead of mere blood - the world needs more of that joyous feeling.

If you're a writer, go write some thing that makes you remember an awakening. If you express yourself in other ways, do that instead. If you are in love, tell that someone that you desire how maddening their scent is or the brush of their skin on yours makes you moan.

Reclaim that tension that Bella has discovered again for us.