feminists, atheists, and being child-free

Recently on Twitter I browsed through the list of people one of the people I follow follows. (Say that five times fast.) Because of her interests, quite a lot of these people were child-free feminist atheists. Or possibly some different order of those.

It made me think, as I clicked "follow" on a few of them, about whether I'd define myself that way. And I came back to a decision I made years ago after reading bell hooks--I couldn't tell you which one of her titles, as I have read most and can no longer pinpoint which one says what. I will not call myself a feminist. I am pro-feminism. This is for a number of reasons. hooks argued that labeling yourself with an -ist limits you, so that's reason #1. But I also have become frustrated with feminism because of the infighting and the exclusive nature I find most feminist groups have. And I wish they didn't, because I love women. I wish I had biological sisters and would love to hang out in a place with spiritual sisters. It's just so rare to find a place really like that, that doesn't get ruined sooner or later. At least, how I define "ruined." I'm thinking of the infighting again. But on reflection, since I don't have sisters, I probably idealize sisterhood. After all, siblings fight. I guess I just don't have the energy for that anymore. I used to totally be into feminist stuff--women's studies classes, I founded an online discussion group, etc. Just sorta done with that now. Read bell hooks. She nails a lot of the other reasons why, and you'll get way more out of reading one of her books than reading this blog. Incidentally, she's also the reason I quit graduate school. Well, maybe not THE reason, but I agree with her when she says (totally paraphrasing here) that high graduate theory is elitist, excludes the average person from being able to participate in dialogue, and doesn't help anyone who really needs help.

Anyway, back to the list of labels.

Atheist: I'm not an atheist. I can't live that way, I fear death too much, for one thing. For another, there's too much synchronicity in my life. I'm a daoist, and I also think there is a spirit world out there that I can sometimes interact with. Not like my psychic character, Veronica, does. But like some speck on her shoe might. I'm serious. So I'm sort of a daoist-spiritualist. I guess.

Child-free: I have no children, so I could claim this label, but since it's not a choice I've made, I wouldn't. I'm not against being child-free. In fact, in hooksian fashion, I might say I'm pro-child-free. But if I got pregnant tomorrow one of the emotions I'd be feeling is excitement. Another would be terror, no joke. But the point is I'd go through with it. I also have often thought about adopting/fostering. So I have no political stance anti-having kids. I am appalled by people who choose to biologically have more than say, seven. I think they are making a choice that is ecologically reprehensible. If a person wants and can afford to have 7+ kids, for the love of the earth, ADOPT. And really, that number could be lower, but I wanted to choose one that actually causes me to feel appalled. And probably I could meet someone tomorrow who is the 8th child in a family and think, "Gee, what a nice person, I'm glad they were born." So it's all relative, in the end. But IN THEORY I object to people having more than seven kids. So there.

Since I intend to epub a book fairly soon, I will have to rewrite my Twitter bio, so when that day comes, I'll probably put something about being pro-feminism in there, as I still do support it as a cause. I could put that I'm a daoist... animist? I'm still trying to work out the exact right label there. And maybe about being pro-LGBT/gay marriage (except get me started on marriage as a legal institution sometime--I dare you), and supportive of those who choose to live child-free. Except I'll only get 140 characters, so probably I'll stick to just one or two of those.

Sample Sunday

The following excerpt is from my women's fic novel (which of course has ghosts in it) BROKEN ONES. It takes place near the beginning. Louise, an anthropology lecturer at San Diego State, allowed her sister, Marie, to spend the night at her place to escape the wrath of her abusive husband, Everett.

Any and all comments warmly welcomed.

___________________

The pounding on my front door woke me, which told me two things right away. One, I’d overslept. Two, whoever was at my door was about to break it down, they were pummeling it so hard.

I straightened out the tee-shirt and drawstring pants I was sleeping in and ran my fingers through my hair a few times, although from the feel of it, there was no taming it.

“Alright!” I shouted as I made my way to the front of the house. “Alright, stop it!”

“Marie!” came the answering bellow. “Marie, I know you’re in there!”

Everett. “Oh, god,” I whispered, unsure of what to do. A quick look around my living room showed that they had already left. The afghans were folded, stacked one on top of the other on one end of my old worn-out couch.

Everett started pounding on the door again.

“Everett, knock it off!” I shouted, and opened the door. He stood there, red-faced and panting, eyes wild. Everett has coffee hair and eyes, and just a hint of olive in his complexion, but at the moment it was as dark as a beet.

Everett Karrar came from a “nice” middle-class family in Point Loma. WASPy-types; they went to their church and attended fundraising events at local nonprofits. Everett fit their image of the good son—he’d done a tour in Iraq, got honorably discharged due to an injury, and now worked as a CPA at a firm in downtown San Diego. He had a wife and three kids, and he moved in the same circles he grew up with. But to look at him now, you’d think he was a reject from the Springer Show. He was so mad, spittle was flying from his mouth with every breath.

“Everett, she’s not here,” I said, trying to project calm.

“I know she’s here!” He was trying to push his way past me.

“See for yourself,” I said, and stepped out of the way so he could come in and look around.

Everett stalked into the entryway. I watched him take in the empty living room, and his eyes came to rest on the afghans on the couch. Some of the red was fading from his face. He kept his eyes on the afghans and said, “She was here.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. She spent the night.”

His eyes darted to me. Two spots of red stayed in his cheeks. “Where’d she go?”

I shrugged again. “I don’t know. You woke me up. I didn’t know she’d left.”

His eyebrows plunged down and his eyes teared up. His hands balled into fists. “Bull-fucking-shit, Louise. Bull-fucking-shit. You think you can hide my wife from me? My kids? Where is she?”

I stood and stared at him, trying to look bored. Inside, I could feel my pulse accelerating, and my hands went cold. I wasn’t going to tell him where Marie went, and I wanted him out of my house. But Everett used to be a Marine, and although his body was going to seed, he was still a lot stronger than me.

“Everett, I don’t know,” I said. “She was here when I got home last night. She asked to stay over, so I said sure. Now she’s gone.”

Everett grabbed my arm, fingers hard and squeezing. “You think you can just laugh at me, don’t you, Louise! Who the fuck are you to get in the middle of things? She’s my wife!”

“Let me go,” I said, yanking away, but he kept his grip on my arm. “Everett, I told you, I don’t know where she is!”

“Yeah, you do,” he said, nodding. “And you’d better tell me.”

“Listen, you fucker, I’m not telling you anything!” I said, my temper snapping. I raised a bare foot and slammed it as hard as I could against his shin, raking down to pound his sneaker. It wasn’t all that effective, except that his face flushed bright red again. “Let me go!” I shouted.

Everett gripped my arm tighter and then threw me down and away from him. I stumbled and my knees hit the floor.

“Jesus, Everett!” I cried. I scrambled to my feet and pointed at my door. “Get out!”

He ignored that and strode towards me.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” I shouted. “You’re crazy!”

That’s when he punched me. I hit the floor again.

“You think you can hide my kids from me? You think you can hide my wife? Where are they?” he yelled. I tried to get on my feet again but my head spun and my jaw felt like it had exploded. “Where are they, Louise!”

I grabbed at the couch for support, pulling myself up. He was fucking crazy. I had to call the cops. On my feet at last, I lunged for the phone, which sat on a table by the wall.

“Oh no you don’t!” he growled. My feet flew out from under me—he’s knocked them out—and then the phone was in his hand. I don’t remember much after that.

this is the end... of your novel

I recently finished writing a new subplot and associated characters into my RiP (revision in progress, which is a complete draft, now in its fourth cycle of revisions, as opposed to WiP, work in progress, which is still an incomplete first draft). Because of this milestone, I reread the novel's ending. I think it's a good ending, but then I realized it's not something I've given a great deal of thought to. I also read this article today, in which the assumption is that everyone reading knows loads about how to write a good opening chapter and almost as much about writing a good final chapter. But I don't. I mean, I have in the last couple of months become much more familiar with the do's and don't's of novel openings, but I haven't read anything or discussed the question of novel endings at all.

So I figured, maybe you haven't either. And I did a little research, mainly by reading these articles:

• How to End Your Novel by Laura College
• Finding the End of Your Novel by Nova Ren Suma
• How to Finish Your Novel by festinapeoples on eHow
• Plotting the Novel's Ending by Harvey Chapman

Of the above, I found the third article to be the most useful. The first was an interesting overview of three possible formats, the second was hard for me to follow (although take that with a grain of salt because my attention span is about as small as a grain of salt), and the fourth was a teaser opening to an article and I'd have had to buy access to the rest. And I just don't have the money for that right now.

What festinapeoples suggests in her eHow article is to create an outline of everything you've already written as you near the end of the novel. This isn't something I've tried--I don't use outlines. When I start a novel, I have a general idea of the story. I know several elements I'll be including, who the major characters are, and more or less where I want to end up. I often have several scenes already worked out in my head. And the task becomes to go from the logical beginning--although, considering the difficulty I've had with the opening of the RiP, there's nothing logical or straightforward about it--and make my way in the most coherent manner to each scene, until I've come to the end. But what I have done is create 3X5 cards as I reached the midway point of the WiP--it was getting hard for me to keep track of everything.

Festinapeoples's outlining method sounds similar. She suggests that you create it to be sure to tie up all of the loose ends you've created in the beginning and middle of the novel. My cards serve the same purpose, but they have the advantage, imo, of being easier to move around than the outline. Maybe the ideal is to do both.

1. Create the outline of all preceding scenes or chapters.
2. Create 3X5 cards for all the remaining scenes (my chapters have several scenes each, so it works better if each card has a scene, not a chapter).
3. Make sure there's a card addressing each loose end from the outline.
4. Play with the order of the cards until everything hangs together nicely.

So that's for the organizational side of it. How about the actual ending, what should that look like?

Of course there are a lot of ways to go about this, and genre is a huge factor, as is the overall tone of your novel. My novels are paranormal fiction, with a strong women's lit quality. While some parts may get dark, at times, the overall tone of the stories is light. I write to entertain. I like to end with dialogue. My RiP ends with the mc and her love interest talking about the events they've just gone through together, and then the love interest asking the mc out. I think it's sweet. We'll see if my crit partners agree!

I'm guessing the dialogue-sweet-ending thing would not work for everyone's novel. Stephen King, for instance. I don't think he chooses that format very often.

How about you? Have you given much though to how to end a novel? Do you have wisdom to share about the right way and the wrong way to do that?

Talking about a story idea

I don't talk about a story idea until I've completed a first draft. The closest thing is to ask someone a question about some detail, and find I'm forced to explain an aspect of the story for the person to be able to answer. And even that makes me horribly uncomfortable, and I've resolved to avoid doing it again at all costs. I have two reasons for this:

1. More often than not when I have done this, the person(s) I told my story to will find some flaw in it or come up with a helpful suggestion, which destroys the idea.

2. (And this is the main one) Talking about the idea relieves the pressure to write it and get it out of my head.

I have a friend who loves to hash out her stories over the phone and it's really hard for me to cooperate with that. Inside, I'm screaming, "Dear god, stop now before you kill this thing!" And, I have to say, she rarely completes a story.

How about you? Do you ever talk about an idea before you've written a first draft of it?

name your baby--er--character

I am obsessed with names. Especially character names. Show me your query, and I will probably become fixated on a character name in it and raise some issue that no one has ever shown any concern over before. When selecting my own character names, I go through a whole process. It's actually a lot of fun for me. Here's what I do:

• Decide on a word or words that best describes the character. Recently, for instance, I needed to find a new name for a character who I would describe as hard, bitter, inflexible. 
• Go to a couple of my favorite name sites, such as this one or this one, and do meaning searches on the words I chose, and some synonyms. Now often, especially for negative attributes, this doesn't go very far (although Mary means "bitter"--did you know that?).
• Go to BabelFish and run the words through various language translations. I settled on "Felsen" for my inflexible character's last name. It means "rock" in German. I'm really hoping it means "rock" as in "stone" and not as in this. But in the end, it doesn't matter--it just has to mean "rock" to me. I don't expect anyone else to look up the meanings of all of my names. And since sometimes I tweak the spellings of them to suit my needs, it would probably be an exercise in frustration for anyone to try.
• Sometimes, if the above steps don't come through, I'll go on to search the names of gods and goddesses, mythological creatures, historical figures, etc., to find a name that resonates.

A few things to consider when naming a character:

• Make sure none of your characters' names are similar. This is a rookie mistake. A lot of people do it unconsciously--they like the sound of certain vowels and consonants in a name, and without realizing it, they use them over and over. Honestly, I think Tolkien did it with Arwen and Eowyn, among others. I bet he had all sorts of justifications for it in his world-building. In the end, it's still a lot harder than it needs to be to discuss who you think Aragorn should end up with.
• Look at their ethnicity and ancestry. If you are going to name a character Billy Gambini, have a reason. Even if only you know the reason. 
• Consider whether the name sounds like anything unfortunate. Unless you chose it to be funny. And trust me, folks, I've seen some unfortunate character names out there--this is the sort of thing I notice.
• Avoid choosing unusual names unless they fit with your genre. If you have a character named Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, they'd better be the headmaster of Hogwarts.
• Likewise, make sure the name is easy to pronounce, even if your character is an alien from a culture where they click their beaks when they speak. Please, for the love of Groosalugg, avoid apostrophes.

That's all I've got for now, although I suspect I'll think of five more points and come back to edit this post again later.

What process do you use to name your characters?