Slogging Blogging

It's just so... bad.

I've had to slog my way though hundreds of books in college, but Twilight instills this deep sense of.... like when you are starving but the food you have to eat is not tasty or nutritious AND it takes a long time to prepare. Also, better food is all around you ready to eat. I'll do it, I feel a challenge to do it, but it may take longer. I can only do it if I let my mind have vacations with better things around.

Tonight I started watching the TV show "V" and I kind of like it. Overacted, yes, but anything that finds an obscure internet conspiracy and uses it as a premise for an entire series has my vote.

My own story is lingering in that strange place between character and plot. I have this vague sense that it is good, I just don’t know what it is. I have all these really compelling images and scenes in my head, as well as characters, but I don’t know what ties them all together yet.

Also, World of Warcraft is awesome and I like to play it. I’d say I play it too much, but I’ve written three frackin’ novels in the last few years. That’s most than most novelists, WHILE I was going to school. I think I’m okay as far as video game time goes.

Also, the word “frack” and any derivative thereof is from the TV show “Battlestar Galactica”. It is used as their futuristic swear word and highlights the absurdity that some words are considered bad and some are considered good. I don’t swear as a general rule, and I never use the name of God in vain, but I like frack. It sounds enough like a bad word to make people stop, and then dismiss immediately, which is stupid really. Someone said to me, “If you mean it, why don’t you just say it?” It’s all so relative as to render it absurd. And the way people swear is just funny. It’s suppose to be edgy, but is something really edgy when virtually everyone does it? The opposite of edge is, flat, as in the EDGE of this knife is no more. It is now FLAT. So if everyone uses the edgy words, they are no longer edgy, right? Why do people get away with this? Same thing with sex, but that’s another topic for another day.

I assured her that if I ever did mean it I would say it. It being the other swear word that starts with a letter F. The “Eff” word. The F-dash-dash-dash word. In the words of Ralphie, FFFFFUUUUUDDGGGEEEE.

Twilight is funny, it uses the word “crow” for Bella’s swear word, which is so farfetched and stupid as to render it adorable, like a differently-abled puppy trying to argue for libertarianism. Everyone knows that it won’t work, but the effort is just so scrappy you have to smile.

I’ve never heard any American person use the word crow as an exclamatory. I’ve heard it twice apart from that. First was from an old Australian man who said. “Stone the Crows, It’s hot.” And the second time was from British playwright Andrew Lloyd Webber’s show “Joseph and the Amazing… and so forth” where Pharaoh says “Stone the crows, this Joseph is a clever kid.”

The saying makes no sense, but that’s the way it is with sayings from Brittan.

So Stephanie uses it because she doesn’t want her characters to swear, which only dips this story deeper into the shellac of unreality.

“But it’s about vampires,” a fan my say. “It’s not supposed to be realistic.”

Yes it is. Every story is suppose to be realistic. Even if you clone dinosaurs, have zombies, and show Hitler winning the war, it has to be done in a way so that the dinosaur riding zombie Nazis can exist in a world that we believe in. This realism is created by the little things. The way people talk or the way scenery is described. The books characters read or the conversations they steer away from. The way light shines though a leaf or the swear words they use.

I love Stephen King’s books because they seem so realistic to me. Not that I believe a vampire could exist, but because his characters and locations are so methodically put forth that I believe what happens.

Another good example of this is the book “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” by Cory Doctorow (which you can read and download for free by clicking here, it’s not stealing, he allows people to do this). This book is a scifi book about a future where death is a minor inconvenience and you wear your reputation on your sleeve for everyone to see and rank. The story could never happen, but it is set in Walt Disney World and the culture and setting is perfect enough that you believe it. Then the fantastic stuff just happens.

So, the popularity of Twilight must mean that lots of people relate to the story or to Bella as a person. As I’ve said before, people don’t act like that EVER, so it has to be something else.

I think it’s sex, but as I said, that is another story for another time.