Jump to content

Click Here!

Madame Manga

Members
  • Posts

    13
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Madame Manga

  1. LJ gives me a migraine. I don't dispute the right of a private company to regulate what material goes on its servers. That's not a free speech issue -- 6A is not the US government. LJ is not a common carrier, since they had restrictions and a TOS from the get-go. If they don't want to allow Potterchan or drawings of fictional teens doing it with fictional adults, that's their right -- it's their space, and they do have good reason to be wary of the vagaries of American law where arguably pedophiliac works are concerned. So why does my blood pressure shoot sky-high every time this shit hits the fan? Well... I used to hang out at Literotica.com. They screen every story before they post it, and their absolute rule is no persons under 18 may be depicted in connection with sexual activity. Not an older character flashing back to younger days, not a young person spying on older people without actual participation -- we're talking a hard, bright line. You have to positively state that your characters are older than 18 -- no mere implications will suffice. Why did that policy not really bug me, although it limited what I could read and post there? Because it was completely up front, unambiguous and unchanging. It wasn't vague, squishy, blurred by "artistic intent" (as interpreted by some bunch of demonstrably clueless webadmins) and otherwise clear as mud. You knew EXACTLY where you stood, and although you might chafe a bit at its restrictions, you'd never get a poison headache trying to comply with the policy. When a story was rejected, they told you why, and you could fix it and re-submit it. They did not swoop on you without warning and nuke your entire account as if you had the Black Death when some anonymous crusader complained. For some reason, LJ seems to think that taking a stand and stating a truly clear policy is bad. And that changing that policy without warning is beneficial to the process, and that constantly reacting in obvious panic rather than planning ahead and sticking to some sort of established precedent is the way to conduct a business. It's a *business*. They have paying and nonpaying customers with a contractual relationship with the company. They owe them a consistent, solid, carefully administered TOS. But they can't seem to get it right even after stuffing all their feet so far down their collective throat that they shouldn't be able to breathe. Two months ago, I was seriously considering ante-ing up for a real LJ account. I've been on LJ for the better part of five years, posted hundreds of thousands of words and have hundreds of comments archived. Are they getting one red cent of my money? No points for guessing right. -MM
  2. Madame Manga

    Smoking?

    Well... I may be a little older than you are, because I recall a time when there was practically no such thing as a non-smoking restaurant. (I don't generally patronize bars and strip clubs, so I can't say much there.) Even in California, twenty or thirty years ago most restaurants had nothing better than a non-smoking section. That usually had no physical separation from the rest of the place more formidable than a half-height glass partition. The same went for airplanes, stores, bus stations, offices, even schools -- just about anywhere other than around hazardous materials. If you didn't want to barricade yourself in your own house 24/7, you'd inevitably be around smokers. As I mentioned, my workplaces for a total of three and a half years were pretty tobacco-infused; at one of them, out of about twenty employees, I was virtually the only person who didn't smoke in the back rooms. And this was a fancy delicatessen where we handled food constantly! Believe it or not, it wasn't against health codes back then. At the time, I didn't object much, because the danger of second-hand smoke wasn't in the news yet, and I didn't want to come off righteous and priggish. It wasn't like quitting and finding another job would have automatically gotten me out of the reek, so I didn't even do that. Anyway, I was young and had good lungs at the time. It might be hard to grasp now, but that was what nonsmokers were expected to do -- put up with it as nothing more than a minor nuisance, or else get labeled as a buttinsky hypochondriac weirdo. That's not an exaggeration. In the late 1970s, I got the shit taken out of me by everyone present for giving a mild rebuke to a classmate who lit up backstage at our high school theater. So I shut up and breathed through my mouth. The reward for my polite stoicism is an extremely heightened sensitivity to tobacco smoke... so far. I'm glad that no one really has to put up with breathing the crap now, but it took a lot of lawmaking and attitude adjustment to get that accomplished. Don't take it for granted! -MM
  3. Just from the quick descriptions (probably not fair, but let's look at this from the hostile reader's point of view) I think I may see what your critics mean. #1: "a bright, overconfident SF-addicted gamer". My first reaction, knowing absolutely nothing about you, is to suspect self-insertion; on the face of it that sounds like every kid who ever dreamed of writing a SF story... or Wesley Crusher. Talk about a millstone around the character's neck! What are the individual traits and history that make him different from all those other irritatingly bright yet socially impaired young gamers out there? What are his genuine human weaknesses? (Overconfidence is not a weakness in the context of a SF story, because it's nearly always just a mechanism to help the writer carry the plot forward. Characters who say, "No, let's NOT investigate what's behind that door" don't get much accomplished.) Whatever you come up with had better be damn enticing and well-thought-out if a reader's going to like this guy or be interested in what he does. #2, the "hesitant" female sidekick, is another big red flag. It sounds like she's mostly there to try to hold back the bold young fellow with her feminine timidity, and scream when confronted by monsters and/or kidnappers. Maybe that's not what she does, but her counterparts in a thousand bad animes and novels have done so for decades. That sort of character has never been anything but a device to get the hero involved in the plot, or to provide a little eye candy. She is also good for pissing off nearly every female reader, and a lot of the males as well. And so on. When characters are there mostly to act out your cool plot, and don't have much to them other than their immediate function in the story, they're going to be flat. Round them out independently of the plot before you ever start to write the actual story. It's only once you know who they are -- and I mean down to the ground -- that you know how they will behave when confronted with the situations you're going to give them. Of course you will tailor your characters to the sort of story you want to tell -- you'd better not have a literal-minded, unobservant guy trying to solve an intricate mystery, for instance. He'll get nowhere. But slotting a round peg into a round hole is dull and predictable. How about something more like "Timid, nonviolent guy has to come out of his shell to fight monsters alongside an exuberant, martial-arts trained girl he secretly likes, but who thinks timid guys are useless wimps"? Conflict is the name of the game -- people need genuine obstacles to run into, genuine problems to solve, and genuine growth to make in the process. If your reaction to this is, "But I see characters like mine in SF all the time", well, most SF is pretty bad, even the pro stuff. Don't imitate the bad. Try googling for fictional character creation, or general fiction writing help. There are a lot of online resources out there... -MM
  4. Madame Manga

    Smoking?

    In the US, *everything* is made into a moral issue. Private sexual behavior (including fantasies and masturbation that involve no one but the individual); the choice to stay home with the kiddies or work (if there's actually a choice involved); the consumption of alcohol, sweets and trans fats... I don't need to go on. That's just the way the culture frames it, and you can't get away from that. A well-honed sense of the absurd is your only protection. I understand your resentment at being labeled morally inferior for a personal habit (as long as you are not blowing in it other people's faces), but if you let the moralists influence your actions either positively or negatively, they still end up calling the shots for you. What do you think is best for you, quitting or continuing? You are completely free to do either, and that's all you need to take account of, until they actually criminalize the use of tobacco. Personally, I hate the stuff and get an instant sore throat every time someone lights up within fifteen yards of me (which didn't happen before I worked with heavy smokers a couple of decades ago) but a Volstead Act for cigs would be just as doomed as the original effort. As you say, people don't often respond well to being lectured. I order foie gras every time I see it on a menu, speaking of moralists attempting to legislate what I stuff into my face. Just because it's so damn yummy. -MM
  5. A response I might well have made in that situation (I've worked retail): "How right you are -- and don't forget to tell your daughter, many boys REALLY like those girls who give blowjobs at the drop of a jockstrap and don't expect, you know, a RELATIONSHIP. Can I point you to some titles we carry on oral sex technique? I mean, you want popular..." *cue knowing Southern-belle giggle*
  6. There you have it. Again with the benefit of way too much experience in fic circles, IMO the best response to someone else's bashing of another author, even if undertaken on your "behalf", is to ignore it as completely as if it had never been brought up at all. It has nothing whatsoever to do with you or your reputation unless you let it. These little sturm-und-drangs that forums and fic sites are so fond of creating can eat up all your time and creative energy if you fall into the trap of feeding them. Don't even be tempted to engage in the discussion -- silence conveys more than anything you could say, and does it without dragging your own tail in the tar. MM
  7. After posting smutfic on the Net for as long as I have (going on 12 years) I highly recommend developing two essential writer's assets: a rhinoceros-thick skin and an unflappably optimistic sense of humor. Anything that anyone says about your precious, slaved-over, dear-to-your-heart baby, aka dirty fic, will sound different to you, the author, than how that person intended it to sound. Guaranteed, no matter how well that person expresses herself. It's much healthier for the blood pressure, and usually more accurate to the reviewer's genuine intention, to assume always that she meant it in the best possible sense. However, it's difficult for me to tease anything resembling even an inadvertent insult out of review #1. That's not a skill that's worth developing, for your own sake. Why look for bugs in the bouquet? Better to practice taking even vile flames as lightly as possible, which is something you can often transfer to real-life situations. Equanimity, or even just not giving a shit, is power. MM
  8. I used MS Word for over fifteen years. When I put together a zine in 1996, Word ate my brains on a daily basis. It's the most overstuffed, underorganized piece of software on the planet, but I didn't have much choice about what to use. Lately, it's been eating my computer's brains; I can't leave a document up for more than half an hour without SOMETHING going rotten. My mouse freezes; the RAM gets hardening of the arteries; the program itself starts to flail and choke and spit out error messages. Then I gotta do a hard reboot and try to remember what the hell it was I was trying to accomplish. Yeah, it's a fairly new system running XP, and there's no earthly reason for all of this. It does it on all three PCs in the house. I've been a Mac user. A relative of mine still is, and his system crashes three or four times a day. Sometimes three or four times a session. Nope, Apples go rotten too. Computers and software in general are still not genuine consumer products, because for the people in charge it's all about cultivating the cutting edge of technogeekery, not providing reliable tools for the masses. We're just going to have to wait until the first generation of rock stars retires or dies and passes on the business to those boring people who actually know how to run a business. So... I switched to Wordpad. The joy of simplicity! I haven't had a crash since... MM
  9. Just FYI...it's not at all unknown for rape victims to both read and write non-consent scenes. Seriously, eroticizing a bad experience is apparently very theraputic for some people. Reason being: on the page it's not real and not dangerous. Writing erotica is completely controllable, and a rape can be re-shaped in the imagination into something subtly or greatly different from the actual attack the person underwent. One of the most terrifying aspects of rape is loss of control, so taking back a sense of control in any way possible is important for healing. I've got no idea at all what this reviewer was on about, BTW--just wanted to clear up that particular point, since it's been an important interest of mine for some time now. MM
  10. I'm so glad that AFF (and the Net) didn't exist yet when I was 13, because if it had, the disjointed Mary Sue crap I was scribbling on school notebook paper might now be immortalized FOR ALL ETERNITY, or at least until the immolation of the earth. *shudder* Think of the future, young ficcers! I am your sadder, wiser, older self traveling back in time to give you fair warning! When prospective employers or dates are in the picture and checking you out for character references, Super-Google-Plex-2021 will be able to tell them exactly what's in your refrigerator and medicine cabinet, report the last time you took a shower or flossed your teeth, and scroll out every post and email you've typed under every screen name back to the beginning of time. You should at least be able to confront your past without having to explain the BDSM/bestiality kick you indulged in at some appallingly tender age... MM
  11. I enjoy the fact that we don't all match. Male, female, tall, short, thin, plump, dark, light...whatever. Anything else, and the whole world would be like those manufactured neighborhoods where all the houses look similar and are painted in similar colors, so that small children get lost only a block away from home. Uniformity is highly overrated. Scientifically speaking, it seems that some human differences do exist beneath the skin; there is enough genetic variation between ethnic pools that you can predict different reactions to certain drugs, different susceptibilities to certain diseases and so on. It's not useful to say "We're all really the same at heart!" because we're not identical. And that's good. Variations between individuals of the same "race" are usually larger than variations between "races", however. Each person's DNA and formative experiences are unique; you've got something in common with the entire human race and with your immediate biological family, and something special to you alone, or which you share with people who have no other connection to you. The internet is great for discovering the existence of your one soulmate on earth who likes both Jane Austen novels and professional wrestling. For example. Besides, people are just plain pretty. I love the fact that black men's butts tend to be well rounded, that Asian women's hair tends to be straight and glossy and capable of growing very long, that Scandinavians have nearly translucent skin and that Persians have huge, luminous brown eyes. And the ethnic mixes! The loveliest child I ever saw had a Japanese mother and a European father. I melt in the face of human beauty... MM
  12. I go back and forth on codes. I do not like giving away plot points just for the sake of CMA; I figure if you are reading a fic set in an adult-oriented fandom that has been posted on an adult-oriented site, you just might need to expect adult content. Listing every single sex act takes up far too much space in a summary, at least in my case--I write multi-chapter stories almost without exception. But I'm not interested in frightening the horses or deceiving anyone. Sometimes I do pack in all the applicable codes; it really depends on the story. A short wankfic, which I don't write often any more, gets many more codes than a more literary piece. Most often I resort to a note along with the disclaimer warning about general sexuality and mentioning the most prominent common squick triggers, but leaving it at that. I think the needs of the plot can carry most people over the rougher patches--I like to give readers a little credit for being grownups. I've been posting stories online for years now, and the only times I've had objections from a reader usually come about because of something utterly unpredictable. How on earth am I supposed to know that Mama apparently told her that a man who enjoys a finger in the ass during straight sex must actually be queer, and so cannot hold any possible interest for a het female? And this is a MANGA fan? Go figure! MM
  13. I'm Madame Manga. I've been writing for the better part of thirty years. Like the name says, I'm into manga rather than anime (though I have no actual objection to anime; I just prefer books to TVs). I don't spread my fandoms around much, but dig deeply into the particular world I'm dealing with and stay there for a while. A long while, sometimes; it can take me years to complete some of my projects since I tend to write at novel-length rather than in drabbles. I read many more titles than I fic off of, however. Another fic activity I enjoy is passing on some of what I've learned along the way. I had a lot of help early on from some other writers to whom I will be forever grateful. Pay it forward! I love to get my teeth into something and do a lot of research. Such as guns and cars for Gunsmith Cats and feudal Japan for Blade of the Immortal. I've also recently written a little Hellsing, but as a writer I've mostly been attracted to under-served fandoms. It's not that I want the sandbox all to myself, but if there are thousands of stories posted about a set of characters, it can be difficult to find an angle I need to explore. If the sort of fic I want to read has already been written, I'm happy to sit back and read it. If it doesn't exist...watch out. I'm an erotica writer to the bone and rarely shy away from any subject. When you've got this much mileage on you, embarrassment eventually wears down to a grease spot on the road. But I like plenty of plot too, and IMO there's no point in writing fic if you aren't going to pay attention to characterization. I've largely concentrated on het with occasional bursts of slash, but I don't usually think in genres; whatever the story seems to call for will turn up. As a reader I rule out only a few squicks. Some of my former strongest turnoffs are now major turn-ONs; if you have a big reaction to something, there's usually a reason. Fic can be self-revelatory in surprising ways. Remember, it's just words. Don't get bent out of shape by someone else's fantasies; it ain't worth your time. My best work has usually been done with the idea of pleasing some other particularly discerning fan or fans; it's nice to have a muse who gives you feedback and can kick your ass with a well-aimed boot. A tight beta relationship with someone who demands high standards is my ideal writing situation. If someone else likes the result too, that's great, but I'll confess to usually doing things the way I want to do them rather than in a way that will appeal to the greatest number of readers. No one's paying me for this, after all. I post stories mostly in the hope of finding a few kindred spirits and maybe giving a broader circle of people some entertainment. I wrote fic before the Net came along and I'd still write it even if I couldn't show a word of it to anyone. But damn, it's nice to open up my mailbox or reviews and find a response. Total gravy. That's what fic sites are for, so rock on! MM
×
×
  • Create New...