Katie(babs) pointed out an… infuriating blog post from a sci-fi writer named Cale McCaskey.  (He was answering comments, which is where he really digs his hole deeper, but he has since decided to stop replying.  So, check out his post but you won’t be able to engage at this point.  Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing at this point.) 

On January 18, Cale made a post titled “The Problem with Romance Novels” and proceeded to denigrate the entire genre of romance.  This, of course, made a lot of people on the internet angry.  Quelle surprise!

Cale claims to be a “sexy, single white male with a really big, uh, wallet.”  There is one claim in that list that I’d believe, and that’s the “single, white male” part. 

But I digress.

For those who don’t want to give this guy more hits on his site, here’s a breakdown of what he’s saying.

His claims:

1) Romance novels and authors demanding respect is similar to people demanding respect for finger paintings.  Translation: it’s ridiculous.

2) Romance is responsible for the “almost 50%” illiteracy rate in this country. (Not sure where he’s getting his numbers- he didn’t source them, although throughout his post, he required others to reference all of THEIR claims.  Just saying, is all.)

3) Romance writers do not deserve the same respect as “authors of much higher standing.”  (It reads like he doesn’t think they deserve any respect at all.)

4) Romance novels are DESIGNED to be inferior.

5) Romance and love stories are things belonging to junior high school girls and should be left behind when girls become women. (I don’t even know.  I mean, seriously?  WTF?)

6) “If a romance story were that good, it would no longer be referred to as romance, but would instead simply be known as drama or literary fiction or a classic love story.” (*blinks*)

I tried to engage the guy in genial, polite discourse, and he stuck to his guns.  Romance is for little kids, he seems to think.  I was dismissed with a wave of the guy’s hand.

As an aside, I’m disturbed by this.  Romance, with all the sexy times and serious emotional connections, are for kids?  What does he think adults are doing when they date and get married, etc?  Does he think it’s all rational, logical decisions based on cost analysis and future projections of wealth, or possibly a decision based on genetic compatibility alone?  There is a reason this guy is single and I think this might be a big part of it.

He makes a big deal about Ivy League schools not treating romance as “real” literature, as well.  He even goes so far as to research people that are mentioned in comments so he can discount their academic status (“He’s not a REAL Harvard professor, he’s just a guest lecturer,” blah, blah, blah).  The pretention is just oozing off the page by the time you get to these comment replies.  I think I threw up a little in my mouth.

I was really incensed for a bit, until I figured it out.

The dude is a troll.

Read that again and let it sink in.

THE DUDE IS A TROLL.

He’s not trolling someone’s blog in the comments, he’s trolling the entire romance/reading COMMUNITY in order to get traffic to his blog.  He clearly needs it.  The guy is at the same level that I am- he’s trying to get published, make a name for himself, but he hasn’t gotten there yet.  He’s trying to build his readership, get some eyes to his blog to check him out.  He’s not getting the kind of traffic that he wants (prob. because he’s pretentious and derogatory as shit, but that might just be me) so he’s decided to try something new.

He nukes the romance community from space (it’s the only way to be sure!!!) and watches the traffic to his site just skyrocket.

My guess?  He’s seen what’s been happening with all of the reviewer vs. author stuff and knows that controversy will get you a lot of attention.  And boy, is he getting it.

The problem with his plan, is that he looks like a total toolbox.  Why?  Because the people he’s drawn to his site are ROMANCE READERS who are not going to agree with him.  And the more dismissive and condescending he gets with his comments, the less likely it is that these people are going to be swayed to his perspective.

Am I going to go back and read more of this guy’s stuff? 

Not a chance in hell.

So, he gets a post with a ton of comments and a lot of traffic that isn’t, for the most part, going to last for him.

I’m sure he’ll get a few new followers, but let’s do a cost analysis on this.  Will the value he gets from new readers outweigh the bad will that he’s engendering in other members of the reading/writing community?  Is INFAMOUS preferable to famous? 

The other question I keep asking myself is if he actually, true facts, believes the crap that he’s spouting.  If he does, he may be in trouble.  He gives me the impression that he is not a listener.  He doesn’t hear what people are saying, because he’s so convinced that he’s right that he doesn’t need to bother. 

This guy is going to have issues in the future.  What if an editor or agent decides they want to pick up one of his books, but he needs to do some story editing?  Is this the guy that’s going to be open to suggestions or is he going to argue over every little change and not bend at all?

He strikes me as the type of person that will self-publish if only because he thinks he knows better than the editorial professionals and doesn’t believe he needs to change anything in his manuscript.

Translation: the kind of guy to avoid when you’re clicking around amazon.com and come across his book.

I also imagine that he’s this way in his personal life, so he’s either going to have to find a woman who agrees with everything he says or who won’t say anything even if she doesn’t.  Good luck with that, buddy.

Funny thing- I’ve been reading Chuck Wendig’s 500 Ways to be a Better Writer (which is totally worth the $2.99- you should all pick it up!) and I just read the bit where he talks about not being a “book racist.”  In Wendig’s case, he’s talking about not denigrating other storytelling mediums, like TV or movies.  However, I think his point can apply here as well.

There are those of us that are so sure that our medium is the only one that matters or that has value, and we are not afraid to express that opinion.  This is true within each medium- look at the film world.  The people who will argue the value of Speilberg vs. Tarintino, romantic comedies vs. indie dramas vs. sci-fi vs. blockbusters of all kinds.

Clearly, this guy is one of those who wants to place a value on each genre of books and rank them according to value to the world.  But as I read over his comments, it makes me wonder what value he’s actually looking for in his literature.  Whatever it is, it’s clear that he’s not truly willing to experiment or try new things.  He’s already decided what he likes and what he doesn’t and isn’t willing to bend on that at all, which I believe is to his detriment as a writer of fiction.

There are many genres of books out there.  Literature, with a capital ‘L’, westerns, mysteries, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, etc.  To quote Wendig, “the storytelling cults can learn much from each other.”  You won’t like everything you read, but you should never just write it off as a lesser form.  You can learn something from everything. 

Some of the best storytelling lessons I’ve learned have come from bad books, bad TV shows, and bad movies, or stories that I haven’t liked, even if I could agree that the writing was well done.  If you can’t learn from what you engage in and encounter, then you may be missing a large part of what has kept humans on the top of the pile for so long.  Adaptability.

I’ve learned a lot from his posts, point of fact, and I will be using the lessons I learned as I move forward, hopefully making myself a better writer and a better person.

But in the end, it all boils down to the fact that, no matter what he ACTUALLY believes or doesn’t, the guy is a troll and not worth worrying about.

There have been a couple of recent book events that have annoyed me. The Da Vinci Code was one of them. So many people were going crazy over the content of the book, over the concept that the author was trying to push, and yet the writing was utter shit. I mean, just terrible.

I read detective novels and suspense thrillers. I went through a period in my life where I had read almost all the current releases, even the shitty books that they sell you at the checkout counter in big box stores like Wal-Mart or Meijer, for like $1.99. So, when I started reading the Da Vinci Code and I was able to guess every step that the author would take for the first 30 pages, I decided I was done.

I don’t want to be a step (or five) ahead of the author. I want to be surprised and shocked and mesmerized the whole way. Which I wasn’t.

And I wasn’t all that surprised about the content of the book, either. After reading other books with similar theological content (and which mare much better written) like Christopher Moore’s Lamb, and seeing films like Kevin Smith’s Dogma, the idea that things did not go down like the bible spells it out is not a new concept to me. And it’s not heretical, at least in my mind. There are numerous reasons why the Catholic Church and the Pope would want to change the story to meet their own needs and I get that. Which is why the whole plot of the Da Vinci Code just didn’t shock me.

Like, at ALL.

That ties in with a second phenomenon that bothers the crap out of me. Remember when Lost came out and all these people got sucked into the story? People who had denigrated and smack talked all sorts of sci-fi and fantasy works for years?

Yeah, they decided that they loved Lost and they fell into two categories. Either they refused to believe or accept that Lost was actually a work of science fiction or of fantasy (which I experienced when I worked at Blockbuster and got into an argument with a woman who refused to accept that Lost was a fantasy despite all of the evidence to the contrary), or they acted like they were the first person ever to like science fiction or fantasy. Or, that Lost was the first show to do any of the things that it did.

Spoiler alert- it wasn’t.

Not that I don’t think Lost was a great show, although I only watched the first season and that was it (god, back to the Twilight/Hunger Games conversation). I think it did amazing things and I am actually pretty glad that it got people interested in speculative fiction. However, as a lifelong speculative fiction fan, it’s annoying.

My husband is seeing this trend in gaming and with comic books. It’s really popular to be a geek right now. Geek isn’t really derogatory anymore, which is nice for the kids growing up, but it’s annoying for those of us who went through that gauntlet when we were kids and are mad as hell that the people that tormented us with snide comments and who failed to invite us to their parties are suddenly embracing the very things that they gave us shit for.

The internet, it seems, it responsible for this in the long run. It’s not that Spider-Man is inherently cooler now than he was thirty years ago. It’s not like the X-Men have undergone a major revision and are suddenly a different, more exciting team of heroes. No, it’s that the people who never would have read those comics or seen those movies in the past are being shown, thanks to technology, that those stories are amazing, they are spectacular (see what I did there?), and they are worth spending time and money on. The internet, it seems, is a geek enabler.

The internet makes it easier to share your passion. It makes it easier to show people WHY you love something and give them an interactive medium with which to ask you questions and find out more. And if someone does find your little manifesto on why Nightwing/Robin is the best sidekick ever in the history of comics (with Bucky coming in a close second), they are able to, with just a few clicks, find more material to read and do research. Comics, it seems, are not difficult to get a hold of anymore, even if you live in the middle of BFE.

Short stories, fan fic, book/comic/movie reviews, podcasts- there is an amazing amount of access available via the web and it’s allowing people to find their inner geek, even if they hadn’t allowed themselves to do that previously.

Which bugs the shit out of the nerds/geeks who had to take the heat for loving Star Trek or Star Wars for the past 40 years or so.

I was an angry kid, tall and strong and big, who cared what people thought but was able to throw shit back and ACT like I didn’t care when people made fun of me. It was fun to be contrary and tell people, “so what?” when they told me that I was a loser or that Star Wars was lame.

“Why do I care what you think?” does wonders for people messing with you. (I will also confess that I won a weight lifting competition when I was in high school and after my total weight lifted was announced over the intercom the Monday after, there was a certain segment of dudes who had given me shot before then who decided that I was no longer worth the hassle, which made life a lot easier for me.)

Seriously, when you tell people who are giving you shit that you don’t give a shit about what they’re saying, it is so much fun to watch their faces. They sometimes deflate, like a balloon, or they get all red and mad, which is equally awesome.

But I digress.

My point here is that my husband and I grew up without the internet. If we wanted to squee over Star Wars or Thundercats or whatever, we needed to actually meet people, probably in our hometown or at camp or something, to talk about it with. It could be hard to find fellow fans (Escape to Witch Mountain fans, please contact me!) and being a fannish person could be super lonely.

If you were alone, and you were taking shit from people at school, it could be a long, hard road to walk.

That all changed with the internet. We got the internet at my house in 1996 and the coolest thing about it, at least for me, was the fact that I could get on Yahoo (oh, 1990′s, how quaint you were!) and do a search for any of my fannish loves and find web sites devoted to it, fan fiction archives with the additional adventures of whoever it was you wanted to read about, newsgroups discussing the latest episodes, and e-mail loops with all of the above.

Suddenly, the community of geeks was much larger, in that it now included the entire world, and smaller, in that so many people from all over the world became close friends with fans who felt the same way about it.

On the one hand, I am so glad that today’s kids can log on to the web and find someone else who loves what they love and they can talk about it. Even in a town as small as the one that I grew up in, it’s easy to find someone else to geek out with, even if they live 5,000 miles away.

The other side is that the special nature of geekdom is slipping away. It used to be that you survived the trial by fire and you earned your stripes. You got respect for what you made it through and what you were able to find on your own. It took work to get a hold of fanzines or fan films. It was hard to get all the episodes of Doctor Who or Cowboy Bebop. Now it takes less than 5 minutes and you can have the entire run of Doctor Who on your iPad.

I feel like an old person, complaining about this, but I think it is something that needs to be brought up. After all that, it comes back to the Lost phenomenon. All sorts of late speculative fiction adopters are annoying those of us who have been in the game for most of our lives. It is super frustrating when people talk about tropes of the genre that appear in these shows (I will include Battlestar Galactica here as well because there are a ton of people who jumped on the bandwagon because it was cool, not because they really loved the sci-fi and started acted as though BSG was the first to do any of it and really? It was a REMAKE of a show from the 1970′s- CLEARLY it is not entirely new and fresh.) as though the show was the first to do any of it.

No. No it isn’t. They are tropes. Please to be doing some homework.

Here’s the thing. I’m not opposed to things like the Da Vinci Code or Lost. I just wish they were BETTER than what we’ve been given. If we’re going to suck in this new wave of fans, why can’t we give them the best that genre fiction has to offer, not just something that’s middling?

Clearly there is something in these works that have connected with these viewers/readers in a way that previous works did not. That must be taken into consideration, clearly. My concern is that what if what drew people in is something superficial and stupid, that no one who is a true lover of genre fiction would ever want to repeat in their own works? Like, did people watch Lost because of the cast? Or because they were fans of Felicity and JJ Abrams was a part of Lost? Or was the massive marketing campaign that ABC threw out a part of it as well?

I don’t want to be the snob that doesn’t want to let in the barbarians at the gate. I love that more and more people are getting into the things that I love. It’s just that, as they do, they are changing the nature of fandom and of fannish interactions. They’re changing what it means to be a geek and some of us long term, hard core geeks who survived all those early battles are a bit bitter.

Just a bit.

I’ve been on LiveJournal for over 10 years, and I’ve been an active participant in fandom and fan fiction culture for almost 20 years. There are certain rules that were created in the early days of the net that governed the way that fan interacted. Those rules tried to take into account misogyny, racism, ablest language, gender and sexuality issues, and generally try to make fannish online spaces safe havens for fans of all types, no matter what they look like, who they worship, who they want to have sex with, or what kind of body they were currently living in.

New fans are breaking these well-established rules, left right and center. Just look at the comments on any random youtube video. Or on popular online blogs like IO9 or Huffington Post. The negativity, the vicious attacks on anything and everything- it’s like the wild west out there and the old school online fans are having a hard time tamping it down.

Many of us are sticking with our little corners of the web but as more people embrace new technologies and advances, we’re forced out more and more. I LOVE Twitter- I think it’s so much fun, but it does allow people to be absolute dicks to each other, and in public. The things that people will say on Twitter that they would NEVER say face to face is just astounding.

And tumblr. I don’t even get tumblr. I feel like an old lady sitting on his front porch with the shotgun and the old dog, warning kids to get off my lawn when I play around with tumblr. But as LiveJournal has issues and people aren’t willing to go over to Dreamwidth (which you should- it’s awesome!), they are finding themselves on tumblr and the epicenter for fannish info and trends is gradually shifting. Maybe not so gradual. And, again, tumblr is the wild, wild west. It doesn’t work the way I’m used to and it’s uncomfortable.

Change is uncomfortable.

I’d really like to welcome all the Twilight fans to the world of the paranormal. I’d love to tell the Losties where they can find the best sci-fi to expand their minds and to find more of what they loved about their favorite show. But I’m not sure where or how to do that, or if it would even be well received, because I’m not sure that their speculative fiction is MY speculative fiction and that makes me a bit worried.

The times, they are a’changing and I’m not sure I like the way the wind is blowing. I bet this is how old school Trek fans felt when Next Gen was on the horizon. At least they had Patrick Stewart to look forward to.

I’ve tried to read Hunger Games at least five times. I have never made it past page four. I’ve tried to figure out what it is that is keeping me out from the biggest book phenomenon since Twilight.

Here are the three things that I can come up with:

1) It’s in first person.

And it’s not very good first person. I have been very upfront about how much I don’t care for first person, generally. It has to be done incredibly well for me to actually feel comfortable reading that close of a POV.

I thought that the first few pages of Hunger Games read very rough, that the author hadn’t quite found her first person feet and it really felt like it needed a second, or third polish. At least to my sensitive first person palate.

2) She wanted to kill the cat.

Look, kill as many people as you want but leave the cat alone. I’m not kidding, As an author, you can kill the entire planet all in one swoop or one by one, Punisher style, but if you want me to like your character, the pets need to be left alone.

I get what she’s trying to do with the whole “I wanted to kill the cat” bit. It’s supposed to be a sign that the world is really tough, that times are awful, and that food is so scarce that the main character would be worried about feeding this additional mouth.

I don’t care. She wanted to kill the cat, game over. No, really. That was enough for me, I was done.

3) I’m just contrary.

I will admit it. I will, occasionally, NOT like something because everyone else likes it. I’ve been accused of that regarding Twilight, but I can honestly say that I’ve read the first book and thought it was shit. I hate Twilight.

Hunger Games, I haven’t really decided yet. I did not like the first few pages that I read and thus, I stopped. I have based my opinion on those pages from that point forward. I have been told by other readers that the first few pages are a bit rough, and that I just need to get past them.

I have also been told this regarding Doctor Who and David Tennant. I shouldn’t have to watch more than a season to get to like the new Doctor, that’s just stupid (I did love me some Christopher Eccleston, good lord did I love him). However, for a book that actually makes sense. It does take a few pages to set up the world and the characters, and to get the plot rolling.

However, it is a problem if the first page has rough writing and contains an element that makes certain readers (re: me) instantly dislike your main character. Maybe not the best way to get that ball rolling.

 

I will admit that I am more interested in reading the book now that the movie trailer has come out. I love Jennifer Lawrence. She was amazing in Winter’s Bone and X-Men First Class. She has this bad ass nature about her, an amazing figure, and this husky, sexy voice that just really works for me. When I saw her in the trailer, she looked hard core and I did find myself wanting to know more about her character and the world that she finds herself in.

I normally get all upset with people over stuff like that. You know, the only wanting to read something because it’s a movie kind of thing.  I did that when P.S. I Love You came out and I discovered that while I liked the movie just fine (and cried my way through it) I really, really disliked the book. That one also has a horrible first person POV, unbelievable character set up, and a contrived plot that made no sense.

I can see why Hunger Games was sold- the whole post-apocalyptic story line, which is hot now, and the kick ass female lead, which we’re always looking for as both readers/consumers of stories and as producers. I’m just not sure it’s the story for me.

I will confess that I did buy a kindle copy of the book with my annual Christmas amazon.com gift card. It was less than $5, so I thought it would be okay even if I made it to page ten and still hated the damn thing.

I still have not read the book.

I will report back if I ever make to chapter 2.

(To be continued…)