Monthly Archives: April 2011

Elisabeth Sladen

Dear Elisabeth Sladen,

You are missed.

As Sarah Jane Smith, you were partnered with the most magnificent man in the universe, and instead of standing in his shadow you stood beside him, an equal. You were not a damsel in distress. You were strong and independent and smart. You taught me the importance of that. You taught me the importance of asking questions and seeking proof and thinking critically about the world.

You were a hero and a role model to a young girl who loved sci-fi in an era when sci-fi and action TV shows tended to push women to the side as unimportant – the love interest of the week.

I wanted to be like Sarah Jane. Sarah Jane couldn’t have been who she was without you, Elisabeth Sladen.

Thank you, Lis.  I am sorry I never got to tell you that in person.

You will not be forgotten.

Elisabeth Sladen’s last scene with Tom Baker

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve never been good at keeping a journal. I just can’t keep up with it, and it seems rather silly to write down “everyday days” (ie. Those days that are just like the days before them in that you go to work, you do work, you go home, you feed the cats, you veg for two hours, you go to bed.)

I do, however, keep notebooks. Everywhere.  I keep one in my purse, I keep one in my car, I keep one in the kitchen (generally for writing down recipes I make up on the fly that turned out to actually taste surprisingly good), and I keep several beside my bed.  These tend to be written and ordered in a way that I am fairly certain that only I would understand . . . just as only my grandfather could understand his office “filing system.”

Because, in my way, these journals are my filing system. A filing system for Brain Blurts. Because for some reason, my best and most original ideas seem to come when 1. I am trying to get to sleep; 2. I am asleep; or 3. I’m lying half-drowsy in the morning and petting my kitties.

If I don’t write these ideas down, they get lost.  Along with the good ideas, there are the really weird ones.  Those get written down too, because sometimes the really weird ones are the ones that actually work, when you get down to writing.

Of course sometimes, when I am stressed, my poor beleaguered brain will bless me with The Crossover From Hell. The dream where you wake up and look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself “WTF is wrong with you, girl?”

Most recently, I somehow ended up with a MacGyver, Stargate: SG1, (new) Battlestar Gallactica crossover. With glitter.  The glitter was important. It was a new cylon detecting device.  I have also previously endured an NCIS/Marvel Universe/Doctor Who crossover where I ended up being rescued from a crowd of Marvel Villains and Cybermen . . . by being thrown off of the roof of a building into a pool of marshmallow fluff (which might actually add a Ghostbusters element to the dream, too).

Ridiculous, I know.  But even in the most ridiculous dreams, I have on occasion found good writing ideas, and not for fanfiction, even when the dreams in question might involve fandoms.  Because sometimes those fandoms are just shorthand – your brain’s way of giving you some recognizable thing to hold onto in the middle of the nonsense.

I’ve even found some serious, not ridiculous stories in the most unlikely dreams.  So I keep track of them. Even if, when I go back and read them, they make no sense whatsoever. Every dream won’t be useful, after all . . . but sometimes the dream you think the least useful turns out to be just the one you need most.

It’s important to keep track of things, no matter where you get your ideas, and no matter how ridiculous those ideas might seem at the time that you get them. After all, you never know when, somewhere in some future story, you might just need to rescue your protagonist by throwing them into a giant bowl of marshmallow fluff.

Image by Pesky Library via Flickr

I was reading an article over at the Saucy Scrivener about being treated as creepy  for reading young-adult fiction.  It’s not something I’ve ever encountered personally, though I am well familiar with a similar sensation from being the only girl standing in the comic book/sci-fi/gaming section of a bookstore or library.

People do tend to discount young-adult fiction for the same reason that they shove to the side any other kind of genre fiction. The accepted thought is that YA fiction is “easier” and “less complex” than adult literary fiction.

I have a great love of literary fiction. I have also, however, long been a crusader for genre fiction. True, the vast majority of genre fiction, no matter what genre it is in, is formulaic and trite. But there are those rare gems among genre fiction and young adult fiction that fully deserve praise based on their literary merit.  Unfortunately, many of them will always be looked down upon for being “just” genre fiction or for having a broad popular appeal.

While I routinely and happily join in the horror that such a horribly written book as Twilight was ever published, I have devoured and loved other books that were classified as “Young Adult”, “Teen”, and even “Children’s” books.  The language might be simpler, the text more straightforward, but complexity of character is what drives the best of these novels, and the best of them absolutely deserve any literary awards or “adult” praise they might receive.

The best of these books have characters with depth and dimension. The characters grow, they learn, they change, and they come alive in the mind of the reader and stay with them long after the book is put away.  Almost all but the most prurient and romance-driven of these books have something to teach their audience, and manage to do so without being didactic.  The very best of these novels? They manage to break away from formulas and tell their story in a wholly original way.

Making a story easier to read does not rid it of any merit, and many of these books are only called “Young Adult” as a marketing gimmick by the publishers. The stories contained within come without age restrictions.

Related articles

• The Future’s Not Bright… (tor.com)
• Soap box: I see a difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. (jillianisreading.wordpress.com)
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Image by Mike_Cooke via Flickr

I’ve fallen in love.

I’m late to the bandwagon. It took my gaming computer going to the great binary cloud in the sky to convince me to give it a try. For the last two months I’ve had only my wee, weak little netbook to keep me clinging to cyberspace. I had no games, unless one wanted to count solitaire. I barely have television on some nights, as my netbook’s ethernet connection is spotty, at best (and I had foregone cable in favor of porting my computer through the TV a long time ago).

I have discovered Minecraft.

I’ve always had a bit of a thing for sandboxy games, where I could let my creativity go wild. Minecraft is like virtual legos. At least until night falls.

Get caught in the dark and, even worse, let the creepers follow you home, and that massive dwarf castle you spent hours building is just so much rubble.  Dig dangerously (overhead or underfoot) and you could find yourself falling into boiling lava or having a mountain of gravel land on your head.  Getting lost in underground caverns has proven to be the worst danger for me – forcing me to suicide just to get back above ground, often leaving valuable supplies behind.

It’s repetitive. It’s completely without direction. It has no real point. It is absolutely awesome.

So far I’ve built a hexagonal castle out of glass, with waterfalls flowing down five of its six sides. I’ve built the massive library as I imagined it from my novel, Remnants. I built a dirigible, just because I could. (And left it dangling in midair, dismantling blocks and ladders as I moved down them.)

And every game-night I lock myself into my little mine and I dig down.  I have plans for a TARDIS (complete with an “inside” that is in another “dimension”.)

I’m having fun with it, and with a few open source, low-resource games I’ve picked up that I can run with my netbook.  I haven’t tried Minecraft multiplayer, or joined any of the servers I’m aware of, as I think that multiplayer (at least, multiplayer with a lot of people and a particularly large world) would likely be too resource intensive for my little workhorse.

As far as other games go, it’ll still be a little while before I can buy a new computer, but I’m stashing as much money as I can afford to stash out of my paycheck each week.   I’m not out of gaming right now, just kicking it 8-bit style for a while.

Related articles

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I’m not sure I had just one big click moment where I realized or became a feminist. I had always had an “activist” nature, I suppose. I distinctly remember being met with amusement as a child when I tried to convince my grandparents to recycle, or my mom to donate to PBS. I always wanted to save the world.

But as far as being a feminist? There were little things that all lead up to an eventual realization of, basically, “This is bullshit, and I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE.”  Little things that led up to my social activism, both as a GLBT activist and as a feminist (two things that I find are inseparable and intertwined).

There was being taught by my mother, at a very young age, that a woman cannot depend on the men in her life to take care of her.  She has to do that for herself.

There was the first pubescent realization, and subsequent shame, that I had a romantic crush on another girl.  And then getting over that shame and realizing there’s nothing wrong with it at all.

There was the moment as a young teenager that I allowed a boy to terrify me, and the certain and absolute knowledge that I would never allow any person to have that sort of control over me, or allow any person to frighten me that way again.

There was being treated as the “ignorant girlfriend” when I visited arcades, gaming stores, and comic book shops with my (mostly male) crowd of friends – at least, until I demonstrated that my knowledge of gaming and comics not only equaled, but surpassed, the knowledge of my male peers.

And coming on the heels of that was the moment when I realized that because of that knowledge of  these “masculine” things, I would be seen as less of a girl, no matter how I saw myself.

There was being asked by my grandfather, the first time I went to vote, if he needed to “tell me who to vote for” as if it was a perfectly normal thing for the male head of family to dictate such things to the women.

Then college, and women’s and gender studies classes, and learning of the feminists before me. By that point I already identified as “feminist” – but I hadn’t yet been pushed into activism.

For that, it took a failure – and being told explicitly that I would not have failed, had I been a man. If I had been a man, I would have been a better teacher. I could have kept discipline in a high school classroom made up almost entirely of juvenile criminals (literally). If I had been a man.

And then there was the gradually increasing horror of the political actions being taken and proposed that would push this country back into an era where women’s bodies were owned and controlled by their fathers, their husbands, their government – anyone but themselves.

There was no one “click” moment for me. For me, you could say that the road to feminist activism was paved with a handful of thrown stones – many of them tiny pebbles, and one or two huge boulders.  It was the bruises from those that created my determination to stand like a wall between those who would attack our rights and those who cannot yet stand for themselves. It was that which created my determination to be an activist – but not just for women’s rights.

Because if I am to stand up for women and for feminist equality, I must also stand up for equality for everyone else.

Written for the Feminist Portrait Project’s “Click Moment” blog-a-thon.

© 2011 – Jennifer L. Davis

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