"You will preach, I will pervert..."

I had a whole rant on how Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai is just... bleh. But that'll have to wait until tomorrow. I'm too tired right now.

Slowly getting back into the writing momentum. I may even submit some stories this month... Goddess knows I could stand to try at least in some places. And it's about time I got my ass out there and got published again/some more. And ... well, yeah. It'll be good for me. So this weekend will be spent dealing with my natlitcrepro issues and working up some stories for submission.

And then... I don't know what else. It's fiction weekend, I know, and I have to figure out which column to put up depending on when copperbadge gets back to me, probably the one I have less done. And I have to update my bloody fanfics, the poor poor patient fan community. And... so much to do.

But tomorrow, a rant on why I hate the idea of Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. And tonight, I sleep, since a bratty kitten kept me up last night.

"She speaks poniards! And every word stabs!"

Now I know I’m troubled by the natlitcrepro community.

It’s not just a figment of my imagination anymore, now it’s real. And I’m not sure what to do with it. On the one hand… I admire the community goals. I can even sympathize, and I like the idea of a community that delivers constructive criticism as opposed to so many websites that offer simplistic praise. I don’t have any real problem with the way the community’s run… yet. I’m not sure if I’m anticipating problems where there aren’t likely to be any or if I’m undergoing a Cassandrian spate of foresight.

Granted, the responses to the rejections haven’t been quite as philosophical or as accepting as one might want. Rejection hurts, plain and simple, and no matter how character-building it may be or how much it may benefit us in the long run, it hurts at the time and it continues to hurt for days afterwards. It especially hurts when it concerns a person’s creativity, when it hits you where you live and in that rare and intense spot where you’ve pinned all your hopes and dreams on that skill. Perhaps not necessarily on that particular community, group, chat, or association, but that skill. And then to be told that you’re not as good as you think you are, well, ow.

But is it really necessary to go into the person’s private journal and then comment there on the person’s hurt feelings and subsequent rambling? And then is it really necessary to take the person’s further hurt feelings as a point of pride, that you’ve hurt and angered them that much? I’ve been the subject of people actually seeking out my journal to see what rude things I’ve said about them in a moment of pique. And they had to seek out my journal, I checked. There were three or four different degrees between their personal journal, which they used to respond, and mine. Which means they had to trace all along those degrees to read that entry and respond.

It’s a personal diary, folks. It’s for personal rants, ravings, blather, babble, vitriolic spatterings, hateful words, exhilirations, exultations, that sort of thing. Can’t you let the person have their opinion without making remarks about it?

And that’s not the only thing that’s been bothering me; there’s also an increasing sense of elitism that I’m feeling. There’s this sentencing board feeling I’m getting more and more out of these ‘auditions’ that are supposed to prove to the community that the author is serious about improving their work. But what I’m getting out of this, my impression of the whole thing is that it’s turning into a melee where the community sees how well the person stands up to unmitigated criticism. The last few comments I’ve seen, several of them have looked rather like the literary equivalent of a firing squad. And I find myself wondering, is this the kind of nurturing community I signed up for? I don’t remember any of this being in the manual. I thought the mandate was innocent until proven guilty. I thought we were here to help.

Instead we seem to be lambasting people and telling them it’s for their own good. I know a friend who created a character for one of her recent novels who routinely tortured people with knives, starvation, exposure, lashings, and other such things ‘for their own good.’ He, too, fancied himself a teacher. He idolized Alexander the Great and Machiavelli. And he was thoroughly, completely insane. I don’t want to turn into that sort of person. I don’t subscribe to the idea that ‘to hurt is to heal.’ And I definitely don’t buy this ‘we must make their lives adverse to make them stronger’ bullshit. Life is adverse enough, and especially the writing life, without all of us tearing into each other like wild dogs. Wild dogs with university degrees and four syllable vocabularies maybe, but wild dogs nonetheless.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it yet. I’m not sure if I want to air my objections to the group as a whole, because I’m feeling more and more as though if I do, I’m going to be subjected to the firing squad as well. And then again, I liked this ideal, this community. I just … I’m not sure I like what it’s turned into.


EDIT:

There's nothing like hearing your friend say "Some people really need to be teabagged. Or at the very least, sent headfirst out of the room." to make all your problems seem... maybe not irrelevant, but certainly irreverent. Especially after he's explained to you what teabagging is.

No, you don't want to know. Trust me.