Veteran of a Thousand Psychic Wars

So, I am writing this little dirty bit of fan fiction. And. Frankly. It's pissing me off. Some things take longer to write than others. Some things are mad complicated. And some things are just downright annoying. It doesn't help that everything has to be right by my standard. When I say that, I don't mean the writing has to be flawless and perfect--I couldn't judge that if I wanted to, and I tend to make hilarious mistakes that I find later. What has to be 'right' is the feel of the thing.

These two people really like each other. However, they both have hostile, combative personalities to some degree. I've never been one to make people do things--which, sorta, flies in the face of writing. These two are difficult to maneuver. And, I suppose, my concern with them isn't even them. It is that I won't finish the story and find out what happens in the end. That's a terrible place to be. I have several stories like that, fanfic or original, with characters that I really like--unfinished. It's like watching a good movie half way through. Here's to hoping that I finish this one and find out how it turns out. And, since I have to talk about something in this space in a reasonably regular fashion, I'll talk about what it means when I say that I enjoy writing fanfiction.

REASONS I LOVE DIS STUFF

Writing original fiction is a lawless places, and, normally, I enjoy living in that space a lot. There, I set up the rules. In a life that has been set up for me, with rules I do not often agree with but am forced to comply with, within the realm of writing I am free. I make the rules. The sky is whatever color that I say that it is. The trees are the size that I want them to be. I can eliminate racial prejudice or accelerate it. In my worlds, gender and sexuality may or may not matter. A lot of people say that writers have a god complex. I disagree with the arrogance implied in a god complex. I don't like the world as it is. I color it in ways that I can understand and that make sense to me. My motivation is desperation, not ego. That is why I write. You will rarely catch me penning original contemporary stuff unless asked/forced. I just don't care for it, and I leave that kind of thing to other people better suited to the task. 

The lawless land of originality is tempered by fanfiction. Fanfiction, by it's very nature, is not an original piece of work. Here are lands with carefully constructed rules already in place. The difference is, I like the worlds, and I can choose to linger about in them. The characters are people already. Every once in a while, I can deepen their personas, but I can't change them. Herein, lies the challenge in writing fanfiction. 

Do not alter the world unreasonably. 

Do not alter the character of someone else's creation. 

Having read a lot of fanfiction prior to writing it, I can honestly say that most of the writers do not adhere to the couple of rules set above. Of the two, the second one, I have found, is the most damning. If an author sets up a character's personality in a certain way, and you love that character enough to write about him/her, what is the point of changing their character? The person becomes different, unrecognizable as themselves, and the story changes from something of an homage to something maddening and laughable. 

I think of it like a test personally--a test with rules that determine pass or fail. The rules are the construct of the world and the people I am working with. To fail, is to alter them. To pass, is to sneak a story into that world that could have believably happened within it. It is, in this way, harder than being original. And I love that. The challenge. 

In the end, it's only really about how one plays the game.

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A friend recently reminded me of this song, and since I definitely feel like this, this miserably plagued kind of night, I'm gonna put it up. 

Thank you, Jamie.

You see me now 

A veteran 

Of a thousand psychic wars

I've been living on the edge so long

Where the winds of limbo roar

And I'm young enough to look at

And far too old to see

All the scars are on the inside

I'm not sure that there's anything left of me

Sidenote: to say  that I don't know who put Light Yagami's uber-sexy, murderous ass in that there dress. But, if that person happens upon this and wants me to credit them all they have to do is say so. 

I can't draw. I don't take photographs/paint. etc. All the work of other marvelous people. 

The Accepted And Condoned Serial Murders That Society Commits

Leelah Alcorn killed herself. She stepped in front of a truck the Sunday after Christmas. I looked at a picture of her face and found her to be both sad and beautiful all at once. She was born a boy in a Christian household. In the face of telling her parents that she felt like a girl born into a boy's body, she was told that: God does not make mistakes.

I am not a reporter. I talk about the things that bother me in this online place that I call my own. I am not telling this story for any other reason than I heard it and it bothered me. It hurt me. You can read it if you want, you can sympathize, disagree or go away.

The death of Leelah Alcorn is murder to me. And while I realize that this is an odd thing to say, I mean it with every fiber of my being. Our society murders innocent people, and it begins with a death of the soul that oftentimes transfers itself into a death of the body--a senseless kind of death. This person did not have cancer. This person wasn't shot in the commission of some terrible crime. This person was murdered from the inside out, and, I guess, what I want people to do is TALK about it--admit that we do this to one another. Hopefully, if we speak on it, we can stop killing our future doctors and scientists and poets for stupid reasons that don't matter at all in the great scheme of things that are ... human.

People are killing their own children. And this is something cold and cruel that I simply do not understand. While I get the fact that some people kill their children every day and the jails and prisons are stocked full of those kinds of people, this isn't quite that. 'Good' people, 'decent' people--not cold blooded psychopaths are committing the acts that I am talking about here. People very close to this benevolent 'god' that they claim to believe in. If these parents truly believed that 'God does not make mistakes' then it stands to reason, by their own account, that they wouldn't find anything wrong with their child to begin with. Their god made their child the way they are in the first place, correct?

Instead, they take this poor kid off to be tortured by fanatics (Christian 'therapists') who think they can change the child's inner make up to fit better into some bullshit 'standard' of what society calls 'correct' and 'true'. Tortured, the child tries to conform and when the child can not the child is rejected. A lot of the time, these children are put out of their households and forced out onto the streets -- defenseless against the predators that are out there waiting for them. A lot of the time, these children just up and kill themselves unable to be what is wanted--unable to be anything other than who they are.

I'd like to say that I can't imagine the pain, etc., but I can. It only takes being human to put yourself in the shoes of a person like this. It's not as hard as some people try to make it out to be. We are all people and we all have empathy. Imagine what it is like to be like this person, imagine the kind of rejection one would feel being cast off from one's family, reviled, discussed like there's something wrong with you all the time, talked down to, belittled...

Imagine the hurt ... and change.

This murdered kid could be the person that cures cancer for us all. And, yet, this life is snuffed out for the stupidest reason imaginable -- an ideology, a fucking idea of how things are 'supposed' to be.

I despise labels--and the way human beings have of putting things into neat little boxes that are, more often than not, labeled incorrectly and for convenience. My convenience is not more important than someone's LIFE.

Please don't be sad, it's for the better. The life I would've lived isn't worth living in... because I'm transgender..." 

She would never truly be a girl, her mother said, because God doesn't make mistakes.

"If you are reading this, parents, please don't tell this to your kids, even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don't ever say that to someone, especially your kid...That won't do anything but make them hate them self. That's exactly what it did to me."

"All I have to do is jump, and then everything is over."

Maybe I'm wrong and my imagination is not good enough. There is a school of thought that seems to believe that you can't understand a thing unless you are that thing yourself. I have my own demons, and while they are not the same, they are similar--because I'm a fucking person and we are not as different as we'd like to claim. I can not even imagine doing something like this to my own. The agony in this kid's death note is palatable, and I wouldn't want to make my child feel that way about anything, especially something they can't change like: WHO THEY ARE. 

I wouldn't want to be responsible for that kind of pain, and then claim, somehow, to love that person. These are things you do to someone you hate, and, even then, only if you are a monster. 

Then again, if Da Lord told me to slit my son's throat on the top of a mountain, I'd have told him to go fuck himself. 

End Transgender Conversion Therapy
_____

Currently in my kitchen making Lean just like Trayvon Martin--even though you can't make Lean with Skittles and Iced Tea. With this new hate driven recipe, I'm going to create that Imaginary Lean that's just as tasty as Walter White's Blue Sky and I'm going to get so fucked up that I float right off this shitty little planet with its judgmental, cave-thinking, twisted humans who think they are sooo much better than the animals around them but put the animals to shame for the horrific, selfish, bullshit they do to one another like its NOTHING ...