Stephanie Gayle Fiction first, everything else later.

Advertising aimed at women makes me more than a wee bit hostile. I hate seeing anti-aging ads. (Guess what? You are going to age!) My roommate Tracey especially hates it when TV ads use pseudoscience to sell cosmetics or health treatments to women. "Free radical?" "Collagen?" "Omega-3?" Obviously these words added to my skin can only spell success. Um, yeah.

So imagine my delight when I discovered comedian and critic Sarah Haskins and her delightful series of reports called "Target Women." From yogurt to wedding shows to feeding your family, Sarah shows how modern shows and ads chide women and try to sell us (always with the selling!) a load of steaming patooty.

I've linked to a few of her reports below. Enjoy.

Target Women: Feeding Your F------ Family

Target Women: Wedding Shows

Posted by Stephanie at 04:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Damn it, Clive Owen. I just watched your film "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead." I'm planning a 300 person conference for work, so my free time? Severely curtailed. Spending 102 minutes over the course of two evenings (did I mention the minimal free time?) was an investment of sorts. An investment squandered.

Clive, your clean-shaven face on the DVD promised me the handsome visage I've grown accustomed to watching in superior films like "Children of Men." This? You have a scraggly awful beard. I kept shouting at you, "Shave it off! Please? Shave it!" You obeyed when there were but 10 minutes left in the film. I endured Malcolm MacDowell (ew) and some of the worst dialogue ever for a last minute physical transformation? No.

Damn it, Clive Owen. I know you didn't write the awful script, but when you read it didn't it strike you as a bit stilted? Slow? For a thriller didn't the story seem short on thrills? And I know, I know, it was supposed to be broody. You brooded the hell out of it, really you did. But, um, brooding alone does not make a film. A story usually helps. You know, a story that holds more water than most colanders?

Don't do anything like this again, okay? You deserve better. So do I.

Posted by Stephanie at 07:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A very astute reader (the only kind I use) pointed out that my manuscript for book #2 seemed a bit off. She didn't understand the ending in the context of the character's emotional and narrative arc. I understood what she was getting at. And I knew what the problem was: I had written the ending alongside the beginning. That is, when I was writing scenes before I began writing the book, I had two that I quite liked: the opening and the ending. I edited the beginning quite a bit but the ending not as much. I should have, because, as my reader noticed, it seems incongruous given all the events that lead to it.

That's the danger in artifacts. You can grow attached to them and lose sight of what they are supposed to represent. I've noticed I'm always much more receptive to suggestions such as "change the ending" or "remove that major character" when I haven't seen the story in a long time (several months). Physical distance somehow begets professional objectivity. I trust the first reader's eyes, perhaps even more than my own, because they're seeing the story new and I never can at this point.

So I'm looking forward to destroying some artifacts...

Posted by Stephanie at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The writing is not going so well lately. All my words seem insufficient. Really. They're not doing the job I'm setting them to do. Worse, I have a conversation that just is not the tense, crackling exchange of wits it was meant to be. I find myself arguing with my characters. "Why are you suddenly being likeable? I did not cast you to be charming. Be a curmudgeon, damn it!" The characters then turn around and say I'm the one who wrote them, so it must be my fault. It's a good point. The kind of point that pliable characters would not make. They would apologize for the error of their ways and start acting the way I expected.
You would think that as an author I would have total control over my work, that the prose would flow from mind to keyboard in a tranquil stream of genius. You would be wrong.

Posted by Stephanie at 08:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)