Random Questions from Everywhere

Random Questions from Everywhere

Yep, it's another fuck it blog post!

I’ve kind of slacked horribly on the relationship advice land questions. Ever since I quit doing the freelance columns, I’ve had a hard time giving out advice. A lot of the questions I get are kind of depressing or lack all the information so it turns into something of an email back and forth, which isn’t conducive to blog posts. In the name of keeping the blog fun, I’m going to answer a couple random, silly questions instead, even if (especially if) the question wasn’t asked in seriousness.

Have you ever “gotten” someone in your books?

Yep! Firstly, let me say this is a long standing tradition in the author world and it is entirely immature, ridiculous, and ineffective. Geoffrey Chaucer did it with Simon the Pardoner way back in the 1300s. It isn’t known precisely who the Pardoner was, or if he was entirely allegorical, which I kind of doubt, but Mr. Chaucer really let the guy have it. Nerd Girl Info: there’s a reference to this in A Knight’s Tale.

I’m certainly not alone in “getting” someone through literary satire. I’m probably not even alone in figuring out how silly the behavior is. Trying to “get” someone with a novel is a little like getting into a gun fight with a musket that takes a year or more to load while firing at someone who probably doesn’t have a gun at all and is so far away, they’re not even aware you’re shooting at them. Let me clarify that bizarre metaphor. It takes about six months to a year to publish a book. So even if a person writes very quickly, which I do, the book will still take six months to be seen by a reader. Odds are, the person being “gotten” won’t even read the work. On the off chance they do, they probably won’t recognize themselves since people are terrible judges of their own character. And even if they do read it and recognize themselves, they probably won’t care enough to even send an email to the author saying, “Hey, I read your book about that incident at a party over a year ago and it truly hurt my feelings to know you thought my pants fit so poorly!”

I'm clearly not the first person to lampoon a cop they didn't like.

To my specific incident of literary “getting” someone…I got a ticket a couple of years ago, a speeding ticket to be precise, and in my 20-year-old brain, I thought the California Highway Patrolman giving me a ticket for going 80 in a 70 zone on an entirely empty section of I-5 was an asshole thing to do. Actually, I still do, but whatever. If you’ve read TheGunfighter and The Gear-Head you’ll probably have noticed there’s a former CHP officer named Rawlins. Zeke orders him around, Gieo blackmails him, Fiona mocks him, and he eventually ends up dead. The GF&GH is a popular book, routinely in Amazon’s top 100 for lesbian fiction. The thing is, I doubt Officer Rawlins reads lesbian fiction. I actually kind of doubt Officer Rawlins even reads recreationally. So, yep, I really “got” him and he has no idea it even happened, nor would he probably care if he did know.

In hindsight (actually a little bit while I was doing it) the whole thing felt silly and a little pointless, which is why I haven’t done it since. Of course, if you get pulled over in the north Central Valley of California by a chubby, arrogant CHP officer named Rawlins, feel free to tell him he’s in a book.

Have you ever tried to start a trending topic?

Why does creating a hand gesture for something immediately make it lame?

This is a question from one of my new twitter followers who is increasingly becoming one of my favorite tweeple. Yes, and several. My history of creating hashtags:

#ShitMyGirlfriendSays: I still do this one from time to time when my girlfriend says something truly fantastic. I probably didn’t create it, but for awhile there all the activity on that hashtag floated around things I was saying and my follower list. So, while I may not have hatched that specific twitter egg, it was mine for a bit.

#TweetingThroughABadMovieOnFX: I used to live chat/tweet during movies on FX. I only picked 2 star or lower movies, only movies I’d never seen, and movies it was entirely likely FX did some truly hilarious things to while editing for television. Last fall, FX showed “Twilight” and I made the mistakes of #TweetingThroughABadMovieOnFX during it. Oh my fucking goddess, did people lose their shit over me making fun of Twilight for a solid two hours. Seriously, I had people pestering me about how wonderful and transcendent of a story Twilight is for weeks! After that, I kind of lost my taste for the whole thing, and FX has started showing better movies.

I pointed to this exact scene as creepy. Twilight fans response: "Ermahgerd isa lurve storah!"

#SexPositiveSaturday: I still think this one is a good idea that just didn’t work out. I wanted to get a bunch of relationship advice/sex advice columnists, bloggers, podcasters, etc. to start posting sex positive information and news on Saturdays with this hashtag. A few of us did for a couple weeks and then it just kinda died, probably due to my lack of focus.

 Have you ever padded out a blog post with pictures to make it look like you wrote more?

Ever get killed in a book?