I’ll never not be amused by the fact that I can drop the words “crucifix nail nipples” into a conversation and some of you who have been with me since the livejournal days will join me in the flashbacks, screaming and crying all the way.
I require context. Because this is a very interesting start of a story, and now I need the rest of it. Could I get a link, or a summary, or something? Pretty please?
All right buckle the fuck up kids, it’s the year 2012 and I’ve just been handed what should be an easy editing gig by my senior editor. It’s a vampire erotica story because one of the final Twilight movies is about to come out, and everything is vampires. Everything. I haven’t edited a single thing in months which isn’t about vampires. I am ready, I can do this. So I open the file and notice there’s a typo in the title, which really should have been my first inkling that something horrendous was about to go down, but you see I’m not quite dead inside yet so I carry on, bushy tailed and bright eyed with my faith in humanity intact. It’ll be dead by page 24, but I don’t know that yet. I’m just editing one more vampire boner fest.
The MC is a girl who we’ll call Sue. Sue is a Good Girl™, Sue is Not Like Other Girls™, she is pale and awkward and a virgin and has somehow managed to find herself a Bad Boy™ for a boyfriend. We’ll call him Dickhead.
Now Dickhead as previously stated is a bit of dick, he tries to pressure Sue into sex because he knows she is The One™ but he loves her really so it’s okay. Except it’s not okay because Sue is a Good Girl™ and holding out till marriage which he’s fine with except he’s got such a bad case of blue balls that one night walking home an attractive stranger lures him into an alley with the words “hey stud” and he follows, dick out before she’s even finished her sentence. Well turns out that was a mistake for Dickhead because she’s a vampire, but not just any vampire, a Dick Biting Vampire. So what started out as a skeevy blow job behind a club that he’ll feel bad about in the morning, turns into him being bitten on the dick and drained of his life essence and left for dead. Except DBV fucked up and now he’s a vampire. Are you still with me? Good, cause it’s about to get weirder.
Realizing he is now an abomination, Dickhead flees, becoming a creature of the night and feeding on animals rather than humans to repent for being such an asshole in life. Sue meanwhile is heartbroken, but carries on valiantly with her life and goes to bed each night crying for the loss of her One True Love™ who she would do anything to bring back. Well guess what Sue, Dickhead never really left you! He’s been “instinctively protecting her from rapists” by hiding out on her roof and fighting hobos who try to get to her open window via the fire escape for months now. Because that’s not fucking terrifying at all.
Upon learning of his predicament and how it happened, Sue can do nothing but blame herself. Oh if only she’d let him touch her secret places, then perhaps all of this could be avoided! Meanwhile Dickhead is having another dilemma of his own, realizing too late that his vampire powers have given him super senses and now he can smell her blood and he can’t decide whether he wants to get with her or eat her. And I don’t mean in the French sense. But he is strong! And over comes his base manly vampire instincts and neither rapes not kills her. Hurrah! And this is so romantic that Sue gives it up, but not before she launches into a theory about how in all fairy tales, True Love saves the day, so maybe her magical pure vagina that has never been touched by anyone, not even her, can bring him back to life. So Dickhead being a dickhead agrees and rips her clothes off, but not before he takes one last moment to marvel at the beauty of her purity, because he will never again look on her again and know she is Pure.
If you’ve only vomited once by now, I applaud your resolve.
So they hop on the good foot and do the nasty, except she is literally so pure in spirit, her flesh burns his. And I quote you from memory because these words are burned into my soul: “her breasts bit into his hands, like crucifix nail nipples tearing at
his flesh, but he did not care because he loved her so and couldn’t
stop”
This phrase haunts me. I dread that it will be the last thing I think about on my death bed and my last words will literally be “god fucking dammit” as I die, carrying that mental image with me into the afterlife. My own solace is in knowing that I inflicted it on other people too, like @ahzuri who is somehow still with me after all these years.
When the magical burning sex fails to heal him and leaves her bruised, battered and broken with “a dainty blue bells of bruises around her secret flower” (I am genuinely quoting this, I could never make something as horrendous as this up without being on acid) Dickhead leaves. Yeah. Off he fucks, leaving her to the mercy of the hobos at her window, and into the night to be the true monster he really is. But wait, there’s more. Remember the dick biting vampire? Well turns out she has figured out she made him into a vampire and has also been stalking HIM and is totally jealous of Sue, so tries to kill her. But again Sues Purity saves her, because sex before marriage which was done out of True Love is not a sin, so she is still a spiritual virgin and I’ll be honest, I started drinking heavily at this point and it’s all a bit of a blur.
A fight ensues some pages later after Dickhead returns, realizing the mistake he has made. And he rescues Sue from the Dick Biter, but not before he assaults Dick Biter, and calls her a slut for luring innocent men into alleys cuts her heart out by cutting her breasts off, at which point i screamed “THAT’S NOT HOW YOU REACH THE HEART” and my brain short circuited completely and I have no idea how it ends because I realized there was 30 pages left and my soul couldn’t take it. I emailed the chief editor like ?????!!!!!!????!!!!!! and the book was immediately pulled from the work line and the author dismissed from the publishing house. Turns out she was a friend of a friend and that was how she got the manuscript past our entry levels for requirement.
And that’s the story of how an author sent me death threats for over a month because I stopped her shitty vampire porn from ever seeing the light of day. You’re all fucking WELCOME.
im really losing my shit thinking about vulcan childrens music and television. who could forget such hits as “3 is an appropriate number” and “walking in the street could lead to maiming or death”
the vulcan equivalent of the wiggles is just 3 normally dressed individuals reciting multiplication tables in unison
Speaking as someone with very little knowledge of Star Trek - I’ve seen like three episodes from random versions and I read Spock’s World - I violently disagree with this.
Even before I had such minimal knowledge as I do now, I thought that “vulcan” was a very appropriate word for them. It’s not that they don’t have emotions, if anything they have more than humans, they just run hard and deep, like volcanoes. You don’t want that thing to erupt.
So I imagine vulcan children’s TV is much like Sesame Street. Here is a muppet with anger issues! He spilled his milk and it made him ANGRY!!! Here comes someone dressed in completely normal clothes to say yes, that was indeed unfortunate, but anger is an irrational response to such a thing and not in keeping with the teachings of Surak; let us now explore different forms of meditation as emotional control, one of which includes three normally dressed individuals reciting multiplication tables in unison.
the bait and switch way this is written literally made me laugh out loud
biden: my new plan guarantees four additional years of free education
kids in high school: holy shit free college?!
biden: oh no two years of pre-school and then two years of college*
*only at select locations, restrictions apply
Okay but pre-school is expensive as hell. Making it free will directly improve the lives of so many families.
so is community college it will literally cut the cost of college in half or make it free for the people that choose one of the many careers you can get with a two year degree are y'all stupid or just dumb
do ppl actually not realise how important affordable childcare is to working women???
Hi, I’m a mum! Pre-pandemic, I was working over forty hours a week, and the entirety of my paycheck went to covering my kid’s daycare cost.Daycare and pre school are expensive, so much so that a lot of people quite literally can’t afford it, even when working full time.
Having two years of pre-k education covered is absolutely beyond helpful. Parents genuinely want to provide the very best for the kids and having early education covered can go a long way in allowing parents to do just that.
Look, I don’t have kids and I am still buried under student loans from college. I absolutely believe free college is necessary.
However.
There is decades worth of evidence that pre-K education is one of the strongest ways of giving kids enduring advantages in K-12 education. A lot of the data comes specifically out of Oklahoma, which does have voluntary universal pre-K (which makes it an excellent case study) and the research shows gains across all racial and socio-economic boundaries. That paper is from 2005. Researchers revisited the kids later to see how persistent these gains were, or if they were drowned out by all the other stuff.
Community college is great and should be accessible to everybody. But universal pre-K will catch more kids early on to ensure they have a better shot at finishing high school. The evidence screams that it is one of the single most-effective measures in leveling the playing field for all kids, and reducing the generations of privilege baked into the system.
And Biden’s campaign stance was always two years of free community college, NOT four years at any and all universities.
It’s not a bait and switch if it’s the two years of college he previously “promised” us PLUS something new and different that is explained IN THE NEXT / SAME SENTENCE so people wouldn’t get confused and think it meant four years of college.
The wording of the tweet is a little bit bait-and-switch if you haven’t been staying on top of the policy discussions, but even so: this is a really good thing, please don’t dismiss all the good that this policy will do just because it’s not everything you want it to be.
I feel like this is also a subtle way to encourage going to community colleges for trades rather than four year degrees, which is something that we desperately need since we basically lost most of a generation of skilled tradespeople in the push for “you have to get a four year degree to succeed”
I'm sorry Neil, although I love your writing and agree with your opinions on most subjects I have to disagree with you on the writers' strike. No-one should have a more privileged life as a result of being clever and creative. I worked from the age of 15 to the age of 65 in low-paid jobs, taking 1 year off to go to drama school and 3 years off to get a fine art degree. I worked in terrible but necessary jobs, labouring, stacking boxes, unloading trucks, running errands, filing, going to work on a bicycle at all hours of the day and night on shift work in all kinds of weather. Even when I was a student I was still working in part-time cleani8ng jobs and even during periods of unemployment I worked in volunteer jobs for charities and social services.
According to Mensa I have an IQ of 160 and according to Plymouth University I have a BA hons in Fine Art but I cannot accept the idea that writers and other creative people should avoid normal jobs like driving an "Uber" or working in an office/shop/factory/construction site. To accept that idea would be to create a new aristocratic class when we should abolishing the old princes and aristocrats.
What we need, I feel sure, is a redistribution of labour so that everybody who can do so would spend some time each year in blue collar work and everybody who can would get higher education and a chance to make art of one sort or another.
The idea of doing other jobs to supplement writing or drawing shouldn't be seen as a terrible thing, a punishment or a suffering. Sharing the jobs around should be seen as normal.
I mean, I've done my half century of sweat labour and it didn't hurt me too much. I'm retired now and still making art of various kinds and I've never asked anyone to pay me for any art piece I've made. making art, writing, drawing etc. is the fun stuff which we get to do in exchange for the blue collar stuff which puts food on the table.
The worst pop song ever written was Sting/Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" which ridicules the working class from a position of educational privilege.
So what's my question? My question is: What's wrong with a writer doing other jobs to make ends meet? Sounds perfectly fine to me.
Nothing’s wrong with a writer doing other jobs to make ends meet. Writers and artists have been doing that since the dawn of time. Actors too.
But by the same token, there’s nothing right about assuming that writing isn’t a blue-collar job, or that writers and other people who make art can only make it for love and that thus they need other jobs to subsidise their craft.
I like living in a world in which the people who make the things that make the world worth living in get paid for their work. For me, that includes the people who make films and TV, books, art and music and comics.
Having spent a lot of time on film and TV sets, it’s a blue-collar world on set, and everyone is working long and hard to make the shows you love. I’m never going to suggest that the riggers or the gaffers or the make-up team or the focus-pullers should drive ubers in order to have the privilege of being on the set and working there.
Or to put it another way, from the most blue-collar writer I ever knew…
The issue about the strike isn’t about having a more privileged life than blue-collar people. It’s about having sort of, please gods, as privileged a life as blue-collar people… while doing both that work (to support ourselves)and another kind of work from which those who do it never get a day off, from the moment we start it until the day we die.
Not one.
Because Story will wake you up for attention on your days off, on your weekends, on your holidays (as if 95% of writers ever have any!). And as for the waking hours, they’re already toast. Story will interrupt you over your coffee while you’re hardly even conscious, in the middle of your normal day’s paperwork, at lunch (if you can afford or are allowed time for any), in the throes of orgasm with your spouse. It will haunt you while you’re changing out people’s catheter bags, and come up to surprise you in the middle of an average workday (per a discussion about the Battle of Salamis that I had with a specialist while resecting someone’s colon). It will leave you in tears, once again, while wrapping yet another patient’s dead body.
Plainly the side of the arts in which you’ve been working isn’t Story. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
If you haven’t been paying attention to the increasing levels of crap that US-based writers (and, also, others elsewhere) have been dealing with… you need to seek out some education at best speed.
Most of us are lower-paid and (to judge by our income) lower- or middle-class. For the last half-century or so, thousands of writers whose labors you’ve enjoyed have worked in a storytelling ecology that’s supported the vast majority of independent/freelance screen storytellers in making a modest or supplemental living. (For example: my only Star Trek: The Next Generation script earned me about $14,000 [my split of $28K with my co-writer]. After that, low-and-dwindling yearly residuals in the low 4 figures continued for some years after. That’s long done, now… but it bought a lot of groceries and cat food while it lasted, while I was also working other jobs.)
That ecology, though, has steadily had the blood sucked out of it with the shift to streaming—when the streamers told us, at the last Guild negotiations, “Nobody knows if this’ll work. We’ll make it up to you later if it does…!”).
…Guess what? It worked. And now they don’t want to make it up to us. (And somehow it’s hard to be surprised.)
The old writer-payment ecology, as a result, is gone. It’s not as if our stories are worth less than they were. (Indeed, evidence suggests far otherwise.) It’s not as if the Earth’s orbit’s changed, or something’s occurred that’s had nothing to do with human actions. It’s because rich people at the top of rich studios and streaming companies have decided they’ve got better use for the companies’ billions of [insert favorite currency, it doesn’t matter which one] than fairly paying their writers.
Some of us actually remember how things were before a workable system was broken, and can compare them to how they are now… bearing in mind what we were promised. As a result, better-known storytellers like Neil (and others: it’s too late in the evening for me to do your homework for you…) are on strike now to assist those of us who’re not so well known. People like me, for whom $14,000, spread over a whole year (or two, or three, or five…) made a big difference in our lives… not like the few hundred dollars now being offered to writers who’ve done a whole lot more work over a far shorter term.
In the larger sense: it’d be just lovely if the world were so arranged that all of us who prefer to mostly do creative work—because it’s what we know best, and do best—were easily able to share (perceived) middle-class labor time around with those who don’t do it (like something out of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed). …Though most of us have also been doing second or third jobs as well. I don’t know any writer who’s grudged that if it meant also being able to do the work we love best.
It’d also be lovely if those whose privilege (as per your description) allows them access to higher education could understand the challenges of those whose situation didn’t allow them anything of the kind. For example: I was lucky enough to pull down a Science and Nursing scholarship at the end of high school… otherwise my lower-middle-class family’s finances couldn’t have afforded me any other higher education at all. I happily worked to support myself all during my nursing training, and special-duty nursing kept me alive until my first few novels sold and made enough to kept me afloat.
That was just fine…for me. But I don’t see why writers more talented than I (and who can tell who they are?), who’ve got more than I have to give to the world, should have to work two or three jobs to support their writing.
And I don’t see why, having lived through the multiple-job bullshit, your vision should supersede other, less onerous ones. I mean, I’m sorry for the stuff you went through… but don’t see any reason why others should need to go through the same. (“I suffered for my art. Now it’s your turn…” is so 1970s.)
Anyway. For the time being, everyday working writers are fighting that corner right now, the only way we can: by withdrawing our middle-class [by definition of middle-or-low-five-figure-USD$] labor from the people making themselves rich off it. And isn’t it funny that the people from whom we’ve withdrawn it are so desperately trying—via AI, etc.—to find a way to do without our labor entirely? (As if what would pass for daily donut money for most series is somehow too expensive…?) It kinda indicates that (color-of-collar) class isn’t at all the issue here.
Understandable, then, that you might be glad you’re retired… and not down in the trenches with the rest of us. Those of us still working hard to survive (including me, still writing at 71 despite theoretical “retirement ages"—impossible for us to consider in this "new world” economy…) hope to survive long enough, if we’re as lucky as you, to eventually, have something similar.
Meanwhile, those of us who weave stories for the entertainment of those around us would just like to make enough from this work to buy groceries and pay our electric bills and feed our spouses (for those of us who have spouses), or kids (those of us who have kids). …Or cats. (etc) You know: the kind of things that ordinary blue-collar people have.
And for their sake: just as the writers before us (in the 1960s) fought for the right to the then-revolutionary concept of residuals, we fight.Not just for ourselves, but for the writers to come after us, who also have spouses and kids*… and tales worth telling.
