I figured it was about time for an update/announcement on my (probably excessively) packed semester.

First and foremost in my thoughts: the thesis.* I’ve got 13 days left before it’s due, and I just finished the first draft. That’s kind of bad, because what I really need right now is a beta reader (someone to read it and give me feedback), and a) I don’t know anybody who really reads this kind of thing, and b) even if I did, there’s just not enough time. Thirteen days is not long enough for someone to read it, give me feedback, and have me make the changes, not when it’s 80-some pages long.

The advantage to beta readers –and workshopping in general – is simple: In order to write a story, I have to crawl up into my head. But in order to know what the world (or, in this case, my professors) will think about the story, I need someone to help me get up out of my head. Since I don’t have any beta readers, my only real alternative is to get distance from my story the old-fashioned way – by leaving it alone for awhile and then coming back to it with “fresh eyes” (a stupid expression if there ever was one). Which brings me back to the time problem. Sure, I’ve got time to leave it alone for a few days, come back to it, and take another pass. But generally when I edit, I need to do that a number of times. A large number. Which is fine when you’ve got all the time in the world, but not so good when there are only thirteen days.

But, while I’m worried, I’m not about-to-go-nuts worried, because I’ve just got too many other plates in the air. I’ve got a big Easter holiday coming up with the family, I’m having another knee surgery on April 26th, and defending my thesis on May 1. I also just got home from ICFA, the sci-fi/fantasy academic conference in Orlando. I had a great, great time: made a few new friends, got to introduce more people to the wonders of Gerard Butler’s version of Dracula, demonstrated my startling talent for chugging beer, lived in fear of a nearby alligator, paid a ridiculous amount of money for room service tea, and –perhaps the most surprising thing that’s ever happened to me – had a perfectly pleasant, problem-free experience flying United. Good times.

While I was there, I also got the word that I’m going to be a presenter next month at Madison’s own Odyssey Con, another sci-fi/fantasy conference that’s a little less scholars, a little more fans. Sample schedule: I’ll be moderating a panel on the Green Lantern movie (subtitle: “What Went Wrong?”). I’m beyond excited to go back to OddCon, and even more excited to be on some panels. For more information, or to figure how you can come see me get my panel on, check out the website at www.odysseycon.com. No, seriously. Do it.

*In my UW-Milwaukee creative writing program, for reasons that are indiscernible to me, the master’s thesis is simply called a “final project.” I find this unnecessarily confusing, so I call it what I want.

No, that’s not a pun, I’m actually referring to the TV show. I’m gonna say this one time, and I mean it: SPOILER ALERT. If you’re not caught up on the show, (there are even a few comic book spoilers in the “footnotes") and you want to remain chaste and pure, stop here.

As you may know if you follow me on Facebook (and really, why wouldn’t you?), I don’t have much time for blogging over the next six weeks, because I’m trying to complete the my master’s degree while simultaneously working on about seven other things. But I did want to take a moment to weigh in on the Walking Dead, because…well, frankly, because I’m just in the mood to do so. I just watched tonight’s penultimate (I think that’s the word) episode, where Shane FINALLY bites the big one. Two things: Yes, it was a good episode. But for me, for season 2, it might be too little too late.

I’m not sure if it matters, because I’m planning to stop watching the show after Lori’s baby is born anyway,* but for me Season 2 has had kind of a snoozeville quality. You know how every once in awhile, NBC will stretch one of their sitcoms, like Friends, 30 Rock, the Office, etc, into an hour-long episode, and then it feels like they stretched 30 minutes of jokes into 60 minutes of programming? Yeah. Season 1 of the WD was only six episodes long, and each one of them was filled with plot, action, character. By stretching out this season, the show creators have just featured too much talking, too much loooooong drawn-out moral conflict that last four episodes on one friggin’ issue (kill the new guy, don’t kill the new guy, who the hell cares anymore?) and not nearly enough zombie mayhem. Seriously. It’s like when they made The Mummy 3 and there were no actual mummies in it. There’s a reason they never spent this much time at the farm in the comics - no zombies is kind of boring.

Also, and this is admittedly not as sweeping of a complaint, but what the hell is up with T-Dog? I didn’t mind that the show added new characters of color to round out the all-white cast from the comics (the series is set outside Atlanta, so it definitely makes sense), but why create a perfectly fine character like T-Dog and then give him three lines for the whole season? When Dale dies, we care. Oh, do we care. When Shane dies…well, it definitely changes things. But if T-Dog dies next week on the season finale, I guarantee half of the viewers are going to be saying, “Wait, who’s that?"**

Okay, one more word, on Shane’s death: to anyone who has read the comics, or any press material since the show began, or seen AMC’s unfortunate little marketing snafu, this was not a surprise. Wah, Shane. I find it irritating that Shane’s death was blown into this big thing. When a death is this easy to see coming, there’s just no way to make it live up to expectation. I say, good riddance. Maybe now the characters can get back to having just a teeny bit of post-apocalyptic moral fiber, which is what made them interesting to watch in the first place..

*Wanna know why? Okay, I’ll tell you, but this is a MAJOR FRIGGIN’ SPOILER from the comic book. Seriously, if you haven’t read the comics and you don’t want to know what happens, stop here. I AM NOT KIDDING. YOU CAN TELL BY THE CAPITAL LETTERS.
Those of you still with me, here’s the deal: in the comic books, Laurie’s baby is born and everything is cool for like, a week. Then enters one of the most truly heinous villains I’ve ever encountered on page or screen: the Governor. He raids the prison where Rick & the Gang are holed up, and in the ensuing shootout, Laurie takes one in the chest with a shotgun.

While she’s holding the baby. To her chest.

Ask anybody; I’m not one to shy away from blood and guts. (I’m reading the second volume of Kick-Ass comics, for crying out loud, though at the moment I couldn’t tell you why.) And I was fine with all the many, many many, scenes of horrific gore that decorate the pages of The Walking Dead up until that point. But I don’t do murdered babies, especially after we’ve spent SO much time invested in these characters. This isn’t one of those brief flashes of dead kids or infants that you occasionally see in this kind of show (Anybody remember That Scene in True Blood?). This is a baby we’ve been invested in since conception, not to mention that the Laurie-Rick love story was the spine of the whole series. I did read on a bit after the baby’s death, in hopes that there might be some redeeming factor in the story that made this make sense (aside from writer Robert Kirkman’s obsession with the “when the world ends, anyone can die” theme, yawn) and shortly after that, the Governor spends a number of very graphic pages beating, torturing, and raping a young woman he keeps tied up for this very purpose. A number of pages. Melissa out.

** I actually suspect this may happen next week on the season finale, mostly because T-Dog got like three thowaway mini-lines tonight, which had nothing to do with the rest of the show. The only reason I can think of for having him pop up for ten seconds of meaningless muttering is to remind us of who he is right before they off him next week.

It has come to my attention that writing a blog is a lot like going to the gym: I want to, I plan to, I know I’ll feel good about it afterwards, and yet when it actually comes to the moment of work, the very thought makes me tired. Like, turn-a-movie-on-for-child-go-lay-down kind of tired. I’ve started about four different blogs in the last few weeks, but got overwhelmed every time, probably because the circuits in my brain are shorting out thanks to child (who turned three last week, incidentally), graduate thesis, class work, side projects*, my “fun” writing (i.e. the sequel to Dead Spots), preparing for next month’s conference, and physical therapy work for my knees. Plus – and this is no small thing – my television doesn’t just watch itself. Somebody has to do it.

Yes, as I’m looking back over my list of busyness, it amuses me that I’ve been working on so much, yet managed to consume many, many TV shows. This is the problem with Tivo: after awhile, you start to feel like watching all those stored shows is just one more thing on your to-do list. Under normal circumstances TV is my go-to relaxation technique, but when that Saved list gets really long, I begin to feel the same edge of anxious panic that accompanies every other deadline in my life. Look at how many shows have stacked up, I think. How am I ever going to get through all of these? How am I going to keep from having all these shows ruined for me? Is it just me or did Jason Lee get super un-hot and then come all the way back around as a hottie? Who says ‘hottie’ anymore?

I know, talk about your first-world problems, right? My Tivo list intimidates me? I know that the right thing to do is to quit cold-turkey – abandon all my shows and stop reading entertainment sites and focus on my family and my work. Maybe subscribe to a newspaper, for once. Get the cobwebs off my bike. Keep my house clean for more than a day. This is definitely the best option for me, and Mattie. I know that. But…I just don’t have it in me.

I’m addicted, I get that. I have the same problem with diet Coke. (First world problems AGAIN. I have so much shame right now.) But here’s the thing. TV makes me happy. I love the stories, I love the performances, I love the settings and plot complications and unpredictability just when I think everything is completely predictable. (Hello, The River. Welcome to my Tivo playlist.) I love letting go of the twenty-seven lists that are scrolling through my head like the Matrix at any given moment. I love getting excited about something that ultimately, doesn’t matter that much. Let’s say I plan a trip to Chicago to go to the Field Museum. There’s plenty to get excited about, but there’s also details to work out, money to spend, things that could go wrong. Maybe the best thing about TV is that it’s easy.

These are things I just can’t let go of. And, if I’m being honest, I love holding on to Melissa version 2.0,** the one who worked in LA and spent over a year at NBC-Universal developing shows. There are still a couple of shows that I worked on that are still on the air, and that makes me happy. Melissa 2.0 would never have been able to give up TV, and she’s still in here somewhere.

So, I stay up late. Really late. On a regular basis. I watch TV when I should be doing between ten and twenty other things that are much more important. And I get stressed when my to-be-watched list gets too long, because it makes me feel like I’m neglecting a pet who’s always there for me. I know it’s stupid, I know it’s unimportant, and I know it makes me not as good of a person. But I think I can accept that.

*A couple of weeks ago I had to write a fifteen-page research paper for a compendium on vampires in like three days. With our internet down. And insufficient childcare. I just barely survived to tell the tale.
**For those of you keeping track at home, there have been at least four different versions of Melissa: Childhood/high school Melissa, College/Hollywood Melissa, Madison Single Melissa, and Married Mother Melissa.

Spoiler Alert - the following contains spoilers for Underworld: Awakening. Nothing that would ruin the movie, but might take the mystery out of the first fifteen minutes.

To my surprise, there were a number of good things about the fourth Underworld movie. They did a really nice job of integrating 3D without letting it run the show, and it was nice seeing Selene, who’s emoted maybe twice in the series, find herself suddenly a facing down motherhood. But despite these good qualities, I’m afraid I do need to administer some chastisements.

Most importantly: Scott Speedman, what the hell? Where were you on this movie? Did you have something better to do? My best guess is that shooting his role as the romantic foil in The Vow conflicted with the Underworld schedule, to which I say: Scott Speedman’s agent, what the hell? The second lead in a surprisingly successful action franchise, or the douche who DOESN’T get Rachel McAdams in a romantic comedy we’ve all seen eight times already? My three-year-old could figure that one out, and she thinks panda bears are called “candy bears.”

Also, the studio/producers: I commend you for not brushing over the whole Michael thing and focusing only on Selene, but if you wanted to include Michael in some scenes, did you have to use the world’s least believable body double? You may not have noticed this (because faces obviously aren’t in your wheelhouse), but amazing things are actually being done with CGI faces right now. Natalie Portman’s face was digitally added to a dancer in Black Swan, young Jeff Bridges was added to Tron: Legacy, and JFK was put in Forrest Gump. Oh, wait, that last one was EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO. What would it cost to create two minutes of Scott Speedman? Maybe having ONE less Lycan in the movie? God forbid.

Also – and this actively baffles me – what was the deal with all the wasted opportunities? Why get Wes Bentley and then do nothing with him? Why not give Charles Dance (One of my favorite villains ever, courtesy of Last Action Hero) a little more room to stretch and chew some scenery, a la Bill Nighy? The reason that the first Underworld movie is the best one is the charisma of the two vampire and Lycan leaders: Michael Sheen’s (who has got to be the most diverse actor on the planet - sorry, Gary Oldman) vicious and heartbreaking Lucian and Bill Nighy’s “Yeah it’s a paycheck but I’m still having a great time” vampire leader Viktor. And it’s not like you cast a bland actor to be the new leader of the vampires – have you not seen Last Action Hero? Or Game of Thrones? Guy got to have more fun in Alien 3 than you let him have here. Apparently you either couldn’t get the talent, or had the talent but ignored it so you could have more shots of Kate Beckinsale’s dead-eyed rampaging.

Okay. Whew. Sorry, guys, had to get that off my chest. The fact of the matter is that Underworld is one of the ‘meh’ series that just keeps churning out sequels, never reaching the insanely high franchise numbers of a Michael Bay or Harry Potter mega-series, but never dipping so low that a sequel wouldn’t be economically reasonable. Other entries in this strange category include the Resident Evil movies, the Step Up movies, and the Harold and Kumar movies. Every time I’ve heard about a new sequel in one of these, I’m surprised, because in this day and age, movie series live and then die on extreme numbers. A studio puts a large amount of cash into the budget, and then expects a much larger number back. We often see movies that appear to have made a ton of money right up until you look at the budget, and it turns out the profit isn’t all that great. Domestically, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was a failure: although it wound up with a $241 million gross, the budget was $250 million. I don’t see Johnny Depp putting on the black eyeliner again, and not just because that movie sucked so bad.

The crazy thing, though, is that there are these little junior varsity series that just chug along, doing their thing, making their modest profits, which range between $40 and $65 million. (The first Harold and Kumar is a statistical outlier, having made only $18 million. It still more than doubled its budget, though.)

Personally, I don’t think most of these JV movies are all that great – it’s not so much that they suck (okay, maybe Underworld Evolution), as that they’re lazy: a repeat of the same general plot and idea over and over…and over. Resident Evil, in particular, hasn’t demonstrated a plot since 2002. But I can’t help it, I just kind of root for them, anyway. When you think of filmmaking, you pretty much think of either Big Studio Flicks, or little-little independent movies. I dig that these series just keep their heads down and keep going. I just wish that the people who made them would have enough respect for filmmaking to also make good movies.

Although in this case I’d settle for just including Scott Speedman.

A belated Happy Holidays to you, my devoted blog readers. In the last week I’ve been nursing Mattie’s sinus infection, nursing my own resulting sinus cold, watching season four of Sons of Anarchy (Thank you, Amazon instant video! You complete me!), escorting some out-of-town family to Madison’s finest locales, blowing a small fortune on new tires for my car, and participating in conversations where we mourn the lack of snow while I secretly rejoice over the lack of snow. I know that’s a poor attitude for a Wisconsin girl, but now that the whole white Christmas possibility is past us I don’t mind not having snow tracked in my house and car. It’s like sand at the beach: it gets everywhere.

Anyway. I’ve been busy. I did finally make time, however, to check out the new, David Fincher-directed Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movie. The other night at dinner a friend asked me if I liked it, and I hesitated. This isn’t a movie that one really likes or does not like. It’s too dark, too violent, too, frankly, perverse. You’re not supposed to like it, you’re supposed to be uncomfortable, dismayed, yet also invested. It’s a movie that one enjoys or does not enjoy, appreciates or does not appreciate, but it’s not the kind of thing you buy on blu-ray just to memorize nerdy quotes to toss about with your friends. I happened to enjoy and appreciate the film, but I do understand why it’s polarizing, especially from a feminist perspective.

It got me thinking about the whole Millennium Trilogy phenomenon in general (annoyance sidebar: why is it commonly known as that when all three book titles are about Lisbeth Salander? Why isn’t it the Salandar trilogy?). These three novels really have become a worldwide runaway sensation, complete with an insanely successful Swedish movie franchise and now US remake. Of course, part of the interest in this whole story is with the author’s unique position: Stig Larssen completed and sold the three Millennium novels, but died before the first book came out. Back when the novel version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo hit big here in the US, I thought that Larsson’s history was a tragically interesting little backstory that was relevant to the books only in terms of the writing being a little rough: they feel as though the author’s involvement was disconnected before real editing began. But this week, for the first time, I made the connection between his death and the novels’ success.

No, I’m not suggesting that the dramatic tale of the author’s death is the only reason these books made oceans of money. They’re certainly better than that. But I think the biggest reason these books were successful is all the discussion that they provoked – about feminism, violence, violence toward women, the nature of journalism, personal security, privacy, and so on. And the fact that the author can’t comment, defend, argue, or relent in this worldwide discussion only fuels the flames of the books’ popularity.

The term paper that I worked on before Christmas was all about the idea of authorship: after we studied the women’s detective fiction genre, I wrote about the Nikki Heat books, which are based on the television show Castle, and how the really scary thing about them is that there’s no actual author behind them. Oh, someone wrote the books, of course, but they’re simply published as the work of “Richard Castle.” Who is fictional. Fictional. It’s a cute ploy, but the problem is that when issues of feminism arise –and they do – there’s no one to take responsibility. No one is accountable.

For obviously different and sad reasons, the Millennium trilogy has that in common with the Nikki Heat books. In this modern, internet-savvy world, the publishing industry has made authors more accessible than they’ve ever been: we can read their blogs, tweets, Facebook pages, websites, and so on. We know what they had for breakfast and what TV show their kids are into. Screw the literary theorists who argued for the autonomy of the work in the 1970’s: these days we like having our artists available. And that puts Stig Larssen’s books in a pretty unique situation. Controversial subject + absentee author + international appeal = the literary version of the perfect storm.

I’ve often wondered, since the brouhaha* over Lisbeth Salandar first began, how things might have gone differently if those books had been written by a female author, or published anonymously, so we’d be left to wonder. One thing I know for sure, though: feminist and literary theorists are going to continue to have a field day with Lisbeth, and for a long time coming.

After all…there’s no one to stop them.

*This is an excellent word. Let’s all try to use it in a sentence today, shall we?

Big day, folks: today my guest blog is appearing on author Lori Devoti’s website as part of her “30 Days of Vampires” December promotion. Read it and comment - you could win stuff! And don’t forget to catch up on all the other blogs from the last 20 days. There’s some really great stuff there.

As I’ve mentioned here before, the husband and I have had discussions on adding a second kid to our small but, I think, superlative family. For the last couple of weeks I’ve gotten a chance to experience that, thanks to my uncharacteristic willingness to watch a friend’s one-year-old a couple of days a week in December. Reactions are…mixed.

Here’s the thing: Mattie is two, and therefore it is her God-given responsibility to be really naughty. A lot. At the store, the library, the pool, our house; at mealtimes, in front of family, in front of strangers, when I needed to be out the door five minutes ago, etc. And almost every time this happens, I find myself thinking, Yeah, but some people have three* of these. And then I feel guilty.

Guilt: the real Mother’s Little Helper. As a parent I feel guilty almost constantly, both for what I do and what I just think quietly to myself. Guilt that I’m not spending enough time with her, that I don’t want to play on the floor anymore that day, that I should be feeding her organic, that I don’t teach her manners well enough, that I lose my temper…this list is even longer than the list of bad behavior. I can usually handle it okay, by either not thinking about it, or by considering the most perfect mother I can think of (this vacillates between one of my friends, my own mother, an aunt, etc). Is there any chance that she didn’t spend an unreasonable amount of time feeling guilty that she wasn’t doing something correctly?

Nah.

This there’s-just-the-one guilt, however, is a whole other thing. It’s like breaking your leg, being miserable, and then thinking, “But there are some people with two broken legs.” Is this true? Yes. Does it make your damn leg hurt any less? Nope. (That’s where the drugs come in.) I can’t shake the guilty feeling, though, and I find myself editing my day when talking to my friends or sisters with multiple kids: “Oh, Mattie was a perfect monster bit of a challenge when we were at the grocery store, and then I got frustrated to the point of crying had kind of a hard time getting her to eat her dinner.” Stuff like that.

With the temporary addition of a one-year-old to my household, however, I figured I’d finally be able to drop the guilt. I was, after all, going to be In Charge of Multiple Children, just like the mothers I most pity in the checkout line at Walmart. Except…well, hopefully having a second kid wouldn’t go this badly.

It’s not the new kid, mind you. For a one-year-old, she’s a delight. The problem has been Mattie’s reaction to the new kid: she alternates between clinging to me like a crazy-eyed parasite, running around snatching her toys out of the baby’s hands, pulling out more toys to show off so she can take them away when the baby gets interested, and just generally sabotaging anything that I need to do to take care of the other child – preparing separate food, changing diapers, washing one of Mattie’s sippie cups, etc. I feel a little bad for Mattie, I do: I’m the one that changed the rules on her. But, oddly enough, this little experiment has made me both dread having another kid someday and realize that it’s pretty important to Mattie’s development. I’m picturing her as an 18-year-old college freshman, running around snatching her magazines and water glasses away from her new roommate, and, I don’t know, bursting into tears if I compliment the roommate’s sweater.

So, yes. Despite my newfound exhaustion (how do people have three?)*, Operation Second Baby is proceeding as planned. Although I still have one more week of babysitting, so don’t hold me to it.

*Yes, yes. I know some brave parents have more than three children. I just can’t even imagine it, so I’m pretending it doesn’t happen, shh.

You know those people who are like “I don’t watch TV?” I’m not one of those people. I don’t understand those people. In fact, I hate them just a little, because they must spend their time doing healthy, educational activities. Probably outdoors, the bastards.

I love fictional TV.* And I’d like to think that my tastes are pretty diverse: I watch sitcoms, horror dramas, single-camera comedies, nighttime soaps, quirky cable dramedies, British sci-fi, even a few procedurals, though I mostly find them distasteful. One thing I do not watch, however, is gritty, violent cable or pay cable dramas. I’m talking about shows like The Wire, Oz, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, The Tudors, etc. Now, I know that these shows, particularly Breaking Bad and The Wire, are often listed at or near the top of lists of the best television shows ever. And I recognize their quality, I do. It’s just that I have a hard time watching them because – well, not to put it in too technical of terms, but they bum me out.

Seriously. I know that doesn’t sound like much of a reason to avoid the best shows on television, but like many others, I watch TV to escape from my own worries. There is nothing more relaxing to me than sitting down with a diet Coke and a full TiVo. When the show I’m watching is bleak, gritty, and depressing, however, it kind of kills my buzz. (Not to mention that most of those shows are not very kind to their female characters, if they have any. But that’s a whole other blog.) Whenever I try to get into these shows I have a hard time sitting through a second episode, which is what happened with Breaking Bad: I watched the pilot, was thoroughly impressed, and thoroughly depressed. I had three more episode recorded, but after avoiding them for months I finally just deleted them. Maybe it would have helped if I was fascinated by meth and the meth-making process; that could have saved it. Sadly, though, I am not.

Why am I explaining all of this? I want to give you some background in order to emphasize how truly extraordinary I find my own new obsession with Sons of Anarchy. On paper, this is exactly the kind of show I stay away from: it’s a gritty, violent, somewhat bleak show about the relationships between gritty, violent, somewhat bleak men. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s basically the chronicles of a Hell’s Angels-esque “motorcycle club” (aka biker gang) in Northern California. I’m not sure why I started watching – probably the same general curiosity that got me through the first episode of Breaking Bad – but I was immediately intrigued, and around episode four or five, I got hooked. Big time. I watched the whole 13-episode first season in two days, which can really only be accomplished by not sleeping much. Netflix Instant Watch only has seasons one and two, so last night I convinced Tyler (“Honey, I need this”) to let me subscribe to Netflix DVD’s for a month so I can watch season 3. I haven’t told him yet, but after that we’ll be buying season 4 on Amazon Instant Watch. Oh yeah. I’ve got this all worked out.

Anyway, I’ve been giving this some thought, and, inspired by a fun article about The Vampire Diaries, I want to explain some reasons why I love this show – and you should, too.

1.) Things happen.
This isn’t the slow, deliberate pacing of Mad Men, or even the drama-of-the-week procedural format. In every episode there’s a beat-down, or a fire, or someone’s killed, and so on. It could have been really over-the-top and obnoxious, a deliberate “Kick-Ass” orgy of violence, but instead-

2.) Tough subjects are well-handled.
I’m not sure I can say that the plot of this show is realistic (my knowledge of NorCal biker gangs is surprisingly limited), but it doesn’t have to be. What matters is that the emotion feels real, and that’s where Sons of Anarchy nails it. One of the main arcs in season 2 involves the brutal rape of a main character. On another show this could easily turn me away from watching further, but the act and its aftermath aren’t played for cheap violence or horror, and it’s not something that happens in one episode and is forgotten two episodes later. The woman in question spends all season dealing with her own reaction to the rape, and we see how that reaction ripples throughout the rest of the characters, even (maybe especially) the ones who don’t know. Despite the brutality, she is determined not to become a victim, and struggles with that, too. It’s relatable, sympathetic, and completely engrossing.

3.) The good guys are bad guys, and vice versa.
One of the big themes that the show deals with is moral ambiguity: the Sons are actually seen as protectors of their hometown, the fictional Charming, CA. Yes, they run illegal weapons, but they also keep gangs and drugs out of the town, and to that end they have the police chief in their pocket. Rather than a cartoonish villain, though, even the police chief is nuanced and complicated, convinced that the Sons are the lesser evil. The depth of these characters is magnetic.

4.) Brilliant endings.
Most successful shows have ended at least one of their seasons with a cliffhanger. Ever Alias, however, lots of these serialized shows have been ending every episode with a kind of mini-cliffhanger: someone gets stabbed, and…credits! The cool thing about Sons of Anarchy is that most of the episodes I’ve seen don’t end in a big obvious cliffhanger, but with a strong, thoughtful plot point that still makes you wave your arms and say, “What?! Where are they gonna go from there?!"**

5.) The romance.
I know, I know, romance in a F/X show? Makes no sense. But Sons of Anarchy is dominated by two major relationships: new father Jax (Charlie Hunnan)*** and the high school sweetheart he tries to avoid falling back in love with, and the Sons leader Clay and his “old lady,” Jax’s mom Gemma. Much has been said about Clay and Gemma, played to rough perfection by Ron Perlman and Katey Sagal, but I love the younger couple. With very few words, they communicate the desperate, undeniable love that draws them together while everyone knows they belong apart.

Honestly, it’s almost enough to make a girl give Breaking Bad another shot.

* I don’t watch reality TV of any kind – not because I think I’m above it (okay, I’m above some of it, but so is everybody), but because I know how easy it is to manipulate with editing. Producers film someone for two days, and then they can cut the footage to make that person out to be any one of a number of pre-existing stereotypes. The same person. From the same footage. It annoys me.

**I usually say this to my dog, who’s the only one stupid enough to stay up that late with me.

***I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr. Hunnan, who I may have slammed quite a bit a few years back for his interpretation of Nicolas Nickleby. My basic thesis was that his “butter-yellow” hair was livelier than his acting. My bad. Guy deserves him some Emmys.

Every year, I participate in the full-contact shopping competition known as Black Friday. I’ve done previous blogs defending this lifestyle choice, so I’m not going to bother with excuses here. Instead, I have decided to bestow upon you my wisdom – the lessons I’ve learned from my long relationship with Black Friday. If you’re even considering heading to a store that day, read this first. (Why post this today instead of next week, you ask? First, I need to give you time to plan. Second, I hope to be announcing something big next week.)

1. Plan early, and plan hard.
The store ads for Black Friday technically don’t come out until Thanksgiving, but waiting until then to make a plan is ridiculous. Go online to sites like blackfriday.info or bfads.net to scope out your ads in advance. (Make sure you double-check the ads when they do come out on Thanksgiving, just in case.) Then it’s time to make your list. Think about your Christmas presents first. When that’s done you can stop and consider if there’s something you really need for your house, that you don’t expect someone to get you for Christmas – for example, this year Tyler and I are hoping to get a new bedding set, because our old comforter is full of small holes.

2. Be suspicious of good deals.
As Black Friday shoppers get smarter, the stores keep getting shrewder, and one of the big things I’ve noticed in the last couple of years is price inflation: a store jacks up the price, either shortly before Black Friday, or even just all the time, and then offers what seems to be an amazing deal, but is really just 5% off what the item should have cost anyway. Shopko and Kohls are the two biggest perpetrators, in my opinion, but Best Buy is no slouch, either. I’ve decided that Amazon is a pretty good benchmark for pricing: while you’ll occasionally see a store matching the Amazon price, it’s very rare to see a store mark an item lower. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: this year Shopko is offering the Nikon Coolpix S6100 Digital Camera for $120 on Black Friday. On the website it claims that the “list price” (what does that even mean?) is 230 dollars. That’s almost half off! OMG!
Not so fast. On Amazon, the exact same camera costs $140. Anytime. So yes, you’re getting a bit of a savings on Black Friday, but hardly the 40% off we’ve been led to believe. (The thing that I find particularly annoying is that Shopko currently claims to be having a “sale” on this camera, so it only costs a measly $170. Which is still thirty dollars more than Amazon, but if you didn’t price-check, you’d think you were getting a deal. Douchbags.) Check your list items on Amazon, and if the price is the same or even close, you might want to consider not braving the Black Friday craziness.

3. Pre-shop.
I recommend pre-shopping: going to the store in advance and looking over the items you want to make sure they really are what you want. (Don’t be the jerk who tries to hide things in the store, though. Not cool.) Ads are specifically designed to make things appear as appealing as possible, so you’ll want to make sure that sweater really IS as soft and warm as it claims to be, and that the bedspread is made of cotton, not cheap polyester. You’re not going to want to take the time to do this on Black Friday – the whole experience is about the go-go-go.

4. Take a buddy.
Shopping alone can certainly be fun – on a nice, leisurely afternoon when you have no other obligations. But for Black Friday, having a friend along doesn’t just make it more fun: it also makes everything easier. It’s good to have someone to wait in line while you’re parking the car, or guard the cart while you backtrack for one more item. On the other hand, a group of more than, say, three, can get unwieldy and end up slowing you down. It’s like high school: choose your friends carefully, because you’re stuck with them for the duration.

5. Don’t sleep.
This year many businesses are opening as early as midnight, or even ten (and Toys R Us cracks the doors at nine), which will make this even easier, but in the past I’ve discovered that it’s better to stay up through the night and then crash at home for the day (fellow mothers: this is exactly why husbands have that Friday off) than to sleep for three or four hours and pop back up to shop. If you stay up, you’ll have giddy excitement energy. If you sleep for three hours, the whole thing will feel like you’re sleepwalking – I don’t remember any of the Black Fridays before I started staying up all night.

6. Eat first.
This isn’t swimming. Eating beforehand will help you keep from getting crabby or overly fatigued. Here’s the best schedule: Hang out with your friends until about an hour before you want to be at a store, then go to Denny’s or Perkins or some other all-night diner. Get a good-sized, but not enormous, breakfast (or supper), and then take off for the store. And of course, caffeine is your friend: I know everyone swears by coffee (blech), but I endorse a 20-oz bottle of diet Mountain Dew, sipped slowly throughout the trip. The cap lets you stash the thing in a large purse, and the caffeine hit is enough to keep you up without making you start to vibrate.

7. Choose your lines carefully.
If you’re after a really big-ticket item, like a television or PS3, then first of all, may God have mercy on your soul, and second, best of luck to you. You should plan to arrive VERY early to wait in the outdoor line to get into the store. Use your best judgment to figure out what constitutes a big ticket item – the bigger the savings, the bigger the number of shoppers who will want the item in question. If you’re not after one of the major-major things, however, a good time to arrive is about five to ten minutes before the store is opening. You have time to park the car and walk to the back of the line, and by the time you get there it’ll start moving. Most of the good deals won’t sell out in the first three seconds, and that way you don’t have to stand out in the cold. Which, if you live in Wisconsin, is particularly stupid.

8. Assertiveness is okay, but remember your manners.
Remember the first rule of Black Friday: have a good time. To that end, don’t let it bother you if you see bad behavior from other customers, or a rude, weary-sarcastic store employee. At the same time, don’t let yourself become the rude crazy person who sneaks around stealing from other people’s carts. You don’t have to be a doormat – if the crabby employee hands you the wrong size, say so – but, as my fourth grade teacher used to say, just be a good citizen.

9. Remember where you are.
No, I’m not just talking about where your car is in the parking lot, though that is important. Here’s a mistake I’ve made more than once: You’ve been shopping for four or five hours, and you’re exhausted but still having a good time. Then you come across something that would be a perfect gift for your husband/child/father. The only problem is, you already have a different perfect gift. So you fish out your cell phone and call someone else who may be looking for a gift for this person…and it’s not until their sleepy “hello” that you realize that it’s 6:30 in the morning on a holiday weekend. You are in the Black Friday zone: don’t expect anyone else to join you. Unless, you know, they’re there.

10. You don’t have to spend all your money.
The whole point of Black Friday, besides having fun, is to get good deals. But there’s a conception out there that going shopping on Black Friday will automatically clean out your bank account. In fact, just the opposite should be true. Check the ads, make your list, and go in with a set number of purchases in mind – then pad the total cost with an extra 20 - 50 dollars for “deal emergencies.” Throw in a couple of bucks for a caffeine delivery method, and that’s your budget. Stay with it. Remember, your thinking probably won’t be the clearest in the middle of the night or early morning, which can lead to what I call Consumer Loopiness, where you get all woozy and suddenly decide that you NEED whatever the store has placed in the rack next to the cash register line. And that’s what they want.

Warning: though this post doesn’t contain what I would call actual spoilers, there are plenty of hints about Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead (comic book series). If you want to remain pure as the driven snow, you may want to stop here.

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have noticed that my I’ve been getting a little fainthearted this year.
It started back in June, when Husband and I started watching the first season of Game of Thrones. I should point out that this new HBO show is excellent, whether or not you’re a fan of the George R. Martin book series that it’s based on. The show has a huge cast, but there’s one character that I would consider the main protagonist, and in the second to last episode, he’s killed. Brutally. In front of his family. It was maybe the most shocking death I’d ever seen on television, and I have to say, it really got to me. The thing about high-quality television, or movies, or books, is that an empathetic reader or viewer can get truly sucked in: for whatever time you spend in it, that world becomes your world. That family becomes your family. Those people become your people. So when this character, who I honestly thought would be around as long as the show, was killed, I felt almost used. It was a little like dating a new person, falling in love with him, and then discovering that he’s had terminal cancer all along. And the thing that kept going through my mind at the time was “If I had known, I never would have started this bleeping show.”

Fast forward to last month, when season two of The Walking Dead premiered on AMC. I knew that the series was based on a long-running comic book of the same name – in fact, I’d even read the first trade paperback of the comics and knew the characters and the basic setup. I loved the first season of the show, but after the premiere of season two I started to get a little suspicious. I don’t know quite how to explain it, except perhaps to say that the show was dangerously good. I was getting invested, just as I had with Game of Thrones, and it’s not a great idea to get emotionally invested in a show whose main premise involves tons of zombie carnage.

What to do? The television show does vary from the comic book, but since both are overseen by Robert Kirkman (whom Entertainment Weekly, for one, simply calls the zombie overlord), I figured the comic book would probably be a good indicator of where the show was going. I felt like it would be wrong to just go on Wikipedia and read a summary of the whole comic book series to see where its going – that would be robbing myself of the chance to experience at least one version of the story (comic or television) as it was intended. So I decided to check the first, huge compendium of the comic book series out from the library. I would get to have the comic book experience, and have an idea where the show would be going. Good plan, right?

As it turned out, though, my suspicions were spot on. Without giving away too much, I’ll say that something happens at the end of Walking Dead: Compendium One, that rivals the death on Game of Thrones, in terms of shock and horror. We’ll call this The Incident. There are a number of disturbing occurrences towards the end of the book, enough that I may have quit anyway, but the Incident alone is more than enough to make me walk away (get it?) from the comic- which I did immediately after checking Wikipedia to make sure it wasn’t all a dream or something.

I think I understand why Kirkman went this route, thought I never would have, and I don’t blame him for my distress: it’s his series, and he can do whatever he wants. Just like I can’t stop James Patterson from running the Alex Cross series into the ground, or Laurel K. Hamilton from turning the groundbreaking Anita Blake series into (less and less soft) soft-core porn. And if Thomas Harris wants to write yet another Hannibal Lector sequel so he can build a summer home or whatever, I can’t stop him. It’s like government: unless you really want to go out and do it yourself, your only real power is your vote. And I took mine away. I said I wouldn’t have watched Game of Thrones if I’d known, and here was a chance to quit Walking Dead before the show, at least, got to that awful Incident.

And yet…I’m still wrestling with this decision, because I am stubborn. I didn’t use to have this problem. I’ve always considered myself to be fairly tough and cynical, at least in terms of what I can stand to watch. I’ve always thought Lifetime was the useless, soppy handkerchief of entertainment. I don’t do touchy-feely crap because I think its stupid, not because I’m afraid I’ll cry. I’ve never shied away from horror movies before this year. But, as much as I don’t want to, I’ll admit it: something about being a mother has softened me a little. There, I said it. And I don’t like that. I want to think that motherhood doesn’t fundamentally change who I am as a person, that it only augments that person. But this whole Walking Dead/Game of Thrones thing is once again forcing me to see that it didn’t really work out that way. I am different. My tolerances are different. And, unlike watching Walking Dead, it doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice.

Over the weekend I got my first taste of professional scholarship: I presented a paper at the Midwest Popular Culture/American Culture Conference in Milwaukee. The how and why I got to this point is really kind of boring: I had to write a research paper last year for one of my lit classes, and I decided to deliberately organize it so it could go to this kind of conference. The idea is that once I get my master’s I “want” to teach writing, and since I didn’t get a teaching assistantship, I need to do whatever I can to pad my resume.* And, let’s be honest. I was curious.

I’ve spoken many times about the divide between “literary” writing and “commercial” writing, and how out of place I often feel at grad school events and classes because I actually enjoy, and would prefer to write, commercial books. Now, in previous discussions I was just talking about creative writing students. The kind of students and professors who write academic and scholarly papers are a rung up on the evolutionary writing ladder, at least in terms of…well, I keep trying to think of a nicer, more respectful term than “snobbery,” but it’s not coming to me.** I always thought that creative writing doctoral students were intimidating, but these folks make them look like excessively educated teddy bears. Given the opportunity to walk into the lion’s den, and given my own tendency to run straight at whatever I think might scare me, how could I resist?

I couldn’t. And here’s what I learned about professional scholarship. First, and as suspected, I’m kind of an idiot. I held my own much better than I had feared, mostly because this was pop culture we were talking about, and I am nothing if not a connoisseur. But there were a lot of panels that were over my head. Okay, wait, strike that. There were a lot of panels that I imagine I could have understood, but struck me as particularly…what’s the word I need here…boring. Crazy boring. Hope-you-got-nine-hours-of-sleep-the-night-before-or-you’ll-pass-out boring. Which brings me to this question: if I find academic discourse beyond dull, does that make me stupid, or just impatient? The idea behind these kind of conferences, I think, is to create a place for a friendly exchange of ideas amongst a well-educated group of people with the same interests. But at all of the panels I went to, there were one or two papers that interested me, and two or three papers that had me pinching my arms to stay awake. (BRUISES.) Now, my education is decent and I’m interested in pop culture, so where did I go wrong? Does everyone who attends conferences feel this way, or am I uniquely dimwitted? Food for thought.

As for my own paper presentation, I was lucky enough to be scheduled for 8:00 am on Sunday. No, I’m not being sarcastic when I say “lucky” – nobody wants to get up that early on a Sunday to listen to people talk for an hour and a half without moving.*** So if you take away spouses, there were maybe six people in the room, and four of us presenters. As a result it was reasonably casual, and I was able to semi-commit the Cardinal Crime of paper presentations: reading directly from a sheet of paper. Several sheets. The idea is that you’re supposed to speak candidly with maybe the use of a Power Point presentation or some visual aids. Reading directly from the paper is kind of like…well, reading directly from the paper. It’s boring. At the same time, however, a) it had been quite a long time since I did the research and wrote this paper, and b) I am not my best before, say, 10:00 am. So I mostly read from the paper, and did a bit of freehand explaining throughout. Tyler says it worked out well, and I know he would never, ever lie to me to make me feel better, so we’re going with that.

Also, I’m not going to go into a critique or explanation of the other three presenters’ papers, because I am paranoid about putting that kind of thing out on the internet and hurting someone’s feelings, but I will say that it sucked to be the person who goes last. When I was done, the panel chair asked for questions on any of our papers, and everyone (reasonably) asked questions about mine, because I had just gone. By then it was 9:30, I’d just talked for 20 minutes, and I was beginning to wake up, so I think I did okay. But it wasn’t until this point that I really started to feel maybe a little really stupid. Every presenter’s worst nightmare is the audience member who wants to argue against you and your paper. Most of the time this doesn’t happen, because it’s tacky and most audience members understand that you’re there to present an argument, not spark a major debate, but I did have an audience member who seemed hell-bent on proving that she was smarter than me. Which was extra depressing because I’m pretty sure she was. Tyler says I defended himself okay, and as previously stated he would never, ever lie to make me feel better, so we’re going with that, too.

In conclusion (academic humor), I would say I had mixed feelings about the whole enterprise. There were times when I sort of had fun, but mostly I kept thinking to myself, “what’s the point?” Was the whole thing just a backslapping enterprise to make us academics feel like we’re doing something that’s relevant, instead of overanalyzing a bunch of things that were never meant to be analyzed at all? Maybe. In theory, I do believe that it’s important to try to understand popular culture as a way of understanding ourselves, and what drives and entertains us. I’m just not sure that’s what we were doing last weekend. But I’m not sure we weren’t, either. Maybe this issue should be tackled by someone smarter or less impatient than me.

* In other words, “make me look smart.”
** Probably because I’m just a commercial writing peon.
***Oops, except people going to church. I was always more of a “10:30 service” kind of girl, myself.

I’ve been pretty focused on the writing and entertainment aspects of this blog recently, and I think I’ve been neglecting the whole “motherhood” part. Or possibly I just didn’t want to have to admit what’s going on with Mattie: I’ve started yelling at her.*

Mattie, who is in all ways hilarious, beautiful, brilliant, and happy, is also a two-year-old. And unfortunately that whole “Terrible Two’s” thing wasn’t just made up by marketing people to sell parenting books. Mattie has reached an age where she can comprehend the things that I say, but she can’t comprehend any particular reason why she needs to listen. (When do I get to start using “because I said so?” I’m really excited about that.) So she has to test me to find out what happens if she doesn’t listen. How will I react? What will the punishment be? How far can she push me before something really bad happens?

I understand all of that, and I don’t blame her for it. But I do have to live with it. I think most people have had that experience where you’re at the mall or the grocery store, and some little kid acts up, and the parent just reams them out. Huge overreaction. Let’s call this a Disproportionate Response Event (DRE). When you see a DRE, you think two things. First, “That woman just snapped. I am witnessing a person who has snapped.” And second, if you plan to spend any time around kids, “I would never do that.”

In general, I think every new parent wants to believe that she won’t raise her voice to her kid. You want to think that you, above all others, will have calm, rational responses when a kid needs discipline. And for a long time, that actually works, because the stupid baby lulls you into a false sense of security. When Mattie was first starting to move around, I discovered that I had unexpected secret reservoirs of patience. By the time she was trying to eat solid foods, and insisting on operating the spoon herself, I couldn’t be fazed. Four poopy diapers in one day? No problem. Being forced to watch Cars three times a day when she’s sick? Whatevs.

I was proud, too. I know it’s naïve, but for awhile there, I really did think I was going to be able to make it through this whole childrearing business without becoming the kind of parent who yells at their kid. Even the early two-year-old problems – mostly, an inability to sit still in a restaurant or movie theater – didn’t bug me. I just stopped taking her to those places.

But all of that was before she got old enough to test me. And all of a sudden, I started hearing myself raise my voice. First it was mostly safety-based, which isn’t so bad: I would yell when she tried to run off in the middle of a parking lot, or grabbed my scissors off the counter. I felt guilty, but, you know…safety. Getting yelled at is better than being hit by a car, am I right? Eventually, though, I heard myself yelling at her- well, I won’t say all the time, that’s not accurate, but enough that she stopped taking a raised voice seriously. And I began to feel that unique kind of frustration that only parents experience: the “for God’s sake, just LISTEN TO ME” feeling.

Then it started to feel like she was trying to get me to that point, on purpose. Remember in Hitchhiker’s Guide, when it’s suggested that mice are actually the smartest creatures on the planet, and all this time we think we’ve been doing experiments on them, they’ve actually been doing experiments on us? That’s how I feel most of the time. It’s like she just honestly isn’t supposed to stop until she’s gotten a big reaction out of me. (In other words, until she’s made me feel like a terrible mother and an all-around crappy human being.)

Example. Let’s say we go to the library, which Mattie loves. The first thing she’ll do is drop my hand and run to the children’s area, hollering, “Come on, Mommy, come on!” I’ll shush her and remind her nicely that we need to be quiet in the library. She’ll grab a few books off shelves and throw them on the floor, which will prompt me to get down to her eye level and tell her that’s not nice, and make sure she picks them up herself. Then she’ll go running off to the giant cow statue in our library, screaming, “Come on, Mommy! Cow over here!” I try to catch up with her without looking too undignified, take her hand and remind her again that a) we need to whisper in the library, and b) she can pet the cow, but she is not to climb on the cow or his wooden base. She’ll nod, possibly even whispering a cute little “Okay, Mommy.” I’ll let go of her hand, at which point she’ll run to the cow, step up onto his base, and start slapping his sides as hard as she can (the thing is hollow, so…loud). I tell her she needs to get down, and she crawls under the cow’s stomach to the side of the base that’s against the window, where I can’t follow her. Then she yells something along the lines of “Mommy, there are colors on the cow! Red green blue white colors!” I tell her to come out, she can’t be standing on the cow’s base. We are getting stares from the other patrons, one or two with a sympathetic smile, and a very stern look from the librarian. I inform her that I’m going to count to three, and if she doesn’t come out and hold my hand we’re leaving right away. One. She ignores me, smacking the cow on the other side of his stomach. I still can’t reach her. Two. Still completely ignoring me. No response. I sigh – I had books on reserve I wanted to check out dammit now I’m going to have to wait until Tyler gets home let’s see the library closes at eight but what am I doing for supper– and say three. She continues a cheerful one-sided conversation with the cow, so I feint like I’m going to crawl back there to pull her out (I can’t fit, but she doesn’t know that), and she sing-songs, “O-kay, Mommy!” and comes crawling out. She hugs my leg and gives me a beatific aren’t-I-so-cute grin. I tell her that no, we need to leave because she didn’t listen. It’s rare for her to go into full-blown tantrum mode, but this would be the time: she lays on the ground, kicking and screaming because we had to leave before she got a stamp on her hand from the librarian. I pick her up – at almost 40 lbs, this is getting harder and harder on my back – and carry her out of the library, imagining that the moment we are gone the whole place will break out into applause. Then I get to have the always-awesome experience of trying to buckle a flailing 40-lb toddler into a car seat.

Now, in that situation, did I raise my voice to Mattie? No. She was saved by the fact that we were in a library. But that whole thing, beginning to end, took about four minutes. Mattie wakes up at 6:30, and goes to bed at 8. She naps for about 90 minutes around lunchtime. If you do the math, that leaves a full twelve hours – 720 minutes – of time when she can be testing me. I meant it when I said I don’t blame her for this: Birds fly, fish swim, toddlers test – but those reservoirs of patience I mentioned earlier? They only go so far. The odds are pretty good that on any given day, I will raise my voice at least twice. Then I will feel terrible. Once in awhile my yelling even makes her burst into tears, which threatens to make me burst into tears, at which point I usually dismiss my self-imposed regulations and turn on an episode of Dinosaur Train. (Unless what she did was bad enough to send her into a time-out.) I worry that I am disciplining her too much.

I worry that I am not disciplining her enough. I start exploding over a small thing because I’ve been patient during the last seven big things. (Ah-ha! You knew I was going to get back to those DRE’s!) Then Tyler comes home, and she says something rude like, “Be QUIET, Daddy!” and he laughs at her. My head explodes.

This is a typical day. Actually, this is every day with a toddler. When I really stop and think about it fairly, I think I’m doing okay. Probably (hopefully) average. But you can see why I haven’t been blogging much about parenting. I’m not exactly proud. Luckily, Mattie goes to preschool two afternoons a week, which gives me a break from her and a chance to start missing her, both of which are good things.

Of course, Mattie doesn’t like going to school. She cries on the way there, and when I leave. Last week I spoke to her teacher Miss Mia about it, and Mia said, “Oh, don’t worry. I know she just doesn’t want to be away from you. Just like you don’t want to be away from her!” And without thinking or meaning to, I laughed in her face.

Note: this blog contains spoilers about a number of movie endings. I’m too lazy to make a list of all the many films mentioned, so if you wish to remain spoiler-free, best skip this one and tune in next week.

Film critics (well, professional critics in general, see Ratatouille) are often portrayed as overly analytic and cynical. I wouldn’t say that this is always a fair assessment, but I do understand where the “cynicism” part comes from. If you spend four years of college finding out what is truly great about film, optimistically admiring all the ways that this medium can be used as both a social tool and brilliant entertainment machine, (sometimes even at the same time), heading into the theater on any given weekend can be enormously disillusioning. I’m not even necessarily talking about bad movies: if you sit down with a big list of the movies that come out in a certain year – and I have – the majority of those films are going to be both mediocre and forgettable. Anybody remember Marmaduke? How Do You Know? Brooklyn’s Finest? They all came out last year, yet I have to work to dredge up any memories of the trailers.

The thing is, I actually understand how movies turn out to be mediocre. This is oversimplifying, but basically it’s a giant “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem. Add in a bunch of marketing consultants and nervous studio heads who are depending on said movie to fill a certain scheduling slot that’s based on a thousand external factors, and you can see how a perfectly good script can end up as a paragon of blah-ness. In fact, if I were going to design a new ratings system for the average moviegoer, from best to worst it would look like this:

***** Worth seeing at the full, nighttime weekend movie price
**** Would give the head-bob recommendation to friends*
*** Wait for DVD
** Blah
* A waste of time

And most movies would probably end up in the “Blah” category. No, how mediocre movies become mediocre isn’t that interesting to me. What I am constantly interested in, however, is how and when a truly bad movie goes bad. Once in awhile you get a movie that was a complete disaster from the day the script is finalized: Bewitched, All About Steve, The Women, The Spirit, Stepford Wives. But most of the time, a bad movie started out as good, and there’s something you can point to in order to explain its downfall: a certain completely unrealistic plot point (see: Up in the Air and Casino Royale, both of which turned their leading ladies into betrayers with little or no lead-up at all) for example, or the death of a major character halfway through the movie. Maybe the movie just got overhyped to the point where there was no chance of meeting expectations, which is what happened to Snakes on a Plane, Star Wars: Episode One**, and Green Lantern, among others.

Lately, though, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to movies that are fantastic all the way up until the ending, when it all goes south. It recently came to my attention that some people can consider a book or movie fantastic in spite of such an ending, which had never really occurred to me until this summer, when I read Smilla’s Sense of Snow. The first, oh, 4/5ths of this book is breathtaking. I’ve never read such incredible descriptions or been privy to the kind of fascinating sub-cultural detailing that both enraptured and shamed me in Smilla.

Then the book, and the inevitable movie that it spawned, takes a 180 degree turn in genre, jumping from a subtle, lyrical whodunit to a bizarro sci-fi angle. This is from Roger Ebert’s review of the movie: “In the early 1960s, when American-International was cranking out a science-fiction thriller every other week, a plot like this would have been worthy of something like “Prehistoric Radioactive Worms from Outer Space.'’ Never mind. The ending simply doesn’t matter. The movie presents it, but isn’t implicated in it. The movie is off somewhere else.”

Huh. Can that be right? Can an ending really not matter so much? Naturally this offended my sense of cinematic right and wrong, so I sat down to examine a list of those movies that I thought were great right up until the last five minutes or so. I guess I was wondering if it was within my mental powers to just blot out the whole ending business and look favorably on the rest of the movie. Self-inflicted denial, let’s call it.

A couple of them, like 28 Weeks Later, The Crazies, and Insidious (both of which starred Rose Byrne, by the way), had annoying, tacked-on “twist” endings that ruined any sense of closure we might have taken with us. Some took the “Smilla” route and went all wacky: Splice, which began life as a wonderfully thoughtful sci-fi drama, dirtied my brain when suddenly Adrian Brody, an actor I (used to) admire, decides to have sex with his animalistic, genetically created surrogate daughter. Who, by the way, has the development of a fourteen-year-old. With a tail. Then she turns male -yeah- and brutally rapes (onscreen) Sarah Polley, his/her mother figure. Who is impregnated and sells the “baby” to a research company. Seriously. That happened. When I come across that movie on my list of Netflix options, I scroll down as fast as possible, because just the sight of the poster makes me want a shower.

When I looked further at the list, however, I realized that most of the movies I like up until the ending bothered me because of a sudden, discordant shift in tone. The first Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, however overstuffed and over-plotted, is at its core about fun. Having Will Turner suddenly become ferryman for the dead and only see his true love once every ten years was just, for lack of a more sophisticated term, a major downer. It made me feel mislead. In Bruges is a tight, remarkably funny crime drama with fantastic performances all around- but it ends with a complete cliffhanger, as protagonist Colin Farrell goes into the hospital with a bullet wound and we never learn whether he survives. That kind of artsy ending didn’t suit the funny/gangster vibe at all.

Anyway. I looked all of these over, thought about it, and concluded that no, I cannot accept a movie with a bad ending as good. Although it’s probably the easiest thing to overlook, the tacked-on nonsense pisses me off, because it’s lazy and unoriginal. The excessively wacky twist was just disturbing. And the shift in tone thing? Well, it’s a little bit more understandable, given the original “cooks in the kitchen” problem, but one of the keys to good writing is coherence. I’m not saying that giving the audience what it wants is always the best route, but as audience members we expect a movie to hold together as one complete piece. Unless there’s some sort of completely brilliant artistic reasoning, twisting a chunk at the end into a different genre is just kind of rude.

Although I have to give these movies one thing: none of them are what you’d call “blah.”

I think I have a problem.

Not a problem like, I forgot to return library books or put the clothes in the dryer. I’m talking about a capital-P Problem, like when you’re addicted to painkillers or drink a liter of vodka every day. But my problem is a lot more commonplace and vague: I’m addicted to technology.

I know, I know - who isn’t, right? Everyone has a Smart Phone, everyone has wireless, everyone pays too much money for DVR and texts cute pictures of their kid. (If you are one of the few who’s managed to avoid “upgrading” to these things, please understand that I applaud, rather than belittle, you.) But my problem isn’t that I have these things, or that I can no longer imagine life without them. My problem is what happens when I bump up against people who aren’t as obnoxiously hooked in as I am. That’s when the true depth of my addiction really comes out to play.

Last week Friday I sent an email - well, a Facebook message - to a friend asking about an upcoming time-sensitive event that’s happening this Thursday. That was four days ago, and I still haven’t heard back. And man, I am climbing the walls. Does this friend not have a Smart Phone? Does she not go on Facebook nine or ten times a day or drive around with one ear always listening for a notification sound? That’s what I do, because I’ve rigged my Facebook messages to go right to my email, and my allegedly Smart Phone notifies me when I get a new email. Worst - and admittedly, most unlikely - of all, does she want to make me go crazy? Does she secretly hate me? Am I not important to her?* Is our friendship built on a foundation of disinterested lies?

Why, yes, these are the thoughts of a crazy person. But believe it or not, it gets worse: while my laptop says that I sent this message, the Facebook application on my Smart Phone says that I never did. Who’s right?! How can these two things which allegedly do the same thing actually disagree with each other?

Which brings me to my next problem: I’ve developed this extraordinarily creepy paranoia that my electronic devices may have turned against me. Okay, okay, I don’t think they’re personally out to get me. That would be silly. (And the rest of this is, of course, completely real and sane.) But I worry that they’re broken, that the millions of things that can go wrong with the internet have happened, and a percentage of my communications aren’t going through. I obsess over this percentage: five? Thirty? Surely it can’t be fifty?

Yup, I know I’m starting to sound like I spend a lot of time modeling foil hats. But do you ever really stop and think about just how much we trust technology to do our communicating for us? Emails, texts, the almighty Facebook, websites, blogs like this one…I’ve putting an awful lot of faith in something that’s been constantly changing since it was invented.

But back to my mental health Problem. What has happened to me? A hundred and fifty years ago, the only way to communicate was by letter, and it could take weeks to arrive. A hundred years before that, you couldn’t get mail in a rural area without riding your horse to the nearest major city. As an English Literature student I read all those Jane Austen books where the romantic leads wrote letters back and forth, and everything took a month to arrive, plus time to write a response, plus the month to get the new letter back. I always used to wonder what people did during those two or three months. What was the Austen equivalent of waiting by the phone? Probably they had a lot of chores.

We don’t even do waiting by the phone anymore. Now we have phones that provide everything in an instant, literally, but the cost is high: you start to not just adjust to instant communication, but actually crave it. Sometimes - actually, quite often - my husband forgets about his phone and either lets the battery die or doesn’t turn the ringer back on after work. And this drives me maaaaaad. Not just because he’s missed out on important information (which has ruined more than one evening and caused more then a dozen fights), but because I literally cannot imagine forgetting about your phone. It makes as much sense to me as forgetting you own a car, or require food to survive.

I don’t want to be this way. I really don’t. But I also don’t have the courage to cancel my phone plan and my wireless and shut down my Facebook account, all of which would be completely reasonable, because I would miss it too much. I would itch for it, and it’s easier for me to choose shame than cravings. Of course, the real victim here is my poor friend who didn’t get back to me in four days and was thus the target of my anxiety and frustration. For this, I’d just like to apologize to all of you in advance.

*If you’re worried that you might be this friend, fear not. I spoke to her before posting this blog, so she’d be warned in advance.

Declaring yourself a writer is a very intimidating proposition, especially because the nature of writing makes it easy to give up before you start.

First, there’s the fact that, unless you’re one of the (increasingly rare) idle rich, you’re probably going to have to work writing time into your preexisting life. Second, you have to decide that you’re good enough to do it. That might sound simple, but the intimidation factor is severe: when you finish reading a really great book, a true opus of literature, it’s awfully tough to say, “yeah, this is what I do, too. This author and I are like, colleagues.” To be a writer you have to make the decision that while, yes, you’re probably not Hemingway or Vonnegut or even Jonathan Franzen, your work is still worth reading.

These two requirements, finding time for writing and deciding you’re good enough to do so, weed out a bunch of would-be authors before they even start. But there’s another major obstacle with just deciding to call yourself a writer. When you write anything, especially fiction, you have to go into it with the knowledge that anything you’re doing has been done before.

I’m dead serious. Many a writer has squashed a perfectly good idea because they worried that it was too similar to someone else’s good idea. But, since there are only six types of plot in all of storytelling, according to Aristotle (who by all accounts was a reasonably smart guy), the chances that your specific story has been told before are pretty frickin’ excellent. If I were to write a book about a marriage that falls apart because the wife has an affair, or the story of an adolescent boy and the dog who helps him to grow up, would these be new stories? In the immortal words of Whitney Houston, hells, no. The point of writing a book isn’t to tell a completely original story, it’s to create a unique combination of story, voice, language, pace, tone, dialogue, and a dozen other factors that individuate your specific book.

I know all of this. I got past the hurdle of deciding I’m good enough to write, and I’m mostly good with that problem of finding the time. I even started writing an “urban fantasy” series even though you can’t swing a dead cat* in Barnes and Noble without smacking into nine of them. I got past all of that, and believe me, it wasn’t easy, but now I’m stuck again. And what, you ask, are you stuck on? Vampires, dear readers. Vampires.

There are a zillion vampire books out there, which I think is okay, because of all the reasons why its okay to write a new book about a marriage that falls apart. BUT – and in case you couldn’t tell by the caps lock, this is a big ‘but’ – there’s still a huge problem with writing a vampire story: making your fictional vampire culture the least bit interesting to an audience who’s already devoured everything from Twilight to Anita Blake to True Blood to those hot guys on Vampire Diaries. (Yes, I know it was a book series first. No, I don’t care.)

What I’m talking about here is something called world-building, which is a concept every sci fi or fantasy author has to personally create. World-building is exactly what it sounds like: building the supernatural or fantastic universe that your characters interact in. The background, the rules, the “normal” parameters of your story. Take vampires, for example. Every vampire story has to deal with certain mythology questions. I’m writing them in list form because I like lists.

Can vampires go in the sun?
Do they have to kill their victims in order to feed?
What happens to their victims after feeding?
How does one become a vampire?
Do they have fangs?
During they day, are they sleeping, dead, or just awake?
Can they enter someone’s house without an invitiation?
Does religious symbolism (ie crosses) bother them?
Does silver bother them?
Do they physically change before/during feeding?
Can they compel/hypnotize/control humans?
How do you kill them?
and, maybe most importantly, can they be good, or just evil?

Theoretically, the whole idea behind world building is to set all of this up (subtly, with information casually sprinkled throughout the narrative) and then leave it as a backdrop to the story you’re really telling. I can do all of that. The problem is that with the astonishing popularity of vampire stories, I’ve begun to feel pressure to find a way to make my vampires special.

The Twilight vampires are basically built of ice, look like diamonds in the sun, and are literally venomous. The True Blood vampires a) have “come out” to the public and b) can give humans their blood, which creates a raging drug trade. The Vampire Diaries boys have magical rings that let them walk in the sun, and are descended from a special line called the Originals and die from a werewolf bite and blah blah you get the idea. It seems like in order to have a successful (read: publishable) vampire story these days, your vamps have to have something special about them. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a special power - A friend of mine wrote a really original novel about vampires in the 1970’s in Memphis - but something has to be unique, and this is where I get stuck. I can answer all the above questions about vampires, within my own mythology, but I’m having trouble thinking of a way to make my vampire culture new and interesting.

But Melissa, you say, remember rule number three, the one about accepting that every story has been told before? Why don’t you just settle for a mythology that’s been used before? Yes, faithful readers, I do remember. And for a long time I did think it was enough to just set up the vampire mythology in a general way and then move it to the backdrop, where it belongs. But now I’ve begun to suspect that the problem with my story is with the vampires, or the supernatural world in general, just not being unique enough.

Of course, part of the problem with all of this is that my book isn’t actually about vampires. My story is about a girl who works for vampires, and interacts with them, but is not one herself. The vampire “culture,” however, is important to her story, which makes it important to the book, which makes it important that it be interesting. I think.

All right, maybe I’m just whining here. But doesn’t it seem like it’s asking a lot for a story to be action-packed, interesting, original, reasonably (I hope) well-written, AND feature a unique vampire culture?

After all, I’m only human.

*This is a Steve Olson colloquialism, which I am using here for folksy emphasis. I don’t actually mess around with feline corpses. Please don’t call PETA.