Twilight revival

Oh dear.  As if the world wasn’t inflicted with enough pain with the Twilight movies.  To be fair, I rather enjoy them for their unintentional hilarity.  Even genuine fans couldn’t watch Edward sparkle with a heavenly tintinnabulation without laughing.  Few fans were happy to find out the battle sequence at the end of the last movie was nothing more than a dream sequence to make something at all happen, but for the short time I crossed my fingers that it wasn’t (I was invited to an advanced screening, and live-Facebooked the…experience), that was cool.  Something happened!  Other than everyone standing around talking before the supposed-bad-guys shrugged and went home!!

Well, we all thought Twilight was behind us, and considering how even her diehard fans were extremely disappointed and returned the books in spades to prevent her from getting royalties (note: I don’t support returning books because you didn’t like it any more than I’d support returning a new type of snack food because you don’t like it–buyer’s remorse is on the buyer), leaving it to the past would seem to be the best.  But then along came The Host, and though most of her readers were left-over fans from Twilight, many complained that they couldn’t get far into it, or that it took hundreds of pages to become interested.

On to producing.  Austenland proved to be a box office flop, grossing less than a third of its budget, and has been widely panned.  It rated sightly better than The Host, though The Host at least managed to earn back its production costs.  The last two Twilight movies, Breaking Dawn part 1 and part 2, are widely considered to be the worst in a series, nay, of the year 2012 (with a whopping 11 Razzie nominations in almost every category for part 2), already scoffed at as comedies that were meant to be serious romances. Her cameo in at the overly-long wedding has been the source or much snickering (cameos should be brief, not several seconds focused on your face as you watch your dream wedding, not repeatedly and from every angle, and not force the audience to watch literally every single step of it too).

But Twilight brought in serious cash.  Since her other book bombed, her attempts at producing have only really resulted in a gross positive when tied to Twilight, and her brother, Seth, has an uncomfortable obsession with micromanaging his cash-cow sister’s career, basically sending the message that her value is in a series started by a middle-aged woman’s wet dream over a teenaged boy who wanted to kill her, I suppose it’s what she has left, especially now that the worst fanfic in the history of ever has dethroned it.

I’m coveting that throne.  Look at it!  Pretty sweet.

Twilight is being brought back from the dead (haha…) as a series of short films to be released exclusively on Facebook (you can use Facebook Purity to block Facebook’s ads and stream of revenue).  Fan reviews are mixed, with some saying they want to know something about the backstories of Carlisle or Rosalie (both covered in extreme depth in the books, as well as in the Official Illustrated Guide), while many others are saying this series is d-u-n-DONE.

On the one hand, I do think Twilight is so two years ago.  But on the other, maybe it can help divert attention from its spawn.  From a self-centered view, I’m thinking it might be able to revive vampires (again, haha…), along with Anne Rice’s revival of Interview With the Vampire with Prince Lestat: The Vampire Chronicles, due out this month.

All in all, this just feels like a giant leap backward into a series that died…  You know what?  The puns write themselves.  I’m going to go pour a glass of wine and get back to writing about non-sparkling vampires.

Two years

Two years ago today, I started writing Sacred Blood.  I’d just finished Twilight and New Moon, and was reading Eclipse, and was pretty dismayed that someone as controlling, stalkerish, and emotionally abusive as Edward was being held up as the ideal man.  This was before Christian Grey was unleashed on the world to make Edward look like a puppy dog….  The tipping point in Eclipse was Edward disabling Bella’s truck to keep her from seeing another friend.

Well, we’ve all heard the saying that if you don’t like something, try doing it yourself, or shut up.  Since I was, and still am, fortunate enough to have the time to write. So I went to the store, got some notebooks, notecards, and a few other things, and started outlining a story I’d had kicking around in my head for a while.  I was largely inspired by problems I had with the Twilight series, such as Bella adamantly clinging to a guy that few of us would want our friends to date in real life, and Edward’s controlling personality being seen as idea, and even the hand-waving of Jacob sexually assaulting Bella.

A mere 30 days later, I had the first draft finished.  Before starting editing, I spent the next two months writing the first draft of the second book, and outlined most of the third.  See, I really wanted these books to work together, and once one book is available, it’s locked in.  While writing the second and outlining the third, elements of those books really needed the seeds to be planted in the first book.  So, when I started editing, I worked those things in, as well as a couple name changes that became necessary after some twists later on.

Originally, Tristan’s family consisted of him, Emma, and Sunil, with the later two still married.  But three didn’t work as the story progressed.  So I wrote in Gabrielle.  However that caused the problem if it seeming like two couples, and I didn’t want that, so in with Jesse, who was renamed Jareth.  Well, once again, it would have seemed to be a trilogy of couples once Juliette was brought in.  Six in the family didn’t feel right, so hello to William and Ash.

I like this group of seven, and as I developed them more, I liked them more.  While Tristan’s French home is their home base, he’s definitely not the leader.  That honor is split between Gabrielle and Sunil, both who are wiser and more level-headed than the hot-headed, sometimes overly-passionate Tristan who often fails to think things through very well.  Sunil and his wife, Emma, who is his calming force due partly to her youthful enthusiasm, just plain work well together, and are an interracial couple, which I feel is an underrepresented pairing (and they won’t be the only atypical-for-fiction pairing).  The back-end trio of William, Jareth, and Ash, all have very distinct personalities, sexualities, religions beliefs, and hobbies.

It’s with some sadness that I must admit they will not all live through the trilogy.  When I first started Sacred Blood, it was going to be a stand-alone, and Tristan was going to die at the end.

Juliette’s thoughts are based largely on my own from a relationship I was in.  That hasn’t been easy.  I really like seeing how she’s developed from being meek and afraid, to finding her own strength.  Each book covers a distinctly different time in her life.  Afraid of her own shadow, submissive girl who was barely a woman, who found courage to take back her life.  Forging her own career and supporting herself, and learning what she’s willing to sacrifice to get ahead, what she will not let go of, and what she’ll give up, without a second thought, for those she loves.  Challenges of spreading her wings, becoming part of a family, learning how she fits in and finding her place, realizing what she wants a far as a family of her own, and what to do about the career she still wants.  At times, I’d had one road in mind for her, only to find, when writing, that a different direction seemed right, and at times, I felt like she was telling me the story when a gate I hadn’t noticed would burst open, and when that would happen, I felt her story leaving my control, and I just went with it.  This has been a lot of fun.

Now that I’m nearing the end of the last book’s third chapter, I’m dragging my heels.  The release date was tentatively set for yesterday, but I’d rather take more time to do it right, and I’m still finding new scenes I feel need to be there.  I’ve got extremely detailed backstories for all of the characters, even ones that seem minor, and in some cases, don’t even have names.  I’ve got ideas for an expanded universe, including not only a book for each of the main eight detailing their younger lives, including Juliette before this trilogy starts, but a spin-off for middle-grade readers (saying how that would work would require giving away a major plot point), as well as historical trilogies with Tristan’s family making background cameos when they’re still human.  They’re from such different eras and cultures that I think a lot of doors are open here.

Over the last two years, I’ve not only created characters and a story I love, but have met many awesome friends who’ve inspired me, and have learned a lot more about writing.  I won’t even pretend to be among the best yet.  There’s still much to learn, and taking the opinion of having mastered something one can not truly master leads to complacency, and with complacency comes an end to improvement.  I’ve had some critical reviews, mostly posted as rude, personally attacking comments, about how my writing isn’t up to the level of, for instance J.K. Rowling or Stephen King (to which I roll my eyes and think, “Duh, I know that, which is why I’m actively striving to improve’), but also a lot more great comments, including from a couple women who looked critically at their relationships, and escaped abuse, and one from a man who didn’t understand before why many victims stay in abuse, who finally started to understand.  Those are the comments that matter most.

Tonight I may open a bottle of wine, toast to two years, and continue writing.  I’ve only just begun.

One-blanket challenge

A little over a year ago, I wrote this post about homelessness, and issued a challenge to anyone reading to please buy or find one blanket, and give it to a person in need.  I’d like you to read that again, and please, PLEASE, consider accepting the challenge.  One old blanket really can make a difference.  In some areas, it could literally save a life.

Earlier today, I watched a documentary on Netflix called Lost Angels: Skid Row is my Home.  If you have Netflix, this link should take you right to it.  I’m lucky to not have been on Skid Row, but still a lot of this resonated with my experiences.  A lot of people think most or all homeless people are homeless because of starting drugs or other choices people can make.  In reality, it’s usually something else, and drugs come later.  Between a cheap line of crack that will both stave of hunger pangs a few days and help you forget your horrid life, or using that money to buy a small meal that will keep the hunger at bay an hour or so, that line of crack will look tempting, even though you may know it’s probably laced with something else to make it so cheap.  To be candid, only stubbornness kept me away from drugs.

That documentary goes over the high rate of mental illness among the homeless, and how Reagan-era politics in closing the nation’s mental hospitals exacerbated the homeless issue and shoved the mentally ill from the hospitals and facilities where they were getting help to a criminal system not set up to help.  It goes over how Los Angeles’s law changes in the late 90’s, which were supposed to get tougher on Skid Row and offer services to the homeless, reneged on the second part of that, and make criminals out of people who were doing nothing wrong, which further disadvantaged people.

Lost Angels is a humanizing look at the homeless in one of the best-known poor neighborhoods in the United States, and I think it should be required watching for anyone who claims to have compassion for the poor and the ill.

After finishing watching this documentary today, after a few rounds of tears (several times I had to pause and go have a cry), I went outside and saw the sky was grey, and it was raining.  My favorite weather.  It made me happy to finally have a non-summer day. I got in my truck, put on some Christmas music (yes, in September), and headed to a doctor’s appointment for a reason that many would consider cosmetic, but that my insurance covers.  How lucky I am.  For a while I was lost in the feeling of Christmas coming soon, and memories of Christmases past.  When I reminisce, it’s always Christmases when my dad was still alive.  But one of the faces from Lost Angels flew into my mind, and I remembered Christmas 2005, and being cold and wet and how much a blanket would mean, and then I remembered my post, and decided to bring it up again, and to encourage people to watch that documentary.

Go watch it.  Watch, and then think about my blanket challenge.  Just one.

Sacred Love release update

My business, which is my day job, has required too much of my time.  So the release date has been pushed back from September 27 to the end of November or beginning of December.  I need to figure that out.  The job that pays bills has to come first.  Perhaps one day I can make writing my exclusive job.

And Sacred Love?  Yes, the title has been changed from Sacred Heart.

What Ray Rice shows us about abuse

I’m fairly certain most people with an internet connection and/or cable have heard of Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens running back who was indicted on charges of domestic violence for hitting his then-fiancée, Janay, in an elevator and knocking her out.  The Ravens terminated his contract, and the NFL suspended him indefinitely, after video footage of the assault was leaked to the public by celebrity gossip site TMZ.  I admit some level of surprise that TMZ has been involved in anything positive, but I do feel a debt of gratitude to Harvey Levin and his buddies for doing this and bringing to light the absurdly light charge levies against Rice.

He was indicted on assault charges, and all charges were dropped since he promised to take an anger management class.

Let that sink in.  He slammed a woman, knocked her out, dragged her unconscious body out of the elevator, and he got diversion, not even a tap on the wrist for what he did.

This case highlights a few major problems, among many, many more.

First, when the story broke, people defended this creep.  I kept up some Facebook threads with people defending him because “what is she did something to deserve it” and other crap reasons, intending to write a post and cite them.  I got too upset, and closed out Chrome.  The links are lost to me now, but the impact remains, as does the societal reflection.  The victim was blamed without cause, and there is nothing a woman can say that would deserve a huge football player, or anyone, raising a fist to her and knocking her out.  At least Vice President Joe Biden says that there is never an excuse.

Still, there are real human people who are defending Ray knocking Janay out!  I can’t even say this is because he’s a football player.  Men who abuse are often relieved of responsibility, women blamed because we “must have done something to deserve it.”  Victim are even targets for mocking.  Fox News (I mentally place quotes around “News”) commentators said, “I think the message is, Take the stairs.”  I know, I know, Fox News should be ignored, but the problem is that ignoring them doesn’t change the fact that victims are ridiculed and abusers excused.  Voddie Bachman doesn’t understand how what Ray Rice did is worse than someone drinking alcohol, using some drugs, or having pre- and extra-marital sex.  “I think we need to demand an explanation as to why it is suddenly acceptable to drop the hammer on those who hit women or say bad things about preferred minority groups, but it’s evil to say that homosexuality is a sin.”  I don’t even know how to respond to that.

Second, abusers are treated mildly by the legal system.  For evidence, let’s look at another case Rice’s prosecutor and judge had just months prior.  Pennsylvania mother Shaneen Allen carried a handgun that she had legally registered in Pennsylvania with her into New Jersey, where it wasn’t registered.  Prosecutor Jim McClain refused to recommend a diversion program to help keep this single mother with her children, and Judge Michael Donio refused to go against McClain despite having the legal jurisdiction to do so.  This mother, who harmed no one, faces 3 to 5 years in prison.  What will happen to her sons?

McClain recommended Ray Rice go into a diversion program via anger management, and Donio signed off on this.

Let me repeat:

Ray knocked Janay out, and had no criminal charges filed.

Shaneen had a legally-registered gun with her when she crossed a border, and faces up to half a decade in prison, without harming a fly.

Same prosecutor.  Same judge.  Same court.

What’s different?  Ray is a famous, rich football player, and Shaneen is a single mom without wealth or fame.  (Race isn’t a factor here.  Both are the same race.)  Ray is a man in a system that excuses men, and Shaneen is a woman in a system where, well, if you want another example of harsher penalties for women, well…

Florida woman Marissa Alexander has been denied a self-defense hearing and faces 60 years in prison for firing a warning shot into a wall to get her abusive ex-husband to leave her alone after he backed her into a garage from which she couldn’t escape (her abuser is considered the victim, and charges against him? as if!) because “Stand Your Ground” doesn’t apply, while Florida man George Zimmerman chased an unarmed teen and killed him, and was cleared of all charges because “Stand Your Ground”…does apply. (Unfun fact: Possible-molester George Zimmermana, perhaps unsurprisingly, was arrested for domestic violence against his ex-wife involving a gun, and battered his new girlfriend and aimed a gun at her, both within three months of acquittal, and he faced no charges and can still own guns.)

What does this tell us?  True victims of crimes are more likely to pay, sometimes with their freedom, through the legal system, while abusers are more likely to get off, even when they’ve killed.

Ray Rice, who harmed someone, has been excused.  Shaneen Allen, who did not hurt anyone, will not be excused, and unless she has family willing to take her boys, they’re likely to end up in foster care because she most likely will go to jail.

The third problem this highlights is how much people don’t understand about victims of abuse.  You may have noticed I didn’t give a last name for Ray Rice’s then-fiancée, Janay.  She is now Janay Rice.  In an UNsurprising turn of events, Janay is blaming the media for Ray’s suspension.  As she said on her Instagram account, “To take something away from the man I love that he has worked his a** off for all his life just to gain ratings is a horrific [sic].”  If he really hit her, why did she stay?  Why defend him?  Take a look at how women are viewed in America.  Breasts used for breastfeeding babies are obscene, but baring them sexually is fine.  We are objects, and we can only hear this so much from society before it starts sinking in, and when our abusers work systematically to make us feel worthless, incapable, unlovable, unworthy of life (an ex of mine had a life insurance policy on me, and after the two-year suicide exclusion, started encouraging me to kill myself when I was going through bouts of serious depression), we believe it because we’ve been groomed to accept objectification.

Ethlie Ann Vare recalls working with Ice T:

I used to write a show called Players, which was Ice T’s series television debut, and we would debate this endlessly on set. Relationships are a transaction, he said; sex is currency. He explained he didn’t believe in monogamy because “As much money as I’m bringing home, she should be going out and finding girls for me.”

FYI, I don’t seriously believe that’s how T actually conducts his marriage. But I do believe it colors his worldview. He would say Janay stays in an abusive marriage because it’s the pricetag for the Bentley and the bling.

I never thought of the violence as a price. I thought of it as a sign of passion. He [Ethlie’s ex] only got so jealous because he loooved me so much. He was so possessive only because he loooved me so much. He never meant to hurt me, he was always so apologetic, and who had ever been — or would ever be again — so totally out of his mind crazy about me?

(That part about abuse being the price for the Bentley and the bling sounds so alarmingly like the world’s favorite abusive, yet desirable, fictitious, sexy billionaire.)

Sadly, I thought of my ex raping me as a sign he wanted me so much that he couldn’t help himself, even if I said no and fought him.  Let that sink in.  I’m not the only survivor of abuse who’s viewed abuse as meaning someone loved and wanted me.  (Wow, he wanted me, even though I was unlovable, awful, stupid, unworthy of life…but he wants me anyway.  How awesome….)  Ethlie and I aren’t the only ones.

As Bea Williams points out:

The truth is I know many women, who if they are completely honest with themselves, they also know these feelings and have also been victims of domestic abuse. They won’t admit it. Their silence is possibly because they don’t want anyone to know. It may also be because they don’t believe the verbal assaults or the mental manipulation count as domestic violence. It does.

Either way, I encourage you to stop pointing fingers. As a victim I can tell you your taunts creates a spirit of bitterness. It makes me want to isolate myself and it move closer to the person that is abusing you. It gives the abuser ammunition to say, “see, they don’t love you.”

I have MULTIPLE friends who don’t see verbal assaults as abuse.  I will not give any identifying information or details, but suffice it to say, I am a confidential ear for more friends than I can count on one hand, all who are abused without a hand laid on them, none of them fully accepting it, if there’s been any move toward accepting it at all.   More than once, for each of them, I’ve listened as they recounted things their significant others have said, necessities withheld, threats made against them. But because no hand has been laid, so far, it can’t be abuse.  Just can’t be.  Abusers always hit and rape, right?  Wrong.

My abuser started it with words.  Twice, one in Massachusetts and once in California, friends of his, who didn’t know each other, warned me about him.  Since, at both of those time periods, he was only being verbal, I didn’t think he was abusive.  The physical and sexual started before his earlier friends warned me, but had stopped for a few weeks, and he said he was sorry.  I didn’t believe those guys that he was abusive since the physical stopped.  Repeat this three years later in California.  Even though, at that time, he had isolated me and cut off the phone and wouldn’t buy food (I had to resort to stealing from my parents’ cabinets so I’d have something to eat, and was too ashamed to tell them how hungry I was because he called me a selfish, fat pig), no hands had been laid on me in a couple months.

I see friends of mine going through the early stages of what I went through, and they don’t understand how it can get worse when their significant others apologize and really mean it this time, really!

Bea brings up an incredible point.  Blaming victims does give abusers ammo to use.  If victims can be loved, if they’re really not doing anything to deserve it, why are friends and family blaming the victims?  Wow!  Suddenly the abuser is really good because the abuser loves us even when our friends and family blame us!

Janay has been blamed in some media for marrying her abuser anyway, and she’s being blamed now for staying with him.  Why not “just leave”?

Beverly Gooden stepped in a few days ago and started the Twitter hashtag #WhyIStayed, which branched off into #WhyILeft.

No woman wants to admit being in an abusive relationship.  He loves us!  He’ll change!  What if I leave and this is the time he would have changed?  What if he kills me?  Better to go into denial!

Yet Janay, like Rhianna, and almost every other survivor and current victim, is, or has been, blamed.

Ray Rice isn’t the first jerk to abuse.  He won’t be the last.  His case is just one more example of abusers being excused, and how, if any action gets taken, it’ll be a long time later when social media pressure forces action, in this case, the contract-cut and NF-suspension.  Sadly, far more abusers will never face any punishment, and even more victims will be blamed.

So there are these writing styles I don’t usually do…

I started out writing this post to cover all of those things, but had decided to break it down into individual points.  I don’t feel right talking about humanizing bad guys right after an attempt at being humorous over something else.  So it will have eight parts, nine, if you count this intro of sorts.

Do you now how hard it is to write a spitefic (the opposite of fanfic) in a tense you’re not used to, from a different-sex first-person point of view, and keeping it as canon as possible while trying to make the things that make not a lick of sense make sense, humanize someone you despise, and of a trilogy you can’t respect? Yeah, it’s a challenge.

A little over a year ago I started a spitefic called A Couple Shades of Taylor.  I’ve started posting the chapters on Wattpad, re-reading as I do, cringing at some of the errors.  I initially posted them raw, and made no excuses about how “I never edit (besides typos), and I barely ever reread the chapter before posting because I overthink things and I feel like overediting or trying to use too many words can ruin the story.”  Quote-unquote.  I just didn’t care to invest the time to do so in what, to me, was an exercise in writing outside of my comfort zone.  I wasn’t so concerned with the typos, and the inconsistency in how I spelled one of the names.

Now that the lack of polish has been explained, I suppose I shall leave the separate parts to speak for themselves, each with my thoughts on them and the challenges they present to me, and why I chose to push myself in each direction.

Part 1: Points of View: First vs. Third
Part 2: Past vs. Present Tense
Part 3: Male Point of View
Part 4: Someone Else’s Canon
Part 5: Sense Out of Nonsense
Part 6: Humanizing Bad Guys (trigger warnings on this one)
Part 7: Characters I Dislike
Part 8: In Summary

 

A troubling deviation in the Fifty Shades trailer, and introducing its successor

Well, elsewhere this topic has come up, with discussion about one of the notable changes from the book to the screen.  E.J. James and director Sam Taylor-Wood (going by Taylor-Johnson after marrying a 22-year-old, so I’ll call her TJ) battled over how close to keep to the books. James wanted the adaptation to more or less take the book as the screenplay.  TJ has insisted that she, not James, is the one who makes movies for a living.  

Well, TJ won, and the trailer itself shows a big, big, big deviation from the book.  

I’m just going to tell you right now that the outside shots are so clearly not Seattle, Vancouver, or Portland, that I just want to scream.  The Seattle skyline out the office windows in 0:24 is just plain wrong.  The shot inside the “Heathman” at 0:53…  Wow.  It couldn’t be more wrong.  But these are things you either need to be from the Pacific Northwest, or have visited these areas to know.  Those aren’t the big change, but they do irk me.

At 1:44, we have that major deviation.  In the book, this is what leads up to Ana seeing the horribly named Red Room of Pain:

Ana’s so innocent that she thought he meant a room to play on a gaming console, and was eager to see what the room was because she couldn’t imagine what he might mean.  Obviously she has no idea what’s going on.  Her childlike innocence and ignorance is an important part of their relationship, sadly.  All she knows about sex she learns from Christian in the books, which is just as he likes it.  He’s turned on by being the only source of information.  

Instead of utter ignorance, in the trailer, Ana asks “Will you enlighten me?” instigating the events to follow, rather than being led into something she’s clueless about.  This puts her in a position of power that she never had until the very end of the book, when she asked him to spank her and she broke up with him.  While this may seem a small thing, a nitpick, but it changes the very foundation of the rest of the trilogy.  She’s the leader, no longer the confused girl who thought a playroom means a place to play an XBox.  It also means he explained a lot more to her beforehand, leading her to want to be “enlightened.”

On the surface, this may seem like a good change.  It would be, if this was in the book.  Of great concern is how many people who have not read the books who will see this movie, and then insist that the books can’t really be so bad, because she somewhat confidently asked to see the playroom.  We will see more glorification of the very type of relationship that should never be seen as acceptable by people who are completely clueless about the contents of the book.

Also I am disappointed in Beyoncé for being a part of this and doing the theme song.  She claims to be about empowering women.  She couldn’t have read the books in their entirety.  A woman who follows along because she’s too scared not to, who is so clingy that she can’t function without a man, isn’t an empowering role model.

Dakota Johnson’s father, Don Johnson, is very upset that she’s doing this role.

I hate to say it, but Fifty Shades is about to have stiff competition in the abuse-as-romance department, and you an bet I’ll rip into Anna Todd’s After.  In addition to the abusive subject matter…

Classy, right?  Anyway, she admits, “I never edit (besides typos), and I barely ever reread the chapter before posting because I overthink things and I feel like overediting or trying to use too many words can ruin the story.“

Oh dear.  How can you edit typos when you barely ever reread your own work?  Also when claiming to fix typos, you might not want to post your own interview with quite a few of them.

Like the Fifty Shades trilogy, After is also fanfiction, Fifty Shades meets the boy-band One Direction.  Unlike Fifty Shades, the After trilogy uses real people rather than characters.  Harry Styles has been called a womanizer by people who think the character in After bearing his name is based on who he is.  Because so many people truly can’t separate a bad fanfiction from a real person, this poor young man was grilled on his sex life, cornered into admitting how many sexual partners he’s had just to get the GQ interviewer to lay off.  Fans of the band are concerned his reputation will be further tarnished once the trilogy is in print and the movies (yes…) are made.

Not surprisingly, many are astounded that the best way to get a $600,000 book-advance, as Anna Todd has received.  Is this the future of book-writing?  Just write fanfiction, which was never intended to be used for financial gain, and wait for the big bucks to start rolling in?  It sure seems that way and, to be honest, it’s literally nauseating and extremely infuriating.  

Sometimes I wonder if I should rename the male lead in my Sacred Blood books to someone popular, toss in some whips and fists, and advertise it as fanfiction of my own books crossed with Twilight crossed with Fifty Shades crossed with whoever is popular with the teenagers today.  After all, publishers do troll fanfiction sites, looking for popular works that have built a following on someone else’s labor, and what seems to be popular is abuse and sex….

If Christian Grey looked like this…

…or like this…

…and the state of his finances was…

…how many women would still have a hard desire for Christian Grey?  Seriously.  How many women would still think…

(actual screen cap from the book)

…that this is at all okay?  Plotting an escape route.  Sexy.  It’s only because Christian looks like… 

 …or like…

…and has lots of…

 …that scenes like this…

 …are remotely acceptable, or worse, seen as romance. So many fans claim that Christian never abuses Ana, that she’s always a willing participant.  So many woman can no longer identify abuse and manipulation as long as the packaging is sexy and wealthy, and can’t wait to see it on the big screen next year (director Sam Wood won an argument with E.L. James, and so will be portraying Ana quite differently, as the instigator of everything, which you can see in one of the trailers).

This is utterly terrifying.