Headsplody goodness.

I guess I'll have to be a professional author before I understand all this, but apparently JK Rowling sobbed after writing the last words in Harry Potter.

Uh, I've never cried over any of my writing before. I've felt a sense of exhaustion, and after my last novel, I did sort of miss having something very definite to do every single day with those characters. But I didn't cry.

Although, I should've had champagne. I just had some cookies.

This is now the second time that something a very successful pro author has done strikes me at a right angle. Laurell K. Hamilton also has reactions to her characters that I scratched my head at.

It worries me. Does this mean that I'm still at some stage in my writing development that's so protozoic and stunted that anything I write is hopeless?

Blargh. That's exactly the kind of thing you don't want to think with THREE CHAPTERS TO GO on your novel. Seriously. My head gets explosion prone when I start thinking like that. Okay. Less thinking, more writing (bwuh?). Or, less thinking about anything that is not my novel.

ETA: I forgot to explain what prompted this entire entry.

So, I changed my layout here, and as I was doing so my fiancee saw me doing the header and said, in reaction to the motto ("the artist is not afraid"): "That's not true, they're very afraid. Their novels are coming to life and eating them alive."

Which might be the most accurate quote about the writing life I've ever heard.

But it made me think of having read about JK Rowling crying over the last HP book.

Why sexism isn't dead (or I should just walk away from the internet sometimes)

Every once and a great while, I read something on the internet that really, really makes my blood boil. I mean, to the point where I have to walk away from the screen.

That thing? John C. Wright explaining why he's not a feminist. Which, if you ask me, is really him explaining why he's a howling misogynist.

I think what really sealed the deal for me was this remark made in comments with jlassen:

"My point is that the harassment of which you complain is encouraged rather than discouraged by the continued and wrong-headed attempt to equate equality with androgyny. Men who are taught to be barbaric rather than gentlemanly are tempted to grope: women who are taught to be flamboyant in their sexual allure rather than virginal and dignified do nothing to discourage such behavior."

Ah. The age old "rape is the woman's fault" argument. Eventually, all misogynists out themselves.

That's to say nothing of his "separate but equal" argument. And in case you missed a chapter or two of ugly American history - that kind of thinking didn't work out so well when we applied it to race. I'm failing to see why anyone would think it works when applied to gender.

( because I am an angry women and I go on at length )

I really wish that for a year this guy could be a woman, and read his own entry with the eyes of someone who's being told that she can't understand honor and she's inherently weak and that it's her own fault if she gets sexually assaulted.

And then, as a woman, I want him to walk out into the world and see what it feels like to have his own attitudes turned on him. I want him to get jeers for being not pretty enough or too pretty. I want him to feel uncomfortable reading history and literature for something that's not his fault. I want him to feel awkward at the office and ashamed of his own body. I want him to have to grit his teeth and be "ladylike" when he wants to scream.

Mostly, I want him to sit down and think about who's he's talking about and for a moment imagine that they're human beings, too. Imagine that their feelings and dreams and problems are just as valid and important as his.

Then I want him to tell me he can stand by his arguments.