Funny comments at Miss Snark's

Check out the comments on this entry in the crapometer. Given that the author is fourteen it's hilarious to see all these commentor falling all over themselves to say she doesn't sound like a teenager. My favorite one is the one who says the character has to sound a lot bitchier to sound realistic. Wow!! Way to let your prejudices show.

Just for a second let's replace the word teenager with the word black - so we have people saying that in order to sound authentically black you have to sound bitchier, black people don't say "fab," they don't say stereo, etc. Of course then the complaints about the word "locks" doesn't work because I have several black friends who use locks as a diminutive for dreadlocks, but you get the idea.

Why would these commentors be stuffing adolescents into little boxes and saying they do do this or they don't do that? The first step in being cruel to someone is to make them an other. It's hard to be mean to someone who's part of your tribe so you have to make them not one of us. Then when something bad happens to them you can shrug and talk about how you take care of your own. Maybe those Smiths hit their wives but us Jones treat them with respect. That tribe over there puts their elders on the ice floe but we go to ours for wisdom. But at the same time you make no move to help Mrs. Smith or Grandpa Other Tribe because he's no longer your problem.

(Many) adults hate and or are wildly jealous of kids and take every chance they get to lash out at them. By making them other and pretending that a) the kid will never be their age and b) they were never the kid's age they can be very comfortable making laws that say things like all teenagers have to be inside by ten o clock or only one child can be inside the 7/11 at a time.

Imagine making those same rules for a member of AARP and think how far you'd get.

More apt than I thought

I posted a comment to this thread at Miss Snark's earlier today. I was responding to someone who said that it's cruel of Miss Snark to get our publishing hopes up when 98% of us can't even write a query letter, which of course means we haven't a hope in hell of writing a decent book.

I talked about the importance of being a beginner and compared the whole process to learning to ride a bike. Yes we fall off at first but we eventually get the hang of it.

I thought about this off and on for the rest of the day and decided it was an even better example than I thought because even when I was an accomplished bike rider, riding my bike across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco State U a couple times a week, I still managed to do something stupid enough to give me a concussion and quite a lot of torn ligaments in my arm. (I bent the handlebars with my arm when I fell)

And of course we've all seen published writers do the same kind of thing, that godawful sequel to Rosemary's Baby that Ira Levine wrote comes to mind. No matter how accomplished you are you can still take a nasty spill and look like an idiot in front of anyone who happens to notice.