Responses to Lily's Friend/With her own EYSes
I am trying, and it is desperately hard, not to argue with the readers who’ve been kind enough to send me critiques of “Lily’s Friend/With Her Own Eyes”.
You readers are responding to a fiction. What I WANT to do is to set you straight, to tell you how I, the omniscient author (right?) meant you to read it. To tell you what the right reading is, to persuade you extra-textually.
What I am trying to do instead is to rewrite the FICTION so the characters and plot convey to you what I meant. Or what I wish I’d meant.
And that’s f*** b*** hard!
Especially as what was supposed to be a simple Christmas gift to a twelve-year-old about teen lovelorn angst turns out really to be an epistemological treatise: what do we know from observation, what from hearsay, what from inference, what don’t we know at all, really, but we go around assuming that we do…?
And then we base what we do (and say) on what we think we know. Without distinguishing the sources.
Mary, Lily, Severus, James, Sirius, and the (absolutely absent, in this fic) headmaster, are each absolutely convinced that they know and understand everything that they really need to of “The Werewolf Caper” and its ramifications.
And all are wrong.
I don’t think my niece Tasha will get any of this. From the point of view of her gift, my effort is useless. Tasha likes the Twilight series, after all: she thinks that a well-preserved nonagenarian lusting after a teen (based on her body odor) is ROMANTIC, and that the drug-addict-fixation fostered by vampires on their victims (Bella is entirely willing to die or to make someone else a killer, so long as she gets her next fix of E.’s physical presence) is true LOVE. So we can assume that my primary audience is, shall I say, less insightful than some of my secondary readers.
So really I’m rewriting for the adults; I think Tasha would take it as it stands.
After I finish my rewrites, I look forward with great pleasure to making more individual responses. (I’ve armed myself by rereading Jane Austen’s Emma, totalreadr….)
But I am determined not to prejudice the readers by telling you what I think of the characters. If I work it right, my fiction should convey what I mean.
If I haven’t, my bleatings about what I really meant, doesn’t matter in the slightest.
So I’m reading every comment anyone is generous enough to leave, and I thank you for them, even when I don’t agree.
I reserve to myself the pleasure of ARGUING (or agreeing) with you after I’ve closed the fic. In the meantime, I’m using your criticisms to rewrite. And, as I’ve said, this is desperately hard.
Thanks so much for your input.
More later. (Grins.)
*
Only one more thing: I am American. And the archetypal American response about a sexual overture from an “inferior” to a “superior” is, I am afraid, still the racial/racist one.
The real one.
The one that happened a few years before my birth, but which every educated American, white or black, who is my age or older, hears echoed in the background.
Emmett Tull. A fourteen-year-old boy. Who was mutilated, tortured, killed, and his body further desecrated, because that child had the absolute, unmitigated gall to whistle at a white woman.
*
So that’s what is-what must be-in my mind at one endpoint of the intersection of prejudice and sex.
As Olga Broumas talks about what the other endpoint is like: Being targeted for one’s gender.
You readers are responding to a fiction. What I WANT to do is to set you straight, to tell you how I, the omniscient author (right?) meant you to read it. To tell you what the right reading is, to persuade you extra-textually.
What I am trying to do instead is to rewrite the FICTION so the characters and plot convey to you what I meant. Or what I wish I’d meant.
And that’s f*** b*** hard!
Especially as what was supposed to be a simple Christmas gift to a twelve-year-old about teen lovelorn angst turns out really to be an epistemological treatise: what do we know from observation, what from hearsay, what from inference, what don’t we know at all, really, but we go around assuming that we do…?
And then we base what we do (and say) on what we think we know. Without distinguishing the sources.
Mary, Lily, Severus, James, Sirius, and the (absolutely absent, in this fic) headmaster, are each absolutely convinced that they know and understand everything that they really need to of “The Werewolf Caper” and its ramifications.
And all are wrong.
I don’t think my niece Tasha will get any of this. From the point of view of her gift, my effort is useless. Tasha likes the Twilight series, after all: she thinks that a well-preserved nonagenarian lusting after a teen (based on her body odor) is ROMANTIC, and that the drug-addict-fixation fostered by vampires on their victims (Bella is entirely willing to die or to make someone else a killer, so long as she gets her next fix of E.’s physical presence) is true LOVE. So we can assume that my primary audience is, shall I say, less insightful than some of my secondary readers.
So really I’m rewriting for the adults; I think Tasha would take it as it stands.
After I finish my rewrites, I look forward with great pleasure to making more individual responses. (I’ve armed myself by rereading Jane Austen’s Emma, totalreadr….)
But I am determined not to prejudice the readers by telling you what I think of the characters. If I work it right, my fiction should convey what I mean.
If I haven’t, my bleatings about what I really meant, doesn’t matter in the slightest.
So I’m reading every comment anyone is generous enough to leave, and I thank you for them, even when I don’t agree.
I reserve to myself the pleasure of ARGUING (or agreeing) with you after I’ve closed the fic. In the meantime, I’m using your criticisms to rewrite. And, as I’ve said, this is desperately hard.
Thanks so much for your input.
More later. (Grins.)
*
Only one more thing: I am American. And the archetypal American response about a sexual overture from an “inferior” to a “superior” is, I am afraid, still the racial/racist one.
The real one.
The one that happened a few years before my birth, but which every educated American, white or black, who is my age or older, hears echoed in the background.
Emmett Tull. A fourteen-year-old boy. Who was mutilated, tortured, killed, and his body further desecrated, because that child had the absolute, unmitigated gall to whistle at a white woman.
*
So that’s what is-what must be-in my mind at one endpoint of the intersection of prejudice and sex.
As Olga Broumas talks about what the other endpoint is like: Being targeted for one’s gender.