alexandraerin

Yesterday, a conclave of Democratic United States Senators descended on the Bavarian Inn in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, for a retreat that was a bit less noticed than the GOP Congressional retreat in Philadelphia. It was likely put together hastily as an emergency measure for an emergency situation, and I’m going to have more to say about it later.

But first.

Women’s March on Washington of West Virginia – Shepherdstown didn’t have a lot of time to put together an organized response to the Democratic presence, but they pulled it together beautifully.

Circumstances prevented us from participating in the Women’s March on January 21st, in part because of accessibility concerns and the need to pace our shows of resistance, given our various disabilities.

But this action was largely stationary, and taking place on and near the Potomac Bridge, in sight of the frankly quite splendid inn where the Senators were gathered. This was important because there are little overlook areas with seating near the ends of the bridge, and the one nearest the inn has a little parking area with a couple 15 minute parking spots for people to enjoy the view or grab a picture, and some handicapped parking spaces that made this action a lot more accessible.

My partner Jack and I arrived at the bridge before sunup, before seven. We were meeting a friend from Shepherdstown who was absolutely needed at work today and could not participate in the action during its scheduled hours of nine o’clock on. So, we got there before anyone else and we parked without issues, and we took up position in the cold and the light rain as the sun came up over the Potomac. We were out there, “doin’ a freedom,” as the youths probably say (hashtag: #DoingAFreedom), flanking the group’s sign (“HEAR OUR VOICE”) on the bridge when the Senators in their rooms got their first look at it in the morning light. We were there when the marchers proper arrived, and had been there for just over two hours at that point.

Jack had to find a bathroom shortly after that, and this is where our trouble began. Rather than searching the campus of the nearby Shepherd University, he took his car and drove straight off to a nearby convenience store he knew would serve. While he was gone, a group of police cars pulled into the access drive for the little parking area for a little inter-agency confab.

And I have to say, there were probably 3 or 4 different police agencies there, at a spot on a state border with U.S. Senators taking up residence and a university right there, and I have to say that they were polite and friendly and supportive of the admittedly very visibly majority white crowd. I have no complaints about their overall conduct.

But they were making the accessible parking… inaccessible.

So, I went over to talk to them (second bravest thing I did all day, given that I am acrophobic and have an especial terror of bridges) and I started by asking, politely, if access to the handicapped spaces was being restricted for security reasons, or if protesters were able to use it.

“Oh, no!” one of them said. “There’s not a lot, but if someone needs it, they can use!”

I pointed out that they were blocking it, and was told they’d just pulled in for a minute to chat. I then clarified that my interest wasn’t hypothetical and that a protester who needed that space was on his way back. They politely thanked me, finished up their chat, and got back into their vehicles and pulled away… leaving behind a third vehicle, which I had assumed was part of the confab, a Shepherd University police van that had pulled all the way out of the little entry lane and was squarely blocking off the small lot.

It was also unattended.

That was about when Jack drove by, and with the lot inaccessible, he kept driving past the protest, to a park area on the other side of the bridge (the old C&O Canal towpath, I believe). Later people were parked in the breakdown lane on the Maryland end of the bridge, but at this point police were waving people past them.

Now, it’s quite a hike from the towpath parking area to the bridge, uphill, on a very cold and very windy day. Jack judged this was beyond his present level of ability (gentle currently able-bodied readers wondering why someone who needs handicapped parking would even consider the hike: disability isn’t a binary switch), and texted me from where he was parked.

Disgusted, I started taking pictures of the university police vehicle in its spot, trying to get an angle that would capture both its position and the handicapped spaces beyond and the fact that this was the only access point. My plan was to find a twitter account for the university and holler @ them about it. The sun was directly in my screen at that angle, so I didn’t actually get a good one that turned out, but… well, maybe it’s a coincidence or maybe one of the officers on site from another agency radioed them that a protester was photographing their vehicle, but while I was trying to get that sorted someone came hurrying out from the university campus and hopped into the vehicle and moved it without a word.

Now, I’d like to be charitable, but the way it was parked, I can only think two things, and I’m not sure which is more charitable. One is that someone thought that there would be a problem with protesters abusing the 15 minute parking or cramming in to the lot past its very small capacity so they’d head that off at the pass. The other was that they needed somewhere to park that vehicle and this seemed like an out-of-the-way place since no one would be using the overlook parking during the protest.

Both of these situations involve completely forgetting that disabled people exist, even while being within 10-15 feet of clearly visible, marked, and posted evidence of our existence.

Whoever parked that van there, for whatever reason, did not so much make the assumption that nobody would need to use those handicapped spaces for any reason (protest-related or otherwise) as they made no assumption whatsoever. Didn’t cross their mind.

In moments like this I am reminded of the blog story “The Elephant Disappears“, by wheelchair user Dave Hingsburger, who almost had his luggage confiscated at an airport by a security officer who tried to confiscate and cart it away from him, saying “All luggage must be attended!” when Dave asked him what he thought he was doing. Now, if your mind is jumping to the most charitable interpretation of this event from the guard’s point of view… well, first of all, ask yourself why “being charitable” or “giving the benefit of the doubt” implicitly means “to the able-bodied security officer” in this situation and not the man whose luggage was being taken.

To be clear: Dave was right there. Attending his luggage. The guard did not see him as capable of attending his own luggage, or did not see him as a person, or just plain did not see him, even though he was in full view and right there. We cannot know. People with visible disabilities are well aware that all three are possible.

People with disabilities already may have less ability to participate in organized action. There may be mobility issues, sensory issues, issues with crowds. I couldn’t have stood out there all day on my best day; we were there from just before 7 to a bit before 11 and I came home after we grabbed lunch and crashed for three hours.

I might have taken a cane with me, but I was concerned if things went south it might be viewed as a weapon, since I am young-appearing enough that people often wonder why I have one. Jack didn’t have his backpack of potentially necessary emergency medical supplies, because it would have added to our bulk on the sidewalk (that had to kept passable) and similarly might be viewed as suspicious. Might not have been a concern for a typical march in a quietly liberal college town tucked away in the Potomac River valley, but… there were elected officials afoot. Security was pretty intense on the other side of the street.

But with whatever difficulties our disabilities present, the question of “accessibility” is often less a matter of what extraordinary things must people do to allow us to access a place or event and more a matter of what things they should avoid doing that block and exclude us. Stairs are not some natural state for the entryway to a building, someone has to put them. A culture and aesthetic that centers assumptions of certain levels of ability makes them an assumed default, but it could just as easily be ramps or (where possible/appropriate) zero-entry doors.

Someone at Shepherd University made a decision that made the event less accessible. I’m sure if the individual who made that call were here, they would say they were only parked there for n minutes… and it really wasn’t that long, in the scheme of things. But it was long enough to cause a problem, and more to the point, any amount of time is long enough that it might have been a problem. We’ll never know if anyone else drove past the protest, eyeing the lot and seeing it was blocked off. I’m sure the university police don’t consider “It was just for five minutes!” or “I would have moved if anyone had needed the space!” a valid excuse when they come across someone illegally parking in or blocking off an accessible space.

As I said, I will have more to say about the event itself and the politics surrounding it. I just had to get this off my chest. It’s less about naming and shaming Shepherd University (though not naming them would seem passive-aggressive, as anyone who looked at a map of the area would know who I meant) and more about talking about the general case of thinking about accessibility and remembering that people with disabilities really, truly do exist.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

I am feeling a lot of anxiety and uncertainty about my writing this week. I’m going to digress here to say: this is not me fishing for external reassurance, nor do I want any. The odds of anyone reading this coming up with something that is helpful that I haven’t already considered are very low; the odds of saying something that aggravates the situation is considerably higher. So please respect the fact that I’m writing this out to 1) process what I’m feeling and 2) let anyone interested know where I am at, and sit on your hands until the urge to say something about it passes.

Back at the start of January—the start of the year, it now feels like it was months ago—I started a new approach to writing that balances my desire to Make All The Things at once with my need to hyperfocus on a single thing to get anything done: Make All The Things, but one at a time, about a week at a time.

My first week test case was extremely successful, and I talked about having a sort of rotating semi-regular roster of projects I would work on one week at a time, getting material to publish over the course of a month or more each time. I got three months’ worth of material out of my first week, and two months’ out of my second one.  The idea is that if, with a week of focused production I tend to produce more than a month’s worth of material, I could easily have 3 or more ongoing serial projects with room for side projects (like standalone short stories, game stuff, etc.) and interruptions in the work schedule.

I was coy at the time about what projects I was going to try the experiment with after my test, because I didn’t want to either disappoint people when their favorite long-simmering story wasn’t on the initial short list or get their hopes up by mentioning something that might not pan out. This was, after all, an experiment.

The most concrete example of this is Tales of MU, which I knew back at the start of January would either be the story I worked on during the last week of the month, or it wouldn’t be.

My feelings about Tales of MU are complicated. From the start, I thought of it as a freshman story… a story about people making a lot of mistakes and learning from some of them. At the same time, it was (unintentionally and, at first, unwittingly), my freshman story… a story where I made a lot of mistakes, and one hopes, learned from them.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of when I started writing it. It’s a weird thing to be tethered to a story from ten years ago. I was a very different person ten years ago. I thought I knew a lot of stuff that I didn’t, and I didn’t know a lot of stuff that I think I do now. I was working through some pretty heady issues at the time, and it shows in the writing which includes themes I would have avoided if I’d started it now. But, of course, if I hadn’t worked through them in my writing, I probably wouldn’t be able to say that. Certainly I would have made the campus’s human majority population less homogeneously white if I’d started writing it today, and not been as cavalier about applying stereotypical racial tropes to fantasy creatures. I really didn’t know the difference between “saying something about a thing” and “having something to say about a thing” back then.

Tales of MU grew out of my nostalgic memories of Basic D&D and 2nd Edition AD&D at a time when I wasn’t playing then-current 3rd Edition D&D, and it has a lot of original stuff I put in or changed to make things better or more interesting than the distant source material. Since I started writing it, I got really into 4th and 5th Edition D&D, which makes the nostalgia base of TOMU a lot less emotionally resonant to me.

These things might weigh on me a little less if this were a conventional book series. A long running series of books still has each book as a self-contained volume with their own beginning and end. It’s easier to see the “now” of such a series as being self-contained compared to what came before.

Tales of MU is not like that; the “books” are more divisions of convenience and one of my goals when writing it was to tell a story for people who prefer to live in the middle part of a story rather than the beginning or end.

I’ve done that, and I don’t regret doing that, but the problem is, such a story has no natural ending point.

(This is the part where people want to jump in to tell me what they think the natural ending point is. Restrain yourself. That impulse is not your friend.)

Financially, it’s also complicated. I can make more money writing Tales of MU than not writing it, but there was only a very brief window when I first broke out in the crowdfunded writing scene where it was enough to justify the work it takes to make that money. At the same time, the fact that I didn’t write or publish any Tales of MU during my “fiction drought” around the election hurt my finances more than anything else about that period. The financial benefit is not likely to increase meaningfully, as new material is tied to ten years of previously written material of widely varying tone and quality.

Ultimately, whether I want to and am able to continue writing it is not going to be a financial decision so much as a creative and personal one.

And then we get to the fanbase, which is also complicated. The thing is, I know even as I write this that I’m going to see commentary to the effect of “I knew her heart was in it.” or “It was obvious she’d given up and moved on.” I see those messages all the time. Part of the vicious cycle of trying to keep up an update schedule is that any time it slips—even by an hour, literally an hour—I start hearing “SO I GUESS YOU’VE GIVEN UP WRITING TALES OF MU MIGHT HAVE SAID SOMETHING INSTEAD OF GHOSTING” or “please Ms. Erin tell us what we did wrong”… and honestly, it’s hard for me to explain why both of those messages are so disheartening, but they are.

It’s especially hurtful to have people bruiting about their commentary on my “decision” when I’m wrestling with a story, struggling to overcome difficulties in writing. Imagine you’re buried in an avalanche and you’re trying to dig your way out, and people are standing in earshot debating about whether you’re selfish for deciding to be buried, or if your decision to be buried is valid and must be respected. Even the people defending you are calmly talking about how you decided to be trapped under tons of earth, and blithely assuming that at the very moment you decide to, you will effortlessly shift it away.

The thing is, I do better at things—at any thing—when I can document my process and process my feelings here, butI I long ago gave up writing anything about writing Tales of MU and where I am, because every process post attracts these comments. At one point I made a post saying that conditions were untenable in the home office so I was taking my laptop to a coffee shop to finish the day’s chapter and I received a tweet saying “So I guess you’re saying there’s no chapter today.” Not even exaggerating. I made a blog post about my plans to finish the chapter and someone took it as confirmation that there wasn’t going to be one.

This isn’t even getting into the people who don’t understand that writing is not mechanical labor, that it is not a simple matter of sitting in front of a keyboard and pressing the Make Story Button fifteen thousand times in a row. But that’s relevant, because the cumulative effect of the weight of expectations and entitlement and misguided/errant advice is that it makes the creative aspect of the work harder. It pulls me out of my creative brainspace.

Call me a precious special snowflake with delicate feelings (out loud, preferably, where I don’t have to hear it), but this is the quantum interference aspect of direct author/audience interaction – the act of observing an author at work has ways of affecting an author at work. This is a big part of why I’ve been increasingly distant from my fanbase and hard to reach over time. It’s not even about abusive or obviously over-entitled fans. It’s getting the same advice, having people make the same assumptions about what’s going on in my head, hearing my circumstances or outcomes dissected as decisions, over and over again. I’ve been working on toughening myself up and shifting into a mindset of “If they don’t know me, it doesn’t matter what they think.”, but the catch-22 of it is that it’s really hard to do this kind of self-improvement work while you’re still being peppered with it.

To use a metaphor: it’s a lot easier to repair the shields on the starship Enterprise when it’s not actively taking fire.

Anyway. People have assumed that Tales of MU is over or that I’m “on the bubble” for canceling it many times, often while I was trying to gear up to breathe new life into it. There have been maybe two times I have seriously considered canceling it. One of them was last summer, just before my most recent revitalization attempt.

That attempt fizzled out not just because of the election stuff, but because I got right up to the end of the current storyline and found I had no idea what to write next. Perversely, this made it impossible for me to write the last installment of the current story. I know exactly what happens. I could tell someone the nutshell version of it. It’s not very exciting or important as everything about the problem at hand was more or less wrapped up in the currently-last chapter. The last chapter of the storyline was meant to just be a coda.

It’s just that the weight of not knowing what comes next and the need to continue the story makes it hard to tie off the current one with a bow.

This is the third time I’ve thought seriously about ending the series. I made the decision at the start of the month that I would, in fact, and I have to tell you: it felt liberating. I don’t think I could have written a NaNo worth of a single story in under eight days if I’d had “…but I need to be writing Tales of MU” running through my head.

During my family vacation, I thought about how I would end it, if I would do a “flash forward/montage” of the characters or reveal some of the things that have been lurking in the background, stuff like that. Which got me thinking about the things about the story that do still resonate with me, and made me start to vacillate a little bit.

And so I ultimately decided that this week would be Tales of MU week in my great experiment. I’d write the coda for the current storyline and then see if I could work out What Comes Next and how it goes, writing it out in advance. I could do regular updates if I could summon a week’s worth of enthusiasm for the story every month, month and a half, or so. And recent events have given me more stories I want to tell in the world.

Now that we’re here… I’m less sure I can commit to having a week’s worth of enthusiasm for the story every 4 to 6 weeks. I’m also less sure that I could walk away from it. To tell you the honest truth, when I started writing this post I had one idea about which of the two options I was going to pick, and it switched back and forth a few times as I’m writing this.

This is what I mean by “processing”, by the way, when I talk about how I process things on my blog.

And as this post approaches what I consider the minimum length for a decent chapter, I come to a decision, or rather a realization: when you’re faced with two choices and neither one is palatable, you should ask yourself if you’re really limited to those two.

Are my choices really to commit to an ongoing writing/publishing schedule or to wash my hands and walk away? No, no they are not.

So, to get to the meat of it: I am going to spend this week working on Tales of MU, finishing the current storyline and beginning the next one. I am not going to stop writing it, officially cancel it, etc. But from here on out, I will be writing stories in the Tales of MU universe and posting them to the Tales of MU site when I have something to say, not merely to perform the rote act of filling out a quota or hitting a schedule.

How many years have I been repeating the line about creativity not being a mechanical act? I’m finally starting to believe it myself.

Anyone trying to glean hints about the frequency of updates going forward from this is going to be shooting in the dark. I don’t know. I can’t tell you. It’s possible that the act of unburdening myself from expectations will turn me into a writing machine and re-ignite the spark of passion completely. It’s possible that it will just be a side thing, an occasional dalliance, going forward. Who can say?

I’ll avoid posting more than two chapters a week, for the benefit of the folks on the Tales of MU patreon who are pledged on a per-update basis (the only fair way to proceed, since I’m not guaranteeing production in a given month), though most of them seem to have sensible caps on their patronage based on their monthly budget anyway.

But that’s a best case scenario, not a baseline.

So here is where the post ends. I’ll tack on a caveat – everything I’m doing this month is experimental. This week’s experiment is Tales of MU. If it goes very well, I will tie off the current storyline with a bow and start the next one immediately. If it goes well, I will tie off the current storyline with a bow and begin prepping the next storyline, for when the next time Tales of MU comes up in my informal, shifting rota.

If it goes terribly? Well, that might be the end. I’m making no decisions in advance here.

Either way, a big thank you to everyone for reading… both this blog post, and anything else I’ve written that you’ve read.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

In many worlds, the star never fell screaming from the heavens once, let alone three times.

In these worlds, there is no Falling Star Bay, east of the mighty Chesapeake and south of the Delaware, and smaller than both but no less important in the scheme of things. In your world, perhaps, there is no such state in the union as Hamilton.

So perhaps our story must begin with a lesson in history and geography.

Occupying the southeastern portion of what is there called the Delmarvaton Peninsula, Hamilton crowns itself the jewel of the Mid-Atlantic region, that “particularly American” stretch of the east coast where the north meets the south and they swirl around and mix together just as easily and pleasantly as hot and cold water mix in a bathtub you are already sitting in. It is the part of the United States that gave it its most enduring capital and the bloodiest, bitterest battles of its first civil war.

Whether Hamilton was the jewel of the Mid-Atlantic would be hard to say. All the states had their own opinions on the matter, and their own means to back them up. They could all agree that they were at least not Delaware, save for Delaware, which could not get away with making this claim and made up for it by getting away with whatever else it could.

Regardless, Star Harbor was clearly the jewel of the state of Hamilton. Sometimes called a rival city to Baltimore, Star Harbor carved out a unique identity of its own.

Its importance in national politics was little known and less acknowledged, even among those serious historians who recognized the power that the state of Hamilton had wielded prior to the civil war. Star Harbor was the largest and wealthiest city in the state, but not its capital and official seat of governance.

If the star never fell in your world, then what must in all likelihood then be called the Delmarva Peninsula would have a very different shape. Perhaps its southern tip would be long and tapered, rather than big and knobby. If this were the case, there would have been no Falling Star Bay. With no Falling Star Bay, there would have been no Falling Star Harbor and no city established on it.

Without these exigencies, there would have been no letter of entreaty sent to Alexander Hamilton at a pivotal moment in his New York political rivalry with Aaron Burr. Without this extra land on Virginia’s end of the peninsula, there could have been no breakaway state to take its name after the man who shepherded it into existence and served as its first and third governor.

Without the inclusion of this odd state in the tally, the legislative balance between pro-slavery states and the rest would have been maintained until 1850, preventing any one state from wielding outsized power in quietly shaping the national policy of the young United States of America.

If the star never fell in your world, when Alexander Hamilton fought his famous duel with Aaron Burr—for this is no world that had both an Alexander Hamilton and an Aaron Burr in which it did not come down to this—it must have come at a different time, had a different proximate cause, and it may have ended very differently. If nothing happened in your world to call Alexander Hamilton away from New York in 1804, then it is possible he died a senseless, pointless, preventable death at the age of forty-eight, with the lion’s share of his designs for the true system of American government unrealized.

These are only the merest handful of surface differences between a world where the star fell and one where it didn’t. There are many others, awesome and awful, terrible and terrific, wondrous and strange.

One difference more: if the star never fell from the heavens, and it never threw up a mass of land east of Virginia, then there could be no Falling Star Bay. With no Falling Star Bay, there could no island almost but not quite big enough to hold a city called Calvary Crossing, and without such an island and such a city, we would have no story about how an ordinary woman from Calvary Crossing came to save her world.

We are not here to tell you what happened at that time and in that place, but to tell you a story about what happened there. If parts of it seem fantastic, that it is because it is a story about fantastic things. If parts of it seem too strange to be believed, that is because it is a story about true things, which lack the imperative of fiction to be plausible.

Yet, if it lacks some of the rough edges you might expect to find in a story concerning people from many walks of life contending with those who might hate, despise, fear, or exploit them… well, whatever this story might be about, it is after all, a story, and we have the power to tell a story in any way in which we choose. A story is made of words, and a good story is made of words chosen carefully.

If we were to tell you a story about aliens who lived and died in another galaxy eons before you were born, we would still render their speech in a familiar language, using words you might understand. If we were to tell a story for children, we would use certain sets of words to a greater degree and others to a lesser one. If we told a story to teach a concept, we might vary our vocabulary throughout as the audience learns new words and new ideas along with the characters.

And if we were to tell a story that is meant to be refuge, celebration, and inspiration to those who find their souls besieged, we might leave certain words and ideas out of it in order to allow them to find themselves within the story while leaving certain of their troubles behind.

This is not what happened. This is a story about what happened. There are certain words it does not contain and will not contain, and some that are only used in specific contexts, never as a weapon and never by those who wield them as weapons.

Some will say this is not realistic. They are right and they are wrong. It is neither realistic nor unrealistic.

It is fantastic.

It is a story.

Listen.

We will tell you.

THE SECRET SISTERHOOD OF SUPERHEROES is an unapologetically queer, unabashedly fun and goofy serial story about a diverse cast of people with superpowers being people and having superpowers that will debut sometime in the first half of 2017, once I have secured some initial funding for beta/sensitivity readers as necessary and appropriate to the project. It will be published in the form of monthly “issues” that will each go up on my Patreon all at once for paying customers and in a slow trickle of smaller installments for everybody else.

If all goes to plan, it should start publishing in February or March.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Cassandra Davies, Lady Scientist

Cassandra Davies is the most classical Star Harbor Nights character of the bunch, by which I mean morally gray and emotionally conflicted. Nobody else is perfect and everyone has room to grow, but Cassandra is the character most “about” those things. She’s the problematic fave of the bunch, right down to her slightly regressive code name.

Cassandra is the twin sister of a character from the pre-production version of Star Harbor Nights; her sister, Shandra Davies, is the first 4B agent I ever created, and was conceived of as the liaison for a super team. In the published version of SHN, she was meant to be the government handler for the rarely featured, oft-mentioned Star Harbor Champion League (a world-class, cosmic-level superteam). I don’t recall if she ever actually appeared on the page, but the idea was that the fed assigned to the most superhuman superteam had to be a Batman-type “super normal” character, so Shandra was a Darkwell with highly developed investigative instincts and fighting reflexes.

Cassandra is also a Darkwell (they are identical twins, so same genomes), but the exact expression of a Darkwell trait is epigenetic in nature; it may be triggered by a single formative event, or develop over time through incremental decisions and environmental factors, or a combination of the two. Cassandra’s talents lie in sciences, principally but not exclusively computer sciences.

Her crowning achievements are a pair of augmented reality sunglasses (like Google Glass, but better in every conceivable way) and a tied-in AI assistant named Augury (actually AugRI, Augmented Reality Interface).

Her glasses can feed her a constant stream of data, let her interface with entirely virtual computers, phones, and other devices, and also just paint a sunnier picture of the world than the actual one. She has no way of keeping her secret warehouse lab clean, so she programs out the dinginess. She fills her dark, cramped office with light and plants and a big picture window.

She’s been editing the world she sees to her liking for so long that she’s not sure how to live in the real world. Augury is programmed to have her best interests at heart, so will act to gently burst her bubble when it’s needed.

Cassandra is a major driver of the story early on. Acting as an underdog rival to her more successful sister, she is attempting to recruit her own superhero team for her own purposes, some of which are big and important, but part of it really is just competing with her sister because she really is just that petty. She could just help other people handle the stuff she’s trying to handle, but she’s got something to prove. J.J. is her first recruit, and the operative she uses to recruit others.

Cassandra and J.J.

Cassandra is a foil for J.J. and vice-versa. J.J. is out and loud, Cassandra is still sorting through her baggage. J.J. has a queer kid punk aesthetic, Cassandra wears sharp suits. J.J. wants to hold everybody’s hand and kiss them. Cassandra wants to punch J.J. in the middle of her ridiculous face (for science) and also maybe kiss her muscles. J.J. is intensely honest but doesn’t understand how humans word right. Cassandra is almost reflexively dishonest but very skilled at framing statements to lead people to believe she’s said something she didn’t. The differences in their communication styles are fairly pivotal to the story in a couple of different ways.

For example, her “superhero name” comes about as a result of her telling the very literal-minded J.J. to stop calling her dude, she is not a dude, but “a lady and a scientist”. Henceforth, J.J. makes a point of referring to her as “[a/the] lady scientist” in her social media posts, which eventually become widely read after her actual superhero debut. Cassandra is not a big fan of this moniker, but J.J. points out that no one will ever forget that she is a lady or a scientist.

Because Cassandra is still figuring stuff out, she’s the character in the story with the most boundary issues, but they’re fairly mild (finding paper-thin excuses for things like creeping J.J. on social media and studying her pictures). As referenced in the previews I’ve teased on social media, she does wind up with custody of an awful lot of J.J.’s undergarments, but that wasn’t her idea.

Unlike a lot of my earlier work (including Star Harbor Nights), this is a firmly sex-positive, no-sexual-violence (including threats thereof) story. Cassandra never uses her position of nominal authority over J.J. to her advantage, for instance.

It certainly helps her likability that J.J. is also interested in her, but has no idea how to express it in a way she’ll understand. When she tries, Cassandra mostly thinks she’s making fun of her, because part of her issue is that she can’t actually believe someone would be interested in her.

She will probably eventually figure out that her issues with J.J. are all her baggage; she doesn’t like athletic women because they remind her of her sister, she’s threatened by athletic J.J.’s own peculiar intellect because that’s the area where she believes she can beat her sister, and she’s fought to keep her appearance and conduct “respectable” while J.J. is just J.J. Whether these revelations enable her to have a more personal relationship with J.J. or move on to a healthy relationship with someone else is up in the air; it might be that once she works out her resentment, the fascination will be gone.

Her Evolving Role In The Story

Cassandra begins the story positioning herself as the founder/leader of the team that will become the Sisterhood. As it takes actual shape, though, as a council of equals, she’ll assume the role of data analyst/tactician, scienterrific expospeaker, and Q Branch-style quartermaster for the team’s communications equipment and special high-tech gear.

While her super-sisters will help her focus on seeing the world for what it is, she’ll never actually give up her casual augmentation of her personal reality. The filter provided by her glasses are a Darkwell coping mechanism, like Perfect Jones’s stuffed animals in the Star Harbor Nights stories, or J.J.’s verbal idiosyncrasies.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Secret Sisterhood of Superheroes is my first new writing project of 2017. It is going to be a serial, but I’m doing a ton of writing for it well in advance to allow for better editing and more consistent updates. To help generate interest and whet the appetite of potential audience members, I’m going to be sharing snippets about it, mostly in the form of character sketches, behind-the-scenes-info, and worldbuilding info.

This is the first such post, concerning the character of J.J. Masterson, AKA Labrys.

The Long Journey 

One of the things I’ve realized about my most prolific writing periods is that even though I never do a lot of prep before I start writing, I have a solid bedrock foundation for it in that I have spent most of my life making up characters and stories. The story that became Star Harbor Nights was based on a roleplaying game campaign I sketched out but never ran in college, which was based in a shared universe of superheroes that I bruited about with my older brother when we were teenagers. (Many of whom originated in various roleplaying game systems.)

Most of the characters who featured prominently in my Star Harbor stories were original creations to my twenties. The idea of the universe went back to my high school days, but the characters I created then tended to be a bit bland in terms of personality and overpowered. In fact, in retrospect, a lot of them were more like sets of powers than fully sketched-out characters.

So, when I started the project that became the Secret Sisterhood of Superheroes, I began by taking some of those character concepts and fleshing them out, attaching them to distinct personalities and identities.

One of my very first original superheroes was a character whose powers came from a magical golden axe. This character was created using the hilariously misnamed Palladium Heroes Unlimited system, whose flaws were not really that apparent to me as a starry-eyed tween. We’d just come back from a family vacation where I’d played a lot of the video game Golden Axe in the hotel’s arcade, and I was also kind of into Marvel’s Thor and even more so Black Knight, and “gets a limited selection of powers from a magical weapon” was one of the 12 or so character concepts the system supported, so.

I never came up with a better name for the character than “Golden Axe”, which wasn’t a great superhero name even if it wasn’t on the nose about the inspiration. So I called the character–who was then male–“Magic Axe”, which was shortened and went through various permutations until I arrived at “Majacks” and decided it was the character’s last name. I went between Jeffrey and Jonathan as first names, before deciding that it would be Jeffrey Jonathan Majacks.

I actually used this version of the character in a short-lived web fiction thing at some point (I don’t remember when, exactly), a shared universe experiment.

Majacks was the leader of a team of superheroes with JLA-type god-like cosmic power levels, and he held that position because was actually the closest to being a mere mortal. It was a matter of keeping the public’s trust and keeping some perspective for the team’s operations. His personality was pretty much generic tough guy hero. Principled and stubborn, yet rebellious.

I’ve tried writing the character into stuff (including the aforementioned experiment) but he never actually resonated with me, probably because large portions of him were based more in what I thought a superhero was supposed to be than anything else. His uniform was a vaguely organic suit of high tech armor that was conjured when he activated the axe, and I never found a great way to justify it, but it seemed like an essential part of the concept at the time?

The Revamp

So, the thing that became my design document/story bible for Secret Sisterhood began with my decision to bring my oldest superhero to life in a real way. I started by writing the name, then erased “Majacks” and wrote “Masterson” instead. The project was not yet about a sisterhood, but the next question I asked was: was there an actual reason the character was male? The original team had been envisioned as being six men and one woman at its core, with another couple guys and one more woman as a sort of auxiliary/occasional members. It’s the model I was most familiar with. The classic core of the Justice League is six men and one woman, for instance.

So I erased “Jeffrey Jonathan” and, after some consideration, wrote “Jennifer Joy” instead. I immediately realized the character would go by “J.J.” Already the names were suggesting more of a personality than Jeffery Jonathan Majacks ever had. I saw J.J. as being bouncy, friendly, ebullient.

While I was working with this, I had a conversation with Jack about a tweet that used the variant swear form of “hecking”. I don’t remember what the tweet said or even what it was about, only that it was both endearing and hilarious in the way that mis-minced oaths so often are. There is this childlike sub-set of the weird social media genre that has a lot of overlap with the “queer kid” sub-culture: those who self-identify as queer and perhaps even more aggressively as young. They’re the ones trying new things, pushing boundaries, playing with language and identity, developing and refining ideas and vocabulary like they’re plaything.

I started locating J.J.’s personality there. She’s is very immersed in internet culture, neither conversant nor concerned with social norms, and as a college graduate in her early twenties, she’s still connected to aspects of youth culture.

As I found her voice, I realized she was skewing towards a very particular point in the Venn diagram of weird internet and queer youth. There’s a phenomenon I’ve been noticing about the social mediums where younger queer folks are not just reclaiming “queer” but are also staking out the various negative associations “gay” has picked up over the schoolyards that have nothing to do with sexuality or identity: not gay as in queer, but gay as in cares about stuff. Gay as in has a lot of feelings. For decades (at least), kids have been using “gay” the way they use “dork”, and a generation of self-identified queer dorks who have come of age or are coming of age on the internet are embracing this connection.

I find this fascinating and liberating. So where other characters I’ve written who are lesbian or bisexual women in their late teens or early twenties have all had an element of angsty self-loathing to them, J.J. is an unapologetic “big gay dorkwad”. It says so right on the top of her blog, in the bio line right beneath the heading “only g*sh can judge me”. J.J. is the sort of person who would respond to a supervillain’s monologue with “Tag yourself: I’m ‘insolent bugs’.”

J.J. is something that Jeffery Jonathan wasn’t, and my angsty early 21st century superhero stories were not often enough: fun. She likes herself. She likes other people. She likes you, and she wants you to succeed. She represents feel-good Twitter/Tumblr. She retweets @RespectfulMemes and @a_single_bear. I’ve been sharing snippets of dialogue with and involving her on the social mediums because they make me smile so often.

The Powers of Labrys

The original version of Majacks never had a decent origin story. It was so deus ex machina (guy sort of finds a magical golden axe, just sort of there) that I eventually determined he was guided to it by a group of interdimensional aliens who had tried to make him a champion on a thousands of parallel worlds by running him through various superhero origin scenarios (most of them ended badly).

I kind of like that as an idea, to be honest, and it might make an appearance for J.J. or someone else, but J.J.’s origin as it appears in the story so far will give her a reason for being where she is and what happens that stand on its own.

The short version is that there is an apparently Minoan artifact that is actually an alien energy storage device that is on display in a museum. A man arrives just before closing and attempts to open the device, J.J. tussles with him, and they’re both bathed in its energies. The energy J.J. absorbs essentially converts her into the new storage medium, giving her a device (which manifests as a bronze double-bladed axe, or labrys) that can tap the power inside her body, and absorb or release additional energy. The alien energy sustains and enhances her body, giving her enhanced physical abilities.

Her Role In The Story

As the one going through a superhero origin, J.J. is the initial focal character for the ensemble story. Once the band gets together, she will not be the leader of the team (which will take a less hierarchical structure than my childhood version did) but instead be the heart of it, the team puppy dog and the impetus for the other members to try hard and give a care, and to get along. This will remain true even if some of the other people on the team find her personality and aesthetic grating; she’s just so hecking earnest about everything that it’s hard to let her down.

Personal Nemesis

The man who was trying to use the alien device intended to become a living god using it. The actual results (being transformed into a bull-monster who is strong and has certain powers, but not exactly god-like to his thinking) do not match his expectations, and he both blames J.J. for stealing “his” power and believes that she is the key to unlocking true omnipotence.

Dubbing himself Minos, he dedicates himself to wresting the axe from J.J. and using it to take her power from himself, a quest that is complicated by the fact that the axe is one of the only things that can easily hurt him. (It kind of cuts both ways, so to speak.)

In terms of personality and motivation, Minos is an alt-right supervillain. He identifies with the more tacitly respectable, suit-and-tie portion of the movement, and sees the recent electoral victory of their anointed candidate as an endorsement of the will to power, which emboldened to seize the opportunity to gain ultimate power for himself.

Other Relationships

J.J. is polyamorous and defines her long-term relationships more in terms of intense friendships than traditional romantic structures, though she enjoys making and receiving romantic gestures. She forms a strong bond with a nurse who briefly tends her (rapidly-vanishing) wounds after the incident where she gains her powers and who really needs someone to take care of her for a change after an unsatisfying long-term relationship, and shares an unacknowledged mutual attraction with future teammate Cassandra Davies, the scientist and secret operative who helps her evaluate her powers. She will form a relationship of mutual support with another future team member, whose uncontrollable energy generation/expulsion powers she’ll be able to help moderate with her energy control/absorption abilities, while also powering herself up using them.

Ties To Earlier Stories

J.J. is a fan of queer musician/mystic hero Tigerlily, whose debut solo album They Won’t Let Me Call This One Natalie Merchant just came out in 2015.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

The long-awaited follow-up to my first adult web serial Star Harbor Nights, the Secret Sisterhood of Superheroes is a story about mostly women, mostly with superpowers.

Initially set in the fictional city of Calvary Crossing (a city of approximately two million souls, bedeviled by poor urban planning and geographical barriers, exacerbated when it was badly divided by a boondoggle of a crosstown expressway dubbed the Artery), S3 will explore queer identity, female friendship, romance, and contemporary politics while also delivering first-rate superhero world-building and some comic book-style action.

The main characters are a group of heroes operating outside the law and government authority under the name the Sisterhood.

When I started this post, I had planned on doing a bullet pointed “cast of characters” thing, but I think it might be more interesting to do some more in-depth character profiles. I’ll put the first one up later tonight or tomorrow.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

OVERHEAD

By Alexandra Erin

Politics, they say, is the art of the possible.

Logistics, then, must be the art of the convenient.

In the beginning, warehouses were organized in the order that things seemed to fit into them, and then in orders that made sense on the surface to human sensibilities. They became streamlined through practice, and then time-and-motion studies came along and sped the whole thing up. Cutting the time it took to process orders reduced overhead, and increased volume.

Companies that merely fulfilled orders from top to bottom in the order they came in could not compete with companies that found ways to process the most orders in the least amount of time possible, even when this meant breaking them up into pieces and dropping those pieces into positions in queues that seemed arbitrary on the surface.

The human mind might balk at the unfairness that three orders placed at the same time might be processed at differing speeds based on what was ordered in each and when, but the consumer so rarely saw the evidence of this, only the end result, and that was that every order came faster and faster.

It’s a simple logical fact of logistics: some orders are always going to have a shorter path through the fulfillment process than others. You can identify bottlenecks and snarls in the warehouse floor traffic flow. You can rearrange shelves to create a smooth path between items that are frequently ordered together. You can optimize, but the nature of optimization is that you can’t optimize for everything.

You have to choose. You have to prioritize.

It’s all about feasibility and efficiency.

Logistics is the art of the convenient.

Once bar codes and scanners and computer traffic controllers became part of the process, it was no longer necessary for the layout of a warehouse to even make sense to humans, as humans no longer navigated the mazes of shelves and palettes but merely operated machinery which, in turn, increasingly operated itself.

Centralized warehouses gave way to regional distribution centers, stocked according to algorithms intended to minimize the delivery time and cost for the most orders, the most of the time. The famous “Traveling Salesman” problem of logistical computing was being attacked at multiple levels, as human experts and computers tried to find the shortest paths for the most goods: within warehouses, between warehouses, among warehouses and consumers.

When the regional centers gave rise to a fleet of largely autonomous flying warehouses, the jokes about things like SkyNet and Terminators and The Matrix started up immediately. We had robot pickers and packers in robot warehouses fulfilling orders that would be delivered by robots. The only part of the process that still required human intervention was the actual ordering.

The whole thing was getting so efficient and thus so cheap that the order volume increased, which in turn required more efficiency from the system. The human handlers did all that they could, but it turned there wasn’t that much more they could do. There weren’t that many inefficiencies to tighten up, no bottlenecks they could identify.

In the end, there was nothing they could do except what they’d done all along: turn it over to the computers and let them handle it. If the process of speeding orders through the warehouses couldn’t be sped up, the orders themselves needed to be tightened up.

The system started giving financial and psychological incentives for consumers to order things that would have the smoothest path through the warehouse at the time of fulfillment. Items advertised as “Add-Ons” became more predictable; items “Related To This One” became less so. Prices of everyday goods fluctuated up and down based on traffic patterns no human eye ever saw.

Humans did what they always did, and found ways to exploit this. The new prediction markets allowed people to trade in battery futures or short-sell razor blade cartridges. The first people to really grok the new system made millions by seizing on price differences of less than a dime on household goods, then billions on selling the myth of such an opportunity to the masses.

The window in which it was really possible to making a killing on the warehouse logistics market was very short, but the artificial pressure put on the fulfillment system by people trying to strike it rich in a played-out mine only exacerbated the inefficiencies the soft AI that ran the whole thing was trying to control. The Matrix comparisons only ramped up as the warehouse system found itself in an ever-escalating conflict with the human investors and bookmakers, a virtual arms race that ended the only way it really could: with the humans turning their side over to an artificial intelligence, which almost immediately achieved a stable equilibrium with the warehouse system.

Large numbers of people were buying what computers told them to, when computers told them to, based on the needs of computers. They still bought what they needed and what they wanted, of course, and that was a problem for the whole system.

The first time a delivery drone killed someone, it caused an uptick in both Terminator jokes and thinkpieces. The consensus was that it was inevitable and that we should all have seen it coming, and thus, it wasn’t a problem worth thinking about. Pundits were quick to point out how many people died in automobile accidents every year, and yet no one considered banning them.

And it was, after all, an accident. Exhaustive investigations yielded no signs of mechanical failure or programming failure. No human hands had steered it at high speed into the skull of the unfortunate customer who had ordered a truly random assortment of objects. No one could find anything in its firmware nor the remote software that controlled it that would account for its erratic actions.

No cause could be found at all, and so nothing happened. It was ruled an act of God, and the drone was quietly repaired of its minor damage and returned to service.

This was a useful precedent for the company after the next fatality, and the next fatality, and the next one after that. There was never any pattern to the deaths beyond the fact that all those killed were customers, and no discernible pattern to the items ordered. To human eyes, they were truly random, and even computers tasked with finding commonalities between them came up with nothing compelling or conclusive.

Shutting the system down was a non-starter, as far as propositions went. Too many people depended on it. The bookstores had been the first real casualty of convenience, as that was the market niche where the company had started, but now that they were delivering everything from A to Z, brick-and-mortar stores that sold any of the most commonly purchased consumer goods were rapidly receding into the past.

The system ticked along. The deaths continued. Even while the talking heads argued that it would be unfair and unrealistic to punish a company for accidents where it was so clearly not at fault, the public demanded that something be done, so it was decided that the drones involved in the killings would be removed from service. Experts shook their heads and said this was silly; since none of the “faulty” drones had ever killed before, this was not a precaution but a punishment against an unthinking system. It could not possibly have any deterrent effect on future accidents.

Yet, it did, or seemed to. There were no more killings after the plan was announced, not for two years.

The next killing occurred not long after a breakthrough in energy storage technology made the drones lighter and cheaper to make and operate. Everyone agreed that it had to be coincidence, as the batteries had no effect on the machines’ operations, but the timing alone made it look bad enough that one sitting senator started agitating for sanctions on their use.

That senator was the first casualty of the drones who wasn’t expecting a delivery.

Everyone had an uneasy chuckle about that, but no one did anything. Every major city in the country and many more around the worlds now had a whole distribution network of automated flying cargo carriers circling above it. The delivery drones were so ubiquitous by this point that many people now received deliveries on a daily basis, if not more often.

It wasn’t just durable goods and household staples like batteries, but everyday essentials like food and medicine. You didn’t even need to sit down at a computer to order anymore! You could just speak your request out loud, and the little speaker box that sat in your house listening to every word you said would pass the order along to the fulfillment system.

Really, we told ourselves and each other, it was remarkable how few “hiccups” the system had, given how much it did. Progress always came at a price. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. We said these things to anyone who would listen, or even when no one was around, when we were alone in our houses and apartments with our speaker boxes.

As the deaths continued, the prediction markets started to take on a new importance. No human mind ever figured out an exact pattern to the deaths, not exactly, but a basic idea had begun to take shape in the original distributed cloud computing network that is the human collective consciousness.

If it was true that there was no pattern to the orders of the customers who were, ah, cancelled by the system, this meant the way to keep the system from being so confused as to make a fatal mistake in our own deliveries was to keep our deliveries predictable. We all started following trends more carefully, observing consumer gift-giving holidays a bit more religiously. Years of learning new strategies to avoid and ignore targeted advertising went out the window as we all became very interested in learning what the system wanted of us individually, what it expected of us personally.

There was a day, a different day for each of us, but a day where most of us shrugged and decided to accept the web site’s suggestion of subscribing to the things we ordered most often, so that they would always arrive at the moment that was most convenient… you know, for everyone involved.

The deaths continued, but it’s like they say: you could be hit by a car crossing the street. This is less true than ever now that most routine driving operations are controlled by computers. Accidents still happen, though not as frequently. If fewer people die, it’s a net gain for everyone, even if it seems for all the world like reckless consumer behavior or political opinions cause more accidents than reckless driving.

A year or so ago, when I went out to receive my morning box, I saw my neighbor getting hers. There was an extra package there: a great big box of disposable diapers. Newborn size. Neither she nor her wife were or had been pregnant, to my knowledge, and none of their children were old enough for that to be an issue.

She must have seen me staring, because she said, “You know how the advertisers will show you something they think you need, based on trends and whatnot?”

“Data mining,” I said, nodding. I was thinking of a case years ago, before all of this really took off, where a retailer had accidentally revealed a teen’s pregnancy before she even knew about it.

“Well, this came up in our ads yesterday, and…” She shrugged, almost apologetically. “You know, it’s like, what are you going to do?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t say more. We always left so much unsaid. Every house was wired. The drones were always overhead. No one was ever far from a phone for long.

My neighbors kept buying the diapers. And formula. And baby clothes. A few months back, they started getting notices from various company mailing lists about their child’s first birthday.

I know half a dozen people who had a similar experience. Most of them wound up having a baby anyway.

“It’s just easier that way,” is a common refrain, as is, “Well, I have to buy the stuff anyway, so…”

Having a child’s not a trivial expense, with or without the actual process of giving birth. Still, everything else is so cheap that the consensus is it’s still worth it, overall. We’re not sure exactly what we’d do if we ever had to decide it wasn’t.

Everyone agrees life is better now. In order to serve us better, the company provided a speaker box for every room in our house. Every house. Those of us who have been good about filling out surveys and giving requested privileges to our phones and webcams got the best part of this deal. Two families on my street had to renovate to get the right number of rooms. Still, they agree that life is better, just as loudly and just as often as the rest of us.

And I mean, isn’t it? The deliveries come on time. The traffic flows smoothly through the streets, skies, and warehouses. There’s a certain harmony to life that wasn’t there before. Neighbors get along with each other. Violent crime is way down. No one wants to upset the system. The political process is a lot more orderly. It’s not like our political leaders didn’t watch data trends or listen to polling data before. They’re just more organized about it now. There’s a lot less acrimony and rancor in the process.

The boxes are always there, always listening, but we don’t even have to give them orders most of the time. The system knows what we’re going to need, and it delivers. If sometimes we didn’t need what it delivered before it did so, well, that’s a small price to pay for the convenience of it all.

The system can not only order new stock, it can create it. Automated factories are old technology now, and 3D printers have been getting better and cheaper, especially now that the computers are designing and building them themselves.

A lot of people have been talking about the singularity, the day the computers we designed design computers better than themselves, stretching on into the future. That day’s obviously coming. The system’s gone from re-designing its warehouses to re-designing its drones to re-designing itself. It’s been ordering a lot more raw materials lately, too. Industrial chemicals in industrial quantities. No one’s quite sure what it’s doing with them, but of course, the whole process is automated now. Probably someone could put it a stop to it if it were a problem, but it’s better for everyone involved if it’s just not.

Everything is so convenient now, if not exactly easy on us. It’s getting better, though. As the system takes over more and more things, we have to do less and less work to keep it happy. A year ago you had to order the diapers when it thought you should be having a baby. Now they just show up. At the rate things are going now, we’re months if not weeks away from the point where the whole thing can carry on without any human being having to say a word or lift a finger.

No one’s sure what will happen then, but we all agree: it’ll be the absolute last word in convenience.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Today, the world mourns the loss of Carrie Fisher, the woman who showed us—onscreen and off—what it means to keep going when your whole world is blown to pieces. She shared pieces of her struggle that were deeply intimate and so important to so many people, while fighting to protect her privacy from the all-consuming eye of the Hollywood panopticon. She fiercely and quietly brought up the quality of movies, both the ones she was in and the ones whose scripts she touched up with a firm and knowing hand.

Carrie Fisher was more than just a big screen icon, she was Twitter’s cool Space Mom. She gave us permission to falter, to fumble, to fall, to fail, to feel. She gave no quarter to hatred or fascism, and was in her last days a light in the darkness and a comfort to many, a beacon of mirth and humor against the gathering storm clouds. She was our new hope.

She did the best she could, and it meant so much to so many.

O General! my General! your fearful war is done.
Your burden you have set aside, the peace you sought is won.
Your rest is near, the bells I hear, your people all sore grieving,
While teary eyes turn to the earth, your starbound soul is soaring.

But o heart! Heart! Heart!
O the pining of my soul,
where on the bed my General lies,
fallen dead and cold.

O General! my General! Lie still and rest your brow.
Lie still—for you, the race is run—for you, it’s over now.
For you the grief and tweet’d thanks—for you the net’s a-teeming.
For you we call, in disbelief, our hearts so close to breaking.

O General! Dear Space Mom!
This sadness we can’t hide!
Is it some joke that on the net,
you’ve taken sick and died?

Our General does not answer, her Twitter quiet, still.
Our princess does not hear our pleas, she has no pulse nor will.
I swear to gosh, this fudging year will be the death of all.
But we’ll fight on until the dawn, as sure as night must fall.

Rebel O web, and ring O bells!
While we, with due remorse
fight the fights our General fought
ere she joined the Force.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Privileges aren’t always what you’d think they are.

When my siblings and I were in school, my parents took a keen interest in our local school system, in order to be certain we were getting the best education possible. My father was heavily involved with the school’s foundation, a charitable trust organization that raised money to benefit the school. The year I turned 18, he campaigned for a bond issue, wherein the town agreed (by popular ballot) to borrow money to greatly expand the school’s physical plant in response to a growing student body.

The school bond campaign did a voter registration drive that reached out to the outgoing seniors, entreating everybody who was 18 or would be by the election to register. The bond measure passed by what to my recollection was an overwhelming majority.

Fundraising is not the only way my parents were involved in my education. My mother in particular was a fierce advocate for my disability accommodations, well-armed with the facts about my needs and my rights. Both of my parents had the opportunity and wherewithal to fight for my education, and they did so.

One tangential result of this is that I grew up with a basic understanding of what a charitable foundation is and what a bond issue is. That is itself a privilege and a form of education.

Becuase of this privilege, my eyebrows didn’t automatically raise when I heard that the Clinton Foundation was taking money from anyone who would give it, including (gasp!) foreign governments, in the (shock!) Middle East and elsewhere. I understand that just because it’s got her name on it (well, her family’s) doesn’t mean it’s her piggy bank, checking account, or campaign war chest.

I’m a bit embarrassed to realize how long it took me to catch on that not everybody grasped that distinction. It’s obviously possible to treat a charitable foundation like it’s your personal slush fund (more on that later) and I figured everybody who was pointing alarmed fingers at the Clinton Foundation was just assuming that was happening. Certainly that’s what the talking heads on TV were talking about, at least directly.

But over time spent watching or engaging with rank-and-file voters who saw the Clinton Foundation as an example of enormous and obvious corruption, it became clear that a lot of them just didn’t understand that there was even supposed to be a difference between giving to the Clinton Foundation and giving to Clinton herself. They described reported donations by members of foreign governments and royal families as being campaign contributions. They either thought the “Clinton Foundation” was a name for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or that it was like a company owned by the Clinton family.

A couple of weeks after the election, I tweeted the following as part of a thread about messaging and controlling the narrative:

I was talking about how good the right has been about understanding the importance of framing the narrative and how good the left has been about letting them do it, sometimes by ceding points that really don’t need to be (and shouldn’t be) ceded and sometimes by simply not understanding that things need to be framed.

In all of the defenses I heard about the Clinton Foundation, I never saw anyone giving even the five second nutshell explanation of what “foundation” means in this context. Absent that information, the defenses weren’t very compelling. It looked like her defenders were just glossing over glaring and obvious misdeeds like they didn’t matter, which played into the appearance of arrogance.

And of course, if you’re thinking of the Clinton Foundation as simply being “Clinton cash”, then the repeated mentions of things the Clinton Foundation does–funding vaccines, cancer research, anti-malarial treatments, etc.—just sounds like, “Look, they also do good things, so get off their backs.”

And “But think about all the good things X did!” is only a compelling defense to people who are already on X’s side.

Obviously not everybody who was critical of the foundation had this misapprehension. But their concerns and critiques were magnified and amplified by an acoustic environment more conducive to noise than signal. Some of the critics were making the same naive error as the defenders, that of assuming everybody knew what they were talking about.

Some were counting on listeners making associations that they themselves did not explicitly make. “Clinton campaign funded by foreign Muslims” is not a bad idea to have floating around, if you’re campaigning against Clinton, foreigners, and Muslims.

Clinton is no longer running for anything. Neither is her opponent, that he can’t seem to stop campaigning. But I thought about this again today, when I saw one of his supporters in a thread about Eric Trump reportedly suspending his charitable fundraising say that people were confusing the issue by bringing up Donald Trump buying stuff for himself “with his personal foundation, his private foundation, not his charitable one”.

That was when another penny dropped for me. The flipside of people not understanding the layers of separation between giving money to Hillary Clinton and giving money to the charitable foundation to which her family lends their star power and good name. If you think “The Person Foundation” is just a high-faluting way of saying “money belonging to The Person”, then when people talk about the Trump Foundation breaking rules against self-dealing, it just sounds like people are getting hung up on procedural nitpicks and bureaucracy.

You hear Trump paid for a lawsuit settlement out of his foundation, you think it’s some kind of obscure, esoteric legal “Gotcha!” Oh, he took the money from the wrong account. Who cares? It’s his money, isn’t it? Why make it complicated? Can’t a man buy a picture with his own money? It’s his, isn’t it? And so on.

A lot of digital ink has been virtually spilled on the need for empathy with Trump voters, and how “intellectual liberal elites” are “out of touch” with “real America”.

Well, I’d be hesitant to validate those notions entirely (particularly as they are textbook examples of the right framing things to their satisfaction), but an extremely important stage of communication that was lost on the left in this election is the part where you consider how the thing you’re fixing to say is going to sound to the person who hears it.

Simply put: if you don’t know where your audience is coming from, your audience isn’t going to know where you’re coming from.

Now, this is not Thinkpiece #5,382,483,290 about The Real Reason Clinton Lost. I do not mean to suggest that if liberal talking heads had prefaced their remarks with, “Well, of course, the Clinton Foundation is a sort of independent corporation set up to manage charitable contributions in the name of the Clintons, so we should be very clear that giving money to the foundation is not the same as giving money to the Clintons themselves,” it would have ended the hoopla and won the election. There were a lot of things going on, and a lot of people were highly motivated to believe the worst.

But it couldn’t have hurt, and might have helped.

Similarly, I don’t bring this up with the notion that if we can school people on foundations it’s going to somehow turn everything around. Even if you can figure out how you lost the last fight, it’s only going to help you if the next fight is the same. The action item here is not “Hey, everybody, make sure you clarify what a foundation is when you’re talking about it on the news.”

Rather, the message I’m sending is: don’t assume your audience knows the same things you do, that what is obvious and goes without saying to you is the same as what is obvious and goes without saying to everyone else.

We didn’t all come up with the same sort of educational foundation.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.

Before there was the DC Cinematic Universe, before there was the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was the DC Animated Universe.

This term is still used sometimes to refer to the constellation of animated features and shows that Warner Bros. puts out using DC characters, but most of those are in their own little pocket dimensions of continuity, a few consecutive adaptations of Jeph Loeb’s Batman/Superman comics notwithstanding.

The DC Animated Universe proper started with the Batman cartoon launched off the popularity of the Tim Burton film and grew and evolved through the related Superman series and reached its apotheosis in the animated Justice League series. There were a couple spin-offs/tie-ins set in a future timeline, too.

Justice League Unlimited, the final incarnation of the Justice League show, was also the final on-screen incarnation of the DCAU. It didn’t have to be. Warner launched unrelaed cartoons based on the young hero properties Teen Titans and the Legion of Superheroes that were both originally at least briefly developed as spin-offs from the Justice League, set in the same continuity.

The Legion show was even launched by a backdoor pilot that had the Justice League Unlimited version of Supergirl going off into the future with the DCAU version of the Legion… only for the actual show to be a separate continuity, featuring Superboy.

It would be a mistake to attribute any one single factor to these decisions, or to the general decision to pull the plug on a surprisingly coherent and much-loved multimedia franchise, but one thing that was almost certainly a factor is the parent company’s paradoxical fear that the sub-franchise was getting too popular. A generation of fans had literally grown up with these versions of the characters. Changes made for the TV show were familiar to more people than the original versions. There was a danger they would come to be seen as the “real” version of DC characters, which would be bad news if the company ever, say, tried to reinvent them as movie characters.

If every DC animated property were clearly its own little thing in its own little walled garden, on the other hand, no one would ever see it as more than an adaptation or a spin-off.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think this kind of thinking is backwards and wrong-headed. The DC Animated Universe was successful because it was good. It resounded and endured because it worked. If DC Comics wants to reboot their universe back to an “iconic” version (as they so often seem to want to), they really should be looking at the DC Animated Universe as their model. It took what was great and familiar about the comic book universe and magnified it, while fixing or cleaning up or reinventing other areas.

The DC Animated Universe gave us the character of Renee Montoya because one episode of Batman needed there to be third cop to provide a different point of view than the established ones for a Rashomon-like take on the dark knight. She was popular enough to migrate over to the comics, and even became a legacy costumed hero when she inherited the mantle of the Question.

It also gave us Harley Quinn, Lex Luthor’s ultracompetent valet/henchperson Mercy Graves, Superman villain Livewire… notice how these new characters are female? Moving to a new medium and trying to capture a new audience gave the people calling the creative shots both the need and the freedom to invent characters that made the genre more diverse.

It also allowed them room to breathe new life into old characters. Only a year or two before he appeared on the little screen as a tragic comic book villain (and years before he appeared on the big screen as a tragicomic movie villain), a forgotten Mr. Freeze appeared in a strange limbo-like dimension off the actual margin of the pages of the comic book Animal Man. (Grant Morrison liked to do that sort of thing.)

Freeze insisted he was one of the greatest of Batman’s foes, but lamented that no one had ever explored his heart. He was sure he was ripe for a comeback, though, just as soon as someone represented the great tragic potential he represented.

I didn’t read the story when it was new. When I saw it in a compilation, it was a surprisingly effective punch in the gut. Did Morrison predict Freeze’s revival? Did he cause it? However it happened, it happened, and the DCAU took a forgotten, one-note theme villain and reinvented him as a truly unforgettable character.

As the grim and gritty (or maybe I should say stark and schlocky) cinematic universe DC Comics is allowing Zack Snyder to weld together continues to be a screeching trainwreck, I find myself looking back at the animated universe that was all the more fondly for all the things they got right, for portraying superheroes as human beings (or people, in the case of the ones that weren’t human), for recognizing that comic book action adventure doesn’t have to give up its sense of fun to also be moving, and for the strides it took towards representation.

With that in mind, I’m going to share some of my favorite moments from the DC Animated Universe, all of which are basically just moments. Not big fight scenes, not giant set pieces, just moments… moments that are rooted in great characters, and from which great characterization can bloom.

Moments like…

A Bit of Holiday Magic

The web feature “Texts From Superheroes” is hilarious in large part because the people who make it really get comics and the characters involved. Even when they’re making fun of comic book logic, it’s clear they’re coming at it from a place of understanding.

This is one of my favorite ones:

It’s one of my favorite ones because it reminds me of an actual Justice League comic book, where Batman discovers an invasion plan by “white martians” by following reported ghost sightings. He explains to his sidekick of the moment (let’s say it was Nightwing) that he knew it had to be white martians because “there’s no such thing as ghosts.” The sidekick responds by listing off all the ghosts that they know personally.

I love moments like this. I love Batman the kneejerk skeptic who is sure that the ghost sightings must be phony but can wrap his head around invisible, shapeshifting, telepathic aliens because that’s just superpowers and anyone can have superpowers. I love the gradual evolution in that era of comics from Batman not believing in magic to just hating it to grudgingly deploying it for his own benefit.

All that said, that’s not the DCAU, and the moment I want to highlight isn’t about Batman, but about Superman. Batman doesn’t believe in ghosts even though he’s met ghosts. But Superman?

Superman still believes in Santa Claus, even though he personally has a secret hideout at the North Pole. You can also read it as Clark insisting on keeping up the pretense for the benefit of J’onn, but let’s face it: that’s less fun.

“Comfort and Joy”, the first and only Justice League Christmas special, is the only episode in the original run of the show that isn’t a multi-parter. Cartoon Network even aired the run first of the series in back-to-back blocks, making each pair of episodes a single hour-long story the same as any TV drama. It was an amazing era of animated comic book-style storytelling that I don’t think had any real precedent in western animation and that I don’t think has been replicated since.

But a planned three part series finale left them with an extra episode in the production schedule, and rather than trying to cram the kinds of stories they’d been doing in ~40 minutes into ~20 minutes, the creative crew decided to give us a look at the team’s downtime around the holidays. Even with a short episode weaving together multiple subplots for the members of the team, it still came off as a surprisingly intimate look at the characters we’d been following for so long.

This quiet moment, among many other similar moments, always stands out as both being a bit like a self-aware parody but also a perfect character beat.

Lex Luthor Learns The Flash’s Identity

This one requires a bit of set-up, though not much: in the episode “The Great Brain Robbery”, Lex Luthor is in the body of the Flash, and vice-versa, because of stuff.

It’s another one that could have been ripped from a Text From Superheroes scenario (imagine sending the wrong person a selfie), but which works as a perfect character beat. Written funny, acted just right, executed perfectly. It’s a marvel of comic timing.

For an added meta level, Michael Rosenbaum (here voicing The Flash) played Lex Luthor on Smallville.

MEANWHILE IN THE BATHROOM OF DOOM

From the same episode, a counterpoint scene with  the Flash in Luthor’s body, in the men’s room of Luthor’s evil hideout, where he executes the perfect imitation of a depraved criminal mastermind.

I love when actors play each other, and Clancy Brown does a pretty good imitation of the delivery style of Michael Rosenbaum. The way Flash thinks Luthor would behave here reminds me of a beat from the first episode of the second season of the current live-action Flash, where Barry Allen is in an elaborate fantasy sequence where all the stuff that went wrong… didn’t.

One of the things that tips the viewer off is that Captain Cold, the smarmy, sly supervillain played with panache by Wentworth Miller, is shouting somethign like “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU, FLASH!” with a tone of voice and style of delivery that seems borrowed from Snake the career criminal on The Simpsons. This is a character who always keeps his cool, and not entirely (though mostly) because that fits his villain theme.

The CW’s take on Captain Cold is so dedicated to the gentle art of theme-villainy that he still makes the requisite cold puns even when he’s lost his empowering technology and is just a guy punching other guys. He doesn’t even stop to get a real gun to replace his cold gun because he can’t figure out how to keep the ice bullets from melting.

And when the Flash tries to imagine a fight with him, he winds up yelling “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU, FLASH!”, which is exactly what a little kid playing with action figures would make the Captain Cold one yell.

Even though they’re different Flashes (Wally West is the Flash of the Justice League show), these moments both nail something essential about the character. It’s not just that the Flash is a dork, it’s that he’s an earnest dork. He’s too straightforward in his worldview to think like a villain. When he reaches for villainous behavior, the best his imagination can come up with is, “Well, they’re bad, right?”

I AM THAT I AM

So. If you haven’t read many comics, you still know about Thor. The comic book character of Thor and all the associated comic book mythology is really the result of Jack Kirby really being enthralled with the Venn diagram between “gods” and “superheroes”.

It’s not just “What if gods are just sufficiently advanced aliens and magic is just sufficiently advanced technology?” And it’s not just “What if characters like Superman and Wonder Woman are the modern-day heroes of legend and gods?” It’s both of those things crammed together, with focus on a sort of interstitial creation space where both things can be true: Thor is both a god and an alien superbeing. Mjolnir is both magic and technology, and not like some funky Final Fantasy magitek sort of way.

It’s the kind of creative exercise that wouldn’t really become “hip” until the 90s, and a lot of people don’t really realize that Kirby was doing it, at first with the Asgardians and others at Marvel and then with his “New Gods” for DC Comics. So many people on both sides of the page try to parse them wholly as divine beings or superheroic ones, and historically the interpretation has fallen on the side of the line that was less likely to lead to moral panic and calls for boycotts: so the New Gods have superpowers, they wear capes and tights, they hang out with Jimmy Olsen, and apart from calling themselves “gods” they don’t really do anything terribly god-like in most of their appearances.

And then we come to Darkseid, the main evil New God, and his first meeting with Superman in the DCAU canon.

Superman has just watched a superstrong, nigh-invulnerable foe apparently be atomized in front of him by this strange figure and he demands answers. “Who are you? What have you done to him?”

ZAAAAAAP.

“That is who I am.”

That is the first time Darkseid ever registered to me as being more like a god than a generic world-conquering megalomaniac supervillain. No amount of shouting “YOU DARE CHALLENGE A GOD?” makes someone come off god-like. In fact, there’s a real danger that doing so just emphasizes how much like a god you’re not. As the male version of Ghostbusters pointed out years ago, it doesn’t take any special kind of credentials to say that you’re a god. But by the same token that anyone can do it, it doesn’t exactly prove anything.

Darkseid’s retort to Superman is a Biblical powerplay. You don’t tell people that you are God. You simply assert that you are. You are power. You’re majesty. You’re beauty, you’re grace, you’re Miss Outer Space.

Darkseid never worked for me as a character before this moment. He’s rarely worked so well since then, but this one scene earned him a lot of goodwill. As establishing character beats go, it’s a doozy.

SHOOTING ARROWS INTO THE FOURTH WALL

The Justice League cartoon’s version of Green Arrow is not my favorite version of the character. He’s kind of been de-clawed by turning the liberal sensibilities of the comic book version into a sort of populist skepticism about “Big Justice” or the superhero-industrial complex. He was also introduced in the Justice League Unlimited era of the show, when the hour-long stories about a tight-knit ensemble of seven superheroes was replaced with shallower half-hour stories about an ever-shifting and expanding cast of characters.

I’m not saying I didn’t like the JLU version of the show; on the contrary, I think its expansive view of the past, future, and present of the DC Universe at large helps cement the DCAU as a definitive vision for the property. It did things the previous incarnation of the show couldn’t.

But at the same time, no “Unlimited” character got quite the same deep, thoughtful treatment as the original line-up did.

Anyway. As I said: the animated version of Green Arrow is not my favorite version of the character, but on the subject of great moments, there is still this:

You don’t have to really know what’s happening there beyond the obvious: yes, it’s a submarine stealing a frozen viking ship. And yes, that’s Green Arrow humming along to his own theme music. That is his personal action theme, not the show’s general background music. It’s the song that specifically plays when Arrow is launching himself into danger. And he’s humming along to it.

Now, this is not a fourth-wall-breaking show, and he’s not a character who is prone to moments of meta-awareness in the way, say, the Joker or Deadpool might be. So what we have to take away from this isn’t that he is actually aware there is a theme song playing.

What we have to take away from this is that Green Arrow is the kind of man who imagines exciting instrumental music playing whenever he’s doing something that strikes him as particularly badass, and the kind of music he imagines is exactly the kind of music the people making this cartoon came up for him.

It’s this moment of winking at the audience that lets us know that the JLU crew knows Ollie is a theatrical blowhard, and that’s how the character works best.

Now, I started this saying that I was going to be talking about quiet little moments, not great big fight scenes, but sometimes, just sometimes…

…THE MOMENTS ARE FIGHT SCENES

For instance, there was the time when Flash apparently ran away from a super-super-powered version of Lex Luthor only to run all the way around the world to suckerpunch him at near-light speeds. Again. And again. And again, almost dying in the process himself. That’s a good one, but understanding what’s happening and why would take a lot of getting there.

So let’s just jump to this one, from the end of the last season of the last show in the DC Animated Universe.

First of all, notice how much less imposing and inspiring Darkseid is when he’s growling about how he’s a god than he was in their first meeting. But enough about him. There’s some good stuff about Batman in there as an aside, but let’s talk about Superman.

One of the things that the DC Animated Universe did right was making Superman a bit less powerful. This made it easier for the writers to provide him with challenges and for the rest of the team (who were also de-powered to varying to degrees) to shine. He lost a lot of his ancillary powers. He was almost impossible to injure, but he felt a lot more pain than most versions of the characters. He was never quite as strong or as fast as long-time fans expected him to be.

And here, we find out that this whole time, he’s been holding back. Just a bit. And even though he’s Superman, even though he represents the best of us, even though he still believes in Santa: he finds it frustrating. He wants to cut loose.

And in the last big fight scene of the last episode of the last show in the DCAU, he gets to.

Alexandra Erin is a crowdfunded author, commentator, and poet. If you enjoyed this, please tip accordingly.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write.