Friday Links: Joe Dante, Horrifying Sounds, and Exorcising Mexico

In the run-up to the beginning of summer, what's been going on in the land of the strange, surreal, bizarre, and horrific?

This stuff, that's what:

• At Ginger Nuts of Horror, Jim Mcleod reviewed Hollywood legend Joe Dante: "Well the appeal of making a low budget film is that there is not so much money riding on it and if we can make a big blockbuster film there are many, many cooks and many people looking over your shoulder because it’s a tremendous amount of money and it is such a responsibility and they want the movie to be as popular as possible and so very often people just try and cut the edges off any make it a bit more (inaudible)everyone will love it, and when you are making a low budget film you don’t really have that problem because you are in and out so fast that it’s like a boulder rolling downhill, there’s really nothing you can do except get it out of the way as you don’t have a lot of time to meddle with the process."
• A most interesting lobby card was presented to us at Zombos' Closet of Horrors.
• Nev Murray reviewed The Spartak Trigger at his Confessions of a Reviewer!!: "Okay, I had a few problems with this book. Problem number one – how to classify it. Which genre to put it in to. I still have no idea. A thriller? A techno thriller? A – I don’t know really. It’s so mixed up."
  
• A mass exorcism was held in Mexico: "Under the guidance of Pope Francis, the Catholic Church took the unusual step of trying to banish demons from an entire country when they held a mass exorcism in Mexico.  Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez and Archbishop Emeritus of Guadalajara presided over a mass exorcism held in Mexico, as Spanish Priest Father José Antonio conducted the ritual himself."
• Terrorphoria gave us a eulogy for Silent Hills: "Nobody knows if Silent Hills would have been incredible, but in the nature of all cancelled projects that look excellent on paper, it was clearly going to be the best, most amazing game that ever existed or ever would."
• John Kenneth Muir expertly deconstructed The Lazarus Effect the way only he can: "The whole movie looks like it has been terminally re-jiggered with, so that it consists, simply, of story set-up and then a series of brutal, but not terribly original murder scenes.  Accordingly, The Lazarus Effect is the worst new horror movie I’ve seen since The Pyramid (2014), one of remarkable promise and utterly terrible, scattershot execution."
• Sean Eaton offered his views on the recent dust-up with the English scientist making a joke that upset all the wrong people, and in his inimitable way, connected it to a Lovecraft collaboration in his trenchantly trenchant R'lyeh Tribune: "The female lab partner in Ashes does not cry when criticized, but the narrator does fall madly in love with her and her with him. “That girl took to chemistry as a duck takes to water!” he remarks, worshipfully.  But the poor woman is later gagged, tied up and locked inside a big mahogany chest by the maniacal Professor Van Allister, a brilliant chemist, (but probably not a member of The Royal Society)."
• Ghost Hunting Theories collected video of horrifying sounds with no clear origin.  I touched on this phenomenon in The Blessed Man and the Witch.
• Here, I solved the mansplaining problem and warned you about Ghanghatas.

Illustration by Tom Sullivan for Call of Cthulhu's S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters.

Mansplaining Problem Solved

A lot of people thought that the If Jane Austen Got Feedback from Some Guy in a Writing Workshop piece was just the balls*.  It's been linked, relinked, commented upon, and generally well-loved.

The comments on the piece were where it lived for me.  Notably, there was some outrage over the inherent "mansplaining" in the piece.  Yes, it was satire, but when readers take it seriously enough to express negative feelings about it, it's not just a knock-knock joke.  It deserves a little analysis.

If you use the term "mansplaining" unironically, you will not enjoy the remainder of this post.

To avoid the mansplaining problem, the solution is to simply segregate your choice of interlocutors so that you, as a confident woman, won't have to listen to the mansplaining.  Whenever presenting a piece for feedback, simply say, "Men need not apply."  It's okay to do that.  No men, no mansplaining.  (You can change the term "Men" here to "Guys" or, if you're so inclined, "Dudebros" to really make an impact.)  If the 21st century has taught us anything, it's that it isn't the value of the information presented that matters, but the gender, race, age, and political viewpoint of the presenter.  Choose who you communicate with wisely, and speak your truth as bravely as you can manage.

Failing that, there are publishers who will cater to you.  It's all good.

What follows will be some offensive mansplaining about related issues.  This is your trigger warning.
My years of employment in the publishing industry have taught me something that should be self-evident to anyone who has worked in or run a business, but is not because the truth is ugly and shitty and hurtful: businesses exist to make money.  This is especially true for publishers.  The vast, vast, vast majority of them care about how much money they can make from publishing your book, and that's it.  Very little else matters.  Including your gender.  And your color.  And your sexual orientation.  These qualities are only important insofar as they affect marketing.  If publishers aren't publishing your books, it's because they don't think they can sell your books.

Isn't the demand for a carve-out to cater to your particular needs an admission that you can't succeed any other way?  Do you really want any success you might achieve to be directly attributed to some kind of affirmative action for writers?  Don't you want to compete?

Extra bonus content about writing workshops:
I did writing workshops as an undergrad decades ago, and I won't do them again.  The best way to get better at something isn't to submit your work to a committee, but to do it over and over again until you've done it right.  That doesn't mean you should publish every piece of deathless prose you ever write: it means that you need to do a lot of reading and writing and critiquing and self-critiquing before you achieve competence as a writer.  That's just the beginning: do you really want to be just competent?  You really do have to read.  A lot.  And you have to do it with both eyes open and find out what you like about what you've read and figure out why you liked it and examine it to determine why it worked so well and how you can do it yourself in your own way.  Over and over and over again.  Some of it's unconscious, some of it isn't.  Cultivate mindfulness in reading.  Then do the same for writing.  Easy-peasy.  Anyone can do it, right?

*"The balls" is a dudebro (that is, male) term for something that is impressive.  As in, "Yo, that patriarchal way you mansplained your position to that chick who asked you a question was the balls!"