I’ve been using Scrivener for my latest project. I’m still in in trial period, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to buy it. It wouldn’t be useful to me if I hadn’t recently come around on outlining. “Outlining’s boring!” I used to say, “I want to get to the meat.” I didn’t want my plotting to be predictable, formulaic.

Funny thing is, I’m approaching the writing much the same way as I always have. I’m writing linearly, one scene after another. What outlining is doing, though, is helping me anticipate character problems, particularly problems of motivation. I’m liking the idea of addressing those things before the first draft is ever finished.

So anyway, I exported it for the first time in awhile. I thought I was something like 50 pages in. Turns out, I’m nearly 80. Whoops. That’s okay, though. Feels good to know it has legs.

I don’t want to say too much about it, but I can be cryptic: it’s not YA; it’s set in the future, in a place I’ve never been; it involves stuff I learned about in my philosophy classes in college.

(But Phoebe, you might say, that could be anything! To which I’ll only laugh. I’d wink, if I didn’t look totally awkward while doing so.)

—

In more important news, I really want someone to buy me this Lego set for Christmas:

Tiny robot! Kawaii!

There’s been a lot of complaining about this Lego line on the interwebs, but I actually think it’s pretty awesome. Not the complaining (“no creativity,” Jezebel? It’s no less complex than your average licensed lego line, and imaginative play with tiny adorable robots and dolls is still creative), but the toys themself. When I was a kid, the “girl” legos all featured women in bikinis lounging on poolsides while waited on by mustached hired help. Oh, and horses. This set features robots, tree houses, ATVs, bunnies, women as business owners, women as vets, women mowing the lawn. No horses, but there are plenty of bunnies and puppies. So it’s a little pastel–so there are lots of cute animals. I liked those things as a kid. A lot of modern boys and girls do too, I’m sure. We shouldn’t put down traditionally girly things just because we also like traditionally butch things like spaceships. That’s not feminist, either.

Santa, if you’re listening, I’d also like the Lego Friends house. Also some wind dancer ponies. And a light saber.

You've been warned, sweetie.

As you probably know, I’ve been worried about Doctor Who this season. Many of my concerns focused on female characters. Despite some very well-written episodes, the sexual politics felt a bit feminist fail to me. Now that the season’s played out, I’m not sure if I can really revise my view of Amy. After all, one major plot resolution hinged on the Doctor deciding to call her by her married name–despite the fact that Amy herself has never stated a preference for that name Williams.

But after last night’s finale, I know I’ll keep watching. Why?

Because I fucking adore River Song.

As I’ve written about before, I wouldn’t be a Whovian if it weren’t for River. I’d seen a few episodes here and there before, but it was “Silence in the Library”/”The Forest of the Dead” that got me really, truly, and inextricably hooked. I loved the idea of a timey-wimey love story playing backwards–like Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, but more fundamentally science fictional. And in the place of a patient and passive artist, we got River–brilliant, iconic. It felt clear to me from the outset that she was a bad-ass meant to be the Doctor’s equal.

I think part of me has always been waiting for an anti-heroine to love, a sort of female Han Solo. But River is even better; she’s a female Indiana Jones. An academic! A professor! Be still, my heart!

I can't be the only one planning a River-in-academic-regalia cosplay, can I?

Initially, I wasn’t sure if I was happy with River’s story this season. She was pretty solidly fantastic through most of last season, but season 6 saw her Poochied in the form of Mels Pond and entering graduate studies “to find a good man.” And I could understand io9′s reaction to “The [squee!] Wedding of River Song”:

So in order to get River to restart the universe and set things right, the Doctor has to marry her — you’ll notice the Doctor never says he loves her, and he makes fun of her for saying she loves him. Soon afterwards, the Doctor tells River, “I don’t want to marry you.” And then, right before he does marry her, he tells her, “You embarrass me,” and he genuinely seems to be full of loathing for her in that moment. During the actual quickie wedding ceremony, River asks, “What am I doing?” and the Doctor replies, “as you’re told.” Awwww… so romantic. Finally, the Doctor tells her, “Now you’re the woman who marries me,” as if she’s won the jackpot.

I found those aspects of the episode difficult to watch. River seemed so dependent on the Doctor, so obsessive, so unhealthy. And selfish, too; the Doctor’s frustration with River centers on how magnanimous she isn’t. She’d sooner destroy the universe than deal with the loss of him.

“They ruined her this season,” my husband said, a sentiment that I’ve heard echoed across the Internet. But then I thought a little bit about timey wimey stuff and realized . . . that’s the point.

The River Song we saw in “Let’s Kill Hitler” and “The Wedding of River Song” is the youngest (non-infant) River we’ve ever seen. She acts like a petulant child with an unrequited crush because that’s precisely what she is.

One of my biggest complaints with Amy this season has been a lack of permanent growth. Every time she seems to develop as an independent woman, she gets retconned back to the status quo. Sure, there have been changes since Season 5 Amy, but they’ve been slight. Again and again, I’ve felt like her advancement was been thwarted or muddled.

But that’s not the case for River.

It feels, of course, like quite the opposite–it feels like we’re watching a strong woman unravel to a mentally unstable little girl. But that’s because her story is being told roughly backwards. Of course she’s a little unbearable now. She’s young, naive, and, worse, spent the first years of her life being brainwashed into a psychopathic killer.

The Doctor and Amy and Poochie Show

But every instance we’ve seen of later-era River has been awesome. She’s a femme fatale, a warrior, an academic. She’s got sex appeal (and I must admit that Alex Kingston’s chemistry with Matt Smith is some of the best on television ever) as well as depth. When we first–and finally–meet her, she’s mellowed. There’s a sadness to her. We know she’s a woman who has seen and experienced loads. But she’s still brilliant. And, more, her relationship with the Doctor seems to have touched her, changed her. Once she was selfish, destroying universes for her love-now she makes the ultimate sacrifice, not just for him, but for others, as well.

You know, I suspect the Doctor feels frustrated with young River, too. We see it in the episode, the way he loses his temper with her, the way he sneers about not wanting to marry her. But ultimately,  he realizes that he must trust her. She may be half-formed, but she’s still the woman he’ll come to know later–the woman he (and we) have come to love.

And it’s an injustice, sure, when we learn that River has taken the fall for not murdering the Doctor. But unlike Amy, whose decisions are often made for her by the men in her life, River chose this. Her wishes are stated explicitly, way back in “The Forest of the Dead,” when the Doctor offers to rewrite time to correct her death:

I don’t think River’s been perfectly written, of course. I think a lot of young River’s traits are ones that were problematic in Amy–traits that highlight the attitudes Steven Moffat revealed in that 2004 interview in The Scotsman:

 We don’t, as little boys, play at being married – we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile women are out there hunting for husbands. …

So River enters academia in search of the “good man” that she loves. And she’s all for the wedding that the Doctor initially resists–she’s so desperate to marry him that she’ll risk losing him just to be wed.

But it’s difficult to read these traits as anything but youthful flaws, when held up to the River who we know comes later. She’ll inevitably grow into a strong, sharp, independent woman, even as she’s a woman motivated and moved by love. We know this is the case, of course, because we’ve already seen it happen.

This picture still makes me squee.

Some bloggers–like Charlie Jane Anders–are saying that River’s storyline is over, finished. After all, we know who she is now, and what she’s done. But there are still stories we haven’t seen (what? You actually believed the Doctor when he said he’d seen Easter Island and Jim the Fish? Pshaw. The Doctor lies), and we know that River and the Doctor spend their nights together (hot). And I’d be so sad to see her go now, just as she’s growing into herself, just as she’s finally found her husband, her match.

I want to see her go ice skating on the Thames. I want to see the singing towers of Darilium. I want to see the Doctor in a new haircut and suit (and body? after the fall of the Eleventh, perhaps?) come to her and cry and give her his screwdriver. I want to see the role she plays in the silence that must fall, and how she learns his name (my theory? she’s the one who asks the question, “Doctor who?” And the silence that falls is River‘s silence, the one we’ve already seen, in a certain library). Now that we’ve seen how her story begins and ends, I want to see all the fiddly middle bits, the romantic stuff, the meat. River’s too wonderful to give her up now–just as she’s getting good.

Spoilers. Clearly. Also long and ranty. Probably also clearly.

I’m upset with Doctor Who. I wish I could say that this is solely for apolitical reasons. Oh, they figure into it. I think the storytelling lately has been painfully contrived and the plotlines largely don’t stand up to Fridge Scrutiny and why was Mels so awkwardly retconned into a show that’s usually so fantastic about continuity and why have River even regenerate if you’re only going to let her use that power once or twice and why tell the audience you’re going to kill Hitler then just leave him locked in a closet and does anyone really think the Doctor staring at screens over and over again is all that ominous? These things bother me. But I’m also bothered by the way River Song has been becoming less and less awesome, to the point now where she only became an archaeologist because she was ISO a “good man” (WTF? I guess we should count our blessings that she’s not a “PhT” as in “Putting Hubby Through”) and have been increasingly frustrated with Amy, too. So I can’t really deny it; I’m disappointed in Doctor Who as a woman, a feminist. I thought it was an awesome feminist show, and now I’m beginning to suspect that it’s not, and that makes me sad.

When Steven Moffat began his stint as show-runner, I was very, very optimistic. Like every other viewer of Doctor Who, I loved “Blink” and “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead.” In fact, I was particularly psyched about the introduction of River Song, a time traveler traveling in the reverse of the Doctor who seemed perhaps to be his equal romantically and intellectually. After several seasons of women pining after the Doctor–and one with a woman who didn’t, but who who had all of her character growth erased by the end of her run–I was ready for some wonderful, complex, capable ladies.*

Amelia I loooooove you.

And in the beginning, Moffat gave us one very promising girl: young Amelia Pond, adventurous, skeptical, brilliant.

And then Amelia grew up. And then Amelia became Amy.

For a long time, I clung to my optimism. After all, Amy looked awesome. And she was . . . impulsive! But I ignored the niggling feeling I had that I didn’t really know Amy. Because Amy was Amelia! And she looked awesome!  And she was . . . impulsive!

These concerns grew, unnamed, as I watched certain features of Amy develop. Namely, her passivity. She’s led blindly through a forest. She’s told that she must be “straightened out” to marry Rory by the Doctor. She’s locked in a box and guarded for two thousand years by her fiance. Hmm.

Sorry, Amy. I tried.

It took me a long time to finally pinpoint this discomfort. It wasn’t until we discovered that she’d been trapped and pregnant for half a season and was waiting for Rory and the Doctor to save her that I realized what it was: other than Amy’s propensity for getting herself into trouble, I felt like I had no sense of who she was at all.

I could go on about this, but this post by Lindsay Miller from Tigerbeatdown pretty much covers all of my thoughts about why Amy is a problematic character. On the rare occasions that she does save the day, she generally does it by thinking about a dude. Much more frequently, she’s a flighty damsel. Though we’re told that she’s the same person as Amelia, a bossy, demonstrably artistic, adventurous little girl, this isn’t often reflected in the woman she became. I’d say that she was sassy or adventurous, too, but these traits are treated like a bit of a joke by the men she travels with, her husband, and the Doctor, and so it’s not really very satisfying for me to watch, as a woman who was hoping explicitly for some awesome ladies.

This week’s episode, “The Girl Who Waited,” kind of got my hopes up. In it, Amy is stuck in different timestream from Rory and the Doctor. And it seems that in the time between her getting stuck, and her getting rescued–thirty-six years!–she does not just wait passively.

In fact, she becomes completely bad ass.

Eschewing the romantic ideal of just waiting for her man, she instead learns to battle her robot attackers. She grows as a warrior, and as an intellectual–she reprograms one robot and renames it after her husband; she builds a sonic screwdriver; she determines the rules of her world and then bends them to her will. She’s not happy, surely (she calls her life “hell”) but, God, she’s totally awesome.

I would love to cosplay Older!Amy. She’s the kind of lady for me–the kind of woman you could totally imagine little Amelia Pond growing into.

When she’s discovered by Rory and the Doctor, they find that she’s no longer so fond of the Doctor. In fact, she refers to him as a “raggedy man” and “the voice of God” and seems very ticked off about all of this waiting to be saved and waiting generally. Hey! Anger at being ditched! That’s not a response we’ve seen from Amy before–but definitely one that makes sense, given what little we know about her character.

We see Older!Amy wrestling with the return of her husband. Should she put on make-up or not? Should she open herself up to him, or is it too late for that? Then they share a laugh, and it seems that Amy makes a decision. When the Doctor suggests that they rescue Amy from her past, rewriting her out of existence, she says no–quite clearly and definitively:

He wants to rescue past me from thirty-six years back which means I cease to exist. Everything I’ve seen and done dissolves. Time is rewritten . . .. I’ll die, and another Amy will take my place, an Amy who never got trapped in two streams, an Amy who grew old with you, and she, in thirty six years, won’t be me . . .. Take me with you. You came to rescue me, so rescue me.

But her husband’s very first response to the discovery of Older!Amy–before they ever discuss, you know, saving her–is that he and the Doctor need to go back in time and stop her isolation from ever happening. Even after Amy’s impassioned advocacy for her own continued existence, the Doctor and Rory both insist that her isolation is “wrong.” Rory brings up the fact that he promised to protect her; apparently his guilt is worth more than Amy’s desire to continue existing. Younger!Amy is referred to as “our” Amy. Really, to these two men, there’s no choice between which woman is worth saving. No matter how much the woman who lived through these experiences wants to survive (to go travel, perhaps, through the universe), the younger woman must win.

It’s interesting to see how this plays out with Rory. He seems to feel some genuine conflict, though he’s disgusted, perhaps, that such an old woman (“Old enough to be my mother!” he exclaims in apparent disgust) would flirt with him–which I find odd for a series which has featured several romances between a 900-year-old man and various twenty-something women and since Rory himself has 2,000 years of life experience on his wife, albeit as a plastic Roman Centurion. This experience roughly parallels what Amy experiences in the Two Streams quarantine facility, ironically–but it’s yet to be suggested, even a season later, that Rory be “spared” this experience. It’s tragic, yes; it’s also irrefutably a part of who he is.

Early in the episode,  the Doctor says of the other inhabitants of the quarantine facility: “I think they’re happy to be alive. Better than the alternative.” Older!Amy’s actions are consistent with this. Even when she agrees to save her younger self (during a genuinely stirring and very well-acted scene) because of her love of her husband, she insists that she be taken along, too. She wants to survive, desperately, fiercely. The Doctor seems to realize that this will of hers to live is the only way to convince her to save her younger self. And because he’s never truly considered saving the old version of her, he lies. He tells Older!Amy that she has a chance of surviving so that she’ll help save her young doppelganger. Then, when she comes to board the TARDIS, he slams the door in her face. It’s only when the truth becomes apparent that she nobly sacrifices herself, but by then the choice isn’t simply between her survival, or the survival of her younger self, but rather between their mutual death or the survival of her younger self.

So much for respecting a woman’s right to choose. Every single aspect of this plot and every action of the Doctor conspire to invalidate Older!Amy’s choices, desires, and personhood. What matters is that she be spared, even if she doesn’t want to be spared–because the men, of course, know better than she do about her very life.

In this episode, the Doctor acts in a way that’s in keeping with his recent behavior, but is still insanely maddening. He’s paternalistic. He’s condescending. He lies. He rejects Amy’s right and autonomy over her experiences outright.

Younger!Amy and Rory’s actions aren’t much better. Near the end of the episode, despite the fact that we both have seen and been told that Amy already knows how to disable the robots via feedback, Younger!Amy is almost instantly incapacitated. Then she’s carried, unconscious, in Rory’s arms onto the TARDIS.

It’s only Older!Amy who is anything new. This is the first time we’ve seen concrete, verifiable growth in Amy-Pond-the-adult. It’s also the first time it’s been suggested that she’s a certifiable genius. Karen Gillan is able to stretch her acting chops like never before. She fights. She invents. She hacks. She flirts. Despite the fact that she’s been hurt, she’s still indisputably a whole, capable person–in precisely the way that our Amy has never been.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t agree with me, Gentle Reader. I’ve fought on metafilter about this already. My husband thinks I’m imaging things. I honestly think it’s difficult to recognize these aspects of “The Girl Who Waited” because this episode was so much better written than what we’ve seen recently. Other than a bit of idiot plotting at the beginning, and a reliance on a giant magnifying glass as a plot point throughout, the script and dialog feels sounder than most of what we’ve seen this season. But Amy’s storyline is really more of the same. The woman has to be saved. Worse, the woman doesn’t really know what’s good for her–to the point where she has to be manipulated and tricked into making the right decision.

I understand television’s need to protect the status quo. But Rory has been allowed to grow, from passive near-cuckold into a hero. In previous seasons, Donna, Martha, and Rose all underwent very palpable growth as their experiences changed their goals, lives, and desires (even if Donna was pretty much royally screwed over in the end). Now that I’ve had a more concrete vision of what Amy could be dangled in front of me–and then snatched away by male characters and writers who say they know better–damn it, I want a sign of that woman on the actual show. I want some sign that Amy can grow into a brilliant, kick ass person even as she stands by her husband’s side.

Because otherwise? If Amy stays as she is today–if the show continues to value damselship over competence, raw youth over experience, passivity over self-sufficiency–if Amy is always the problem and almost never the solution?

Then I’m done.

*On first viewing, I did not much like Rose, and while I highly respected Martha, I felt that the conclusion of Donna’s plotline diminished her. I still think Donna got screwed, but I now appreciate the previous companions much more as strongly drawn ladies with clearly defined motivations. Especially in comparison with Amy. Ugh.

Shut Out by Kody Keplinger
Recommended.

Second books can be tricky. Even when authors produce standalone novels, eschewing the literary world’s current hunger for sequels and series, they have a difficult task ahead of them: producing work that’s more than just a retread of earlier success. In some ways, I know that comparisons between Kody Keplinger’s first novel, The DUFF, and her second, Shut Out, are inevitable. It’s not just their bright, girly covers that tie them together but thematics (a teenage girl’s ownership of her sexuality) and character (the poor family of origin with a complicated past; the control-freak girl; the supportive friends). But, while Shut Out does occasionally falter in much the same way that The DUFF did, it also stands quite capably on its own merits.

First for the bad: I thougt that the opening chapters of Shut Out suffered from the same sometimes-awkward writing that I noticed a year ago when reading The DUFF. The dialog in both begins overly deliberate and sometimes clunky; there are too many awkward physical descriptors and said bookisms. But you’d be wrong to judge either book on these first chapters. As Keplinger warms up, so do her prose stylistics, becoming more natural and confidently voiced. More, I was quickly enveloped in the story.

I suspect quite a bit of what appeals to me about Keplinger’s books is how familiar the lives of her protagonists feel. Shut Out brings us another working class family. Lissa lives at home with her dad, who has been wheelchair-bound since the car accident that also took away her mother, and with her older brother, who has dropped out of graduate school to help out at home. The men of her family are fans of the local high school football team, so when Lissa brings home Randy, a high school football star, he quickly becomes a part of the family. There’s something real, tender, and sad about the way the men in this book bond while Lissa makes them food and mothers them.

This is the first of Lissa’s many foolish and real choices in Shut Out. Like Bella Swan, she falls into a caretaker role that isn’t entirely fair. However, it was clear to me that this domesticity wasn’t necessarily meant to be a positive trait, but rather a realistic reaction to feeling motherless and adrift and to having one’s needs ignored by the grown-ups around her.

People generally ignore Lissa’s needs. Her boyfriend, for example, is so embroiled in a rivalry with the high school soccer team that he abandons their trysts entirely to play pranks with his teammates. Lissa finally gets fed up—she proposes a sex strike against the boys on both teams until they agree to abandon the rivalry entirely.

This sex strike is the central premise of Shut Out, and its selling point (it’s a retread of the Lysistrata). As Lissa unites with the other girls, she begins to struggle against the pressures and stereotypes they all face. I found this message more organic and interesting than the one found in The DUFF. Honestly, I never entirely believed Keplinger’s first book’s message that “we all feel like DUFFs sometimes”—far more convincing to me was the message here that “teenage girls face all sorts of sexual pressures and deserve to be in control of their sexual lives despite the schizophrenic attitudes of our society toward female sexuality.” It’s a messier, and less optimistic theme, maybe, but it rang truer for me. As in our world, in the world of Shut Out some girls do it and some girls don’t. But nearly all of them struggle against their reputations.

But far from being a merely didactic undercurrent, this message actually provides a dramatic reveal about one of the characters—one I didn’t see coming at all, and which spurred me to page back through the book and examine it in this new light. It’s a neat little narrative trick, and one with Keplinger utilizes deftly, clearly illustrating her control over her plot and characters.

As the story progresses, Lissa continues to stumble forward. Again, she’s a protagonist who often makes terrible choices, who is often blind to the truth in front of her, who is sometimes selfish and stubborn if only to cover up her own weaknesses. Like Bianca from The DUFF, she suffers from certain control issues—but they’re more fully fledged here, and realistically problematic. I found Lissa to be a terrifically messy heroine. Her mistakes might not be fun for teenagers to read, if only because they likely hit a little too close to home, but they’re certainly true to life. She’s struggling—with her mother’s death, with her father’s disability, with change and with sex and with growing up.

Her problems aren’t all solved in the end, although Keplinger again concludes on an optimistic note. We’re given the impression that Lissa is a work-in-progress—as we all are, really. And as a reader who craves honesty even from books emblazoned with neons and pinks, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Disclosure: This book was generously provided by the publisher for review purposes. I’m also personally acquainted with the author.

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