I believe in Sherlock Holmes. And also complex storytelling.

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I read a lot, and I watch a lot of television and a lot of films, and I currently have a good chunk of spare time to spend reading and watching and subsequently complaining and gushing. Recently, I've had a lot of friends recommend the BBC Sherlock to me, so after weeks of brushing it off, I headed over to Netflix and had my mind blown by how flawlessly constructed everything is, from plot to character dynamics to the most convincingly insane villain I've seen probably since Voldemort. For those of you who haven't seen it, the show is a modern day retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. It's incredibly rooted in that canon, but it's a completely fresh, thrilling take. I think if you love the original stories, you'll be thrilled by the hints and the modern twists, and if you're new to it (I was only familiar with Hound of Baskerville, because the imagery of the hellhound terrified me out of Sherlock stories as a kid), you won't feel behind. I highly, I highly recommend it.

It actually felt sort of refreshing, because-- not to sound pretentious-- it made me think, it made me analyze and want to talk about it, and it never assumed I couldn't put two and two together. So I got to thinking, and was trying to decide what exactly it was doing so right, and what exactly frustrates me the most in fiction. (Not just television, really-- novel writers, I'm looking at you too!)

And so, I give you: The Top 3 Sins Against Intellect Committed by Modern Fiction (aka OMG Seriously We're Not Idiots)

1. Inconsistency
A PSA to all authors, screenwriters, editors, directors, show creators: your audience uses the Internet. If your book/show/film has an obsessive cult following, there's a good chance that everything you do will be cataloged forever via Tumblr gifs and rampant quoting on Twitter and angry debates on Livejournal. When you make a choice, you have to stick to it, because our memory spans longer than the duration of a single episode or chapter, and we're going to notice if you completely throw away character development or any attempts to band-aid a plot gone awry.
Big Offender: Glee-- The Sam Evans/Chord Overstreet's Employment Issue, anyone? That's honestly the tip of the inconsistency iceberg for Glee; major events tend to have little to no long term impact on anyone in Lima.
What I Can Live With: Someone's bound to notice that Gilmore Girls changed Jess Mariano's backstory (his father originally left when he was 15, causing him to act out and get sent to his Uncle Luke; later, he'd never met his father) sometime after he'd been introduced. Or that Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games has a special lake spot she's never told even her best friend about, until he convienently needs to be at that spot in Catching Fire. They're little mistakes someone's going to catch, but it's not as grating as knowing whatever you're watching now might not matter in two weeks.

2. Expecting Me to Take Things at Face Value
Look at this couple. They're so in love. I told you they're in love so they have to be DON'T QUESTION IT! And this character! They're evil! I don't have to tell you why they want to blow up that building THEY'RE EVIL! No. If you want me to buy that your characters are in love, it needs to make sense that they'd fit together. If you want me to be convinced by your villain, tell me his motivation.
Obvious Offender is Obvious: I feel like I'm coping out with this, but seriously, I'm supposed to believe Edward and Bella are True Luv 4 Eva because her blood "sings for him?" Really?
Warily Giving it a Chance: Once Upon a Time (which, for the record, is probably my favorite new show this season) sort laid out who we like, who we don't, who's endgame from the get-go, but they get a pass: a) They're based in fairytales so they're sort of bound to set rules and b) they're slowly but surely giving us reasons, even if we've already got a conclusion. It's not my favorite set up usually, but I think it had to happen here.
Winner: Sherlock has this down to an art. We see every dynamic between every character established at one point and morph into another fuller point. We're never told to accept a caricature or archetype even though we have background for it. Sherlock and Watson are literary pair everyone knows, but the show never expects us to just buy their relationship: it grows and they grow. And Moriarty--I would have accepted Moriarty as a convincing villain based on Andrew Scott's vocal acting alone (SERIOUSLY, CREEPY), but here we have a villain who is not only irredeemably evil, and we've been given a context in which "he's bored" is a totally plausible motivator.

3. Leading Me to Important Points
A Really Important Thing is about to happen and this is a Clue of Significance. You know it's significant because there's a nice tight camera shot on the Clue of Significance or the Really Important Thing was just repeated a fifty times in a 30 minute time span. Look, I know you want to make sure we get it, but chances are, we saw. We're paying attention. Feel free to reveal subtle clues episodes or chapters in advance because at the very least, we'll remember what we should have picked up. Foreshadowing doesn't have to be a dying art.
Seriously, we got it: Oh, Lost. Such a smart, involved show. You really have to pay attention. But if you weren't, by chance, and you missed that there are five important numbers on the island, don't worry, Hurley's going to repeat them a handful of times. And they'll pop up anytime anything numerical happens. And we'll zoom in on them on the hatch. And if they pop up and you don't notice they pop up, someone will probably point out them out. And they're in some combination on every speedometer in every car on the show! (I wish I was joking about that.)
My mind is blown WHAT EVEN JUST HAPPENED!!!!!: Harry Potter is a great example of the power of foreshadowing and letting your audience pick apart the details. Seven books, more than a decade, and JK Rowling is threading clues through the earliest book before we really know what we're dealing with. Also, I have to mention that Sherlock's generally pretty great with this: here's a show that's got solving crimes at it's center, and you generally won't have it all picked out half an hour early, but following along isn't hard, and it all makes sense. And the reveal of who Moriarty is at the end of The Great Game actually made me scream WHAT at the TV.

Here's the thing: I'm not saying that I'm so smart that it takes so much to really impress me. I'm fairly observant and kind of a nerd, and I pick up on things. But I honestly think the majority of people are capable of understanding and following a reasonable, intellectual show without being spoon fed.

In conclusion, seriously, Sherlock. Do it. (I also highly recommend Downton Abbey, which is also British, but actually Victorian.)

But of course, there is always a hamartia AND MINE IS A FAILURE TO AUTOSAVE.

So I'm at this point in my life where I'm at this lull between my life for the past year in my hometown and my life in a new city, where I'm in the process of moving, but not really panic mode because I still have a couple of weeks, THEREFORE this is the time in my life to crackdown on my whole "writing should be a right now, not maybe some day thing" resolution. So I made plans to go to the library and sit in the quiet with my headphones and get things done.
Yeah, I...well. See. I had to plan. Like. There were these things in my head floating around, and I couldn't get them to stop floating, so I had to write them down with little references to like, Lost and Mean Girls in my notebook. And then I had a headache one day, and Adam Lambert was going to be on Ellen anyway, and by time my headache went away, I would have missed Ellen! And I love Adam Lambert, and Ellen gave this underprivileged science student a scholarship and I totally cried!

Basically what I'm trying to say is that I didn't actually sit down and do anything remotely productive until today. So I went to the library, wrote quite a bit that I was fairly proud of, was super into it, and....Word stopped autosaving. It was weird. I couldn't figure out why, so I just went with it and decided I could save manually after i finished this sentence/thought/paragraph/page/etc.

You see where this is going.

Humans have this sort of fatal flaw where we think we're borderline invincible, I think. Like, people generally tend to think that Worst Case Scenario isn't going to happen to them. Logically, they know it can, but in their heart of hearts, they don't believe it. And while I'm as guilty of that as anyone else, I also have a healthy dose of paranoia that keeps it in check and reminds the logical part of me that I am as susceptible to the universe's whims as anyone else. It also has me scrambling to Web MD everytime I so much as cough.

But when it comes to little things, like oh, look they've taken out the outlets at this desk...oh, I don't need to plug in my charger, I'll just sit here anyway. And why isn't Word autosaving oh well I'll save it when I'm done! My computer's really old and tends to shut off without warning when the battery's low, but I'll totally notice and finish with plenty of time!

All of these things were so, so wrong.

In the grand scheme of things, I lost like 800 words, maybe, which is annoying, but not a big deal. I can recreate 800 words. And it's certainly nowhere near a disaster. But it's a nice little reminder that I should probably never try to outsmart technology or situational misfortunates because I'm inevitably not smart enough to do so, I just have a really big ego and think I am.

Aaaaaand now I have 800 words to recreate, so I'll be getting on that now.

Get off of my lawn, YA Lit!: a rant

(The following post has slight spoilers for The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Nothing too revealing, but if you know literally nothing and want to remain knowing literally nothing, skip this.)

Seriously though read this. I cried. Seriously,

Story time: Out of the 18 seniors in my English Literature graduating class, 6 of us did our senior theses on YA lit topics. Our professor tried to dissuade those of us who weren’t planning on going into education from doing those topics, and to consider something “more literary.” She flat out told us she didn’t see much merit in it. My own research discussed how subtext effectively functions for adult readers of The Hunger Games, which sort by nature goes against her point, but I swear I came up with that before she was telling me and my classmates that we should do our papers on Caribbean literature instead.

(I should also say I had another professor who used Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian for our Native American literature class, and it was probably the most effective book we read—not because we weren’t capable of digesting the denser texts, we were, but because even though we’re a bit older than the target demo, it still had and honest, blunt, engaging, funny voice. Never underestimate the power of well-done bluntly honest humor. More on that later.)

As someone who is no longer a teenager, but (I think) still qualifies as a “young adult,” as someone who reads a lot of YA books, as someone who attempts to write fiction for teens and young adults, let me just say that there are so many inherently problematic things with the criticisms of YA lit that actually have nothing to do with the actual books they’re supposedly critiquing. This actually is probably a set of many, many issues I have, rooted in various things I’ll probably go on about in the future, but for now I’ll start with the big one.

That was a really long, expository way of saying: here, have a rant.

So, I recently read John Green’s newest book, The Fault in Our Stars. I think it’s a brilliant book for many spoiler-laden reasons I won’t get into here, and I highly recommend it—it may be my favorite book of his. And I adore everything John Green writes—because John Green writes about incredibly smart teenagers being incredibly thoughtful about the same existential panic that much of culture seems to think is reserved for a mid-life crisis. I love John Green because a common (and utterly absurd, in my opinion) criticism of his books is that his characters are too smart: they use big, sprawling SAT words and memorize the last words of famous people and read a lot and celebrate metaphorical resonance.

Grasping for Adulthood, Pt. 1

I did a myriad of things this weekend that I think sort of constitutes adulthood. Maybe.

1. I filled out paper to rent my very first post-graduation Big Girl Apartment in a Major City that is Not In My Homestate.
Not really adult: One of the deciding factors was that my building is the one closest to the laundry, so I only have to drag my stuff the shortest distance possible. Also I'm like five minutes from a Nordstrom. Love Nordstrom.

2. Bought Actual Kitchen Necessities for my Big Girl Kitchen where I will do Real Cooking that doesn't involve prepackaged boxes. Also fell madly, irreversibly in love with Ikea. (I honestly don't know how I've gone 22 and a half years of existence without setting food in this magical land of home goods but I never want to go back to that dark time.)
Not really adult: I bought things mainly based on how cute the colors were and where they would fit into my decorating theme of French-ish Hippie Meets Lots of DIY Crafting. Also complained about being too tall/old to go play in their magic forest kids thing. Also the highlight of highlights was the chocolate bar I bought. The three chocolate bars I bought.

3. A pre-ordered  copy of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, which comes out today and is probably one of those books that will just make me want to give up because no other books have the right to even try to follow it, is sitting at my favorite indie book store with my name on it. As we were in another city and driving home, I couldn't go pick it up and I DIDN'T hint/ask/borderline demand that my mother drive an extra half hour each downtown and back so I could get. This is the height of maturity, if you ask me.
Not really adult: I did, however, whine a little when the bookstore called me to let me know it was in. Actually, I whined a lot.

I'm trying, y'all. Baby steps.

(But seriously, I know I haven't read TFIOS yet, but I probably highly recommend it. John Green is the epitome of what contemporary American literature should look like. That's your PSA for the day.)

On my attention span and resolutions.

I can't think of a single time in my life where I have seriously sat down and thought about what I want to resolve to do in the new year. Not in a holier than thou, what's the point in resolutions, the idea of a new year, new start is just an arbitrary denotation of the passing of time sort of way-- actually, I do always make resolutions, sort of, I just never think about it or officially declare anything. This is probably because while I'm the kind of person who frequently has grand ideas and expectations for herself, I'm also the kind of person who moves onto the next grand idea within two weeks. While I always have the same general interests, what's getting me excited tends to go in phases. I used to feel like I was annoying and flaky, but I moved on from that.

...Get it? I WAS FLAKY ABOUT BEING FLAKY. LIKE. THAT'S FUNNY!

And really, how am I supposed to predict the course of an entire year to make goals? Last year, I did things I couldn't have ever guessed I would have gotten the chance to do. Last year, I was a photo double and stand in for a film, which a) I didn't know was a thing this time last year and b) provided me with a much cooler ice breaker fun fact than "I'm half-Greek."

My point is that sometimes you don't know what you really want to accomplish until you do it.

My real point is that I suck at follow through, but I'm really good at excusing myself for it.

But this year, I resolve to make resolutions my attention span can handle.

1. Move to a bigger city. This is a cop out, as it's something that's already like a 75% done thing. But whatever there are no rules, there are no resolution police IT'S FINE.

2. Write more. Finish the first draft of Thing I Have That Sort of Resembles A Novel I Think? Edit that draft. Find critique partners. Edit some more. By December, try to have something that wouldn't embarrass me if I were to start querying agents. Query agents. Maybe write a short story and try to get that published. I'm sick of thinking of writing as a someday thing.

3. Keep a blog for at least a month but preferably longer than that. I've had so many failed blog attempts I literally cannot count them anymore. I've tried to music blog, pop culture blog, film blog, fashion blog. Yet, I have had a livejournal that I've kept fairly active for 7 years (stop laughing, I have a lot of feelings), a twitter I use like an on-going conversation with someone who deeply cares about the minute details of my day, and tumblr where I reblog quite possibly everything. So I know I'm capable; I'm just capable of talking about myself, not things that are globally relevant or remote academic. So I'm not going to promise that this blog will be a thing, but I think if I do it with the idea that it doesn't have to be anything other than writing with myself as the character, maybe I'll do it.

4. Finished Lost. I typed that thinking it was going to be a joke resolution, but when I did I realized I was completely serious. I never watched the show when it aired, but the whole series is on Netflix. I'm almost done with season 2, and I'm sucked in enough that I feel like I need to see this through. Breaks for emotional detachment are both acceptable and necessary.

So there. No huge, immeasurable goals for my character or anything, but I am going to do those things! All of those things! For at least a month I will try to do those things. And damn the attention span that says I won't! Internet, I'm counting on you to hold me to this.

(for the record, as I write this, I'm procrastinating writing the scene I said I'd get done today AND the next episode of Lost in my Netflix queue.)