Stay Classy, Grand Ole Push 'em Around Party

Today in keeping it classy news, have you guys seen this article? To summarize, conservative donors are pulling funding from a SOUP KITCHEN FOR THE HUNGRY AND HOMELESS and anonymous callers and internet-users are harassing its director as punishment for revealing that Paul Ryan barreled his way into this facility for this fake photo opportunity:

With the recent exodus of moderate Republicans and the notion of "compassionate conservatism" basically in its death throes at this point thanks to the rise of Ayn Rand-ian ruthless self-interest-as-virtue, can you guess the new face of the Republican party? Yep. That's right. A BULLY. Bullying people who give back to their communities and the vulnerable populations they serve. Check. Bullying coal miners to miss a day's work without pay to attend a "mandatory" high profile Romney/Ryan rally. Check. Bullying your own employees, as have the billionaire Koch brothers (you know, the guys who bankrolled the "grassroots movement" Tea Party), to vote Republican next month or "face consequences." Check. And finally, bullying freaking SINGLE MOMS during the prime-time debates. (Of ALL the people you could choose from to pick on? Really? You, Romney, who just stated your passionately flip-flopped anti-choice platform, decide to pick on women who chose to have and be there for their kids, even if they knew the kid's other parent wasn't going to be around and that they'd have to do the hardest job in the world alone?! REALLY?!)

Friends, family and readers who support the GOP and/or the Romney-Ryan ticket, for the love of whatever god or creed you hold to, please hold your party representatives accountable for this sort of behavior. Please let them know that you will not stand for it. That you expect better of them. That those who claim to be patriots as they stand with one booted foot on the neck of their fellow Americans are anything but. They won't listen to those of us they know aren't voting for them. But even with loyal Republican party operatives like this guy doing his part to throw the election by dumping Virginia state new voter registration forms in the trash, I imagine party leaders will damn well listen to you if enough of you speak up.

LESS SUB, MORE TEXT: A Queer Tale of Buffy Fandom and Fan Fiction

I wrote this, my very first feature story, in 2007 for The Hipster Book Club, which like so many other great sites, has since been poofed off the face of the internets. So I'm reposting it here. Still another five years later, I still haven't written or read any W/T fanfic. But to say that this fandom experience shaped my core values as a writer is—well, kind of an undersell. 

Update, January 2013: this article was required reading at UC San Diego during Fall Quarter 2012, for an undergrad Communications class studying user-generated web content and fan fiction communities. In December 2012, I did a brief Q&A with the class via Skype about fan fiction, fan communities, and the state of queer visibility on TV. So awesome!

LESS SUB, MORE TEXT
A Queer Tale of Buffy Fandom and Fan Fiction
By JULIA WATSON

Before the summer of 2000, I had never heard of fan fiction. A recent graduate of UC San Diego's undergraduate writing program, I spent that summer in self-imposed exile in the middle of nowhere, an hour east of San Francisco. I was three hundred miles from my family and friends, living away from my hometown and completely alone for the first time in my life. I had left with the intention of finding, in three months of blessed solitude, a way of recovering and unwinding from the combined chaos of school, work and my youthful demons. I was resting. I was writing. And I was watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Watching the show started innocently enough—just a little background noise to keep me company while I ate dinner. But the more I watched, the more hooked I was. The show offered a variety of draws: tight, snappy writing; direction which was unusually nuanced for television of its time; and feature creatures who stood as metaphors for the cultural and internal demons battled in the very scary world of everyday life. But most notably, the show featured a cast of characters with whom I fell head over heels in love.

There was Buffy, the heroine: righteous, glib-tongued, and unfailingly committed to saving the world. There was former librarian and mystical mayhem expert Giles, her charmingly tweedy British mentor. One can't forget Xander, the doofy but steadfastly loyal boy-next-door. And there was my favorite, Willow, the insecure, nervous-babble-prone computer geek. Willow, the bumbling novice witch. Willow, the budding lesbian.

Alyson Hannigan as Willow.
Photo property of Twentieth Century Fox.

Initially, I had been excited enough just to find a relatable character in Willow because she was nerdy and interested in metaphysics. But gay, too? It was enough to make my bookwormy, astrology-studying, dykey self all but plotz with delight.

Openly gay since 15-years old, I was used to getting my cinematic kicks in the subtext. Gay folks are experts at this because, up until recently, there were no gay folks or gay relationships on TV. Subtext was all we had. As a wee queer thing, I crushed on Nancy McKeon, who played the smoky-voiced babybutch Jo on The Facts of Life. Jo's tension-laden interaction with snooty, preppy Blair made my babydyke head spin with mischievous, if slightly clueless delight.

As I grew up and started to figure things out, there was the odd film about lesbians. But there were virtually no happy endings for gay women in the movies. They all somehow came to similar bad ends. They went crazy, went on murderous killing sprees, or ended up dead—often by suicide—or all three: crazy, murderous, and then dead. The film landscape was pretty bleak, and television wasn't much different. Up until Willow and her girlfriend Tara, the only non-tragic "lesbians" I'd seen on TV were of the sweeps variety—straight female characters who tempted the dark side of the force by flirting with and maybe even kissing another girl, only to scamper quickly back to the safety and conformity of heterosexual lovin'.

By the time I finished college, I had seen this enough, and the eye candy novelty of it was beginning to wear thin. I wanted real storylines about women loving one another. I wanted romance. I wanted characters who were actually lesbians! There were plenty of gay boys as regular characters on TV at that point. Sure, they were relegated to snarky celibacy in Bestfriendlandia, but they were here and they were queer. Where were all the gay girls?

So like every other lesbian who watched witchy Willow and Tara lock eyes and hands and wills, telekinetically sealing themselves into a laundry room to keep out the bad guys, I knew by the way they held on to one another longer than necessary that there was more afoot here than mere spellcraft. I saw it coming, but I was prepared for Willow and Tara to turn out to be just another Sweepsbian flash in the pan.

Only they weren't. Over the course of nine episodes, they spent more and more time together. Willow started lying to her friends about where she was spending the night. And the intense way these two were looking at each other while they held hands and "did spells" had increasingly less to do with getting their Wicca on. They were quietly, unobtrusively falling in love. And then they were girlfriends. Officially. Willow had a coming out scene with best pal Buffy and everything.

Amber Benson as Tara.
Photo property of Twentieth Century Fox.

I became more and more starry-eyed over Willow and her shy girlfriend, Tara, utterly delighted and very much aware that I was watching two girls fall in love on television for the first time ever. A big fan of the internet, too, I searched there for more information about my new favorite show. So it was that I stumbled across The Kitten Board, an active fan community dedicated to the Willow/Tara relationship. There I discovered a group of folks who found this couple and their budding romance every bit as magical as I did.

Elsewhere in online Buffy fandom (already the biggest internet TV fandom ever, surpassing the efforts of even the Trekkies), the response to Willow and Tara was less enthusiastic. Buffy websites and message boards were awash with homophobic vitriol directed towards Tara in particular, for "converting" Willow, and calling for "the fat dike [sic]" to be booted off the show. But Willow and Tara were here to stay: Even the show's creator, producers, and writers said so, courageously taking a stand in support of Willow and Tara and gay relationships in general.

I was disturbed by the harsh reaction on the part of some fans, but after six years of being openly gay, I was used to seeing and hearing that sort of ignorant, poorly-spelled drivel. It didn't lessen my excitement about Willow and Tara one iota. I was enchanted—ecstatic even. And I wasn't alone. I threw myself into online Willow/Tara fandom at the Kitten Board with gleeful abandon. We were a group comprised largely of gay and bisexual women from all over the world, but we had our resident lesbros (friendly, mostly non-pervy straight guys), too. For those of us to whom the relationship meant so much, The Kitten became an oasis of calm within Buffy fandom, a safe space to celebrate how amazing it felt to finally see ourselves and our relationships represented week after week on the little screen.

Still, I couldn't help but notice the glaring disparity in the way the Willow/Tara romance played out when compared to the other relationships on the show. Buffy and her boyfriend, Captain Cardboard (Riley), boinked like sex-crazed bunnies, as did Anya and Xander. Even crusty old Giles was seen with a naked woman in his bed around the same time Tara was introduced. Willow and Tara? Months later, still doing "spells."

For an entire season and a half, we never saw them kiss. We never knew when or even if their relationship had been consummated. They flirted tamely. They held hands and exchanged sweet smiles. They danced together at the Bronze like the uncoordinated dorks we knew and loved them to be. But due to strict network censor rules about homosexual content, Willow and Tara's physical relationship was relegated entirely to metaphor and "magic." Their identities as witches became code speak for their being gay. This was a running gag on the show, an example of the kind of tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that made Buffy one of the smartest shows of its time.

Because I was so hungry for gay female visibility onscreen, I happily ate up the metaphors. Certainly, this was further than any other show had dared to go in exploring an onscreen lesbian relationship, and the makers of Buffy were folks well known for dealing with metaphors most exquisitely. They pulled them off in ways that were creative and visually appealing, if lacking in outright smoochies. In the place of a first love scene for our girls, we saw Willow and Tara, mid-spell ritual, lightly stroking each other's arms and chanting breathily—until Willow finally falls back onto strategically placed cushions, writhing and moaning in "magical" ecstasy. It sounds a little silly, even to me. But it was sexy. And it was better than nothing.

But I wanted more. And on The Kitten, there was more. I discovered fan fiction, stories written by fans about their favorite characters, posing new storylines, new scenarios, and oftentimes in the case of Willow and Tara, long awaited, fully-fleshed out love scenes. Some of the folks writing Willow/Tara fanfics were incredibly talented. Others clearly didn't have much experience as writers, but their efforts were heartfelt. Even the poorly written stories were unfailingly interesting in the myriad ways their authors portrayed the emotional and physical relationship between Willow and Tara with less "sub" and more "text."

As a reader, I became fascinated. Here was a group of gay female fans taking matters into their own hands, re-imagining this relationship and what parts of it we as viewers were allowed to see. As a lesbian, I found this incredibly empowering. And as a writer, I found myself thinking I can do this.

By then, my sojourn up north had ended, and I was back in San Diego working part-time jobs and not making as much progress as I liked on my novel. I couldn't seem to connect with my characters in quite the way I wanted. The bulk of what I had on paper at that point was turning out to be more in the way of backstory and lackluster character sketches than useable prose. I was stuck.

I wanted to write something engaging and sexy but lacked the courage to try my hand at erotica. I wanted to imagine my two favorite TV characters finally being given free reign to be sexual with each other. It seemed only natural that these impulses should meet. So I wrote my first piece of erotica—my first fanfic. I called it "Vixens," borrowing one of Tara's lines from the show. She had dubbed Willow a vixen, flirtatiously calling the redhead out as temptress. It was one of the sexiest onscreen moments the girls had ever shared.

As a writer, I used that first story to expand on what I had been allowed to see, but also to play with the idea that as a viewer, I had long been teased by the use of "spells" in the place of real love scenes. What started as a bit of musing about how Willow and Tara might have consummated their relationship quickly turned into twenty or so pages of Tara teasing and tempting Willow to get over her sexual "shyness." Yes, she used magic. But she used sexier magic, and she used wiles and wickedness, too. I included several steamy scenes of foreplay that were suddenly cut off, leaving my borrowed heroines aching for more. There was even a semblance of a plot, and plenty of fun bringing the other characters into the background, trying on their various voices for size. And in the end, there was the gloriously frisky lesbian lustfest that we never got to see onscreen.

Satisfied with my virgin effort into the genre, I posted my story on the fan fiction board at the Kitten, using the penname "Dumbsaint," a nod to my favorite obscure Kerouac quote. The response floored me. I was a hit. I had instant, self-proclaimed fans. I had folks requesting permission to repost the story elsewhere on other fan fiction sites. People actually thought my work was good—and they weren't shy about saying so or asking for more. For a young, frustrated, unpublished writer, it was a uniquely gratifying experience. And it was surprisingly easy to write these characters about whom I cared so much.

Willow and Tara in Buffy season 6

I wrote more stories about Willow and Tara, and their fondly imagined sexcapades. My initial efforts after "Vixens" took up where the show would leave off, imagining those spells scenes that I saw onscreen evolving into more physical explorations. I wrote about what their first kiss might have been like. I penned still another version of how they might have consummated their relationship. In some of these stories, I dispensed with plot altogether and just focused on character development along with the romantic and sexy, sensory stuff. I was having more fun as a writer than I'd ever had in my life, and for the first time, I found myself part of a community of other writers who supported and applauded one another's efforts with a uniquely loyal and heartfelt brand of appreciation. We wrote for ourselves and for each other, brought together by our mutual adoration of these characters, and for many of us our shared experience of being gay women in a mainstream culture that often made us feel invisible. Watching the continuing adventures of Willow and Tara every week gave us hope.

So I kept writing. My stories even won a couple of fan awards, though those never meant as much to me as the comments and emails I got from people who enjoyed reading my work. I had an audience that wrote back. The same day that I would finish and post a story, I would receive instant feedback. Any ideas I'd had about what transpired between authors and readers were forever altered. And through the experience, I was developing a wholly new sense of confidence in myself as a writer.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of its sixth season, Buffy made the move from the "family friendly" WB to UPN, a flashier, edgier channel that was gradually allowing the writers and producers a bit more leeway in what they could show on screen. Even so, magic was still the vehicle by which the sexual relationship between Willow and Tara was expressed. The increasingly silly nature of this was not lost on me.

"Once More, With Feeling," the much-celebrated, tongue-in-cheek musical episode of Buffy arrived. In it, Willow and Tara came the closest they had yet to having a real sex scene. At the climax of their sappy love song, Tara falls back on the bed she shares with Willow, as the latter crawls down her body and disappears from the frame. Tara begins to levitate off of the bed, her head thrown back, singing about magic and how Willow makes her "complete." It was clear enough that we were watching them in the act of lesbian sexing. But still with the spells and innuendo!

Unfortunately, the musical episode spelled the beginning of the end for Willow and Tara. Their relationship took a turn as it was revealed that Tara really was, literally, under Willow's spell. The redhead had been magically "erasing" Tara's memories of fights they'd been having about Willow's using magic irresponsibly, and too much. Suddenly, magic wasn't just a metaphor for lesbo loving anymore. Now magic was drugs, and Willow was an addict. The subtext had begun to make its way into some rather alarming territory. The witches broke up, and Willow's life began to spiral out of control. In the fandom, we gnashed our teeth and pined for reconciliation. Lots of fanfic authors, including myself, tried their hand at those kinds of stories.

It was no secret that the show had been planning to explore an "Evil Willow" storyline—the writers had been carefully foreshadowing this arc for years. I was game enough to follow along, sure that I'd be in for a thrilling ride. After all, an alternative universe "evil vampire" Willow had showed up a few times during season three to great comic effect, and those were some of my favorite episodes. I had complete trust in the brilliant writers and in executive producer (and mad genius) Joss Whedon: Willow would venture down the dark road, but in the end, her love for Tara would pull her back. And they'd be together again.

But alarming rumors in the form of spoilers began to trickle down into the fandom: Tara was going to die. Her death would be the catalyst that sends Willow off the edge into evil with a capital "E." Stubbornly, I was one of many fans who insisted that even if Tara did die, they'd find a way to bring her back. Heck, Buffy had already died twice on the show. She'd spent the entire previous summer decomposing underground, only to be magically resurrected by Willow.

Alyson Hannigan as "Evil Willow."
Photo property of Twentieth Century Fox.

Like so many other folks to whom this fictional relationship meant so much, I had faith that the girls would be together in the end. The creepy new undertone to the subtext would be resolved with the show's characteristic brilliance. They'd make it right. I was sure of it. After all, the folks who made Buffy were aware that they had staked out a brave new, positive precedent in the way gay people were portrayed onscreen, and they were proud of what they had achieved with the relationship. Echoing previous statements by executive producer Joss Whedon, one of the show's other writers publicly promised that Tara wasn't going anywhere.

And so it was with mounting horror that I watched the end of the show's sixth season play out. We fans got the Willow/Tara reunion we had hoped for. It was a bit rushed, but for the first time, there was a truly passionate love scene that began with hot and heavy kissing and ended with the girls naked in bed, flushed with loving afterglow. And then there was more kissing. Naked-in-bed-kissing! It was intimate, sensual, and beautiful, and long, long overdue.

So it was especially upsetting when, later in the same episode, Tara is dressing next to the bed in which they'd just made history as well as non-subtexty love, and she is struck by a stray bullet meant for Buffy. She looks down at the bloodstain slowly expanding over her heart, appears puzzled for a moment, and falls to the floor dead.

And she stays dead. The resulting "Vengeance Willow" goes on an evil, murderous rampage, and she is saved in the end not by her love for Tara, but by the selfless love of Xander, a humble male carpenter. And a story about a yellow crayon. The imagery was truly upsetting. Whereas before, the show had always been so cleverly subversive in their use of metaphor, now the "evil, crazy, murderous lesbian" and the world to boot were being "saved" by the newly appointed Jesus figure. And a yellow crayon.

Let's see. Evil and crazy. Check. Murderous. Check. Dead. Check! Where had I seen this before? Oh, yes. Everywhere.

The Kitten board imploded. We gay fans in particular felt misled and betrayed. Willow and Tara were literally all we had in terms of a committed, long-term lesbian relationship on TV. Now they were gone, and to add insult to injury, it had been done in the tritely clichéd manner we were all too accustomed to seeing.

Joss Whedon finally admitted that Tara had been marked for death from the very beginning. But he was puzzled by the sense of betrayal expressed by many of the gay fans. On UPN's "The Bronze," a fan-site often visited by Joss and some of the show's writers, Whedon expressed his indignation at some of this criticism: "I knew some people would be angry with me for destroying the only gay couple on the show, but the idea that I COULDN'T kill Tara because she was gay is as offensive to me as the idea that I DID kill her because she was gay."

Long-running debates ensued throughout Buffy fandom—nowhere more passionately than on the Kitten Board—weighing the value of artistic license against social responsibility in storytelling. Some folks at the Kitten even put together a beautifully-worded Lesbian Cliché FAQ to explain to other fans, the show's creators, and the world at large, just why Willow and Tara had meant so much the show's gay fans and why it hurt so keenly to lose them in the way that we did.

After the smoke had cleared, Tara stayed dead. A few of the writers from Buffy eventually made conciliatory comments to the press in response to the fan outcry, conceding that "maybe" the show had "done something bad." "Maybe" they had unintentionally invoked the old negative clichés. That was as much as the fans ever got by way of any indication that the creators of the show understood how the end of the Willow/Tara storyline, text and subtext alike, read to its queer viewers, and how hurtful that was. In the end, I had to own up to giving the show's creators too much credit; sure, they had shown themselves to be clever, culturally savvy and progressive, but everyone makes mistakes. I was disappointed, but I forgave them and moved on.

Eventually, I was once more able to enjoy the show as much as I ever did, and to revel in my Buffy geekdom with the best of them. It helps that now that there's Showtime's The L Word and cable networks like Logo that feature all gay-themed programming. The queer media landscape has come a long way.

But after Tara died, I stopped writing Willow/Tara fan fiction. I stopped reading it, too. I know there are new stories out there, some of them written by friends who are incredibly talented writers and featuring alternate endings for season six with continuations of Willow and Tara's story. I've heard many of these are quite good. I'm not ready to read them yet, even five years later, but chances are that I will someday. Just knowing that those stories are out there gives me a sense of comfort; it means that there are still fans out there with heart enough to keep rewriting, re-imagining, and expanding upon the realm of the possible, and on what we're allowed to see. If I learned anything from the experience of participating in Willow/Tara fandom, and as an author of fanfic, it was that stories and characters belong as much to the people who love them as the folks who originally created them.

And if you ask me, that's still magical.

(Reposted from The Hipster Book Blub, October, 2007.)

Top Ten Horrifying Questions Straight Men Ask Lesbians

I’m not sure why it is that some straight dudes think it’s okay to ask women they don’t know prying, prurient questions just because we share a love of all things lady-shaped, but it happens  alarmingly often. C’mon, gay ladies and gentledykes—we’ve all been there. A new acquaintance corners you, and before you can click your heels and say “There’s no place like home,” you’re so embarrassed for the guy that you wish you could disappear all Wicked Witch of the West-like into a puddle on the floor. Or maybe unleash upon him the unmitigated wrath of your army o’ hoppity, flying monkeys. 

I’ve got mad love for all my lesbros out there, but some guys need to be taught a lesson. Literally. We’re talking Lesbians 101. So for the next time you find yourself in just such a situation, I humbly offer the following handy-dandy answers to keep at the ready:

10.  How do chicks do it? I mean, how can a woman possibly sexually satisfy another woman?
If you even had to stop and think about this then I have some really bad news for you: she’s faking it. 

Can you move a little to the left? Chopped just came on!

9.     Do lesbians like to sleep with men?

Yes, just not in a Michael Jackson kind of way. I mean… Um…

8.   Can I watch?
For your own personal safety, I must regretfully decline your request. Gay cooties, you know. They’re catching enough in casual conversation, but if you were to actually witness lesbians in the act of loverliness… we’re talking some serious Liberace shiz in store for you, dude. Tatted lace doilies and raised pinkies while drinking from tea cups! With real tea in them.

7.     What happened to make you the way you are?
I was 11. So was she. She walked past me on the playground and I caught a whiff of warm skin and shampoo. BOOM! Lesbian. Kind of like a drive-by gaying, or instant gay coffee. Just add butterflies.

6.     Yeah, but how did you know that you were gay?
The hardest part was the question and answer portion of the program. I mean, I knew I had the talent competition licked, but when the judges asked me who I’d rather make out with, Katee Sackhoff or Michelle Rodriguez… I froze. But all ended well. I sailed through the audition and into the ranks of lesbiankind. Lickety split.

5.     In a lesbian relationship, which one of you is the man?
The equation goes something like this:

(Length of left middle finger – length of left index finger) + number of sports teams you played on in high school) divided by (number of Indigo Girls CDs + cats owned)

And voila! You have your man number. The one with the biggest man number is contractually obligated to pay for dinner and hold the door open, and the other one has to pretend to have a headache at least once a week during the sexual overtures of the Manbian.

Oh honey, can't we just watch Rizzoli and Isles tonight?

4.     If you like sex toys shaped like penises, why not just sleep with a man?
Right. Because if Newt Gingrich strapped on a silicone vagina, you’d be ALL OVER that shit! No?! Ryan Reynolds? The Dos Equis guy? How about the guy from those Calvin Klein underwear ads? Really? Still a no go? Huh. Mayhap there really is more to sexual orientation than meets the genitals.

3.   But if you’ve never had sex with a man, how do you know for SURE that you’re a lesbian?
Clearly you speak from experience and are an expert in the art of man love. Tell me, how many other men did you have to sleep with before you were completely sure that you were straight?

Manly man love: not for sissies

2.   Will you do a threesome with me and my wife/girlfriend?
Does your name rhyme with Mad Wit?

1.   If you could take a pill that would magically make you straight, would you?
No, but if they make a gay pill that finishes up where my gay root dropped me on my ass and left me only half-finished, can you let me know? I would really like to talk to someone about my free gift of rhythm, interior design savvy, and keen fashion sense. I think there was a little mix up with my fairy gaymother on that one, ‘cause I’m still waiting on—wait, are you still there? Hello?
  
*Originally posted at OurChart.com in 2007.

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa Maxima. With Monsters On Top.

All this week I've been trying to spin story threads like cotton candy, and ending up instead with sticky sugar flurf stuck all up in my hair and the paper cone jammed in my ear. Why? It took me a few days to figure it out. And the long and short of it is? At the risk of sounding like a pretentious asshole, I have fucked up. I have angered the muse.

Screw you guys. Meaning me guys. She has packed up her legos and gone home. (My muse is an eight-year-old girl in combat boots and with a crooked front tooth, who speaks in pirate when she gets excited.)

I get why she's mad. Making up stories used to be fun. We used to do it just to entertain ourselves. And as I get closer and closer to having my fingers pried from their death grip on my MFA program, the pressure and expectations I've been putting on us and the stories we make up together have been  ratcheted up steadily higher. And higher. After all, all this time and money and sacrifice and scary amounts of debt... all riding on the hope that maybe, just maybe, we might learn to be really freaking good at this. Good enough that someone, even lots of someones, might start paying us to do this, so we can have more time to make up still more stories and there are only six months yet of paid access to  full run of the island of misfit toys and holy crap we're running out of TIME!

!!!

Until alluva sudden? Yeah. All stress and no fun. All work and no play. And therein lies the problem. 'Cause all work and no play is no way to work creatively. And I know this. But still, I lost sight of it for a while. And here I am, scratching my head and trying to figure out how best to make amends.

Dear Crooked Tooth, I'm sorry I acted like a butt. As my first peace offering, I solemnly swear that I will make time every week to play. No matter how busy I think I am. In good faith, I have begun leaving a trail of monster-shaped bread crumbs leading back to the door of our clubhouse. Please see Exhibit A:

Exhibit A, brought to you by the letters C-H-O-M-P-A & Z

Take your time. Until you decide you're good and ready to forgive me and come back, I will be here every day running amok with our Crayolas and piecing together one of our silliest, funnest stories yet. Yanno, the one that made our eyes get like this o_O when we thought it up, 'cause it was THAT awesome.

Don't be too long, though. Without you, this story will be no fun at all and will probably start smelling up the joint like one of Stinkertina's dirty gym sock and fishbone sandwiches. Ew.

Your pal,
JW

Choose Your Own Geekventure

So last night I embarked upon my maiden voyage as a DM. (For those of you who lack the proper geek credentials but snuck into this blog anyway, that's short for "Dungeon Master," a.k.a. the person in charge of running the game for the other nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons.)

One of the things I'll be doing with this blog (besides posting mind-'splodingly adorbs videos of cats hugging ninjas) is recapping my players' weekly gaming sessions as a form of geek history appreciation. Last night was our first game. For those of you who care about such things, the campaign is a houseruled 4e game set in Eberron 30 years after the end of the Last War. Let's meet the party.

You cannot resist me, masked stealthy hyoo-mahn. Give to me all of your loves.

• Myrrh, a vengeful kenku (avian/raven humanoid) assassin and alchemist with a penchant for poison and no love lost for humanity
• Svok, a wily kobold summoning wizard, the first of his kind to attend a proper university to study the arcane arts
• Kunulundi, a snarky bullywug (frog humanoid) warlock with a 'tude like Eeyore and an appetite for multi-purposing attack hexes that involve swarms of insects
• Miglesh, a noble orc warpriestess of Balinor with the long-suffering patience of a saint and a mace that just won't quit
• Shep, a loyal corgi sentinel druid whose "beast shape" is a gnome and whose devastating "puppy eyes" attack is so far way scarier than his wolf companion
• Dalin, a sneaky kobold rogue-sorceror who grew up literally under a rock, is like to steal you blind before you know he's there, and who may or may not have social anxiety disorder
• Tairox, a six-day-old golem psion made of moon rock and ether from one of Eberron's moons whose telekinetic and telepathic powers and newborn naivete are by turns charming and maddening (appropriate, given that he is from the aberrant Plane of Madness)

That's right, fools. The player characters are all monsters from Droaam, small time heroes among their own clans who have been summoned by the mysterious Daughters of Sora Kell to the shores of Lake Blackwater for reasons unknown.

As each of them gains the rocky shore of the lake, the adventurers, still strangers to one another, encounter a redonkulously old little goblin who shows more interest in poking his campfire with a stick than answering the adventurers' many questions about why they've been called here. They chat amongst themselves, growing irritated with him, but just as the sun slips over the western horizon, KAZAAM! The entire group is enveloped in a nimbus of silvery radiance. The light collects on each of the seven adventurers' bodies, revealing the identical claw-inside-an-oval shaped birthmarks on each of them--even skittish Dalin, who freaks and hides under a rock.

Another column of silvered light appears out over the water, and inside of it forms the image of a hideous old woman with elongated, gnarled claws for hands and sagging grey and jet black skin. Worst of all are her eyes: milky white and shining, they are without pupils of any kind. And yet she cackles benevolently at young Tairox when he politely emulates the behavior of Shep the dog, assuming in his ignorance that lifting your leg and peeing on someone you just met is a socially appropriate way of greeting someone. (Nice work, Shep.)

The woman reveals herself to be Sora Teraza, the eldest of the Daughters of Sora Kell who jointly rule Droaam. She refers to the party as "the children of the dark claw" and bids them to listen to a prophecy she believes to be tied both to their destinies and the fate of all monstrous races across the continent of Khorvaire. After revealing that she has foreseen the path of the prophecy leading each of the seven to attaining the one thing they each desire more than anything else, she asks them if they are willing to undertake this quest. To a dog, each of them agree.

Sora Teraza tells the group that they must seek to learn more of the prophecy north of here in the Heart of the Woods in the nation of the Eldeen Reaches. But she also councils that (being a party of monsters an' all), it might be best if they seek the help of Teraza's allies in House Tharashk, the dragonmarked house that holds power in the Shadow Marches to the west, before they travel north to the Eldeen Reaches, which is mostly peopled by monster-unfriendly humans, elves and eladrin. She also warns them to steer clear of Droaam's capital city of Great Crag. There are powerful enemies there; better to grow in strength and knowledge before facing them.

Just before she leaves them, the party asks the Sora if she will give them something to aid them in their quest. She says she has given them the only thing they'll need to see it done: the indomitable monk known as the Greymouse as their guide, i.e. the tiny, wizened goblin dude. They look askance at him. "Yeah. Lucky me too," he grouses.

And on that valorous note, the adventure begins!

The next morning after breaking camp, the party started down the south shore of the lake. In order to safely reach House Tharashk's stronghold in Zarash'ak, they've elected to heed Greymouse's advice and take the longer but safer route, skirting just south of the perilous swamp known as the Vile Marsh. If they can find a boat, traveling on the Blackwater River will make up for a good portion of the time they'll lose not taking the direct route through the swamp.

To that end, the party headed to a small fishing village at the place where the lake meets the river in the hopes of procuring a boat from the goblins who live there. After a hastily thwarted attempt by Svok to steal one of the goblins' fishing vessels, the party managed to smooth things over with the goblins. As it turns out, today is a high festival day in the village, and its residents have gathered in celebration to do what they do best: drink ale and gamble.

As Tairox (the proud new possessor of a recently manifested and as of yet untested mouth and digestive tract) whetted his maiden whistle by downing 6 steins of tasty ale in rapid succession alongside a few of his new friends, the party's kobolds got down to some gambling. The goblin running the "house" account of the gambling establishment was so drunk by then that our shifty little kobolds quickly robbed him blind (with the aid of a few thievery checks and a hastily thrown-together dicing game by a noob DM), winning a few hundred gold, some decrepit low level wondrous items of ill repute and, glory be, A BOAT.

Just as the drunken goblin the kobolds have swindled began to sour on their company, an inebriated Tairox amused himself by using his telekinetic force powers to move stuff around inside the hut that passes for these goblins' great hall. But when he accidentally upended one of the long tables, sending an open cask of ale flying into the air and then crashing down onto Svok's head (neverfear, dear reader, for he was more concerned about whether he could lick all of the spilled ale off of himself than the measly 3 points of damage he took from the hit), what remained of the friendly mood of the goblins quickly eroded into open hostility. So when the village shaman appeared out of the shadows, horrified and accusing Greymouse of bringing "an aberrant creature!! (!!!)" (Tairox) into their midst to cause trouble, the party found it expedient to beat a hasty retreat. One step ahead of the angry mob of goblin fishwives, the party managed to make off with their sorta-kinda-won-fair-and-square new watercraft.

Thankfully, they were not pursued. But this may have been because the villagers knew something that the party did not: the recent heavy spring rains had swollen the narrower riverbank just south of the village, creating a perilously swift current, and just further south, a tricky series of rapids which the party must now navigate. But luck was on their side: the boat at least had six (tiny, goblin-sized) oars in it, with which the party might attempt to not die half-drowned and smashed on the sharp rocks of the river. As they approached the rapids, Kunulundi, who had initially elected to swim alongside the boat, thought better of this and tried to swing up into it. Slipping on the wet edge of the boat, he nearly dashed his bulbous froggy head against a jutting rock nearby, but Tairox emitted a wave of telekinetic force that flipped the frog end over end, safely landing him inside the boat.

Despite the fact that not a single one of them are trained in athletics, an unholy series of natural-20 die rolls insured that the party made it through the first few sets of obstacles in the rapids miraculously unscathed. Tairox did fall out of the boat at one point, but Kunulundi, grateful for the golem's earlier assistance, rushed to his aid, hauling him back aboard. (Go team.)

The party breathed a collective sigh of relief, but alas, a moment too soon. Though the rapids were now behind them, Dalin, in the prow of the boat, called back to the rest that they were running out of river. Yep. They were approaching the drop-off of a 20 foot waterfall. With no way to stop their forward momentum, the group braced themselves for the drop. Tairox fell out. Again. Joining him in the water this time were Shep, Dalin and Kunulundi (although the latter had the foresight to jump clear of the boat rather than simply fall out of it). The only problem? The boat was still coming down right on top of the swimmers, like to crush the life from them or drown them or both. Calling upon his telekinetic force powers, Tairox managed to bounce the boat like a stone skipping on the water. Landing behind them with a splash, the boat glided back towards the waterfall and disappeared.

Those left on the boat found themselves inside of a cozy hidden cavern. After the party had regrouped and dragged the boat up onto a rocky ledge inside of the cavern, they found that the boat had been damaged either by the fall or Tairox's quick-thinking response to his imminent doom: in either case, there was now a 1-foot square hole in the hull of the boat, effectively delaying the party until they could made repairs to the boat. A quick tour of the cavern revealed it to be the former layer of some sort of large feline, whose grisly leavings offered up a sweet reward: among the pile of bones and rotted clothing, the group found a magical dagger, a bag of residuum, a couple of magical items, and a bag of holding. (Suh-weeet.)

During the loot-finding, Greymouse quietly took his leave of the party, wandering off into the nearby swamp for who knows what reason. While the others stayed in the cavern to set about fixing the boat, Miglesh, Myrrh and Svok volunteered to go out scavenging to see if there might be any resources nearby the cavern that could be utilized in the repairs. With the tools from Myrrh's climbing kit, they managed to fell a small tree. But the noise they made in doing so attracted unwanted attention, and while tramping through some nondescript shrubberies, Myrrh was suddenly attacked and grabbed by an tangle of swamp roots.

Out of the swamp came skulking two little mudmen and a pair of over-sized will-o-the-wisp-looking swamp gas spores, all spoiling for a fight. With their ungodly sensitive perception (did I mention that in addition to a psion, there's a freaking DOG in the party?), the party members still back inside the cave managed to hear Myrrh's cry of alarm over the noise of the waterfall. Although they swarmed out of the cave bravely to aid their companions, they swarmed slowly, stymied by the difficult terrain of the river water.

With his webbed feet and fancy water speed, bullywug Kunulundi was the quickest of the companions to respond to his new friends' distress, but alas, his valor proved unlucky: as he rushed out of the cave, a larger mudman emerged from the water, this one armed with a long spear and riding a giant water snake, roughly the size of an anaconda. Yeah. AWESOME. The spearman lunged at Kunulundi, wounding him. Less apt were the attacks of the smaller mudmen on the shore, whose inept attempts to pin Myrrh, Svok and Miglesh down with flung mudballs only resulted in the risk of the three adventurers hurting themselves from laughing so hard as the mudmen slipped and fell in their own muck after rolling twinzie-natural-1s during their attacks.

As the rest of the companions gained the shore to confront the spearman, Kunulundi landed the fiend a fearful blow with his long froggy tongue, giving the spearman a lashing so fierce he's not like to soon forget it and unseating him from the scaled back of his serpent mount in the process. Back admist the angry shrubbery, Svok skittered into the center of the battle to hit multiple targets with a ricochet of arcane lightning and then summoned an elemental fire warrior to defend himself and his friends. Slipping out of the root cluster's grasp and deftly into a better position, Myrrh swung her cruel-edged scythe around in a deadly arc, hitting both the mudman who had just charged her in a rolling wave of sticky river mud and the root pod as well. Her surge of triumphant glory was dimmed slightly, though, when she realized that the mudman, being made of mud, was immune to the poison she had applied to her blade before making the attack. Miglesh smashed into same mudman with her trusty mace and casting invoked Balinor's healing grace for poor wounded Kunulundi.

While Dalin scrabbled up a stony incline and loosed a deathly rain of daggers down at the groups' attackers, Tairox charged into the fray, loosing a mighty wave of telekinetic force which threw the muddy spearman and the snake back away from his friends, pinning both of them down. Stout-hearted Shep attacked the giant snake, provoking and just barely dodging a slap of the creature's massive tail. When the snake retaliated, snapping at Shep with its venom-injecting fangs, the brave little dog stood his ground and looked up at the snake with an astonishing look of such winsome adorableness that the snake stopped in mid-strike, confused at why it had bothered to attack something as cute as this sweet widdle cuddly puppy in the first place.

As Svok's fire warrior singed the second mudman, Kunulundi reared back, inflated the sac under his chin, and released a Funnel of Doomy-Fly-Shaped-DOOM upon the spearman. (The remnants of which he snapped up for a snack rather than let go to waste, that economic soul.) Seeing the root tangle that had grabbed Miglesh begin to flee towards the waterline, dragging a helpless Miglesh along with it, Shep invoked druidi lore to commune with the root cluster, convincing it that if it released the orc priestess, the party would let the creature go in peace without further attack. Convinced by the dog's sincerity, the root tangle released Miglesh.

After being savaged by Shep's unholy maw of cuteness, the spearman fell to his knees, groveling, begging the party to spare his life. "Why should we?" called down Dalin, another throwing knife poised in his hand. He was surprised to find the spear-wielding mudman speaking Draconic, but a closer look revealed the scaly skin beneath all that mud. The mudman promised them useful information and all of his treasures if only they might let him live. Cautiously, the party agreed, throwing in an intimidation check or two for good measure and insisting that the mudmen repair their boat to seal the bargain. On a lark, Tairox also insisted that the spearman give him his giant serpent mount. "But that's my favorite snake!" the spearman protested, before reluctantly ordering the serpent to stay with the golem.

The mudman revealed that the village at the southern outlet of this river, the same one to which the party was headed, was deserted and cursed, its residents slaughtered or simply vanished. He didn't know what was responsible for this, only that those like him avoided the place, speaking of it only in fearful whispers. After relinquishing his spear and a small pouch of gold, as well as the slings belonging to the two other mudmen, the spearman ordered his root tangle minion to sacrifice its life to repair the boat. Obediently, the little creature (half-dead already) climbed up into the boat, spread its fibrous roots across the gaping fissure in the hull, forming a water-tight patch as it died there.

Forearmed with the spearman's warning about the village at the end of the river, the party made camp in the cavern under the waterfall, planning to set out once more the following morning. Amazingly, Tairox succeeded in single-handedly (if just barely) taming the snake, earning himself a most impressive mount. Just before they posted the first watch and went to sleep, Greymouse returned from his sojourn in the swamp to find the boat neatly patched and the party one giant snake stronger than he had left them. "Huh," he muttered sagely, almost impressed.

As sleep began to take them one by one, a sudden cry from Svok's bedroll elicited groans and giggles from the others: "Dammit! I could have just used my Make Whole ritual on the boat. I totally forgot about it!"

And so ended session 1 of the Mark of the Apostate campaign.

Are you there God? It's me, Nerdface.

Since this is my first post, I thought I’d kick things off by introducing myself. There are really only three things you need to know about me. These are as follows:

#1 – I am obsessed with pirates. I am also strangely compelled to wax rhapsodic about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, food and Lady Gaga, but pirates were my first love. Some have chalked this up to a preoccupation with the romantic ideal of the swashbuckling vagabond seeking fortune and adventure, inciting tales of vengeance and high drama on the seven seas. Truly, I’m sure all of that figures in somewhere. Mostly, though, I just love the way they talk. For example: in Piratical, a simple, every day request such as “Hey! You! Go get me a beer!” translates to: “Avast, ye bilge-swilling cur! Step ‘andsomely now and fetch me a tankard o’ hearty grog afore I run ye through fer sport and toss yer poxy carcass to Davy Jones!” For reals. What’s not to love about a dialect in which the more impressively one can swear and insult one’s fellows denotes one’s rank and status? Plus, they have shiny, shiny swords.

#2 – I knew I wanted to be a writer from a very young age, but I remember with piercing clarity the first time someone actually treated me like one. I was a few months into my freshman year of high school, taking a course that might as well have been titled “Science for Dummies.” We had to write a brief assignment describing the physical structures of the human digestive tract and how they work. In an attempt to stave off premature death from terminal boredom, I wrote mine as a first person narrative from the POV of a protagonist in mourning; someone had just “accidentally” swallowed his pet, Fluffy the goldfish (See, Vengeance Tales). So this guy was imagining – in gruesome detail – his beloved Fluffy’s final journey down the gullet, the esophagus, the stomach, and finally, the intestines of his arch-nemesis. When she handed my paper back to me with a shiny, red ‘A’ affixed to it, I’ll always remember the way Ms. Hoover looked at me, with a mix of bemusement, weirded-out wariness and pity. It was the first of many such looks I would receive over the years, ushering me not ungently into the ranks of my brethren, the writers of the world. We happy few, we band of barmy.

#3 – Dolls are terrifying.

And that about wraps this up. Stay tuned for many tales of debauched girl geekdom to follow.