Hmmm.

So many options. So so many options. Sigh. Let's get this over with.

Well, I really like Kid Flash. I don't particularly like Robin. I guess he's okay. I don't mind Raven but I really don't like the Raven idolatry on parts of this site.

I really like intelligence and independence. If you can write a smart, original story, you are cool. I don't like writers actually putting into the story "character X's pov". Take the training wheels off for god's sake! Precision in characterization like Once a Thief by The Red X, and some stories by Meiriona and Super Chocolate Bear, is cool. Oddly enough, realism in fantasy stories is much better than other approaches.Dumping song lyrics into your story is just lazy and almost never works worth a damn. Peoples' reactions to songs are very individual. You may think that everyone has the same reaction to some song you like, but you first heard it in exactly the right setting for it to mean that certain feeling to you. The rest of us, weren't there. So don't just drop in some frigging tune's lyrics and expect that we'll all have the same teary eyed feeling you had when you heard that song in the back seat of the car when you heard your cat had died. We were not there. Spare us. Please.

And don't act like you're holding hostages. " If I don't get X reviews the story gets it! I swear! I'll do it!" Or. "I'm not writing another chapter till I get X reviews! Come on people!"

STFU.

Alright, some more. Graduated with a degree in engineering, yeah, the usual place you find people who want to write. Guy. 5'10" 160 dark brown, gray. I think I only saw a Teen Titans episode a couple years after the show started. I have something serious percolating on the side but needed a break and was intrigued by Lightspeed, so I wrote Reach the Horizon. I was running through my head various reasons why KF's parents might have been such aholes to him and that provided the impetus to write Here's a Good One. Hope you liked either or both. If you didn't. Hey, tell me. I'm an adult. I can take it.

More gripes.

I don't understand why Kid Flash gets characterized as dumb in so many of the stories here. What did he do or say in Lightspeed or Titans Together that was dumb? He didn't speak like an idiot. He didn't make any dumb choices. He was overly trusting of Jinx at first. That's about it. Hell, you can argue that he was the only one with the smarts and open mind to see that Jinx was only, oh, situationally evil at worst. Watch where he tells Jinx that he likes the decor of the HIVE hideout. "Very . . . secret lair," he jokes. Watch the part where he goes into her room at HIVE headquarters and says that he didn't figure her for the unicorn type. Watch when he's in the cage at HIVE headquarters and he and Jinx are having a sort of a moment. She's wondering what he'll say next. Will he try to kiss her? And he uses the ultra serious mood as the springboard for a joke, asking her for mustard for his sandwich. His intelligence is very clearly above average. Very clearly. But, if you don't want to put any thought into things then I guess fast equals hyper equals dumb. Sigh.

Real world gripe. I really don't understand listening only to music playing on the radio today. Would you only look at paintings that'd been painted this year? Sorry, can't look at Vermeer or Turner. Brush hit canvas before 2007. Would you only read books that'd come out in the last year? etc etc etc. I don't get it. Seriously. It's sooooo dumb. Do you think your grandparents or great grandparents or their predecessors never felt angst or alienation the way you do?Did all these feelings realy begin with you?What an amazing conceit that would be. They didn't. Sure, the way they were expressed was different but even the most caustic,sarcastic artistic expressions of today were done in some similar way in the past. It doesn't mean your feelings aren't uniquely yours. It just means they probably aren't unprecedented. You can find an interesting artistic stab at your feelings in some work of the past if you try. And looking to the past now and then makes you less of a sucker/mark/dupe for the marketing machines of today. And that feels good.

We live in an incredibly fortunate time. We have hundreds of years of music available to us. Okay, about 350 or something like that but you get the point. You can turn on your ipod and play Handel's Water Music then Miss Thing part 2 by Count Basie then Take Five by Dave Brubeck then Tupelo Honey by Van Morrison then Touch the Sky by Kanye West. You don't have to play just the latest top 40 song (which might be terrific, btw. just as old does not equal bad, neither does new). And because we live in this incredibly fortunate time, your options for music don't begin and end with the folk music of your village. We are so frigging lucky. The same goes for books. A man by the name of Erasmus was once thought to have read every published book, (around the year 1450 iirc). It's physically impossible today (even for Kid Flash!). There's so much available, fiction, non-fiction, everything. Whatever you want, click on Amazon. It's yours. We're so frigging lucky! Just 100 or 200 years ago, the options available to you might be the books in your house or the meager selection at your little town's library. Now, the whole world of books, everything, is right there for you no matter how odd or relatively unpopular your tastes. Don't take it for granted. Give thanks that you're living in 2007 in the west. You're lucky. And tv shows, movies etc? Just 25 years ago, most people in the U.S. had about 8 possible channels on their tv's and a fairly small number of movies available on video cassettes. Now, most everyone's got a couple hundred channels and most every movie ever made is available on DVD. You are soooooo lucky!

And to show appreciation of that good fortune, don't be an ignorant jackass and try to prevent some artistic expression that you don't like. The test of your commitment to freedom is not how well you tolerate the things you like but the things you don't like. It's called being an adult in a free society. You don't try and take away freedom from anyone not like you and demand it for yourself. That's ignorant and childish.That's being a little fascist when it suits you but wanting to be a free man or woman when that suits you. Free societies produce more in every way because they allow people to express their energies in almost any way and to thereby create value for their fellow citizens. You want to come up with a new computer application? Hey, knock yourself out. You want to write a new book that'll wow everyone with its insights? Bring it on. Free minds create value and make everyone richer.

Kind of highbrow, huh? Just be a libertarian. There. That's simpler.

Just started reading god is not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. Great stuff. Some other suggestions? Winter's Tales or Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen. Tremendously impressive writing style. Economy and precision in storytelling of the highest degree. A Simple Heart by Flaubert. Literary pointillism. Without you realizing it he takes you from point A to a point B that would seem absurd at first but which is perfectly sensible in the context of the story.

Reviews.

I feel tremendously ambivalent about reviews on this site. I think we should all be committed to our own conceptions of our stories. At the same time, I loved receiving positive reviews. I wish I had been indifferent to getting them but I couldn't help but be pleased, even with the ones that offered no explanation for why the reviewer liked the story. And, on the other side of it, when I see a good story for which no one's left a review, I picture some girl or boy toiling away in loneliness, unrecognized for their wonderful little creation. And it bothers me. I guess I've come to accept that we all love recognition and that it's not too bad if kept within reasonable bounds. But, the authors who gush and thank every reviewer and try to create a sort of circle of obsequiousness (I just sucked up to you, so please suck up to me again after you read this chapter!) go way beyond reasonable bounds. You know who you are.

(The avatar picture is Wally flanked by Roy on the left and Dick on the right)