Pen-Elayne on the Web

Quote of the Day

In the end, people grow old, are romanticized, sentimentalized, their histories shaped by caring and sympathetic hands. This is an inevitability I have learned to live with. What stops me from being a complete on-fire ass-kicker bitch-from-hell in this industry is the tacit understanding of this inevitability.

For there are not just the idealized heroes on the page but from behind-the-scenes. Going to SDCC, this of course is obvious.

And what I have done, if anything, is take the usual "loser" in that history, the "negative factor" in the equation, the ignored, the silenced, the never-was, the footnote, the Red Shirt, hapless Spartan #56, the 1930's starlet who gave and gave and gave head and got nothing but this lousy T-shirt, who was told that the air quality was safe, who was told to stay in the building and wait for help to come, who had their belongings dumped in the damned-dumpy-dump-dumpster that was specially called in just to clean out that very office, who had to go along with the n-word jokes because he didn't want to seem "angry," who had to go along with the homo jokes because he didn't want to seem "radical," who had to go along with the boob jokes because she didn't want to seem "bitchy," those whose silence was the biggest asset they had -- what I have done is offer an option, an outlet, a methodology, a mouthpiece, an example.

But actually, I haven't done a goddamn thing. The Internet did it.

The Internet gives you the opportunity to have your own histories and versions sit alongside those oh-so-very-carefully crafted narratives of those who Matter. You might use the Internet and pretend you matter, pretend so very hard, until your realize that the field is level, the rules have changed, and it is YOU who matters, matters to you and yours and your clan.

YOU MATTER. Your story matters -- the story of your life, and the stories you dream up every day, drifting up from your unconscious like spirals of smoke.

- Valerie D'Orazio, Comic Book Howl: The San Diego Syndrome