In Which Thea is Not Exactly a Feminist

My younger brother and sister (and probably my parents) get a little tired of me pointing out the overwhelming number of male main characters in movies, and the lack of a realistic sample of female main characters in books.

I know my sister didn't like it when, after we watched the trailers just before the Hobbit, I pointed out that not one of them portrayed a movie with a female main character. This wasn't a comment on the apparent quality or creativity of the movies (because we were both pleasantly surprised with the apparent originality of Oblivion, and can't wait to see it). This wasn't to say that those movies were somehow evil for all having male leads. All I was saying was that every single one had a male lead.

You know what you say with the main character of your story? You show through who they are, the things they do, the values they hold, the change(s) they undergo, and the consequences at the end of it all what makes a person important, what makes them worth thinking about. And, whatever you say, if you say it often enough, without any notable challenge or alternative, people tend to believe it.

Surviving a Lifetime of Shyness

When I was really, really little (like, younger than four), my parents took me to Sunday School for the first time. I went in the room, saw the group of kids, freaked out internally, and hid under a table. This happened for a few weeks, my mom dropping me off, me hiding under the table, her coming back and getting me. I wasn't hysterical, I just was frightened of all these kids that I didn't know. Well, after a while of watching all these kids doing fun things, and getting bored with the table, I finally got out and joined them.

2012: The Year the World Didn't End

I've seen several people reflecting on their blogs about what went well/not so well the past year, and I rather liked that idea. It seems a more productive thing to take a moment to see where you've been and then organically growing from there than it is to just decide where to go next. Context allows us to see more clearly what's needed, and can give us ideas for how those needs can be met. At the very least, context is great for picking up new vocabulary. :)

What went well this year?
1) My writing. I finally proved to myself that I can finish things, not only by finishing the first drafts of several short stories (via Written Arpeggios), but also by self-publishing my anthology. On top of that, I completed the first draft of a novel for the first time ever this summer. How much I enjoyed doing all these things has only confirmed to me that I love writing. :D

In Which Thea Memes

Looks like I've been tagged for a meme. Well, that makes it sound far more serendipitous than it really was.

Mike Duran, a writer who I greatly respect, and whose blog I read regularly, got tagged with this meme. I loved the idea behind it and really wanted to be tagged by someone at some point.

A few days later, D Jordan Redhawk, a friend from an online writing community called Forward Motion, said on Facebook that she'd been tagged for this meme and asked if anyone wanted to be tagged by her (thank you very much for doing that! :D). I said yes.

Which is a very short story to say that, once you know what you want, and if you pay attention, you have the ability to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way. :)

I take it back: The whole thing really was wonderfully serendipitous, which is pretty cool.

I Never, Ever Thought I'd Do This... part 2

Part 1 is here.

If a majority can exert influence simply by sheer number, then what is it about minority groups that allows them to influence others? What is their power? According to Moscovici, the power of a minority lies in its consistency (Moscovici, Lage, & Naffrechoux, 1969). In a variant of the study mentioned earlier, the confederates were instructed to sometimes say the slide was green, and other times say that it was green. As a result of this inconsistency on the part of the minority, less participants ended up agreeing with the minority than those in the original study. From this, Moscovici concluded that the power of a minority lies in its consistency.