Slow start

I hate the writing days where I feel I’m just treading water and not getting any closer to shore.
My eHow work this morning was positively plodding. I don’t think it’s so much me as that we’ve had a temporary shortage of finance/business titles (it happens every so often) so I’ve wound up picking tough, cumbersome topics to work on. Even so, as that’s my bread-and-butter financially I feel annoyed with myself with not being able to master and finish them faster.
My fiction is doing well (as noted yesterday), but as I think I mentioned a few weeks back, none of the short stories I’m currently working is close to being finished. So even though I’m progressing I don’t have the satisfaction of having one I can see almost at the finishing point. And unfortunately there’s nothing I can do about it.
That being said, let’s move onto a fresh topic: Stereotypes! Which some of my weekend/movie watching reminded me of.
Dr. Bloodmoney is a Philip K. Dick novel set primarily in post-holocaust Marin County, which suffers as much from a loss of hope as anything else. While I like a lot of Dick’s novels, this one didn’t work for me at all: While more character-centric than most post-nuclear stories, the characters aren’t that interesting (except the DJ who, trapped in orbit, provides the broadcasts that give America something to focus on together. And even there it’s more situation than character).
But what really sticks out is one of the characters, a quadriplegic Thalidomide child (a medicine that caused horrific birth defects in some children after their mothers took it) with telekinetic powers. He’s the main villain, murdering anyone who crosses him or interferes with his community——in short, as vile mentally as he is physically.
While I’m not as passionate about disability stereotypes as sexist ones (I don’t mean that they’re not important, just that they don’t press my buttons the same way), this is still a discomforting portrayal of a disabled guy, especially as it’s the only one in the book (as I note here, when you have only one minority/female/disabled character, stereotyping is more of an issue than when there’s a plethora).
And then we have They Only Kill Their Masters, a 1972 film in which small-town police chief James Garner investigates the death of a local woman with a torrid sex life. It’s not a strong film; the efforts to interweave the mystery with Garner’s personal life only make it kind of slow and listless, rather than more interesting.
Anyway, we learn early on the victim was killed by one of her lovers. And that she was bisexual. So it’s not really that surprising when the killer turns out to be Hal Holbrook’s wife, June Alysson——because she was secretly gay! And she and the victim were lovers! So when the victim dumped her, Alysson took revenge! (are you gasping at this shocking plot twist).
I haven’t seen this particular twist that much lately, but I ran into it several times back in the last couple of decades of the last century. There was a long stretch of time where the only time you ran into a lesbian was when she outed herself at the end of a murder mystery to explain why she committed the murder.
Again, that wouldn’t bother me if we had a fair number of lesbian characters——jealousy is, after all, a classic reason for killing people——but in context, when that’s the only time you see a gay woman (as opposed to all the straight characters who aren’t killers) it pissed me off a lot.