Over the next few days, I’ll repost my PTSD in Fiction articles here (as Macmillan only has non-exclusive rights).

“This is the story of how I lost my atheism, and why I wish I could regain it. This is the story of the people who lost their lives in an alien desert bathed by the hideous radiance of a dead sun, and the love that was lost and the terror that wakes me up in a cold sweat about once a week, clawing at the sheets with cramping fingers and drool on my chin. It’s why Mo and I aren’t living together right now, why my right arm doesn’t work properly, and I’m toiling late into the night, trying to bury the smoking wreckage of my life beneath a heap of work.”

    —Bob Howard, The Fuller Memorandum

You could sum up Charles Stross’ The Laundry Files series as “Dilbert meets Cthulhu,” but while I’ve never been much of a fan of Dilbert (though Scott Adams’ strips are funny and often too apt), I am a total fan of Bob Howard. It’s not just that I identify with him, a former young, talented hacker who would have been at home in Linux/BSD open source projects, and who’s now been co-opted into The System. It’s not just that I sympathize and sometimes cringe with his more normal day-to-day trials and tribulations, which any office worker slaving away in a cubicle would be familiar with.

It’s because his job is to kick the ass of supernatural threats to the entire world, and he does it from the worldview of a sarcastic, down-to-earth working stiff who happens to know about recursive algorithms, stack traces, and VMS. And those things—that ultra, deep-down tech nerdy knowledge—are actually useful for the exorcism of demons, the stopping of incursions of the Elder Gods, etc.

[Continued at Tor.com...] Also, Charles Stross himself shows up in the comments with a small foreshadowing on The Apocalypse Codex!

(I know I got at least ONE person! ETA: I’ve never had someone cuss at me for rickrolling them before. I love firsts!)

I actually do love Rick Astley songs. Especially “Never Gonna Give You Up”, although for April 1st I tend to think along these lyrics instead of the normal ones:

We’re no strangers to 4/1.
You know the rules,
And so do I.
Playing pranks is what I’m thinking of,
And you’ll get this from every other site.

I just want to play with your feelings,
Gotta make you understand:
I’m gonna kid you up,
I’m gonna let you down,
I’m gonna run around,
And joke with you.
I’m gonna make you sigh,
I’m gonna say goodbye,
I’m gonna tell a lie,
And desert you.

It was a fun post to write.

Of course, it might come to pass, so it might actually be a prophetic April Fools joke after all….

The 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie was a box office hit, grossing over $65 million on its Christmas Day opening weekend in the US alone, and currently grossing over $500 million world-wide.

As you might guess, a sequel is now in the works.

Given that Sherlock Holmes had a plot that resembled nothing that ever appeared in the canon—or in any other Sherlock Holmes adaptation—it’ll be interesting to see what Guy Ritchie comes up with next.

Especially since the character of Mary Russell will officially become part of the new canon.

[I'll let you get your pitchforks this time.]

On IMDb there’s a report that one Andrea Plunket, furious over Downey and Law’s interviews playing up possible homoerotic subtext in the Sherlock Holmes canon, is threatening to withdraw sequel permissions if Guy Ritchie keeps this up.

Plunket comments, “It would be drastic, but I would withdraw permission for more films to be made if they feel that is a theme they wish to bring out in the future. I am not hostile to homosexuals, but I am to anyone who is not true to the spirit of the books.”

Dear Ms. Plunket: allow me to introduce you to the concept of shipping wars. Because you’ve just put your foot right into one of the longest ones in unofficial existence—one that is, in fact, over a century old at the time of this writing.

[I mean, just look at the hats!]

“There were eighteen months… not that I suppose he’ll ever tell you about that, at least, if he does, then you’ll know he’s cured… I don’t mean he went out of his mind or anything, and he was always perfectly sweet about it, only he was so dreadfully afraid to go to sleep….”

– Lord Peter Wimsey’s mother attempting to describe his difficulties from second-hand experience

In the first part of this series, I talked about how PTSD is experienced in real life versus many of its more popular and less accurate portrayals in fiction.

In the second and third parts of this series, I went into more detail with four examples of PTSD in fiction: Sinclair in Babylon 5, Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, the apocalyptic version of PTSD postulated in World War Z, and Josh Lyman in The West Wing.

While these depictions are somewhat successful, even extremely so, they tend to be either one-off Very Special Episodes (Babylon 5, The West Wing) or bittersweet finishers (World War Z, The Lord of the Rings). Writing about a character experiencing PTSD is already a difficult affair; writing about a character living with PTSD is much, much harder. So often we think that the most exciting part of PTSD is when it explodes, an event that supposedly either leaves a shattered mind behind, or must be immediately mostly or completely dealt within the next few chapters, lest the aftershocks shake the plot and character relationships too much.

Thus, there is one more example I want to discuss that particularly sticks out in my mind, because it covers the long-term portrayal of a character with PTSD who nevertheless is functional: Lord Peter Wimsey, one of the famous sleuths in the mystery genre. His author, Dorothy L. Sayers, whatever else she may be, had a very good grip on chronic PTSD.

[You know, PTSD reminds me of that sword that eats people's souls.]

Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals is about the parallel development of football (soccer, to Americans) in the alternate and funnier reality that is the Discworld; yet as always, there’s much more swimming in the depths of his Monty Python-esque stories. Humorous but thoughtful, Unseen Academicals combines early Pratchett at his lightest (Pyramids, Moving Pictures, Guards! Guards!) with late Pratchett at his heaviest (Monstrous Regiment, Night Watch, Thud!), resulting in an easy read with a heavy afterthought.

[Oh Terry Pratchett, when will you ever be easy to review?]

“It doesn’t sound like something they let you have when you work in the White House….”

“As long as I’ve got a job, you’ve got a job.”

— Josh Lyman and Leo McGarry, his boss, in The West Wing

In part 1, I talked about how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is actually experienced in real life, and the general ways in which fiction often gets it wrong.

In part 2, I covered in detail two specific examples of PTSD portrayals in Babylon 5 and The Lord of the Rings.

Part 3 is going to cover two more portrayals in detail, both more realistic, sometimes even more positive, than induced Set Piece PTSD or the “destroyed forever” implications when PTSD is used as a bitter(sweet) closure to a story.

[And we start off with zombies.]

All the same, I liked IBARW in the end, and I think it’s a good thing all around.

From my personal viewpoint, it was a good thing because it’s very hard for me to remember that there’s lots of people thinking about this topic in constructive terms (some very… off posts here and there, but overall IBARW was good stuff). I only felt encouraged to blog myself about a few hundred links into it all, which is something, because I usually withhold from musing on this topic, much less for 1500 words or so.

I was even encouraged to the point of sharing something rotten that lies very deep within me.

The process of writing that particular entry in turn encouraged me, even before I knew that people actually liked the thing instead of spitting on it, to write Oh No, Mammoth Books of X, No. Without reading a lot and blogging a little in IBARW, I don’t think I ever would have thought about writing such a thing—much less in the turnaround I did it in.

Post-IBARW I’m more comfortable writing about racism. The cost to myself, as I discovered in the course of writing about the funny thing that happened to me at the grocery store, or about the Mammoth Book, remains the same: a lot of self-hatred that never, ever ebbs. But I see more value in myself writing and blogging about such things, even if other people could do it better.

Anyways, we have all sorts of Days and Weeks across quite a few cultures. They almost never mean “we should only appreciate X {on Day|during Week}”, but “every day we should appreciate X”. But the thing about the everyday is that we forget. We shouldn’t, but we do.

A final note: I am humbled that people liked A Funny Thing Happened to Me At the Grocery Store the Other Day. “The other day” was, of course, three months ago, because I couldn’t bear to write about it until I ran into IBARW.

And sometimes you feel so lost that you forget that there is a temporary passage through this storm (or, you know, this category-five hurricane, if your life is pretty much storm to storm).

So! Comfort fiction.

[The fuzzy blankets of media enjoyment.]