An Ode to SVU

Have I written an ode to you, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit?

No, I haven’t? Why, what is wrong with me? Let me shower praises on a show that has deftly written so many crime episodes with crimes so heinous that it warps my brain so much. After SVU, I could be watching a harmless tv show like ‘How I Met Your Mother’ and be convinced that Character A is committing incest with his daughter or raping Character C on a daily basis.

No?

I love Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. I shamelessly adore the show. While my love for some tv shows are fleeting (e.g. House, survived up to Season 3 before wanting to dig my eyeballs every time I see Hugh Laurie on telly), I am a firm lover of SVU. It’s not the best show in the world, it’s not particularly insightful and if you follow true life crime in the newspapers, you can pretty much figure out who the killer is before the end of the episode. But there’s just something about the show, the pacing, the conflicts, okay, let’s face it, the stupid amount of chemistry between Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson and Christopher Meloni’s Eliot Stabler that has made me a fan.

Perhaps the other reason why I love SVU is for its grittiness. When they mean heinous crimes, it usually is heinous. It deals with incest, rape, child murders and the heroes, sometimes they get the bad guys and sometimes they don’t. You cheer when things work out but with some cases, it leaves with you a terrible feeling all the way down at the pit of your stomach.

One of the reasons why I love murder mysteries so much is seeing how the copper deals with facing such depravity over and over. Each writer has their own take – Mankel’s Wallander despairs about the fate of his country and his countrymen with every crime that happens under his watch to a breaking point. Dick Wolf’s Detective Stabler and Detective Benson, on the other hand, deal with it in the best way I believe any good American would. By going out there and punching the hell out of the suspect.

Hit first. Ask questions later.

Sometimes it’s so politically incorrect that it is delicious. In real life, you don’t want your cops to be behaving that way; you don’t want your cops to be punching the lights out of you if they suspect you have been up to no good. But in SVU, it is perfectly fine because you know they are the Good Guys. And in a world where things are getting murkier by the day on what is right and what is wrong, it is nice to see a bit of black and white, and you know that these guys, they’re making the world a better place.

And they waste no time in doing so. CSI irritates me with its over-reliance on forensics – the flashy lights and ridiculous angles as the scientists, who often work in very dark rooms that look like night clubs with much cleavage seen from their white coats. Those are time-wasters; they don’t add anything to the story. In SVU, when they say they need to get to the suspect, its cut to the next scene – the door is smashed down and my heroes are running in, guns ablaze and scaring the bejeebus out of the bad guys.

It’s also a decent stand-alone, you can pick up any episode from Season 5, watch Season 8 after and not be jarred by much, only that some of the characters look older, loss a bit of weight or added on a bit of weight.

But, as with all good things, it must come to an end. Christopher Meloni has decided to leave SVU at the end of season 12. Thank goodness I was surfing the net in bed, or I would have collapsed from weak knees. No more Detective Stabler? Poor Olivia! Heck, poor Adlina! And as much as I love SVU, I think it is the partnership between Stabler and Benson that makes the show and I don’t believe that the show can survive without either partner. Which makes me rather sad.

But thank you, Christopher Meloni! For 12 wonderful crime-fighting years.

Murder Wall

Lately I feel that a sense of restlessness and guilt that I associate with the non-completion of work and projects on my plate. As you know, and I’ve been harping for nearly a year now, I’ve been writing what has been my first draft of my novel.

I’ve finally completed it. *Yay*

Now it’s time to edit it.

See, the thing is, while the novel is lying beside me (figuratively, it’s actually on a hard disk) I can’t seem to do anything else. In most cases, I’ve allowed my social life to slide – it’s hard to make the effort and meet friends when I have this behemoth sitting next to me, making googly eyes and taunting me.

My novel looks a bit like a shaggy elephant, sort of like Snuffleupagus, but only meaner and smaller (small enough to fit my room).

But as with countless of writing manuals have said, at the end of the first draft – put it aside, pick up knitting, train for a marathon, anything, to forget about it so that you could look at it objectively when you do return to it.

So I tried not to focus on the novel, decided to go back to doing umm, other stuff like Tanjong Ole and *cough* fanfic *cough*. There was one thing that I couldn’t resist doing despite it being connected to the novel.

About a year ago, I published a photo of my plot wall, or more accurately, the first part of my plot wall. Over the next few weeks, it grew to something more akin to this:

Plot blurred for obvious reasons

Yes, it took up my entire wall, the plot did. I slept next to murders and conspiracy for about a year.

But as most writers can attest, the plot I started with was not quite the plot I ended up with. Halfway through the novel, I had already decided to rework the plot during the edits and so, despite the note cards keeping me company for nearly a year as I toiled away on my laptop, it was mostly redundant by the end.

But I really liked all the notecards on the wall, it gave this student-feel to my room. And it reminded me towards the goal I was striving for. But , it’s weird to leave something up there that was no longer relevant.

So after much deliberation, I made the painful choice of bringing down all the notecards from my wall. Out with the old, in the with the new as the cliche goes.

Naked wall is naked

I felt so naked, sleeping next to a bare wall.

But.

The wall wasn’t naked for long. Actually, from the moment I decided to bring the cards down, I’ve already decided on a replacement. I’ve designated the wall next to me my Novel Wall, and I wanted to create something that would give me a feel of the world I was living in. Inspired by the inspiration boards that are all the rage in wedding blogs, I started creating my own inspiration board with photos that I felt could have come from the world I created. I’m really pleased with the end result, it does feel like it’s starting to come together.

A new sexy beginning

So there it is. Wish me luck on the first round of editing!

P/S: If you’re wondering what the green thing is, it’s a mosquito net, a traditional way of keeping mosquitoes at bay. Fucking hell man, the mosquitoes here are persistent!

Snippet Time

It’s snippet-y time! i.e. these are the days where I can’t be bothered to craft a blog entry. Not that going through some of my older posts suggests that I craft anything…I think my blogging is far more akin to regurgitating.

Old Memories

Bro was cleaning up his room when he found an old group photo of our band in Dharamsala, India. My music teachers were hippies, and we used to go up to Dharamsala and to the Buddhist temples at least once a year.

My brother was like, “Maaan! Look at everyone!” And we reminisced about the people in the photo when my brother noticed, I was not in the photo, despite being on the same trip. In fact, neither were my closest friends in High School at that point: Sayaka, Krista and Melissa. All four of us were missing.

I finally remembered later that the four of us had made the trip some sort of restaurant-hop, we were busy eating momos in some Tibetan restaurant. For some bizarre reason, the four of us goofed around Dharamsala quite a bit and spent a chunk of time eating. So much for being good girls =)

Words that I hate

The Guardian ran an article today on words that you dislike and various people are contributing. My contribution would be:

pseudo-intellectual

ball-park figure – i.e. I’m pulling this number out of my ass

value-add – most of the work we use to do never had any ‘value-add’, term was almost used in irony

glocal – Global and local. I hate it.

hubby - oh, how I despise this word! It makes me feel like a weak little woman. ‘Oh, save me hubby! I can’t lift this pot, hubby! Let me bear your babies, hubby!’

Argie! I am woman. Hear me roar.

incentivise - blergh. You have to incentivise me the moment I hear that word.

quan person – that’s just being lazy. Everyone ought to be a quan person, if not they’re using ball-park figures for everything. Who on earth goes around saying they’re a qual(-itative) person?

There’s another government term in here that I’ve forgotten, suppressed memory I suppose, but urgh, each time I heard it at work, I wanted to kill someone.

Murder Mysteries

To all budding murder mystery writers. If you describe a woman as dainty, beautiful and needs to be protected, all your readers will automatically figure out that she’s the killer. No motive needed. Dainty, beautiful women are as cliched as the butler who did it.

Actually, there are so few butlers who did it that it’d be nice to read a mystery where the butler actually did it.