I am not a dancer, but I grew up with dance. For my own part, I Scottish Country danced every Friday with my family, so I understand the sheer pleasure of movement to music on an instinctual level, though I am not talented at it.

Moreso, my sister danced growing up. She followed the city's top dance school's professional ballet track to the end of it at age sixteen. At her peak, she was taking fourteen separate classes a week - on top of regular high school at a school on the other side of the city. Not just ballet, of course, but modern, jazz, spanish, and surely others I am forgetting.

The result of this is for a non-dancer, I have seen a lot of dance. From her school's recitals with students at all skill levels, to ballet after ballet (I can't count how many versions of the Nutcracker I've seen! Let alone Giselle and Onegin and Cinderella and Swan Lake and Beauty and the Beast and Romeo and Juliet...) at the NAC, to modern performances by professionals and students in their school's full-time dance track, to world-class highland dancers (I grew up at the same church as the... 2006? world Highland Dance champion, and had the pleasure of seeing her dance many, many times), I've seen it.

Enough that I understand the medium on a deeper level than a casual viewer, enough to know when a dancer is incredibly technically skilled, and when a dancer has something more than just the technique and has the gift of dance. Enough to understand what kind of themes contemporary ballet and modern dance play with, and what those formats look like in the real world, outside of a reality show such as So You Think You Can Dance.

I don't know if it's the part of dance I don't know - ballroom dancing - that seem to be both Nigel and Mary's backgrounds that makes for the difference, but I am saddened and bewildered by the narrowness in the modern, jazz, and contemporary routines. Not necessarily in the choreographers - say what you will about Mia, she's for real. Sonya, I adore to pieces, and Stacy Tookey from SYTYCD Canada. No, it's the judges who reinforce it, week after week, who pound it into the viewers -

It's the heterosexuality of it all. Look, the real dance world? Not very heterosexual. Forget all the gay male dancers that Nigel seems to be afraid people will group him with, the dancing itself, not the classical tales but the new stuff, the contemporary and modern stuff, is often all about breaking gender boundaries. The last piece of dance I saw, by the Paris Opera Ballet, easily one of the best dance corps in the world, was a three part piece. The first was all women - strong, brutal, sharp, exhilarating. The second was men and women together, playing on classical partnerships but clearly subversive, and the third was a blatantly homo-erotic piece involving only men. It was physically powerful, yes, but it played with ideas of strength and masculinity and the marginalization of men who do not pick up on those roles. The men not only - gasp - touched each other intimately, there was even an extended scene where one man bathed the other. It was beautiful. It was uncomfortable. It was profound.

And that's not at all unusual in the dance world. But on SYTYCD? The men had better be masculine, and the women feminine, or Nigel will come down on you. The wonderful jazz piece by Sonya - clearly a fierce, alpha female - got criticized because Jeanine was in charge? Are you kidding me? And Evan was thrown around by her too much? Nigel's main problem with Evan seems to be that he's too soft for a leading man. His praise of Brandon, especially in the Paso Doble, was littered with machoisms and sexual overtones to a frankly disgusting degree.

And all the men-only choreography on the show, what is with that shit? The girls get something of a variety, and get to work together to create beautiful pieces of art. The boys, heaven forbid they touch unless it's to throw each other around, my goodness. That final dance between the top two boys had better be a battle, had better be about male posturing and machoism and sexual dominance. They'd better be trying to outdo each other. They'd better be "nasty" and dirty and sexualized men, or they weren't as good.

I love a lot of things about SYTYCD. I think bringing dance to a wider audience is a wonderful thing. But this? This is a parody of the real dance culture, sexist and dated and full of that "American" undertone that fills so much US media: fear of sexualities that are different, alternative, don't fit the perfect "male/female" duality.

It makes me so, so sad.

allopathic, who knows me in real life and doesn't actually read my writing because he doesn't watch Torchwood (but is a cool guy who likes to chat about writing processes and other such things) got me thinking. The particular question he posed to me was:

Do you put a lot of thought into your writing before you start typing?

I hemmed and hawed a little, and asked him if he meant for new chapters or for short stories, or at the beginning of a long, chaptered story. He said he wasn't restricting himself, and it got me thinking; how do I plan, but more specifically, how do I plan different things? This rambling meta is an attempt to answer that question. I'll reference things I've written, and there will likely be spoilers for A Matter of Time up to chapter 17. It isn't a guide to writing - I'm far from qualified, and am still learning how I write best - but more an exploration of what I do but don't necessarily put into words

( how I write )