(no subject)
I never mean to do this, and then I do it anyway.
Allow me to introduce working-title "Secretary of Darkness," what I'm going to work on for four days of NaNoWriMo and then inevitably abandon.
A lot of people ask me what could possibly draw me to the kind of work I do.
Well, actually, they don’t. I wouldn’t be very good at my job if people knew enough to ask those kinds of questions. Administrative assistance for major supervillains isn’t the kind of thing you tell people you do. If you have nights off at all and the kind of boss that lets you leave the island lair, you make something up, teaching kindergarten or caring for the elderly. But if people knew what I did, I’m sure I’d get those kinds of questions.
I get them from the men themselves sometimes, though not as often from the women. They seem to understand. So few of them have any call for a secretary, of course; villains can get by on just really hating goodness, but villainesses have so much work to do to be taken seriously as devious forces that most of them pick up the skills I have early. I like villainesses. They smile at me when they come and go and are usually cordial, if distant. They call personally. I do draw a line, understand, between villainesses and women who like to commit crimes. Black queens have little time for anyone they aren’t seducing or murdering. Villainesses are different; they’ve got class. Sorceresses and dark goddesses and so forth, well, God, they’re just bitches.
Sometimes I wonder why I’m still in this line of work. There are other men whose dry cleaning I could fetch, whose appointments I could keep in miraculous order, whose lives I could run. I’ve worked for major corporations before - the pay usually evens out. But something draws me to these people, the mad doctors, crazed inventors, scientists too brilliant or driven for the torpor of academia. There’s a common look to them; after a while you can pick them out of a crowd. Most people say that they’ve looked over the edge of insanity, seen things that man was not meant to see, that it changed them. I don’t think that’s it. Your average villain hasn’t seen anything a mortal man couldn't see reputable copies of at Ripley's. The difference is that, if such a thing did exist, something that could ice your blood and twist your mind -- they’d want to see it. And they’d take notes.
Allow me to introduce working-title "Secretary of Darkness," what I'm going to work on for four days of NaNoWriMo and then inevitably abandon.
A lot of people ask me what could possibly draw me to the kind of work I do.
Well, actually, they don’t. I wouldn’t be very good at my job if people knew enough to ask those kinds of questions. Administrative assistance for major supervillains isn’t the kind of thing you tell people you do. If you have nights off at all and the kind of boss that lets you leave the island lair, you make something up, teaching kindergarten or caring for the elderly. But if people knew what I did, I’m sure I’d get those kinds of questions.
I get them from the men themselves sometimes, though not as often from the women. They seem to understand. So few of them have any call for a secretary, of course; villains can get by on just really hating goodness, but villainesses have so much work to do to be taken seriously as devious forces that most of them pick up the skills I have early. I like villainesses. They smile at me when they come and go and are usually cordial, if distant. They call personally. I do draw a line, understand, between villainesses and women who like to commit crimes. Black queens have little time for anyone they aren’t seducing or murdering. Villainesses are different; they’ve got class. Sorceresses and dark goddesses and so forth, well, God, they’re just bitches.
Sometimes I wonder why I’m still in this line of work. There are other men whose dry cleaning I could fetch, whose appointments I could keep in miraculous order, whose lives I could run. I’ve worked for major corporations before - the pay usually evens out. But something draws me to these people, the mad doctors, crazed inventors, scientists too brilliant or driven for the torpor of academia. There’s a common look to them; after a while you can pick them out of a crowd. Most people say that they’ve looked over the edge of insanity, seen things that man was not meant to see, that it changed them. I don’t think that’s it. Your average villain hasn’t seen anything a mortal man couldn't see reputable copies of at Ripley's. The difference is that, if such a thing did exist, something that could ice your blood and twist your mind -- they’d want to see it. And they’d take notes.