If you are a long-time reader of this blog, author and bi-coastal BFF Jodi Wing is no stranger to this blog. Her book, “The Art of Social War” was more than just a work of fiction but taught some lessons on social war and how women often don’t help each other — unlike men who work in a different thought and action levels.
Jodi Wing has been working on another book but also has come up with a well-thought strategy to give the younger generation a bit of the knowledge that she (and other women)
Hollywood, and more specifically the entertainment industry, is a battlefield of a very specific sort. There is a logic to the work and corresponding social life here, but it is a logic that would be illogical anywhere else (except for maybe that other famed ‘company town,’ Washington DC.) It is a terrain filled with very unusual freedoms, restrictions and advantages, and I wrote 100,000 words about them all in my debut novel, The Art of Social War (HarperCollins). In fact, I was interviewed by my esteemed pal, Stevie Wilson multiple times right here for LA Story– for the satire is based on Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and is essentially about (I like to say) Very Bad Behavior in Hollywood & Girl-on-Girl Crime.
The Art of Social War is a dark comedy about a New York couple that relocates to Hollywood and lands in a high stakes social war with a hardcore film industry Overlord and his equally hardcore Hollywood-Wife-with-Tenure, a daunting creature indeed. The social and professional obstacles that our heroine, Stacey, and her husband Jamey (Overlord’s nemesis) encounter are high drama, and (I’d like to think) high comedy too… please check it out, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Nonetheless, an extremely curious thing happened on the way to publishing said fictitious, debut novel:
Readers– especially girls and women, of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds, by the by, started writing to me through my website www.theartofsocialwar.com, to tell me how the book and its storyline resonated with them in a decidedly non-fictional manner: for while the details are satiric and Hollywood-specific, these enervating tales of interpersonal woe are universally relatable. Readers proceeded to tell me their real life ‘War Stories,’ as reported from their own ‘front lines of battle,’ issues that occurred in their everyday lives. And then, they’d ask my advice on how to resolve these conflicts, Sun-Tzu style. I very quickly discovered that by having employed The Art of War in the context of one modern woman’s life (my own), I was really writing about how to overcome Very Bad Behavior, how to resolve conflict, especially in what I call Girl World 2.0 (all the changeable emotions and drama that we thought we were done with in middle school, which is what I refer to as Girl World 1.0.)
Not so much, it would seem.
Jodi Wing
Author, The Art of Social War
Hit the blog tomorrow for part 2 (and the very powerful) essay from Jodi Wing!!
Stevie Wilson, LA-Story.com
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