The Good Old Days Were Never Good

March 14, 2017 by admin 2 Comments

Some of the classic-for-old-white-guys stories disliked by young readers at the Young People Read Old SF site

So I found this site Young People Read Old SF, by accident, blundering around the web; it was inspired by a quote from my friend Adam-Troy Castro:

…nobody discovers a lifelong love of science fiction through Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein anymore, and directing newbies toward the work of those masters is a destructive thing, because the spark won’t happen. You might as well advise them to seek out Cordwainer Smith or Alan E. Nourse—fine tertiary avenues of investigation, even now, but not anything that’s going to set anybody’s heart afire, not from the standing start. Won’t happen.

Someone took him up on this, and created a site and drafted some young readers; you can tell the old fan who set this up pulled a crop of stories that he felt had serious merit, and in fact, many of these stories are ‘classics’ from the SFWA Hall of Fame collections; older stories voted on by the Science Fiction Writers of America in the 70s as being award worthy, from before the time the Science Fiction Writers of America existed.

You can tell that the older fan who put the time and effort into this expected these stories to be better received. Looking over the list, I expected the stories to find at least a few modern fans.

So, TL;DR, Young People Really Hate Old SF.

One reader delights in hating everything, which I expected; another reader, after giving up on the idea of representation, of having POC and female and non heterosexual characters, more or less hates everything regretfully.

There are a scattering of positive comments. But mostly, boredom and hate.

Part of me resists this analysis, strenuously. What about the GOOD things in these old stories? How can you hate someone in the 40s for not getting details right about the 2000s? Isn’t it amazing the stuff they get half-right? Aren’t the awkward stabs at portraying some racial and gender progress sort of… charming?

No, modern readers tell us, they are not.

But part of me sighs and relaxes. I’ve said for a decade now that SF doesn’t age well. A handful, and I mean, literally, a handful, of titles will survive each decade in any meaningful way.

Part of me exhales and counts to ten and closes its eyes and says this is Okay. We write for ourselves, for our readers, for our editors, for our time, never knowing to what degree we are embedded in a fleeting moment, or to what degree we speak to the ages.

Not our job to know that.

In a broader sense, I feel a greater sense of freedom, with regards to mining that old content, those 1000 books I read from age 13 to age 18, for tropes and moments and emotional highs and translating that into something that can still be read and enjoyed today.

Either finding the universal and scraping away the period ‘isms’ (sexism, racism, nationalism) or by infusing the content with modern values of inclusion and compassion and diversity.

Maybe I’m just making more dated ephemera. Maybe I can find a book that lasts in me. Either way, there’s work to do. Much more work than when I thought of those ‘classics’ as being things I could still point a young reader at.

To any young reader who enjoys any of the 1000 books I read as a teen, I say, awesome, welcome to the club; to the readers for whom this stuff is intolerable, who read the new stuff I’m reading and writing now, I say, awesome, welcome to the club!

We’re a big tent. People of the future. Denizens of faery.

Our work goes on for as long as the unknown beckons.

News Poisoning

February 27, 2017 by admin Leave a comment

Everybody knows what food poisoning feels like. Two exits; no waiting. Retching, dry heaves, misery, which you know will resolve in a day or two most likely.

Since the election, many creative people have been suffering from News poisoning, with mental effect of a similar nature; the problem is the source of the poison isn’t going away anytime soon.

I know some people who have put their creative lives on hold to be more politically active. I know those who have decided to take a step back from current events and continue to work in their creative careers.

And of course, many many people struggling to do both at once, and feeling torn up about it. They aren’t active enough, or their work is suffering, taking a back seat to the burning need of the resistance.

Successful artists can afford to wear their heart on their sleeves. Stephen King is free to speak his mind, but as a fledgling SF author, to speak out on politics costs you some fraction of your audience; adult SF is a small audience to start out with, when compared to many genres (YA, Romance, Mass Market Thrillers) and slicing that readership in half out of the gate feels self-sabotaging.

I’ve worked as an unpaid, Krugman-esque op ed writer in social media for decades now. Inhaling news, and exhaling commentary, building a following of a few thousand, and losing it again as my interest waxed and waned. I’m Krugman, without the Nobel Prize, which is to say, I’m nothing like Krugman.

I’m more like a sports fan who thinks he could be a radio color commentator, but who has never had that gig a day in his life. My efforts to monetize this work have generated a little money, not much, but then, my fiction writing hasn’t made much either.

One wants to combine all of one’s selves into one unified force and punch through to success, to victory; but one fears that mixing one’s politics with one’s fiction will result in unpublishable message stories, half-assed polemic.

Writing dystopia’s feels a little on the nose; writing rosy futures feels absurd. Secondary creations which sidestep the moment feel irrelevant. Letting the climate kill your creative life feels like giving up.

My only way through it, is to try to do more, and talk less about it. Take the time I used to spend mulling politics, use it to advocate for the things I believe in (science, fairness, equality, the environment) and keep on keeping on.

So far, it’s not working. The world swirls around me. I struggle not to hate the 27% of the country who have plunged the world into chaos, and the 73% who let them, myself included. I struggle to believe in a decent future, as the extrapolation machine in my brain sees untold misery unfolding over the next few decades.

I believe in a 73% solution. That the 73% who didn’t vote for chaos can eventually lead us away from a looming world of environmental disaster and massive human die offs. I give money and time to the 73%.

but talking about it… as I’m doing now? Why don’t I stop doing that and write?

Why?

One thing at a time, maybe. Learn to read like I was fourteen again; then maybe I’ll be able to focus on my creative work like I was twenty five.

Social Media Exile

February 3, 2017 by admin Leave a comment

My ‘Freedom’ control panel, blocking social media and other sites on all devices 23 hours a day. Because yeah, i need this.

Social media lets you hold onto people who you’ve left behind.

They move, or you move, and in the old days, there were two options. Well, three. One, you never saw or spoke to them again, if you were casually friends. Two, you made a few calls or visits, maybe, and then, fell out of touch–forever. Or, rarely, you kept up with them, and they with you, by spending time, and or money. Long distance was no joke. You might have twenty, forty, fifty dollar conversations with your vanished friend. This wasn’t something done casually. Spending that money represented a kind of hunger, a real connection, for each other.

Long distance got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, and was finally free bundled in with whatever internet product you paid for, the internet bloomed, social media happened; skype and facetime happened, and it became effortless to maintain a slender connection to everyone with whom you have ever had the slightest feelings for.

Ex girlfriends. People you did workshops with in the 90s. High-school friends and high-school enemies, college friends, work friends, writing friends. All those little tendrils of contact wrap you in the illusion of friendship and community, or rather, give you that community, minus the fleshy component, of faces and food and drink and touching and smelling each other.

Make a few hundred such friends, and scatter them to the winds, and you have a party that never ends. Kind of cerebral and sedate, as people open magical doors from jobs and houses thousands of miles away, jot a note on a scrap of paper, stick it to the wall and then disappear again. But the notes keep piling up. Some of the notes are nothing, newspaper clippings, restaurant receipts, form letters, come-ons for causes, jokes and recipes and pointers to things for which there are no convenient concrete metaphors. (Magic keyholes through which one can glimpse kittens falling off of vanitys? Mix tapes? TV guide pages?)

It’s not that great a party. Every now and then, you meet someone new, someone says, “you would like this person,” and you friend them, because why not?

Robots will want to hook up with you at this party, and you learn to ignore them. And rarely real people too, who you learn to ignore too, if you’re married, or not interested, or both.

Still. It’s a party.

My problem is that I’d rather go to the world’s shittiest party than do pretty much anything else.

So I upped my social media blocking game, to twenty three hours a day, seven days a week. I use the program Freedom on all my devices. The lingering remnants of a lifetime of friendships torn away, I find I am mostly alone in my city now, with a handful of people I’m close to. My kids recede away into their teenage lives.

A friend of mine from Woodstock tells me I need to do meetups. I have a few local friends, from a meetup I used to do…

I know a barrista, at my cafe, and I talk to him some.

Eventually, I guess, I get so lonely I make new friends in meatspace?

We will see how that works.

Maybe he likes your work. Maybe he just wants to sleep with you.

November 26, 2016 by admin Leave a comment

Trigger warning: This post is about sexual abuse. Very mild sexual abuse, of a young man, me, so, honestly, who cares, but it’s my story and I’m telling it because it pertains to some stuff happening in SF now (and for the last forty years.)

Set the wayback machine to the mid-eighties. I’m twenty one or twenty two, in art-school, and I’m emerging from what we used to call a nervous breakdown. A combination of over the counter and recreational drugs and a poorly managed class work load knocks me out for a few months, and then, a few years, after that.

During this time, after high-school, in those first terrifying years of quasi adulthood, a friend of ours, a movie-star handsome young man named Gabriel, falls in with a wealthy philanthropist who lives in a mansion on the outskirts of town; the mansion has a name.

Let’s call it Ravencrest.

Gabriel was an enigma; he crashed our suburban high-school the way you might crash a wedding party. Our school was top notch, attended by the suburban refugee sons and daughters of my decaying city’s professional class; the inner-city school dictated for Gabriel by his actual zip code was not good.

So he snuck into ours; I don’t know how, but he did. He lived near the elementary school my family had fled from when I was in forth grade.

There were stories about Gabriel; that he had a business card—a joke business card?—that identified himself as a male prostitute. He was absurdly handsome, witty, urbane, and likable.

And now, he’d been adopted by an eccentric millionaire, a man who owned a newspaper and had professionally played the concert piano.

As I struggled with myself, who I was, what I would be, unsure of my art, of myself as an artist, I was invited, as were all of Gabriel’s friends, to hang out in the mansion.

To spend the night there, too.

Rumors of sexual contact swirled around the man and his relationships with young men, but nobody was on record as having made any criminal accusations, and he assured us that his many enemies had started these rumors to bring him down. They had accused him of being a vampire, because he suffered from Cutaneous porphyrias and couldn’t tolerate sunlight, for example, and indeed outdoors he always wore huge black wraparound sunglasses.

He was celibate, he said.

One evening as he was saying good night to us he gave me an unwanted sort of longish kiss on the lips and looked me in the eye. He saw, I think, astonishment. He smiled. I guess my reaction wasn’t as bad it might have been. I think he filed me as a ‘maybe.’

He’d told me I was a genius; that I would be a great artist, but of course, most people didn’t understand that, the way he did, and I would have be careful, about who I listened to about my creative future.

Shortly thereafter it came out, one of the boys visiting, while going to the bathroom, saw one of the young men (legal age) creeping into the great man’s bedroom late at night.

He heard sex noises. The cat was out of the bag.

My people stopped visiting Ravencrest. Gabriel escaped into the Marines, and then, escaped from the marines, and then, vanished from all our lives. Time marched on.

Looking back at the photos of us all back then, it strikes me, how handsome we were. How attractive. I’m a repelling wreck now, but back then? I had something, some odd rare burning quality that I can see, was, oh, there’s no way to say it that doesn’t sound vain, but hot. I was sort of hot.

I may or may not have been any kind of artist. The millionaire, in any case, would have been very happy to sleep with me. He was grooming us. Flattering us. Pushing us. Seeing how far he could go. How we would react. Looking for someone who would trade, sex for approval. Sex for a chance at the big time.

I know. Barely any abuse at all. Yet, as the ambivalence of the world to my vast talents struck home in the years to come… yeah. It hurt.

So I get, in my small way, what it is like, to feel that sadness, when you find out that someone you thought was a supporter was just trying to get you into bed. I imagine this happening to me over and over and over again…

And I get how furious people get, at the men who do this. Even when this is all that they do.

On the face of it, not much happened that you could talk about in a court of law. An icky hug and kiss. Some compliments that turned out to be bullshit. In the world we live in, the opportunities for me to experience this abuse proved few and far between. I can only imagine the horror, of this happening again and again. But twenty five years later, the memory is still vivid, disturbing, and embarrassing.

At age 53, bald and heavy, I am now immune from such things ever happening to me again. A small thing to be thankful for. When someone likes my work I know what it is they like. My work.

So I ask all those who hold power over others in creative pursuits—do not try to trade your compliments and support for love or sex or even mild feigned romantic interest. You know it’s wrong.

Don’t do it. If you do, and people compare notes, you’re gonna be completely fucked. And not in the way you were hoping.

And you’ll deserve it.

That is all.

I Give You Permission to Write

August 4, 2016 by admin Leave a comment

So here’s the thing. Nancy Kress, in her writing book, calls this the Tolstoy problem; when you figure out you’re not Tolstoy, you’re not your writing hero, your story isn’t like theirs, In the bluntest terms, you’re not as good as Tolstoy. You’re never going to be as good. What do you do?

If you’re like most people, you:

Live in denial. See your work work through a hazy mist I call The Naive Glow of Creation which makes you incapable of seeing its weakness. This means you’ll stop getting any better or get better very slowly.
Collapse like a house of cards and never write again. Cultivate Writer’s block, or pretend you were never serious to start out with.
Alternate between collapse and denial.

The third path, or I guess, fourth, since I’ve included alternating, is to see what you do as clearly as you can, keep writing, and try to improve. Trust in the process. What process? The one you build, your practice.

In simple terms your practice looks like this:

Writing and reading and researching.
Revising and editing.
Sharing and submitting.
Processing Feedback.
Rewriting. (Optional!)
Repeating this process with new work; at new lengths; in new genres; submitted to new markets.

There are a million different ways to be a writer and a million different ways to write; one of the great things about writers is that so many of them are happy to write about the craft and the process, and with social media it literally possible to see exactly how your writers, the people you read, write. They’ll post their word counts, talk about editing and research, galleys and rewrites and copyedits and plot holes and deadlines and everything.

The process has never been less mysterious, as explicated, as explicable.

If you are an Amazon user and you want to pay ten bucks a month for Kindle Unlimited, there are about 100 pretty decent writing books you can read for the all you can eat fee.

Manuscript preparation has never been easier. Research has never been easier. Markets have never been this well indexed. Email document submissions are fast, efficient, and cheap. Barriers to entry are lower than they have ever been.

Which means of course, that competition has never been greater, for publication, for eyeballs.

But seriously. You want to do this thing? I give you permission.

I give you permission to write.

I give you permission to suck at first.

I give you permission to not even know you suck for a good long time.

I give you permission to embarrass yourself.

I give you permission to discover that you suck and have a short sad.

I suggest gently you Get Over The Sad Faster Than Me. (I once quit for eighteen years.)

I give you permission to start over; start again; write in a new way; write with new people; write with workshops; write without them; write and never show it to other people; write and show it to everyone; write and give it away free; write and treat it as if it were made of fucking diamonds and gold and shit and can only be looked at by agents and Important People and to Throw It Away if it doesn’t sell to The New Yorker.

I give you permission to ‘sell’ your work to magazines that pay in smiley faces.

I am a novice writer, I’ve only written ten or twenty thousand pages, I’ve sold thirty stories, which have been distributed to a few hundred thousand people. I’ve made ten thousand dollars in 25 years. I am a failure. I am a success. I am still trying. I’m not dead yet.

I am a writer. Write with me.

I can think of nothing more worth doing.

Write now. Write.

You can do it.

If I can, anyone can.

The unspeakably horrible un-ending pain of writing rejections

March 19, 2016 by admin 2 Comments

rejects600w Just a quick note, to the writers out there who read this blog, about the pain of rejection, which is one of those things that all successful writers mention in passing, but of course, being successful writers, we all know, that this is just the beginning of the story. Hearing about how your favorite writer was rejected early on is fun.

It’s refreshing. It’s inspiring.

It suggests that a time may come when rejection hurts less. Or when there is much less of it.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it will be true for me, not a successful writer but a writer who has now had enough success to think that true success might one day be possible. But it’s not true yet.

And a friend of mine related a bit from James Patrick Kelly, a long-time favorite SF short fiction author of mine, about how the rejection never ends, it just changes its tune.

First, your story is rejected with a form.

It’s rejected with a nice note.

It’s rejected with a rewrite request. Then the rewrite is rejected.

The story is published! Nobody reviews it. Nobody seems to read it.

The story is published! It gets bad reviews.

The story is published! Some good reviews! A few people admit to having read it! Award time comes…. crickets.

Award time comes, a few recommendations. (I am here; the rest, from here on out, is hearsay and speculation, based on the second hand reports of the Jim Kelly bit.)

Award time comes, you made the ballot! Now you lose the award.

You’re on the ballot. You lose. Again. And again. And again. (It’s a honor to be nominated! You get to to go to the Hugo Losers party!)

You’re on the ballot. You win. You still can’t sell your novel.

You sell your novel to a publisher! (repeat above, ending with, the book doesn’t earn out. Your publisher says no to the half finished sequel.)

You regularly sell novels. Which never make a bestseller list; you limp along, able to keep publishing, knowing you will never be Neil Gaiman or George Martin.

You become Neil Gaiman and George Martin.

You know you’ll never be J.R.R Tolkien.

It’s rejection, forever and ever and ever.

Still want to write?

In that case maybe, just maybe, you’re a writer. With the capital W. Or the lower case.

Best wishes, then, to you, and me, and the rest of us.

Even poor Gaiman and GRRM. Who my heart goes out to, now, knowing what I know, fifteen rungs down the ladder.

###

Even I have refused to talk about what I said this post was about, which was the pain of rejection; to clarify; on rejection, you will hate your story; you may hate yourself for writing it; you may hate yourself for submitting it; you may think that there were edits that could have saved it that you know now, in hindsight, you should have made; you may think the story is entirely worthless. You may think that you are entirely worthless. Your friends will remind you that you are not the work. You will want to punch these friends in the fucking face for saying you are not the work. If you aren’t the work what are you? If the work isn’t you, what is it? You not being the work is every bit as bad as the work being rejected, thank you very much. You.

Smart friends will say that this is part of the process. You’ll want to punch them, too.

But know, that this is part of the process.

And yes, I know, you want to punch me.

I’d want to, too.

Hello, my name is Jay, and I’m a social media addict…

March 16, 2016 by admin Leave a comment

Six days into my Facebook cold-turkey.

The stress of leaving the 24-hour party that is, or was, my feed, induced a variety of symptoms. Medical symptoms. A perpetual throat-clearing tic got worse; panic and anxiety responses tamped down with meditation popped up again. Am I certain the fast caused these things? Not really, there’s no ‘control Jay’ who didn’t go off FB that I can compare my life to, but it seems to me that they’re related.

FB bolstered the illusion of my being a professional writer; created this constant background bubble of voices and support. I could write something, an essay, a political screed, a joke, and within minutes have dozens or hundreds of people participating in the conversation.

FB was part of my professional identity as a writer.

The problem is, FB isn’t writing.

And a profession is something you make a living at.

I wish I could say that I’ve written a ton of fiction in the last week, but instead I’ve done production work for design clients and gone to the doctors and done stupid things to sooth and relax myself in place of FB. I had a huge backlog of production and design work, neglected while writing, that was going to get me eventually. I’m in the thick of it.

I recently have tried to re-learn how to read a newspaper. For years now my news has beeen embedded in my feed, and stuff branching off that. Without my feed, I find myself scanning the front page of new sites, wondering what I want to read, what I really care about, as opposed to what FBs algo’s think I care about.

I am pulling away from politics. Pulling away from debate around contentious issues.

That feels…. good?

A friend once told me that the strength of an organism can be measured by the quantity and robustness of its parasites. is it possible that FB is a kind of symptom of a version of me that works better than I’m working now? Even though it is obviously a huge time suck?

Am I just pointlessly driving myself crazy?

I’ll keep you posted.

Doing Deep Work: Everything I Know is Wrong

February 27, 2016 by admin Leave a comment

The-Firesign-Theatre-Everything-You-Kn-410810 — This is just being used as an illustration of how stupid I am. It’s also a great album; do some google-fu and find free Firesigh Theatre Youtube content, and then buy a laugh.com CD re-issue. You’ll be happy. You’re welcome.

I’ve been writing fiction on and off, mostly off, for twenty something years.

I completed the prestigious six-week, fiction writing workshop Clarion West in the 90s, after selling a handful of stories to smaller professional-paying national magazines.

In the last three years I’ve sold a dozen pieces to some of the biggest magazines in the field, including nine pieces to Asimov’s SF and two to F&SF, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

So, brief moment of elation, Yay! Got that over with. Now, on to the informative self-loathing.

At my wife’s insistence I listened to the Unmistakeable Creative Podcast “Rules for Focused Success in a distracted world,” a conversation with famously efficient person, Cal Newport.

So, if you want, go listen to that now and come back.

This led me to buy a copy of Cal’s latest book, Deep Work for my Kindle. There were fifty-two holds for it in the Cambridge Library Minuteman Network, and after listening to the podcast I was all hopped-up and giddy so I spent the fifteen bucks. Yes. Fifteen bucks.

So I’m working my way through it. It’s not hard to read, the prose is easy going; what’s hard about it is the title of this article, this understanding that I have been doing this writing thing pretty much all wrong forever, so reading the book I am forced to stop and cry periodically. (And my consciousness, quite honestly, is fragmented by decades of network culture. More on that later. If I remember.)

Rather than paraphrase Cal, I’ll invert his messages, in keeping with my title, and my general spirit of wrong-headedness, so you’ll know what not to do.

These are the George Castanza writing impulses. You feel them. But do the opposite.

Write in short bursts, at infrequent, irregular intervals.
Write in an environment filled with distraction.
Write last. You have other stuff that is more important to do. Remember, your will power is infinite.
Don’t finish what you write. Keep starting new things. Ruminate on the things you have started. But don’t finish them. Ruminate on them for years.
If it is uncomfortable, at all, as you reach or stretch yourself, stop immediately. You could pull a brain muscle. And then where would you be, eh? Say, you notice you write 500 words and then you come up for air, and this is a pattern. Don’t push it. Don’t push your face back down into it. Just marvel at your 500 words. That’s twice what Hemmingway averaged a day. So you’re twice as good as him. Fire up Neflix, Twitter, Facebook, eat a tube of Pringles and drink a liter of Ginger Ale. You earned it.
Do not study the work habits of your heroes, or other successful people. You are unique. Your success is assured. as long as you are true to yourself.
If you want to make a change in your work patterns, set a very very stringent goal, and immediately hold yourself to it. As we know, this is how athletes are made. One day, you simply get up, and you run a marathon, shedding a hundred pounds in an afternoon, and you’re ready for the olympics. A period of sustained effort, reflection, trial and error, isn’t necessary. Your intent is all that matters.
With any effort to modify your process, avoid metrics. Don’t keep score. Use your own seat of the pants gut feeling about how your changes are working out.

In all seriousness, what Cal has to say about the effects of network culture on our ability to do hard things, to sustain effort, is horrifying. He summarizes many studies and books which I have been avoiding reading for years on these things. Which is great. You don’t have to read them. Cal did. He tells you about them.

The news isn’t good. But you knew that.

Cal venerates the wealthy more than I do, and he tiptoes around the examples of CEOs who are jacked into the matrix 24/7; while I’m willing to push Cal’s thesis even there—these people are probably just assholes riding some wave of good fortune and ruthlessness and the sweat of others—Cal makes excuses for them, as they must be, as we say in business, creating value. To earn so much money.

Sure. Got it.

He posits a ‘journalist’s style’ of Deep Focus, which some can cultivate through long practice, which permits a worklife heavily punctuated with interruption and distraction, but for most of us, Cal has a stoic’s message, which is mostly what you were afraid it was going to be. Here goes.

For those not wanting to invert the bullets above, I’ll just say it straight.

Periods of long, intense, uninterrupted sustained effort are needed to cause the metabolic changes that make you better at something. (Nerve myelination is referenced in the book, the process whereby heavily used neurons insulate themselves and become faster firing)
Distraction is distracting; at a deeper level, distraction produces _lingering deficits in cognition_ with every unfinished task in your inbox sucking away at your minds precious bodily fluids.
Social media is stupid and smart people avoid it, if not always, then at least for set-aside periods of time to get shit done. He gives many examples. Oh. So many.
There’s more, but that should be enough for now, to get you started on your own miserable inventory.

The good news? Cal is a positive guy, so his good news is that you realizing that business culture took a serious wrong turn and is now pushing idiotic, counterproductive stuff lets you get ahead, by figuring out how to wall off bits of time and focus for you to get your awesome on.

What dumb stuff is fashionable and bad, you ask? Open office plans; constant meetings and constant interruption; being forced to use social media, are all examples of mindless business fetish.

Oh, other good news is that all the stuff that business is wrongly focused on? Using easy-to-use social media tools? Churning out emails and attending meetings? Everything dumb? OK, AI is going to be doing more and more of the dumb stuff anyway. So Deep Work becomes more and more important, because by definition, it’s what can’t be automated.

So go Deep, and you stand a better chance of not being turned into Soylent Green by our new AI overlords, or the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump or whoever.

Whew! So. What’s next for me?

Figuring out how to put some of the horrible truth into practice.

He says, as he blogs. But. I’m focused here longer than I am on an FB post. So.

That’s a start.

Getting Help with your Women, POC and GLBTQ Characters: Rules for the White-Het-Cis-Male Writer

December 20, 2015 by admin Leave a comment

exit-300w — My illustration from a wonderful piece of flash fiction from FSI is a brilliant case in point; is my inclusion of a POC in an illustration where no race is identified in the story a good thing? What about when we realize that the story is about expendable red shirts! Is it now a bad thing?

Science Fiction has been and continues to be embroiled in a controversy around the representation of women, GLBTQIA characters and people of color.

There are fans who long for the good old days, when such people were mostly absent, and there are fans who are delighted by the inclusion of these viewpoints, and there are fans who claim not to care much, so long as they like the story in question.

William Gibson is famously quoted as saying that all spec fic is really about the present, in one way or another, and our present is very much about these issues. Avoiding these characters in your body of work means you’re writing from another era, for another era.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But it’s not what I want to do.

But what about cultural appropriation and exploitation? When does a certain kind of stereotypical representation and story telling prove to be just as problematic as the white-washed world?

You have found the apparent double-bind. Ignore people unlike yourself and be part of one problem; do a half-assed job with them and become part of another.

What’s a writer to do?

Try. Fail. Try harder. Fail less.

First you have to try. If you think of yourself as a spec fic writer, who can write aliens and AIs, role-playing the Other should prove doable—right? If girls and gays are inconceivable, maybe you should give up on the aliens and AIs… you’re not up to it.

Heh. But I kid my people.

Second, you need feedback, from the people you are attempting to represent fairly. You need beta readers, my friend. And yes, perhaps this post should be titled ‘writer discovers an actual use for social media.’ (If you lack these kind of people in your feed, by the way, and or they won’t volunteer, well, there’s another data point for you!)

You need beta readers; POC beta readers, GLBTQ beta readers.

More than one per group would be good.

Whats the downside? You may find that after an honest back and forth your story is gone. It’s disappeared. The bulk of it no longer makes sense. It’s time to start over or write a new story.

You may find that your betas accept the story as written, but tell you, ‘we have enough of that story already. We know that story. Were tired of it.’ (Expect to hear this about stories including rape and suicide.)

So you may lose a story—by learning something, that will make you a better writer, and a better person.

That’s your worst case scenario.

So. Now you know what to do. Do it.

Let us Now Dismiss Famous Men; saying Goodbye to Lovecraft

November 12, 2015 by admin 1 Comment

This isn’t the bust of HPL which has been retired by the World Fantasy Award this week. I’m tired of looking at that one. This is a bust anyone could buy from Joyner Studio—except, it’s sold out…

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

(“The Call of Cthulhu”, August or September 1926)

So pretty much everyone in the genre at this point is reflecting again on HPL, his racism, his work, and our reaction to it, then and now.

My friend Don Webb recently wrote a great bit about Lovecraft’s virtually unprecedented (please correct me if I’m wrong) literary generosity; his mythos was a kind of freeware, open-source franchise, the like of which has never been seen before or since. The Lovecraft circle shared memes and tropes, god’s and monsters, promiscuously. As with VHS triumph over beta, the PC’s triumph over the Mac, android’s numerical superiority to iPhone, and as in the success of open source and AA, there is a power in making and sharing something without locking it down and installing a turnstile.

HPLs generosity of course, was bounded by his racism; there were no POC in the Lovecraft circle, that I know of. And again. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Reading the different takes on the mythos, the different voices, added to its reach and strength; again, there wasn’t much out there like it. Eventually we’d have big media franchises and shared worlds and share-croppped fiction with big names enlisting young blood to keep some best selling series alive, but somehow, this was not and isn’t the same thing.

You have to go to comics for this kind of weirdness; the cacophony of voices and characters, of shifting twisting uncertain backstories and ever changing realities. And of course there you have the domination of something like a studio system, ruining everything.

But all this is tangental to the short point I wanted to make, which is that people of a certain age recall enjoying HPLs work and are now more or less embarrassed or ashamed at themselves for being, as the apology goes, people of their times. The angst, the fights, the howling, is how we deal with the cognitive dissonance. To fans of a certain age, HPLs racism was reflected in virtually everything we consumed.

And so, we didn’t notice it all that much.

The little rascals on TV before school, with Buckwheat’s fantasy of tap dancing back to the ghetto with the trucks filled with watermelons; Johnny Quest’s mentor Steve screaming at the black savages; Disney’s apology for Racism, the Song of the South, complete with charming songs and animation.

HPL fit right in.

The little Rascals started saying ‘edited for television’ at some point and I was so stupid I had _no idea why_. The Warner Brothers cartoons started getting whittled back; I wouldn’t see the WW2 stuff till I was in my 30s. Disney trunked the Song of the South and pretended it had never existed. We all moved on. But HPL stayed frozen in time even as the mythos metastasized, like some hideous tentacled thing encased in arctic ice.

So Buffy could have a Stereotypically Strong Female Lead and the first seriously foreground gay relationship (of course it ends tragically) AND a succession of Cthulian Big Bad Story arcs. The racism may have been integral to HPLs vision but the ongoing echoes of HPL let that aspect mostly fade away.

And to get to the core of it, Cosmicism, the HPL universe, is darker than racism; its darker than nihilism; God(s) exists and they hate us or we are beneath their notice.

To Cthulu, #nolivesmatter.

If cosmicism is true (it could be) then HPL is just another flawed prophet carrying with him a racial stupidity that was pathetic even in his time; crappy science, crappy understanding of genetics and race. Like Michael Crichton’s climate skepticism. Just another genre writer grinding a stupid ax while also doing Other Things.

A modern take on cosmicism can bring with it the understanding that, we are all the same sluggoth slime, crawling back up the evolutionary ladder from the Old Ones polluting ooze; our pathetic status as half intelligent misbegotten garbage apes is shared equally by all races because races mostly don’t exist the way we think they do, or HPL thought they did.

The modern era can eat and excrete cosmicism and carry it forward without batting an eye, which in fact it is doing happily; the racism in it is no more integral than racism is to any religious faith or creative endeavor.

Long live Cthulu!

Good night, HPL.