The SFWA Shuffle: Is It About Respect?

When I was growing up, Walter Cronkite was like Jon Stewart times a thousand.  Walter was one of three newscasters – ABC, NBC, CBS was what you had – and he was by far the most trustworthy.  White-haired, placid Walter didn’t make a habit of going on rants like Jon Stewart, or Bill O’Reilly, or, well, any of the thousand cable jockeys.  He just mostly read the truth as he saw it.
There weren’t feedback forums in those days.  The best you could get was to wander on down to the bar and get into an argument with someone.  If you wrote a letter to the newspaper, the newspaper decided if they printed it – imagine having successful comment on a blog take three days to arrive, and having it be a big deal when it went through.
There was no community.  There was only Walter, holding forth, one man telling you the truth.  You believed in Walter, because you never had any reason not to.  And Walter only pronounced judgment a couple of times in his career – but when he said that we’d lost Vietnam, it was like God himself told us that things were over.  The tears of Walter Cronkite were a terrible thing to see, like the tears of America itself, inspired only by the death of a President.
You trusted the Godhead.
Now?  Nobody gets off light.  If you’re in broadcast, you’re not only one of a thousand folks on the screen, but your words are torn to shreds by a million Twitter-feeds and blogs and Facebook posts and comment forums the second they’re off your lips.  Trust is for suckers, the Rush Limbaugh junkies who lap up what he says uncritically – and note that his audience is mostly older folks seeking a Walter Cronkite methadone.  No, conservatives and liberals alike know to question, to poke, to prod, and to seek verification – even if it’s only verification from like-minded individuals.
One misstep, and the fallout is very public.  Rage used to happen silently, impotently, in phone calls to the station and flurries of letters, and the stations themselves got to determine how loud the dissenting voices were.  Now anyone can tune in to the constant stream of fury, and you’re not Walter Cronkite.  You’re literally only as good as your last broadcast.  Reputation counts for very little; even the longest-term of friends can be yanked off their pedestal by one misstep.
And I wonder.
There’s a SFWA petition going around because of the way that Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick were “censored,” and what’s interesting is that aside from notable conservative Brad Torgerson – who also seems to idolize much of the past – I don’t think there’s a person on that petition who’s under sixty.
I wonder how much of that reaction is the Grandmasters Of Yore feeling threatened by this new culture that’s swimming up to engulf them.
See, they’re supposed to be Walter Cronkite now.  The elder statesmen.  When they speak, their words should fall on fertile ground.  And when they saw Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg being savaged by these people who were nobody – nobody! – until Mike and Barry got taken off-stage, I wonder how terrifying that is for them, to see someone’s grand legacy simply not count.  The idea that these men’s decades of service, their reputation, would not shield them from the onslaught, well… the only reaction is that this must be censorship.  Nobody would call for the heads of respected statesmen.
And I wonder whether there would have been a petition if, instead of People Who We Know Are Brilliant Writers, the column had been written by Phil and Jackie Nobody, just two old folks recollecting the way an editor looked in a bikini.  I wonder if all these Grand Statesmen would have required a petition for that column’s removal, seeing that as the Thin End of The Wedge – or whether they would have cheered to see such ignorant rabble escorted from the room.
I suspect Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison wouldn’t have given a crap about Phil and Jackie Nobody.
See, to this generation, Who Gets To Speak is about who has the smartest thing to say today.  We’ve all linked to a blog post from someone we’ve never heard of who nonetheless articulated things beautifully, and we’ve all condemned a long-term hero who shoved his foot in his mouth.  Reputation counts for something – but in this new world, it will not shield you, and the reputation is not so much an acquired position so much as it is the accumulated head-nods of people agreeing with your wise positions.
But to that generation – and a generation is often a state of mind, not an age – they believe in Walter Cronkite.  One suspects they aspire to Walter Cronkite-hood, and are pleased to have gotten there.  Who wouldn’t?  Being The Voice is a wonderful thing.  And to them, I wonder if the reaction of “censorship” isn’t so much that “people are being fired for saying silly things,” but “people like us are getting fired for saying silly things.”
Walter Cronkite didn’t say silly things.  Whatever he said was made golden by the fact that Walter Cronkite said it.
And I wonder whether these otherwise quite-wise and compassionate people weren’t signing a petition against SFWA so much as they were protesting this newer and rawer and more brutal way of life.

Bring Your Own Goddamned Context, Guys: On The Latest SFWA Scandal

There’s another Science Fiction Writers of America kerfuffle this time around, and I think CC Finlay sums it up admirably.  Go read what he wrote.
But CC links to a pretty decent essay by David Gerrold – not that I agree with what he says, but I think he’s pretty even-handed and honest as a man can be who stands on the other side of this issue – who says this:

The indignation junkies immediately whooped up an outrage posse to complain that the bulletin was a sexist rag — Malzberg and Resnick’s response/explanation was judged and found wanting. They had to be flogged.
Okay, I exaggerate — but I know Malzberg and Resnick. I admire them. I’ve learned from them…

To which I immediately said:

Look, I don’t know Michael Resnick and Barry Malzberg – nor should I have to in order to parse their essays properly.  As writers, they above all people oughtta know that when someone’s reading you, you should not expect them to understand intent, but rather what you put on the goddamned page.
And I for one am sick of the idea that one can only interpret a given blog post via the rose-colored filter of knowing someone.  As anyone who knows me, I have stuck my foot in my mouth monstrously on more than a few occasions.  And when I have misrepresented myself so grievously, it is not the reader’s fault.  It is my fault for failing to provide my own context.
Am I happy to have friends who’ll defend me when I fuck up and come off as a misogynist asshole?  Absolutely.  Am I glad when they do?  Yup.
Do I use that personal knowledge as an excuse to come off like a jerk in print?
No, no, no.
I don’t give a crap what Barry and Mike are like in their personal lives.  Full truth is that I’ve been on a few panels with Mike Resnick, and he seems like a decent guy.   But would Mike Resnick expect me to know who he is in order to make sense of his latest novel on Africa?  If he wrote a chapter that, in its entirety, consisted of the words “Whoop whoop, the jungles are floppy,” would his friends rally around him, going, “No, no, Mike’s been to Africa, you see!  You gotta know what he means when he says floppy, which you can get by hanging around him at the bar!”
I suspect they’d say “fuck that.” You need to bring your own context with every story, amiright?
Well, that rule applies also to non-fiction.
What Resnick and Malzberg wrote was offensive to me – and worst of all, not particularly useful.  If it had been the “Barry and Mike toss around wimmen-in-bikini jokes while explaining how to break into the Chinese translation markets,” well, sure, maybe I mighta had something to offset the 1960s gags.  But there wasn’t.  And I don’t think it’s “censorship” to make an editorial decision, “Hey, this backslapping column that is routinely offending people while also providing no useful writing knowledge should be cut.”
Look, the SFWA Bulletin should be a place for everybody.  You wanna rail about politics?  You’re a writer, get a blog.  But I think a central place for SFWA’s membership should offend no one – not because I think that debates should not be had, but because I think there are appropriate places for debates.  You’re a dick if you start spouting your Ayn Rand bullshit at a kid’s birthday party.  You’re choady if you start spouting your pro-Obamacare beliefs in the middle of someone’s date.
There are plenty of on-topic debates for SFWA to have – hell, I’d love to see a raucous throwdown between traditional publishers and self-publishers.  But those are all related to the central subject of writing.  And I suppose the SFWA bulletin could be bawdy all the time and start prefacing every mention of Harlan Ellison with “Award-winning and breast-grabbing author Harlan Ellison,” or by referring to the military fiction authors in jest as “toothless gun yokels,” but there’s no sense in it.
If we can not offend our paying members in the central meeting place of our organization, then that is a good thing.
We’re all writers, man.  This is a hard enough goddamned gig without bringing in worthless crap that divides people.  If the bikini-clad woman on the cover gets chucked in the bin?  Fuck it, it’s a cover.  If that cover was a blank white expanse but the inside had Connie Willis telling me how to research on the Internet, a debate between Seanan McGuire and Jim Butcher on the best way to become a best-selling urban fantasy author, Chuck Wendig explaining how to raise your blog traffic and Mike Resnick explaining how to pitch an anthology, by God I’d be so happy with that fucking magazine I’d hug it in my goddamned sleep.
But no.  What we got was bikini covers and two guys taking up six pages to amuse the people who knew them already, and that’s not censorship to take that down, that’s a not particularly useful magazine.
And as for Barry and Mike, well, I don’t assume you’re bad people.  You said something a little dumb, doubled down, and are perplexed by this “negative feedback” you’re getting when you don’t come off as charming any more.  The problem is that this new generation – and we may be ingrates – does not care.  We have no gentle tide of your past charm to surf on.  All we have are the words on this page, right now, and what can you do for us, guys?
As always, the writer starts with a blank page, and a blank audience.  Stop blaming the page, and the audience, and write better.

The Power Of A Good Character Arc

“This story isn’t working,” I told my critique group last night, after hearing their comments.  “I wrote it the wrong way, and I need to tear it up and start all over again.”
Which was true.  I’d written the story in all-dialogue for some reason, a technique that’s inherently clumsy – you have to have people speak in clunky exposition to show what’s happening (“Why, you’re sprouting wings, Margaret!”), and there’s no good way of putting in vivid description without having poets spontaneously composing prose to speak aloud to one another, and if one character is concealing something then it’s difficult to show their side of things without even clunkier monologues.  So basically, I had a great story about a sexually dysfunctional warship – but doing it as a radio play for something that needed the visceral pleasure of military fiction was inherently distancing.
The interesting thing is that after my critique group had convinced me this wasn’t the way to go, some of the members still liked the story very much, and expressed concerns about me tearing it to pieces and starting over… Even though some of their complaints about the story were what had convinced me this all-talky approach wasn’t working.
That’s the power of a good character arc.
Which is to say the story was flawed, but the character’s journey was extremely potent – you had a body-dysmorphic woman who’d left her meat-shell behind to transfer her consciousness into a warship, and she had to come to acceptance with her new and far weirder body in order to be comfortable in her new existence.  That’s a really potent lesson to be learned, and as such the story is kind of guaranteed to work on some level for many folks.
Stories are, in some ways, a lesson learned by the reader, as experienced by the character.  That’s what the character arc is – the person within it has discovered something new (usually courtesy of a try/fail cycle or two where they demonstrate how their old approach wasn’t working), and proceeds to integrate that lesson into his or her life.
If you have something really universal that the character learns – a bold statement on love, or loss, or whatever – then everything else about the tale becomes easier.
A good character arc is like a sketch from a brilliant artist – you can rough out a few lines, and it has power and emotion even though many other aspects of it may be lacking.  In fact, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that my most-beloved (or at least my most-discussed) stories are also the ones that have the strongest character arcs.  You have Lizzie learning huge lessons about warfare and friendship in Sauerkraut Station, and you have Irena learning what she really needs to do to save her brother in “Run,” Bakri Says, and you have poor Stewart learning about his significance in the place of the universe in Riding Atlas.  Whereas I have stories that I think are better written, but the lessons the characters learn within them are smaller, less interesting – and so they don’t connect with an audience as deeply.
In many cases I have tales I can’t sell, and I think that’s because the lessons the people within it learn are fractional – an incremental notch forward on their personality.  Whereas the easiest sales I get are the ones where the characters wind up totally transformed by the end of it, learning that everything they know is wrong: Lizzie facing the unfairness of battle and emerging scarred, Irena getting a different take on who her brother is as she loops through his time machine, Stewart seeking shallow intimacy but discovering the real intimacy after he faces down the entirety of the universe.
For me, the best thing I can possibly do with a story is to have a great character arc – a really significant lesson.  If I do that, then everything else can be forgiven.  And in this case, what I have is a character arc so great that people are responding, I think, to the potential of it, even if the shell that arc is currently carried within artificially stunts its impact.
The problem is that, being a pantser, I don’t know what the character arc is in advance.  Sometimes I get to the end and go, “Oh, that’s not actually that much of a change.”  And then that story tends to be a more difficult sell.  (Not impossible; just difficult.  Smaller lessons can resonate more deeply with smaller audiences, in much the same way an in-joke isn’t for everyone but those who get it often laugh harder.)
But this dysfunctional warship story is interesting, because I think what people are reacting to is more the potential of a story unlocked.  The word “important” was said more than once about the tale.  And I think if I was a pre-Clarion writer, the kind of guy who shrugged and said, “Eh, close enough,” I’d probably try to refine that clunky dialogue methodology down, and maybe switch a few scenes around, and eventually I’d come up with something nice.  The tale would be heartwarming to some no matter how I phrased it, because a) I’m a decent enough writer to make bad approaches look decent, and b) the pulsing potency of that character arc would resonate with some just because they want to learn the lesson that’s unlocked by my protagonist.
Yet I’m me, now.  I’m willing to say, okay, the central plot is great, but the housing is bad, and find some way to back off and rewrite it in a fashion that it not just harnesses but amplifies the strength of that core, until I get something that explodes out of the gate.
That may mean I write five more drafts until I get a good start on how to approach this, and then several more drafts until I refine the story’s elements so they all work in harmony.  That’s okay.  I have a good start.  And post-Clarion, I know that “good enough” isn’t good enough; I’m battling with much more popular writers in a queue of hundreds, and so I’d damn well better be the best.
But I’m heartened.  What I have is a tale that some loved in a very raw format.  That gives me hope that I can break it carefully out of the shell and put it in something more suited to it.

WeaselCon, New York City, 02/20 at 4:30 pm

I am bungeeing through the New England area, and I do not have time to see everyone I would like.  Basically, Gini and I will be driving all night on Wednesday, having lunch at Babbo on Thursday, seeing Book of Mormon that evening, spending the day in New York to celebrate my Godson’s birthday on Friday, spending the day with my dear old Dad on Saturday, and driving back on Sunday.
But we do want to see you!
So here’s the deal: we have all of two hours free, and we’ll spend those two hours at the Beer Culture bar in New York City at 4:30 pm on Thursday, February 20th.  If you can read this, you’re welcome to show up and say hello to Gini and me.  (Though it’s nicer if you tell me you’re coming.)  It’s not a ton of time, but I’ll have a beer and happily say howdy.  We may get there earlier, depending on how Babbo goes – but we’re not rushing that fine meal, so no promises.
I will provide nametags.  I will also post a picture of what Gini and I are wearing that day on my Twitter feed, so you’ll have the best possible image of me.  I will also pontificate at length about the new corduroy pillows.
Feel free to show up, if you wish.  I like people.  So odds are pretty good I’ll like you.

Do Women Make Less Money? No, Yes, And Then Maybe Yes Again.

The Daily Beast debunks that old canard that women don’t make 77 cents for every dollar that men earn.  As they say, and correctly:

The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week. When all these relevant factors are taken into consideration, the wage gap narrows to about five cents. And no one knows if the five cents is a result of discrimination or some other subtle, hard-to-measure difference between male and female workers.

So it’s not true, and I wish people would stop pushing that bad factoid.
…But on the other hand, it is true in a sense – because if you look at the source of the discrepancy as listed in that very article, it’s basically that “women enter fields that make less money.”  The ten least remunerative (and God, I love that word) majors are dominated by women, whereas the most-lucrative majors are infested with men.
So on the one hand, yes, women don’t make any less when compared to men – they just take crappier jobs.
And why do they take crappier jobs?  Quite possibly because, if you’ve been paying attention at all, the way women are systematically treated in the lucrative technical fields is so hostile that a lot of them quit.  (And that girls are systematically encouraged to not go into those fields by being given different toys, which subtly signal what’s okay for women to do.)
So yeah, trotting out that canard irritates me.  It’s not that if you place a woman next to a man, they earn significantly less* – it’s that women are steered via societal forces towards jobs that pay them less.  And fixing that problem requires a whole bunch of different solutions – ones where we have to look deeper at the questions of what women are encouraged to do, and why, and what can we do to make those careers more welcoming to women.
And – and I wish I could find a link I read a while back – there was a discussion of some of these high-paying and very technical professions, and how in other countries where women do flock to these professions, they tend to get paid less.  The theory was that when women crowd a profession, it becomes viewed as easier to do, and hence gets paid less.  And I can’t find that, so I can’t research it – stupid browser crash – but it passes my sniff test as something that could be true.  After all, nurses often know a hell of a lot more than doctors, but because nurses are largely women, they often get shrugged off as not knowing what they’re doing.  I’d have to look into it more, but who knows?
So there’s a problem.  To my mind, quoting the ol’ “women get paid less” makes the solution seems like a simple thing, as if we just passed a law that smashed wage discrimination this would all go away.  But it won’t.  The issue is more insidious, and deeper; we have layers of incentives and disincentives, in some cases, applied almost from birth, that quietly encourages women to move into fields that will reward them less.
That’s a deeper issue.  You have to combat that with other societal incentives.  And I don’t know all the ways we could fix that, but I’d at least like to see the issue focused on.
* – Which is not to say you can’t find pay disparities if you look for them, but on the whole the problem is different.  If you are saying, “Ferrett is not concerned about women earning less!” then you have clearly turned your brain off for the day.

JESUS CHRIST WE DO NOT NEED MEGGINGS

I AM SO ENRAGED I AM GOING TO TRY NOT TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS okay wait I’m gearing down wait I’ll talk normal now.
Let’s talk about “Meggings.”  These are leggings for men.  Yes, men, if you want to wear colorful skin-tight pantyhose-style things on your legs, you now can!
Except you totally could have before.  Like, you know, men have worn leggings for years – in military outfits, in ballet outfits, in all sorts of Renaissance wear.
You know what none of those guys had to do before?
Assign their clothing a different name to protect their precious fucking masculinity.
Look, I’m well on record for wearing nail polish – I like nail polish.  It makes my nails look pretty.  I like pretty.  And I’m comfortable enough in my guyhood that I don’t feel that I’m somehow sliding into Icky Girl Territory if I want to have something pretty on me.
And I especially don’t have to try to assign some existing product a whole new fucking name – like NAIL ARMOR – to ensure that nobody knows I’m doing something girly.  It’s not a “murse,” it’s a fucking purse, and yes maybe girls have purses but I don’t have to mutilate the language just to ensure that I’m not carrying icky icky girl stuff on my body.
When a girl wears jeans, she doesn’t have to call them “vajayjeans” so no one will accidentally mistake her for a guy.  (They have “girl jeans” because girls are usually different shapes than guys, but that’s just so we know where to shop.)  That’s because guy stuff is generally not considered so toxic that having it on your body sucks the hormones out of you.  I mean, sure, maybe if you start wearing a mustache it’ll be a girlstache, but simple items of clothing and decoration?  Fuck that noise.
Girls have leggings, and so do guys.  Girls wear purses, and so do guys.  Girls wear nail polish, and so do guys.  And maybe some jackholes will think you girly if you have these accoutrement on your person – but honestly?  Clutching your pretty pretty princess nails to your chest and shrieking, “This is NAIL ARMOR!  In MILITARY GREEN!” will not make these people think better of you.
It’s okay, dudes.  Wear your leggings proud.  Or not, because, well, they’re leggings, but you don’t have to make everything SUPER-MANLY to justify it on your person.