I Dunno, I Can't Tell; Musings On Women And Science Fiction And Fantasy And Stuff

When all’s said and done, the greatest flaw of humanity is that each of us are trapped in our own head.  We’re the sum of our experiences, and even if those experiences are warped, we can come to believe they’re objective truth.
Case in point: women and speculative fiction.
I was reading Eclipse Four in the tub, a short story collection that I purchased simply because it contained three of my absolute favorite writers: Kij Johnston, Nalo Hopkinson, and Jo Walton.  Each of them are in my rare “Buy on sight” author group, where merely hearing they have a new novel means I’ll purchase it without knowing a thing about it.
Each of them also writes so well they make my fillings ache; Kij writes these ethereal, longing-soaked stories that stab like daggers, and Nalo’s mastery of tone and voice makes it feel like she’s speaking right to me, and Jo Walton has a knack for finding the emotional center of a story that pulls me through even as she never writes the same kind of tale twice.
And the more I thought about it, my personal area of the science-fiction field seems to be women-centric.  My writing mentor?  Cat Valente, she of the beauteous prose and ascension to the rarified air of NYT bestseller-hood.  My peers who seem to be having the most positive reception to their stories lately?  Kat Howard, Amal El-Mohtar, and Felicity Shoulders, all of whom are getting righteously reprinted in the “Best Of” annual collections for their wonderfully good tales.  The breakout star I think of (and hear about) the most often?  Seanan McGuire, that series-writing machine.
This isn’t me picking women to prove a point.  This is me looking around at the folks I see as writers, and noting that the ones who stick in my mind the most tend to be women.  Not all of them are, of course; Jim Hines picks up the “Novelist who I know far better for his blogging” prize, and Jay Lake is the man whose insane persistence is my inspiration when I feel like quitting.  Paul Berger gets my award for “Writer I wish would produce more,” and George Galuschak gets my “I went to school with him, why can’t I write like that?” award.
But when I think about writing, the majority of people who come to mind tend to be female.
And I don’t know.  There’s a lot of talk, as there should be, about how women are routinely fucked over in sci-fi and fantasy, and I’m certainly not saying they aren’t.  I’ve heard the tales of guys who don’t read wimmen because wimmen can’t write.  I know there’s still a lot of dumb discrimination still.  I know you look at the super-sellers of the field and it’s still mostly male with China and Neil and Scalzi. I know the majority of editors are male.
But people were pleasantly surprised when last year’s awards had so many women in the mix, and some said it was a blip and would doubtlessly vanish next year… But from my little corner as a writer hauling himself one rung up the ladder at a time, what I see is women around me.  and I don’t know whether that’s because once again, I’m back fighting The War On Jefferson Hill again, self-selecting because I’m more comfortable with women, or whether it’s the sign of a genuine sea change.
I hope it’s a sea change.  But I can’t tell.  I’m stuck in my head, from one perspective, and I can’t see the whole picture.  All I know is that whenever Kij or Nalo or Jo write something, I’m there, and I’m taking notes, and wishing like hell I had their talent.  And in that moment, I don’t care what gender is writing, all I know is I want more stories like this.

Woman Loses 282 Pounds And All This Battering Hatred, Film At 11

Let us start this hootenanny by reminding you that I am chubby myself, and I am personally attracted to larger women.  So please, when discussing the horrors of fat hating, don’t make the mistake of thinking that I think fat people should be removed from sight.
That said, this article in Yahoo puts me in two distinct mindsets at once, like two muscled guys trying to cram through a door.
The headline is “Woman Loses 282 Pounds In Three Years,” and the teaser text says, “After years of being bullied, ignored, and mooed at, Natalie Strawn decided to change her life…” at which point it tells you how she lost a lot of weight and now society likes her.
On the one level, I find this to be terribly sad.  The fact that fat people are subjected to all of that loathing is pretty awful, because obviously every person you see who’s overweight is:
a)  Horrifically unhealthy, unlike all of those suave bulimics and anorexics we idolize;
b)  So slovenly lazy thanks to this accumulation of large that obviously they must be unmotivated welfare freaks with nothing of worth to give;
c)  So ugly that they’re downright rude not to immediately change themselves for our convenience.
So the fact that a fat girl gets a lot of shit is, well, sad.
On the other hand, I used to get a lot of shit when I didn’t shower for two weeks on end, and wore the same shirt for four days at a time regardless of what soup stains had accumulated.  And after a while, I asked myself the rightful question: “Self, if society thinks so poorly of me for behaving this way, is it worth the troubles, or should I change myself to be better?”
And I think of the liberal gut reaction that NO, YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BE YOURSELF, which is kinda bullshit.  There are a lot of people for whom “Be yourself” equates to “Be an asshole,” and so you see people cutting other folks off in mid-sentence and haranguing folks with their interminable rants on sports cars or fitness or the latest computer technology.
Or, in a less toxic example, you have this constant barrage of “NEVER CHANGE” and as such you have all these people who feel lonely because they’ve been taught that the world should conform to their needs, and never quite discovering that there are quite significant benefits sometimes in changing small things.  Dressing better makes people treat you better.  Listening actively makes people like you better.  Cultivating some surface knowledge of the shit you don’t care about (for me it’s sports and cars) often makes you able to bridge to topics you do care about.
You can get a lot of mileage by ignoring this constant refrain of “You’re awesome the way you are” and asking, “Say, maybe if I bathed regularly and combed my hair, people might respond better to me.”
Yes, that’s a lesson I learned.  I’m not proud to repeat it here, but hey.  Honesty’s what I do.
Fitting into society isn’t a bad thing.  A lot of times your crazy uniqueness is actually a hindrance, and maybe it’s time to learn how to, you know, work with people.  But no, everyone is a perfect snowflake, if you just stand your ground people will come to you.  In movies, anyway.  In real life, you often just sort of disintegrate on the edges of the playground as everyone carries on in their reindeer games and ignores you, able to subsist in this real-life loneliness with a straggly net of e-friends who have gathered from the corners of the globe to listen to each other on walkie-talkie radios and no real-life hugs.
So I go, “Hey, if she’s getting all this flack, then why not drop some pounds?”  It’s a rational response: PEOPLE HATE FAT? DON’T BE FAT.  (Even if that’s a lot trickier than it sounds.  Permanent weight loss is hard, yo.)  Shouldn’t I be patting her on the back for a wise decision in trade-offs?
Then I see the fact that the video made the front page of Yahoo!, and my blood boils again, because the lesson here is that this fat woman used to be shit on by everyone and now she’s lost all this weight and she’s desirable and wonderful and ARE YOU LISTENING, FAT PEOPLE?  The lesson in that post-interview is not “Hey, how do you learn how to deal with jerks?” or “Really, is society’s evident spite at fat people justified on any level?” but rather EVERY FAT PERSON SHOULD DO THIS, HERE’S HOW, NOW SHE’S WORTH OUR ATTENTION.
Because you know, you don’t see these kinds of front-page miracle turn-arounds for ugly guys who groomed and dressed better and learned how to talk nice (though to be fair, there are a few fashion shows that scrape the surface of that).  No, every time something hits the front pages it’s “YOU LOST WEIGHT, NOW WE’LL SHOW YOU ON TELEVISION!” because fat-hating is so ingrained into our fucking society that we have prime-time hit shows devoted to rehabilitating these useless fat people into human beings.
And I just stall, locked like a Blue Screen of Death.  Because honestly, yes, society hates fat so much that it is a logical conclusion to lose a few pounds to get a better career, a more supportive boyfriend, health care that won’t write off your every ailment as “That’s ‘cuz yer fat, porkzilla.”  But on the other hand, isn’t losing weight just giving into what is a fucking insane desire on society’s part?  Because there’s a point at which yeah, I probably would fit in better if I never read these silly “book” things except for bestsellers and never mentioned my polyamory, but fuck that.  There are lines where you give into society and start to erode your core personality.
So I’m filled with rage and shame on all levels – because it’s the NRA and abortion argument all over again, where you have one side that’s so “NO, IT MUST BE THIS WAY” and the reaction of the other side inevitably mutates to “WELL, THE OPPOSITE OF YOUR WAY MUST BE WHAT WE WANT,” and the middle ground dissolves so that you’re left with two camps where any change to society is an assault upon your being and no, fatty, you can step out of the adipose ghetto if you just drop a few pounds and smile and dance prettily for us, and I just want to punch the entire fucking world.

Sick Puppy

I woke this morning to a sinus headache, a full-body ache, and vomiting.  As such, there will be no blog entry today, but you can have a puppy.

Seriously, since I’ll most likely be stuck shivering in bed all day today playing Ascension on my iPhone, if there’s anything you can do to entertain me, please do.  I’m not going anywhere.

Clarionniversary, December Version

Stories Sold This Month:
I sold my flash fiction spaceliner tale “In The Unlikely Event” to Daily Science Fiction.  Also, “Rooms
Stories Worked On This Month:

• “Priest” (Heavily working title).  In Week Four of Clarion, I wrote a rather tedious story about a priest attempting to perform Last Rites on a zombie, which was led astray by a) me not being a terribly good writer, b) me trying to remain completely faithful to Catholic rituals, and c) the fact that I didn’t actually have an ending and as such just made something confusing and vague in the hopes of appearing deep.  Neil Gaiman correctly called this tale “boring.”  However, the backstory, in which we have a priest shooting zombies, was interesting, and made for a 1300-word tale.  Finished today.  Quite proud.
• “The Girl Who Fell In Love With The Sea” (Final first draft).  Finished this one about a girl who goes insane and believes the sea is her boyfriend; will clean up and submit to my faithful RL writers group shortly.
• “Engraved On The Branches Of My Lover” (Final draft).  If you look back through the Clarionniversary posts, you’ll see many references to a story called “Bad Broccoli,” which has mutated so thoroughly that the only similar point is that both contain a postman for a protagonist.  I’ve rewritten this at least seven times and I don’t know whether it’s any good, as it’s too wrapped up in my personal mythology, but I cleaned it up as best I could and sent it out.
• {$UNNAMED NOVEL}, did brief writeup on some of the main characters and setting.  Then got sidetracked by “Priest.”

October Rejections: One generic from Clarkesworld.  Not the good kind of generic where they held it for a week, but the bad kind where they sent it back in a day. Oops.

Currently In Circulation: “Riding Atlas,” “Unreal Estate,” “Devour,” “Season to Taste,” “All Things Head Towards The Sea,” “Shadow Transit,” “The Afternoon War,”  “Shoebox Heaven.”
Overall:
A bad month, really.  I got lazy, didn’t really write for like four days.  That may not sound like a lot, but it sure is slacking for me.  I need to get on the whip, but I’m waiting to do final drafting on my Novel of Doom, and as such it’s difficult to get too attached to anything.

Musings On Mix Tapes

Making a mix tape is such a strange thing, these days.  Not that I ever like making mix tapes in the first place.
Look.  Music is personal to me.  Deeply personal.  And I learned a long time ago that my musical tastes are quirky enough that I hate listening to it with other people, because I fucking hate that moment when I’m totally moved by this song and I see that they don’t like it.
I rock the songs when I’m alone.  But if you’re not 100% with me, I don’t want to be with you.  It’s just painful, that time when you realize you’re trying to share this confection of beats and joy with a friend and they’re all like, “Yeah, is it over yet?”
So I’ll listen to news.  Or be silent.  Talking’s good.
So if I make you a mix CD, it is me opening a heavily-locked door to my heart.  It’s me saying, “Here are songs I like a lot, and I think you will too.”  And I don’t risk that for just everybody.  Because hey, I know you won’t like all of them, but maybe we can find this lovely little patch of carpet in the middle to lay down and snuggle on.
I’m currently in the process of making Christmas mix tapes for Angie and Jen and Jenna, and it’s a layer upon layer.  Because now there are songs I love that belong to someone else.
While I adore Great Big Sea, that whole group now belongs to Bec because she loves them and I love them.  It would be like cheating to give Angie a song by them – or, in fact, give them a song that Bec introduced me to.  And there are songs I gave to Gini a long time ago that I’m reluctant to give to anyone else, because they were on the first precious mix CD I gave to her – and even though Gini doesn’t listen to those songs all that often, I spent such time in Ann Arbor listening to those songs while I was so deep in love with her that I refuse to hand them to anyone else.
So each mix CD becomes a little trickier.  If I give them this song, and they love it, it may be theirs forever.  Which makes each CD a greater gift, in some way; they own another piece of my heart.  And so I must proceed with care.

"That's how you investigate. I know, it's what I used to do."

I’ve been playing Skyrim for a while, as has the known universe, and along the way you pick up quests like stray dogs pick up ticks.  You can’t avoid getting a quest.  Talk to a stranger and they’ll hand you tasks by the armful, leaving Skyrim so helpless you wonder how they get anything done without relying on mute foreigners to do their work for them.
Thankfully, all of these quests are listed on your Quest menu, and when I’m between big quests I’ll try to fill out the smaller ones that I have, apparently, completed incidentally without even realizing I’ve helped somebody: “Collect the bounty from Raerek,” or “Return to Talen-Jai.”
Then I saw “Go kill the chief at Dragon Bridge Overlook.”
So I went off to slaughter him.  I didn’t know why.  I had no recollection of anyone even asking me to kill these people, nor did I have any particular motivation to do so.  It was just on my list.  And as I stood among the dead bodies, I finally realized:

I had become Leonard Shelby.

The 2011 Annual Greed List!

The time has come for my Annual Greed List – the large (and, yes, uncut) list of things I desire for Christmas in 2011. Why do I do this? If you’re really interested, here’s a brief history of the Greed List.
The briefer version, however, is that I think “What you want” is a reflection of “Who you are” at this moment – your music, your hobbies, your fandoms, who you are as a person.  And while I guess I could just toss all this on an Amazon Wishlist and send you over, why bother?  I want you to know who I am in this moment, and so I not only list what I want, but explain why I want it.
So here it is.  Here’s who I am this year.  And “Who I am” is a little sad, because generally Gini and I get pretty good gifts for each other, but this Christmas we’re not because of a$2,000 car repair bill that hit just before Thanksgiving.  So we’ve vowed not to exchange presents – which is probably going to be bent a little bit, but not much.  So I’m not planning on getting a whole lot this Christmas.  Alas.
Still, I’ve got Gini.  And as noted, “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth,” and part of the reason we’re broke is because I spent embarrassing thousands of dollars on my dental woes, so hey.  I got it.
It’s good.
King-sized bed.
Our bed situation is a little embarrassing.  Because we’re older.  And this really is a perfectly good bed.
But as I’ve gotten older, my sleep has rubbed thinner.  I’m twitchier, taking longer time to doze off, and waking up sooner.  And Gini was never really a deep sleeper anyway, so this is not working out.
The thing is, we love to cuddle, but our queen-sized bed doesn’t allow us room to thrash.  So  about twice a week, one of us gets up from the bed and grabs our pillows and sleeps in the guest room, rather than subjecting the other to a night of bumpy partners.  This feels like failure.
What we need is a king-sized bed – one where we can snuggle up to each other in the center, yet retreat to our far corners if we have to when the bad nights come calling.  It works in hotel rooms (with the obvious disadvantage of having to crawl across an endless Desert of Blankets to get to the end), and it would work here.
This was probably going to be our big Christmas gift to ourselves this year, but a King-Sized bed is pretty expensive.  More so when you consider the rock-like surfaces we need for our ancient backs to be happy.  So it’s not going to happen.
But it’d be nice to dream.
A Universal Remote.
Our Monster Penis System is legendary – a 55″ television with a surround-sound system that rattles the windows.  But it’s also a legendary beast.
To use the Monster Penis System requires not one, but five separate remotes – one for the sound system, one for the television, one for the Blu-Ray DVD (thanks, Dad!), one for the DVR, one for the X-Box.  And probably one or two for things we don’t even know.
So Gini and I joke about how much control we have at any given time – Gini has the sound remote, I have the DVR, and as it turns out we want to watch the DVD player and then we have to get up and track it down.  What I’d like would be one remote that controls our entire system at once, so that we can then lose that and be able to control nothing.
That’s what I desire for Christmas: one single, glorious point of failure.
Paiste Alpha Thin Crash 14″
I’ve started drumming again this year because I like having nice arms.  Pretty girls like nice arms.  And it’s a good form of exercise, smashing and thrashing away for forty-five minutes or so.
The problem is that while I like my drums (though I do fantasize about a full set), the cymbals I have are very one-note.  Which is to say that I started as a hard rock and punk drummer, and the cymbals I have are very big, angry, long-decay things where if I hit the crash it’ll still be vibrating by the end of the song.  I want a nice bright cymbal with a short decay so that I can vary the sounds.
Not that anyone but me will be able to hear it, of course.  But it’ll make me happy.  And stronger.
Awful Hawaiian Shirts
I used to want T-shirts.  Black T-shirts.  But in the past year or so, I… have become a Hat Person.
Which is to say that I have ceased my youthful ways of black shirts with clever slogans and black pants.  No, I have donned an outfit that can allow me into almost any restaurant, since it is a casual wear.  But there is a problem: I run out of shirts early.
Look, I have an entire drawer full of black T-shirts, but I only have about ten Hawaiian shirts. Which means that if Gini’s lax with the laundry, I’m back to square one.  I need garish shirts, the worse the better.
I mean, look, you know the shirt I really wanted to get?  It was in New Orleans.  It was orange. With green stars on it.  And in each star?  Alternating.  Young Elvis, Old Elvis, Young Elvis, Old Elvis. I consider it one of the greatest disappointments of my life that it was a size “small.”  So you know damn well that I’m going for garish.
Stephen King’s 11/23/69
Not that I haven’t been a raving Stephen King fan, but I’m not a Stephen King nutter.  I’ve gotten to the point where I skip his books unless they’re recommended to me – the lovely Megan recommended Full Dark, No Stars, and aside from his rapetastic set of novellas (which is not a ding in itself, but like spam, that was more rape that I’d planned for), and the OMG DISAPPOINTMENT after the stellar beginning of UNDER THE DOME, I haven’t purchased a lot.
However, his latest story – which seems cockamamie – presses all my buttons.  It’s time travel. The man goes back to Derry, for God’s sake.  And it’s been getting stellar reviews, both in terms of the New York Times liking it, and in terms of my friends going, “Yeah, this works.”
So we’re poor little churchmice now, and I am waiting patiently for Christmas.
Mail-Order Mysteries: Real Stuff From Old Comic Book Ads!
Here’s a Greed List first: I’m just gonna tell you to watch the video.  Here, check this amazement out:

If you grew up in the 1970s and read comic books, you’ll doubtlessly have wondered what you got when you ordered from those phenomenal ads.  I certainly do.  And with this book, I can find out exactly what level of disappointment I would have been in for had I ponied up the cash!  (Sea Monkeys, man.  Sea Monkeys taught me ads were a lie.)
Super 8 Blu-Ray.
Speaking of both Stephen King and reading comic books in the 70s, Super 8 was the best Stephen King flick in a long time.  Except it wasn’t actually written by Stephen King, and it didn’t feature a Stephen King ending, which may or may not be a good thing.  (Stephen King’s recent messes of endings versus Steven Spielberg’s sappy endings?  Depends on what your flavor today is.)
But the Blu-Ray comes with two hours of extras, and indeed I do love the extras.  So can I haz this?  Please?
Nitpicker’s Guide for Deep Space Nine Trekkers
One of the joys of this year is watching Deep Space Nine with Gini.  It’s an incredible time commitment – at this point we’re in Season 7, which means we’ve watched 115 hours of television – that’s five straight days of enjoyment.  And I’ve grown to love the characters.
The Nitpicker’s Guide is written by a guy who loves Star Trek so much he actually will wind up the tape and count how many floors went by in that elevator scene.  And compare it to the known schematics of the Enterprise.  And determine that according to what just happened, the elevator exited the spaceship and went about fifty yards into deep space.
I’ve inhaled all of the Next Generation Nitpicker books and even love the old Trek books, but never read Deep Space Nine because I heard it wasn’t that good.  Boy, was I wrong.  So I want to go over these stories again with a fine-toothed comb because I want to read the behind-the- scenes stuff.  And see what happened here.
Muppet Movie.
The new Muppet Movie – well, just called “The Muppets” – spurred a deep happiness at remembering how good the old Muppet movie was, too.  And I’d like the Blu-Ray version of the Muppet Movie, with two hours’ worth of extras and crazy stuff and sing-alongs… But I guess the Muppet producers didn’t think that a new version of the movie would sell to kids at, you know, Christmas.
I mean seriously?  What the hell, Muppet people?  You could have cleaned up.  It was waiting for you.  Why?
In any case, we’ve got the old version.  And it’s not like the movie isn’t good.  And because it’s old, you should be able to find it cheap.  If you want to.