Yesterday, in reaction to a recent episode of the Cabbages and Kings podcast, I concluded by suggesting that if we can’t find stories which include people like ourselves, that one of the solutions is to write the stories ourselves. As the cliché goes, if you want a job done right you have to do it yourself. That isn’t to say that only queer writers should write queer characters, nor that only women should write women and girls as protagonists, nor that only people of color should write stories with people of color in the lead. My point is more of an outgrowth of the oft-repeated advice of many different writers that if you can’t find the kind of story you want, you should write it.
Part of the reasoning behind that advice is that no one sees the world quite the same way as you, so no one else can tell your stories. Another part is, if you want to see something there are bound to be other people who want to read that kind of story too. And even more, there will be people who don’t know they want to read that kind of story until they find yours. Then they will want more…Continue reading You don’t have to add diversity—just stop erasing it!→
Everyone claims that they evaluate a book, or movie, or other work of art based on the quality of the work, and not the identity of who made it. But that isn’t true. A woman writes a Star Trek-inspired story in which characters who were not involved romantically on screen are, or the characters cross-over with the characters of another fictional series, and it’s relegated to fanfic archives and looked down upon by serious people. A guy who has had several science fiction novels published writes a Star Trek-inspired story in which the fictional characters cross-over into the real world and discover a strange relationship between the real and fictional world, and it’s awarded a Hugo.
Knowing who did it changes our perception of the quality and importance of the work. Even though we don’t like to admit it.
For example, I have justified my enthusiasm for a movie or television series that everyone else I know thinks is terrible—and that I agree is badly written and/or poorly directed—simply because a particular actor or actress was in it. Similarly, there is an author (who I have written about before) whose activities promoting anti-gay laws and fundraising for anti-gay organizations caused me to pledge long ago that I will never again buy anything that he has written; and when asked my opinion of his stuff, I mention the reasons why I boycott him.
That’s a bit different than the blanket sort of de-valuation that either Kane or Penny were discussing in the above linked items.
And it isn’t just who produces it that matters in the way the powers that be evaluate a work of fiction. Even more important then who is writing it is who we (which is to say, the collective consciousness) believe is the intended audience. Red Shirts wasn’t dismissed out of hand as fan fiction not merely because it was written by a guy, but even more because it was perceived as being aimed at the dude-bros of geekdom. Many things in the story were crafted to appeal specifically to the guys who love space battles and love arguing about whether Han Solo or Captain Kirk would come out triumphant in various arenas of competition.
I want to pause for a moment and point out that I liked Red Shirts, just as I like BBC’s Sherlock. I’m a guy who grew up watching the original Trek series (during it’s original primetime run 1966-69) as well as reading Sherlock Holmes stories. Because I’m also a queer guy, I don’t entirely match the target audience, but I’m close enough for it to resonate. My point isn’t that those sorts of work are inherently bad. It’s that other work which is at least as good (if not better) gets relegated to various ghettos of the arts not because those works are inherently less worthy, but because they are perceived as being intended for the “wrong” audience.
If you have a girl or a woman as your lead character, your story won’t be marketed as serious science fiction or fantasy or mainstream fiction. Instead it will be channeled into Young Adult, or Romance, or some other “specialized” category. Heaven forfend that you have a queer protagonist! That is going to be perceived as a niche work at best.
How do we fix this? The first step is, if you really love science fiction or fantasy, make an effort to find works that don’t fall into that so-called mainstream audience. When you find something that you think is good, buy it, recommend it, look for other things by the same author and buy those as well. If you’re active on Goodreads, post positive reviews of these discoveries. If you bought the book from an online source that lets you rate and review works, write a review. All of those places have algorithms for recommending works to other people, and most of the algorithms are more likely to recommend a work if it has a lot of reviews.
If the work is published in a magazine, whether it be a paper publication or online, write in to say how much you liked the particular story. Let the people who published it and the person who wrote it know that you liked it! If they know there is an audience for that sort of story and that sort of protagonist, you’ll see more of that kind of thing.
If you find yourself wishing there was more work that has a particular kind of protagonist or is set in a particular kind of world, consider writing it yourself. Sometimes the only way to get more good art that includes us is to do it ourselves. And that’s okay. Because no matter how unusual you may think it is, I guarantee you that someone else out there is looking for it, too.
A duplicate of China’s Jade Rabbit lunar probe photographed during tests before launch (Image: CNSA)It’s already the third Friday October!? It’s the month of pumpkins and falling leaves and spooks and costumes! It is also Gay History Month
Once again, I’m really, really, really glad that the weekend is upon us!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Beauties and Beasts by Amelia Vaughn. “Because he should know that true love is still for him, even though he’s not interested in pretty girls. He deserves that. All kids do. Because true love is for everyone.”
The Inside Story of Apple’s New iMacs. To me the heart is the effort they went to in order to make the sound the new mouse makes as if moves “right.” It is all about the details!
Independent review board says NSA phone data program is illegal and should end. Bad headline, because the real story is: “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which the telephone records program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation,” said the report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”
Image from the 1954 Gojira (click to embiggen)I don’t remember precisely when I saw my first Godzilla movie. I was probably four or five years old. When we were living in the parts of Colorado where all the TV stations we received came from Denver, one of those channels had a Saturday afternoon movie called Science Fiction Theatre (or something like that) which seemed to almost exclusively show Japanese sci fi films. So there were a lot of Godzilla, Mothra, and other kaiju films that I saw during this time.
Often when there were parts of the plot that didn’t make sense to me, Mom would explain it away as the problems with translation. She had already explained about how the movies were originally filmed in Japanese, then dubbed into English. So anything else that seemed odd or illogical was because of that. It didn’t occur to me until later that part of the process of translating it for an American audience also sometimes involved editing the film, taking out scenes or cutting them short.
Spirit Day began in 2010 as a way to show support for LGBT youth and take a stand against bullying. Following a string of high-profile suicide deaths of gay teens in 2010, GLAAD worked to involve millions of teachers, workplaces, celebrities, media outlets and students in going purple on social media or wearing purple, a color that symbolizes spirit on the rainbow flag.
Spirit Day now occurs every year on the third Thursday in October, during National Bullying Prevention Month, and has become the most visible day of support for LGBT youth.
This year GLAAD will celebrate Spirit Day on October 15 where we will all stand together; communities, corporations, celebrities, landmarks, faith groups, sports leagues, schools and so much more, to send a message of solidarity and acceptance to LGBT youth.
I certainly felt powerless as a kid in school (back in the 60s and 70s) against the bullies, and I’ve already written way more than anyone needs to read about it. But one of the reasons I felt powerless was because I thought I was alone. Not that no one else I knew was getting bullied——many of my classmates were. But we never felt that anyone cared. Part of that was because back then, at least, some teachers hurled insults such as “pussy” and “faggot” at us. But another reason was because no one was taking our side.
(Click to embiggen)I’m getting ready to do National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again, which means that I’m also nagging, wheedling, and otherwise attempting to recruit people to join in the fun. It really can be fun. Usually people respond with worry that they can’t do it, or that they’ve tried it before and didn’t finish, and therefore they don’t want to set themselves up for failure again.
The problem with that is one thing which is certain to set you up for failure is not even giving it a go.
No matter what I say, some of you (and you know who you are) will continue to protest that you’re never able to finish, you never know what to write next, et cetera, et cetera.
To which I say: bull. Pure, unadulterated bull.
You know why that claim is pure bull? Humans are hardwired to tell stories. Over 2 millions years of natural selection has strengthened and perfected the neural machinery of language and more specifically story-telling. Stories are how we constantly make sense of the world. Another driver cuts you off in traffic? When you tell someone about it later, you use narrative tools to do so, attributing possible motives, build in dramatic pauses, and probably use some colorful language.
You’re human? You can read these words? Then you know how to tell a story.
The only reason you haven’t finished before is because you decided not to finish. You might claim that you didn’t know what to say next, or claim you wrote yourself into a corner, or ran out of time. But all of those things are lies to cover up the real problem. You are afraid that what you wanted to say next was not “good enough.” You were afraid that what you wanted to say next was “wrong.”
Don’t worry about whether it is good enough. It’s a first draft. Of course it isn’t perfect, yet. But if it gets you from one paragraph to the next, it’s good enough for a first draft. Keep going.
Don’t worry about being wrong. It isn’t a math quiz or a history exam. It’s a story. Not only that, it’s your story. There aren’t objectively wrong ways to get your characters from point A to point B. If you’ve written your protagonist into a corner, the next words you type can be, “suddenly, a trapdoor opened beneath her feet.” You’re out of the corner. Worry about making a smoother transition during the second draft.
I had started to type in the previous paragraph that there aren’t wrong ways to tell a story, but that isn’t true. There is one definitively wrong way: and that is to give up.
When it comes to the editing and revision stage, there will be all sorts of considerations about continuity, and what works in the particular kind of story you’re telling, and what will work for the kind of audience that wants to read the kind of story you’re telling. Those are all things that can be fixed by rewriting, deleting, tweaking, adding, and so forth. But it is utterly impossible to fix a story that isn’t written.
So stop making excuses. Roll up your sleeves, and write.
And if you won’t listen to me, then take if from Ray Bradbury:
“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”
—Ray Bradbury
When I was a kid, I don’t remember any of the school districts I attended giving us the day off. Columbus Day was a day we talked about the very white-washed version of his “discovery” of the Americas. I used to work with a man who was born on Columbus Day, and what he loved most about it was that where he went to school it was a day off, so he and his friends always got to go to the movies or something similar on his birthday.
I have neither a clever nor wise conclusion to this. I think it is sad that there are people who defend Columbus Day, and not at all surprising that many of them are the same ones who bitch about so-called illegal immigration with absolutely no self-awareness of the irony of what Columbus and other European colonists did to Native Americans. But I do believe that names matter, just as truth and understanding matter. So, count me as one of the people who thinks the federal holiday’s name, at the least, should be changed.
Today is National Coming Out Day. If Ray were still alive, it would also be the day we’d be celebrating the twenty-second anniversary of our commitment ceremony (he promised to stay with me for the rest of his life, and he did).
Since I am still occasionally surprised to learn that someone I know or work with hasn’t figured out that I’m gay: my husband (Michael) and I are both men, and we’re very much in love with each other and happy together.
My husband and I.
But while I’m (re-)stating what I think ought to be obvious, I would like to announce that I am a card-carrying liberal gay man who thinks:
Another of my posts mostly about news that came out after I queued up the Friday Links.
Bring out the buds!
Thursday before last was the first day of legal recreational marijuana sales in Oregon. The big news out of Oregon that day should have been about the triumph of de-criminalization over the myths of the war on drugs, et cetera. Instead we had a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College. Despite that, legal marijuana did move forward, and in a really big way: Oregon’s first week of recreational pot sales tops $11 million.
Wish we could just dodge the bullets
The Upmqua Community College shooting was the 32nd mass murder (using the FBI’s definition) in the United States of 2015. Lots of news organizations were reporting that it was the 32nd mass shooting, but the FBI doesn’t have a definition for mass shooting, only for mass murder, which is when four or more people are killed in a single incident. But the media keeps reporting these as mass shooting statistics, and I think that that affects how people perceive the problem, because by the FBI’s statistics, the Lafeyette theatre shooting in July, in which eleven people total were shot, but only two died, isn’t being counted in that statistic.
A more reasonable statistic would be the define a mass shooting as any time 4 or more people were struck by a bullet in a single incident, regardless of how many of them survived. By that metric, The Umpqua Community College shooting was the the 295th mass shooting of the year. Read that again: 295 mass shootings for far this year in the U.S. as of October 1—that’s more than one a day. That’s more mass shootings in a year than other countries have in decades. Heck, that’s more mass shootings a day in the U.S. than most countries experience in a decade! Yet, some people keep insisting that these things can’t be prevented. They are right only in the sense that as long as we let them use that nonsense argument to prevent us from doing anything about it we won’t reduce the number of shootings.
As if one school shooting on Friday wasn’t enough, we had two! TWO IN CUSTODY IN FATAL TEXAS SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY SHOOTING. Since I made a big deal in the earlier paragraphs about definitions, it would be misleading of me to refer to the Texas Southern shooting as a mass shooting: only two people were shot, of which only one died. However, the Texas Southern shooting is worth mentioning because it was the third shooting on that campus within the space of a week! There are been another incident on Tuesday night, and they mention just casually an incident the previous weekend where someone fired two shots but didn’t hit anyone.
But Congress doesn’t have time to close any loopholes in existing gun laws (such as a fact that it is not a federal crime to knowingly purchase a gun on behalf of someone who is legally barred from owning a gun!). They’re too busy conducting a witchhunt against Planned Parenthood and coming up with nothing. Republicans Admit Planned Parenthood Did Nothing Wrong.
Billionaire bully
Fortunately, not all of the news late on Friday was bad: We Were Sued by a Billionaire Political Donor. We Won. Here’s What Happened. Billionaire donates millions to anti-gay causes, a magazine reports the fact, and he sues them for defamation. This is a variant of a problem we deal with with these rightwing nut jobs all the time: if you don’t want to be called a bigot, stop doing bigoted things! Especially when you’re a co-finance chairman of not one, but two presidential campaigns (which means you are no longer considered under the law a private citizen, you’re now a public figure) who buys dozens of billboards to put up anti-gay messages, purchased full-page ads in major newspapers to run anti-gay slogans, go on Fox News to describe how awful it is to institute anti-bullying campaigns that try to protect gay children from harassment and bullying, et cetera.
Coming out is scary. It doesn’t always go well. I’ve written before about some of the issues I’ve had (and sometimes continue to have) with family members and old friends. But I firmly believe that, unless you are a kid living at home or otherwise still dependent on your parents for financial support, or unless you live in a place where it is illegal to admit to being queer, coming out is better than continuing to live the lie. There will be some surprises when you come out. Some people that you are certain will never come around, will become your biggest defenders. Some people who you thought might understand will disown you and go to their grave without reaching out. You will definitely learn which people really love you, and which only love the idea of who they think you ought to be.
But living the lie carries a heavy price, because you live in constant fear of being found out, and you expend a lot more energy than you realize trying to cover things up all the time. Second-guessing yourself, keeping track of cover stories you’ve told, the constant worry damages both your mental and physical health. And all of that goes away once you stop hiding in the closet. Once you’re free of that you’ll be able to fill your life with people who really love and respect the real you for who you are. And that is a much happier and healthier way to live!
A graphic trying to depict commerce as arteries and organs, published in 1889 by the Land & River Improvement Company of Superior, Wisconsin.It’s already the second Friday of October, the month of pumpkins and falling leaves and spooks and costumes! It is also Gay History Month
Once again, I’m really, really, really glad that the weekend is upon us!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Yesterday, in reaction to a recent episode of the Cabbages and Kings podcast, I concluded by suggesting that if we can’t find stories which include people like ourselves, that one of the solutions is to write the stories ourselves. As the cliché goes, if you want a job done right you have to do it yourself. That isn’t to say that only queer writers should write queer characters, nor that only women should write women and girls as protagonists, nor that only people of color should write stories with people of color in the lead. My point is more of an outgrowth of the oft-repeated advice of many different writers that if you can’t find the kind of story you want, you should write it.
Font Folly 