Awesome People Hanging Out Together

Another little tumblr blog of famous people chatting with other folk you might not expect. It's fun to see big names hanging out. 

I'm Not a Gamer

Every now and again, someone will link me to an article about another time where someone has complained about sexism either in video games or the gaming industry and the response has been at best to dismiss them. More often that they get swamped with hate mail and rape threats. I had been discussing one of these articles with a good friend and I said something to the effect of, yeah, I'd just come to accept that the video game industry and culture is hostile to me and doesn't want me as a customer (probably more accurate to say that the steps they would have to take make me feel welcome would alienate more of their current base than it would bring in in terms of myself and people like me). I know some perfectly lovely gamer gentlemen, but generally speaking, I'm okay with just writing the larger industry/culture off as a place I would not enjoy, and, if I ever doubt that instinct, it just takes one internet comment thread to convince me I probably did right.

But that did get me thinking about the things I won't cut ties with. Certainly science fiction has some atavistic little trolls lurking in its communities. And comic books seem to be in a race to the bottom in terms of drawing women as soft-core pornography. Is it a question of prevalence? Is it just that I can point to creators and creations within those other avenues that have been not only wonderful but friendly to me as a reader? Am I still okay with comics because for every Frank Miller and Dave Sim, there's also a Neil Gaiman and a Gail Simone (dreamy sigh! Gail Simone)?

What's our responsibility as consumers? As creators? At what point is it okay to just pack up and head for greener pastures and at what point is it morally imperative to say "no, this is mine as well, and I will not allow you to ruin it"?

EDIT 6/15:

You know, that all said, I've also been reading several things recently where people throughout the industry- not just the ladies- are stepping up and going "woah there, let's not just dismiss these complaints out of hand, and let's conduct ourselves like decent human beings". I apologize to anyone I offended or slandered with too broad strokes.

Some Self-Publishing Statistics

A broad look at authors self-publishing and what they're making. 

The Economics of Anarchy

Well, not really, but it's some thoughts about economics from a different perspective.

LitReactor

I try to be on the lookout for sites that run writing advice- especially useful writing advice (you know, not just "have a blog", "build your brand", and "feel the fiction"). I've been poking around LitReactor and it seems to be pretty handy (my favorite so far is the article on visceral horror by Jack Frickin' Ketchum). There's a pay-only section of the site that includes more articles and a workshop forum, but I haven't paid, so I can't tell you anything about those (though there are lots of free services for critiquing).

Anyway, go have a read, it's nice. 

On Progress

So I recently went back to a story I wrote about 6 years ago and gave it the once over, because I'd like to get better at the editing.

I'm not really sure how I feel about the exercise.

On the one hand, I'm happy to feel like I've improved in some ways. My prose especially is much tighter. The story's biggest problem is long sentences that have more than one way they could grammatically be read. I also go on quite a bit, though honestly I still do that. Cutting out repetitive examples is going to be a big thing in the revision. Another structural weakness was that the final scene was essentially a long monologue where a character pours out all her feelings in a very repetitive and predictable way.

Actually it's also got me thinking a bit about structure in general, because before the confrontation, I actually had an epiphany scene, which in many ways is sort of a better climax (especially as it echoes the first part of the story where the other character is not present- sort of a reorientation of the main character). I think I can shorten the final confrontation to make the new actions the character takes a direct result of that epiphany- so that it's essentially denouement with a lot of gross body modification.

That was another thing- I found places where I felt like I was being unnecessarily gorey. And I say that as someone who really enjoys red splatter (my published stories include dismembered cats, thousands of drowned dead being compared to cereal left too long in milk, and a scene where a character reaches into the chest of a living horse and attempts to rip out its still-beating heart). This just felt like a child screaming "pay attention to me!"

While it's unfocused, there are ideas, single images, and phrases in this story that I loved to death rereading them. The plot is pretty archetypal, but I think it's carried out in a way that still makes it fun. Some of these things I look at and think: I don't think I could have come up with anything this cool. I did manage to add a bit of horribleness I think is thematically in keeping, but basically there are some bits that are as good as anything I've written recently.

And there's the rub.

Six years. I just don't feel six years better than this story. I'm inarguably better than I was when I wrote this, but I don't feel better enough. I feel like I should have mastered more secrets, uncovered more of the secret formulas that make things work.

I get that things are going to be slow, and progress was never made overnight. I get that I have a full time job and in fact work close to 60 hours most weeks. But other authors do far more and still get good work accomplished. I feel a little like I'm spinning my wheels in sand. I want to get to a point where I look back on what I've done and feel mortified at its simplicity and childishness. And that doesn't seem to be happening.

So I guess that's really the goal. Horrified transcendence. It just feels such a long way away. 

Speculative Fiction Race Round Table

Hooray! Another round table discussion on race!