The Brief, Horrific Lives of Mantis Men

So I recently read Kij Johnson's Mantis Wives. It has a lot in common with her previous nebula winning story Ponies, and to a lesser but still real extent with her OTHER nebula winning story Spar, in that it takes a human relationship we take for granted, makes it alien, and spins out the pathological elements until they're fabulous and grotesque and really gut-punchy.

So, I recommend you read Mantis Wives for yourself, but the gist of it is that even though mantis women realize they don't NEED to kill their husbands, they're locked into their roles and they can't figure out a different way to live.

I quite like it, but it is, by necessity of what it is, largely composed of needlessly cruel torture of boy mantises. That's really kind of the point.

Now there's a fellow down in the comments who seems to be kind of a reactionary jerkface, but I've always maintained that being an jerkface doesn't mean your point is not worth entertaining intellectually.

To what extent are we- am I as a reader- more comfortable with this story because the violence is happening exclusively to men? It's something I've talked about before, and something that continues to worry me.

For all that dudes are disproportionately the people doing violence, they're also disproportionately the victims, and I defy someone to argue that we're not socially conditioned to feel it is less of a tragedy when violence is done to a man (the theory being, of course, that this is not only his natural sphere, but he's big enough and strong enough to stop other people from hurting him; and if he wasn't, he should have been.) I think there's a certain extent to which we sort of view all men as soldiers, and all women and children as civilians- it's part of a totally paternalisitic system that gets used to justify why men ought to have authority over said interchangeable category of women and children who in this line of thinking depend on them for protection and provision; but at the same time it's a system that doesn't have a lot of sympathy to spare for the man who does not end up being the alpha. We're given to believe that fighting and death are ennobling to men in the same way beauty and passive mystique are the ideals for womanhood.

I don't think it does anybody any favors, and it spins off into this idea that it's more wrong to hit a woman. (When a man beats his wife, he's a monster; when a woman beats her husband, it's comedy).

Ish.

There's certainly fiction I've read that demonizes the ladies, to the extent that violence (often sexual or specifically humiliating) befalling them (though usually not at the hands of the actual protagonist) is the cathartic release at the end of the story. Bitch got what was coming to her. Or the not explicitly stated but still pervasive implication that men are predators and women are always prey. Sometimes it's slowly, lovingly rendered. Sometimes it's a joke. But it's a powerless woman having terrible things happen to her, and the gist you get from the story is that you're supposed to enjoy it, even if it's just in the way you enjoy horrific stuff, with a little extra garnish of lady misery. Frank Miller's my go-to top of my head example for this, but there are some horror stories I can point to as well, and we've all seen the splashes and teasers at the front where that attractive girl with the bright red lipstick gets killed so we'll be entranced in the mystery. She might just be one of a dozen victims, but her- the one with the lipstick- she's the one we watch it happen to, over and over again.

I guess we can argue that maybe that's supposed to arouse people's protective instincts, but her skirt is so short, and her lipstick is so red, and the camera focuses so hard on her lips, her hips, and her tits, that I really don't think protection is the instinct they're going for.

And I'm not going to lie, there's fiction that demonizes men. Books, stories, movies, where the whole lot of them are lazy, rude, beer swilling abusers and rapists who think they own the world because they have the upper body strength to throw a punch at a lady's face; whereas the women will be, at least in contrast, developed people with real motivations (though these often arise out of their victimhood at the hands of dudes). And in this vein of fiction (often touted as female empowering) these straw men get what's coming to them, and usually the women get validation and sympathy from a group of right-thinking people who help them hide bodies or reduce their sentences after a teary confession of all the facts. Or they drive off a cliff because death is better than going back to their husbands.

I think in a similar way to the way you imagine creepy dudes picturing that blonde getting stabbed in the alleyway as all the girls who turned them down for sexytimes, there's a group of people who actually will always be satisfied by straight up revenge stories where a blameless lady victim cuts off reproductively important bits of the cartoon man who wronged her.

I think there are people who will say the violence against women as entertainment is not an issue (google sexism and video games if you don't believe me), but I think they're an atavistic minority. I think we're much quieter than we should be about the ease with which we accept violence against men as normal, natural, and even righteous.

Think for a minute- how many female characters have you seen charge into a hail of gunfire, or hold the pass while her friends get away, so that she can die a "good and noble" death? Why do we accept so easily that this is a good thing for men to do? How many times has a gun or sword fight come to a screeching halt because a woman died, after they had just killed nine or ten men without blinking?

I don't think we necessarily think of men's lives as worth less, but we're very willing to accept them being beaten, shot, and killed, without it being something we get upset over.

How weird is that?

(Very little of this actually applies to Mantis Wives specifically, since the story kind of plays around with a power-norm flip, and the violence reads as unnecessary and pathological, at least to me. I don't get a feeling of glee at their suffering out of it, though she does seem to enjoy writing description (I think that's more just language play). I do think, though, that this story would not have worked AS well for me if it were male stand-ins doing violence to females, and that's something that worries me a little, but I think the subversion of the norm in this case helps examine it. That's a technique that can go very wrong in unskilled hands, though). 

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.

Men's Fiction

Esquire announced its intent to publish straight to e-book anthologies of "Men's Fiction", and I am cautiously optimistic.

I'm actually really for publishing "Men's Fiction" and labeling it as such. The editor hopes for stories "dealing with passages in a man’s life that seem common," which I think is a fantastic thing to do. Let's talk about boys being expected to fight. Let's talk about the draft. Let's talk about fatherhood. Let's talk about not knowing for sure if a sexual partner's offspring is also yours. Let's talk about the expectation of being the breadwinner, or the directionless feeling when that's no longer expected and one doesn't know exactly what is. Let's talk about being expected to be physically strong in the way women are expected to be physically beautiful. Let's talk about the intersections of masculinity and race in our society. All of these are valuable and important and potentially great stories that are generally pretty specific to men.

I think one fantastic thing about directing attention to the idea that there is specifically masculine fiction is that it helps put wedge between masculine fiction and general fiction being masculine by default. I like the idea of there being a gender continuum with delineated poles and a broad neutral ground in the middle where the subject isn't anything gender-particular, but rather the human condition. Not "women's fiction and general fiction", but "women's fiction, general fiction, and men's fiction".

I am, of course, also leery, because often when people say "men's (anything)" they mean either straight up pornography, or a sort of he-man woman hater's club business that tends to be pretty distasteful. But I'm optimistic that's not where this is going.

EDIT: Aaaand it's been pointed out to me Esquire has a long history of excellent fiction. Here's the highlights of the Esquire collected anthology 1993:

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway; "The Death of Justina" by John Cheever; "Towel Season" by Ron Carlson; "Parker's Back" by Flannery O'Connor; "Adult World I" and "Adult World II" by David Foster Wallace; "Neighbors" by Raymond Carver; "Fleur" by Louise Erdrich; "A Man in the Way" by F. Scott Fitzgerald; "In the Men's Room of the Sixteenth Century" by Don DeLillo; "Rock Springs" by Richard Ford; "The Remobilization of Jacob Horner" by John Barth; and "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien.

That's a really boss line up and I'd love to see them carry on in that tradition.

Checkhov's Gun Rack

This one was a request by a good friend. I'm on a writing group that engages in a weekly exercise wherein one of us will put up a prompt and all of us will write for one hour and then share the results. I've actually gotten some really fun (albeit unpolished) stories from this, and I enjoy both writing and world building on the fly.

Because I only have an hour, I usually won't spend to much time figuring out what I'm going to do. As soon as I have a vague concept (usually related to the prompt), a character with one or two traits (eg. a shy student, a crabby old woman, an outlaw poet), a goal (eg. to be married, to be normal, to protect a colony of monkeys), and an obstacle, I dive in.

And the first thing I do is start putting in detail completely at random.

Alright, not completely at random. If I want to write a funny story, it will be funny detail; same for horror, romance, what have you. Details will be as in-period as I can make them without research if it's a period piece. Things won't be per se infodumped- in part because I'm not attempting coherency yet- but at every juncture I can without stopping the action, I'll drop in something specific. The heroine has five children, two of whom have died. The garden is full of mangoes and cinnamon trees. The love interest worked in a cigar shop until it burned down. The town's main export is gourmet cheese. Umbrellas have become fashionable even on sunny days. It is religiously forbidden for women to wear shoes. Just, you know, whatever. It doesn't need an internal logic or consistency. I'm building on the fly.

In trying to explain this and grasping for terms, I started calling it Chekhov's gun rack. You know some of them have to be fired by the end, but you can get away without shooting all of them. In improv theater terms, it's called "saying yes"- taking every new idea put forward as true and doing whatever you have to not to contradict it.

By the time I've inserted half a dozen to a dozen details (and I've been writing this whole time), patterns will have begun to suggest themselves. Perhaps our heroine, now a crabby older woman, lost those two children in an epidemic that caused people to radically rethink their faith and adopt all sorts of new, troublesome, fundamentalist practices, like women being forbidden from wearing shoes. This offers up a great potential conflict, since she and her love interest can be of different opinions as to whether or not this is a good thing- which in turn gives them something to believe and reasons to believe it (being righteous didn't save his shop from burning down, did it?). It also presents some additional obstacles for my main character (there are jobs she can't safely do and places she can't safely go without shoes- or indeed, perhaps she's been denied the protection of footwear she has some sort of wound or old injury that results in a limp). What I can't consolidate (mangoes, cheese, umbrellas) becomes background detail and ambiance (in this case it means our setting is tropical, linked to broader trade networks, probably industrialized, and relatively prosperous on the global scale), and what I can weave in starts eventually (hopefully) to support itself and look like it was planned from the start. Occasionally, I'm left with something striking but orphaned (I wrote an alien invasion story where I'd stated there was no more coffee anywhere in the world, but left it unsupported as to why or how it was connected), but distracting little bits like that are pretty easy to delete later.

Just as a note- I'll often throw out the first idea I have for connections or extrapolations (in the above example my first impulse was to write the woman as grouchy about how things have changed and her lost freedom, while the man was a true believer, but I think it's actually more charming the other way around, as the heroine then goes from someone who cannot fight against the overwhelming currents of her times to someone who refuses to engage in acts that would actually benefit her, because they run counter to her convictions. It also makes for a more sympathetic love interest. I envision a gentle, sad old man.) The easiest answer is often not the most interesting one.

The process doesn't lend itself to careful world building, but I find I really like the results, which end up as often as not being kind of quirky and unexpected. Honestly, even when I have world-built, I still do some of this, because I find it much easier (and honestly more fun) than trying to start by making a complete and consistent world and extrapolate the details that logically follow from it.

In my experience, life itself is chaotic, and full of silly little things that don't fit neatly. Like a brutal dictator kidnapping a film director to make his personal rubber-suit monster movie, or a large amount of the red food dye you eat being ground up insect shells. It's not always something you could have come up with logically, but it makes the world a more interesting place.

A Tale of Two Stupid Commercials

I watch some of the fine programming content Comedy Central makes available through their web page, which unfortunately means I see the same small set of commercials over and over again, ad nauseum (see what I did there?).

There's the regular stuff, happy pastel singing laundry detergent, horrible snide neighbors lording their smart phones over people, a kid who loves bacon so much he marries it (which ends with "you may now eat the bride" and a sickening wet chomp that is the stuff of nightmares). But there was one in particular that bothered me.

The ad follows a handsome, scruffy young man on the prowl for fresh lady-meat, but every time he comes close to one of his victims, flakes of head skin swarm from his rakishly unkempt mop like a swarm of cylon fighters, and the girl's face slow-motion freezes in a look of unnameable, lovecraftian horror before she vaporizes in a puff of cgi dust, leaving her discarded clothes. The young man looks sad to have missed an opportunity for sex, but doesn't seem particularly weighed down by the guilt of constantly annihilating strangers with the mere presence of his weaponized dandruff. He then goes home and shampoos with the advertised brand, and, miraculously three different girls appear (I think they're implied to be the same girls, but I don't think they are) without those pesky clothes that were left behind. They proceed to paw insatiably at his head, with that vacant, slightly bite-y look models wear on the covers of both Cosmo and GQ. "Don't lose girls to dandruff" the sophisticatedly accented lady announcer reminds you, in case you missed the message.

I know, intellectually, that the intended message of this commercial is "buy our dandruff shampoo!" and not "women who do not want to sleep with you functionally may as well not exist." But I went out of my way to be somewhere else when the unskippable ad came on. This one commercial is probably responsible for more clean dishes in my apartment than any two other factors combined.

So then a new ad came into rotation. "Don't you wish you could just make some things disappear?" a young woman in club wear asks, as a rat-like man with an open-to-the-sternum disco shirt seems to sniff at her from behind. She flashes him a disgusted look and he pops in a familiar cgi dust effect that sets her hair swishing playfully at the camera. She then walks toward us with swinging hips as she enumerates the virtues of the particular tampon she's trying to sell us. Across the room, a nonthreatiningly normal looking boy is being chatted up by two women you don't really see well before our off-screen heroine presumably splatters them out of existence with the sheer, horrible force of the obliteration power this new tampon has granted her. She then skips up and begins a happy conversation we can only assume he's smiling and nodding along to out of fear for not only his life, but his very physical existence.

This ad is also stupid, but it doesn't bother me.

And I got to wondering if that makes me a hypocrite. I mean, I like to think I'd also be bothered if the god-murderess of the second commercial were going up to dudes and trying to engage them in tampon conversation, only to vaporize them horribly when they told her they just wanted to be friends. Tampon girl is malicious in a way dandruff boy isn't. Sure, her first murder could be argued to be defensive, or at least provoked, but all those girls were doing was standing next to a boy whose attention she wanted. They didn't deserve to die. Dandruff boy just wanders through a hellscape of unintended casualties (though he's either incredibly callous or really bad at pattern recognition to keep at it). Maybe I'd be upset if the dudes in the second commercial were as objectified as the ladies in the first. Dandruff boy's new shampoo lands him a silent, lustful harem and the implied promise of sex with at least two more women than we assume he has penises; while all tampon girl seems to want is a chance to talk to her boy of choice. These dudes don't have time for much development, but they do at least get "creepy potential date rapist" and "cute but normal boy", while the lady's characters are "sexy, horrified club girl", "sexy, horrified librarian", and "sexy, horrified gym girl", all of which dissolve away into "indistinct, hair-crazed sex-vixen". But those two other girls in the tampon commercial get about the same, and the second ad gives no indication that they will ever be rescued from the icy void of non-existence, not even for group sex with a previously unacceptable stranger.

I don't think I'm having this reaction because deep down I think it's more okay for girls to vaporize boys (and other girls) than for boys to vaporize girls.

But I do have to admit a large part of it probably has to do with the fact that the first ad is, to a certain extent, about me but not for me (girls will totally sex up a guy with a non-flakey head!), while the second ad is, to about the same extent, both about and for me (girls, tampons will make all your life's travails conveniently vanish!). I wonder if there are gentlemen out there, similarly given to pointless analysis, who rankle at the idea of a tampon-powered psychic serial killer cornering them after she brutally dispatches all the other perfectly nice girls. The boy in the commercial doesn't seem to mind, but then again, neither do the bitey towel girls in the shower-seraglio foursome.

I can't get over the feeling that the disparate responses I have to these two ads are meaningful. Telling. It's possible I think this because it's very late at night, I admit, but still.

It probably doesn't bear thinking about.

But I'm going to anyway. 

Outside Over There

I didn't realize how much of my childhood was written by Maurice Sendak until I was an adult. You never pay attention to that sort of thing when you're little. But when my sisters had kids, my mothers and I would tuck them into bed with In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are. I can close my eyes and see the illustrations of a little bear in a cardboard space suit coming home or the melting ice baby from Outside Over There.

There's an amazing feeling, when you open up a book that your parents read to you, as if suddenly the world warps and you're warm in somebody's lap, and the universe is composed of sugary cereals and climbable trees, and problems that the distant adult part of you knows weren't ever problems at all. You remember how much bigger the world looked, and that sense of wonder. And these little things, these incantations of memory- "Ida played her wonder horn", "Max, the king of where the wild things are"- are anchors that keep you from drifting too far away from that part of yourself.

We lost a man today to whom I owe some of the first dreams planted in the garden of my imagination. Thank you, Mr. Sendak. I'll read you to my children, and I hope they will read you to theirs. 

Story a Day in May (II)

I'm doing Story a Day in May again this year. The rules are as simple as can be- 31 first draft stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. They don't have to be long, but they have to be complete.

I did this last year, and it was a very productive exercise. One of the stories from the batch so far has been published- Wendigo Bake Sale, which just ran at the Drabblecast- and there are at least a few others which I think can be polished to professional quality. All in all, that by itself would justify keeping up with it, but there were a couple of other interesting things that came of it as well.

I ended up writing more, which is probably to be expected. The goal wasn't any particular volume of words, but often stories go longer than what I had set as my daily goal.

I also ended up writing more experimentally. I wrote something in second person future which will never see the light of day, but which was fun and educational to create. I wrote a story that was one giant sentence, mostly a list. I tried to deliberately write in the style of other famous writers, just for a giggle. Every day I knew I had to do something, but I also knew I'd be doing something again tomorrow, so if today's something was a little indulgent, it didn't matter. I think every now and again, playing around like that, experimenting just for the joy of it, is an incredibly valuable thing to do as a writer.

Because really, when you get right down to it, it's all supposed to be fun, isn't it?

(by the way, of absolutely infinite story a day value are the many essays on flash fiction by Mr. Bruce Holland Rogers)

The Problem With Writing Advice

The problem with writing advice is basically that we're all beautiful, individual little snowflakes who are determined to fail at writing in an infinity of different and creative ways. I, for example, tend to flap my hands and whinge impotently about how whatever I'm working on isn't ready for anyone to look at it yet. The advice I need as a writer tends to be in the form of "ways to know when it's good enough" and "just send it out there, tiger, it has to grow up someday." There are other people like me, certainly. But there are also a number of people who will pound out a first draft and put it into an e-mail without so much as running a spell check. The last thing they need is encouragement about submitting.

Writing involves dozens of discreet, albeit related, skills; grammar, rhythm, pacing, vocabulary, plot building, character, word play, formatting, market savvy, editing, world building, research, self-discipline, self-motivation, quality assessment, and so on. And each of us is probably on at least slightly different places on the road to perfection in each of these. Not to mention none of us have exactly the same temperament regarding the consumption of advice; I know some people whose principle motivation is spite against people who have dared to suggest a best way to do something. Generalized writing advice, no matter how well meaning, is often likely to either not really apply to you personally, or be so universal as to be true but not particularly helpful.

That said, I think you should probably read it all, and take it for what it's worth. The best thing, honestly, would be to have a talented, well-informed professional who had read your entire body of work and studied the market, and could give you tailored, useful feedback, but honestly, the ratio of professional authors to author hopefuls is soul-crushingly skewed, and professional writers are actually busy people who are not likely to have the time to read everything you've written. A group of peers can be helpful, but they're also likely to have about the same knowledge and market set you do; and as such they may not just be unsure, they run the risk, through no fault of their own and not for want of earnest good intentions, of being very much wrong.

In the end, I think you have to cultivate a certain capacity for self-assessment and careful reading. Know what you need and know how to recognize advice that might help you, then try it and see if it works. If it doesn't, have the self-awareness to know whether you're doing it wrong, or whether that just wasn't the advice for you. It's hard to do, but in the end, I think it works out better than looking outside for advice to write you a neat, concise little map. Advice written for a general audience doesn't know where you are, and as such it can't tell you the quickest way to where you're going. 

The Human Accrued Continuity Omnibus

Yes, I'm a dork, and if you catch the joke with the acronym, you have no room to throw stones.

Anyway. 

At irregular intervals, the imp of the perverse will scrabble the idea into the back of my skull that I really ought to try my hand at some sort of alternate history, which generally results in me doing forty straight hours of fascinating but ultimately inadequate research. Human events are connected in all sorts of weird, fun ways. One dude, albeit one powerful dude, William Randolph Hearst, near-single handedly drums up US sentiment against Spain and helps drag us into a war of colonial acquisition- a war which provides a backdrop against which an officer by the name of Theodore Roosevelt can distinguish himself on the national stage, ultimately making it possible for him to run for president and securing a legacy which aids to power other members of his family including his somethingth cousin/nephew-in-law Franklin Delano who nearly ends up president of the United States for life and creates the New Deal programs and so on. And less direct paths- the books and people that the powerful and the insane cite as inspiration.

I don't tend to think of history as the story of powerful charismatic dudes directing a horde of mindless chess pieces, but there are undeniable bottlenecks- places where things break if just one pieces is out of alignment. Maybe instead of Nietszsche's rants on will and superhuman men, what really breaks through the shell of a young, impressionable Adolph Hitler is a bit of translated Buddhism- or a little bit of Thoreau. Or maybe instead of quite so much Thoreau, Gandhi reads a little more Nietzsche and decides that what an oppressed India needs to get itself out from under the thumb of British oppression is a bit of the ol' triumph of will? 

At any rate, yeah, the small links that make up a long chain of events.

It's too much work for one person to chronicle that sort of thing- what inspires people, what leads to what.

But it's really not too much work for crowdsourcing.

This is just kind of a twinkle in the eye idea. I'm sure it's doable, likely with existing technology. An interlinked series of causes and consequences that you can click through and follow, maybe even in some sort of automatic graph ("magic box, I'd like to view a tree of consequences of the invention of rum, four iterations down, please"). 

Heck, it's possible somebody's already started doing it.

I'm just saying I think it would be cool. 

Why Don't You Just Sex It Up a Little?

So I was speaking to an older gentleman I know who also writes, and he was lamenting the fact that he had never been particularly good at networking- something he felt had cost him in his potential writing career. We got into talking a bit about conventions and meeting people, and he expressed the opinion that I had a bit of an advantage as a young, attractive woman.

Maybe, I said, but I really don't want to use that.

Grow up, he said, everyone does on some level, and it's not as if you would pick your nose in public, or deliberately spray when you talked, just because you felt like it gave you an unfair advantage over people who did.

From there we got into a discussion about the fact that because of some bad experiences (though certainly not as bad as it's gotten for some other people) I'm hesitant to put even flirtation, never mind actual sex, on the table. I don't want any more stalkers outside my door in the middle of the night leaving me phone messages that they know I'm home because they can hear me moving in my dark apartment and why won't I pick up the phone? I don't really want to get grabbed any more because my jeans were tight or my shirt was too low. I don't want any more perfectly nice guys who think we're going to be together forever because I smiled too wide or I laughed at their jokes. The last one's almost the worst, because they really are perfectly nice guys, who aren't doing anything wrong, really. Most times it's just a miscommunication. I've been on the other side of that and I feel terrible turning them down (admittedly, occasionally when you turn a perfectly nice guy down, he'll start with the passive aggressive recrimination, or even outright meanness and then I feel a little better about the whole thing, or at least about the choice, because he wasn't so perfectly nice after all).

So, you know, carry a jacket you can button closed over a low top, don't let people buy you drinks or dinner, take a step back and hope they don't close the gap, shut down conversations and escape them if they start drifting in that direction, that sort of stuff (because I don't really drink, I'll often just pick up someone's discarded bottle and carry it around with me, so that no one thinks I'm too much of a wet blanket, and if someone asks if I want a drink I can wave around my bottle as if I'm still working on one). One falls into patterns of being around folk.

I don't want to give the impression that I don't like people, or I'm afraid of people generally, or I don't try to be fun, maybe even a little flirty sometimes, and for what it's worth I like sex and don't feel obligated to pretend I don't,  but I feel pretty cognizant most of the time that it's very easy to get backed into a corner where either someone expects something from you physically or you're some kind of horrible tease (and before you the reading audience write in to say that's horrible, or that's not true, or that shouldn't be true, yes, yes, I know and I agree with you, but there's a very wide gulf between theory and practice, and I don't live in a hypothetical world.)

What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that flirting and giggling and dangling my body out like bacon on a string might indeed snag me some additional contact stuff, but it's perilous on so many levels, not the least of which is being tarred with the professional reputation of having either teased or outright slept my way into work- or even if I myself manage to get out not-at-fault in that scenario, having work dismissed as "oh, they just bought her story because they thought she was cute." Part of what I love about writing is that until I go to a convention, what I look like never enters into it. I have a feminine name, but for all anyone actually knows I could be 90 years old and 500 pounds. I don't have to post a picture on my blog if I don't want to, and I honestly don't think anyone cares about the physical body attached to a random name in the slush pile. It's beautiful and liberating.

And then there's the perhaps more lasting interpersonal level where people I could have been friends with become frustrated would-be boyfriends, and I lose out on a friend because the threat of sex came into it. I would so much rather just be one of the boys in possession of an incidental vagina. I want to be nice. I want to be your friend. I want to be your peer.  I want to laugh at your jokes because they're funny. I want to hang out in a group full of mutual respect with people who love the same things I do. I really, really, really want this, and anything else in my professional life, not to be about sex.

Because making it about sex makes it a no-win situation.

On Consistent Production

Alright, I don't talk much about my personal life on this blog. This is a conscious decision I've made both because I tend toward being a bit more of a private person generally, and also because I don't generally think you all would be terribly interested in hearing about the minutia of my life.

Today I bring it up because I tend to be one of those people who says, listen, if you don't make time for writing, it just won't happen. And generally I believe that's true.

I've got two weeks coming up where I don't think I'm going to get any writing done at all. At my physical, paying job I am scheduled this week for 60 hours of work, 50 of it in situations where it's unlikely I will get any significant breaks. After that I'm going to spend a week playing host to a visitor who's very important to me. I don't anticipate getting a lot done either of those weeks.

And I think that's okay.

For one thing, I intend to make it up. I'm below my goals for the whole year, but not as far behind as I was this time last year. It's a process.

But I also think that the time you spend writing isn't a zero-sum game. Obviously the time you spend doing something that isn't writing is time when you can't write, but the other side of that is that you need to have something to write about and you need to have the energy to write. You can't just treat it like a grindstone, and you certainly can't let it become something you resent. Life is beautiful and sometimes you've got to step out and grab a couple fistfuls of inspiration; learn something and come back to your writing bringing greater insight and experience with you. Can't grow as a writer without growing as a person, basically.

Which is not to justify not ever writing, if you're one of those people I need to restate that for. But it is to say if it's all you do, it's going to suffer for it. 

The Reverse Bechdel

Okay, so, you may or may not have heard of the Bechdel Test, which first appeared as a joke in Alison Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For". A movie passes the Bechdel Test if all of the following happen.

1. There are two or more named female characters
2. Who at some point talk to each other
3. About something other than a man

This has become a pretty popular measure amongst feminists and media critics because it's easily quantifiable, and when you think about it, it's stunning how many movies don't pass. Now it's no guarantee that a movie is good, or even a good portrayal of women if it does pass, nor is the reverse true if it fails. However, I think there's a lot to be taken from the measure in terms of the presence, importance, and agency assigned to female characters.

That said, not everybody agrees. The counter argument is that a movie is a tight form without a lot of room for superfluous information (which is fair and true), and all the characters who are not main characters will suffer for it in terms of characterization. That's where the Reverse Bechdel comes in. I polled my friends and acquaintances for movies that do not pass a reverse of the rules above, that is:

1. at least two named male characters
2. who talk to each other at some point
3. about something other than a woman.

If the movie is about a woman and her relationships, will men occupy the same ancillary role? Will they have agency, interests, and relationships outside of their orbit around the main female character?

I figure it's the kind of question I can answer late at night if I come home and am too tired from work to write.

Here's our list of potentially reverse bechdel failing movies so far (please feel free to add in the comments if you have any more):

1. Amelie
2. Antonia's Line
3. Beaches
4. Bridesmaids
5. Bridges of Madison County
6. Boys on the Side
7. Calendar Girls
8. Coraline
9. The Craft
10. Death Becomes Her
11. Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood
12. Driving Miss Daisy
13. First Wives' Club
14. For the Boys
15. Fried Green Tomatoes
16. Ginger Snaps
17. Heathers
18. Heartburn
19. Julie and Julia
20. League of Their Own
21. Mean Girls
22. Princess Mononoke
23. The Ring
24. Rose
25. She-Devil
26. Steel Magnolias
27. Spirited Away
28. Stepmom
29. Sucker Punch
30. Teeth
31. Thelma and Louise
32. Underworld
33. Wall-E
34. The Women
35. Working Girl

We'll see how it shakes out.

On Tribe

Oy, out there. Oy, I say!

I get, I really do get, that it's human nature for people to put up totems, to define themselves as one group, to mark everybody else as outside people, and to loudly proclaim how it's the inside people who are the best and the rightest. It's tantalizing to belong, to feel special, to have a sense of an order in which the things you associate with yourself are of central importance.

But really, relax and get to know your neighbor. It's totally worth it.

So I got to see the Circle Jerks play at one point. It was, all in all, a pretty good show, but I was struck especially at one point when Keith Morris, in between songs, urged the people who had come to see his show to look around the whole festival, and not discount the techno and house stuff, because some of it was really cool, cutting edge music. He actually had people boo back at him.

I get liking something, and wanting something more of what you like. There's absolutely no evil in that. I think the problem is when we start to define ourselves as Spaceship and Explosion people, or Dragon and Elf people, or Only in the New Yorker people. I hear genre folk talk about literary fiction like Jane Austen is hiding under their bed ready to strangle them if they put down their light saber. I read people over and over again talking about the defining differences between the way literary and genre fiction writers think (and when you provide counter examples like "what about Kafka?" or "have you read Gene Wolfe?" mostly they blink at you and go "well I haven't read that one specifically").

I am infinitely richer as a reader and a writer for having read Nabokov, Austen, Tolstoy, Faulkner, and Hemmingway, and I consider myself a pretty straight genre person. It's not something to be afraid of. These guys aren't some tribe from over the mountain that sacrifices to strange unholy idols and has a blood feud with your people. They're more like the aunts and uncles you don't talk to enough. Go and say hi.

Seriously, guys. It's okay. Take off the war paint and put down the standards for a bit. Make a fruit basket and go say hello. I bet you'll be glad you did.

What Do You WANT to Write?

It's actually kind of funny, because I've said, multiple times, that knowing the answer to this question is (and should be) one of the fundamental parts of writing. But when I sat down and asked myself, my answers were really pretty vague. I want to write something fun and beautiful, I want to write something of lasting quality. Statements like that mean only a little more than nothing.

The first things that come to mind are in terms of other people's fiction where I think "yeah, that's the sort of thing I'd like to write," rather than something really sui generis. For specific stories, I'll sometimes have a very clear picture of what I'm trying to achieve, but just as often I'll be flying be the seat of my pants, and vision is something that will come up int he rewrite. I don't think either is necessarily a bad way to work, but it has been weirding me out since I asked myself the question.

I'm also forced to admit that sometimes when I have a specific idea in mind for a story, particularly if it's ambitious or important to me, I start to slow down and fret every time the story veers away from living up to that expectation. I don't think goals are necessarily counterproductive- I tend to think you actually need them if you're going to right focused, directed fiction, but I also can't exactly ignore my own experiences with this pitfall.

So... all you out there in internet land- what is your relationship to goals writ large and for specific pieces of writing.

On Picking Projects

I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to things I could be doing with my writing time. I have multiple notebooks full of ideas- some of them even sketched out into acts and arcs. I have what's frankly become a shameful number of first drafts and stories I really meant to finish. I have some novels that are not ready to send out yet. And on top of that, I'll very often sit down and just bang out something new, either for a prompt or a specific anthology opening.

Picking what to do is something I really need to be better at.

Mur Lafferty once said she has a big jar with all her projects in it, and she will draw one at a time from the jar, work on it until it's done, and then draw another one. I'm not quite that disciplined- in fact I find when I'm stuck, going off and doing something small and different will often jostle me out of my funk. On the other hand, there have certainly been things I've walked away from and failed to come back to.

At present, the first for me is social- if I've promised a story to someone, if it's a group activity with friends, if it's something for a project someone I like is doing, that will usually take precedence.

Secondly it's impersonal deadlines- deadlines have just always been a big kick in the pants for me, and I'm trying to stay more aware of upcoming anthology and themed publication deadlines, and either write to them or find a story that fits well enough but needs a little polishing.

Then there's the question of moments of inspiration. Lately I've been of the opinion that when you've got the surging drive to work on something, you may as well work on it until it's done, so that's a spanner in the works. Fun is very often a main motivator for me, because I'm resigned to not turning a great deal of profit on this.

Then there's shame. There are things I've started and meant to finish, and knowing I haven't finished them fills me with that productive sort of self-loathing that means I have to correct the deficit I have allowed to happen.

Honestly, this is something I need to be much more disciplined about, and probably something for which I need to form some sort of plan, but on the other hand, I really do enjoy the strange spontaneous turns things take when I fall in love with an idea, or rediscover something fun.

I don't know, how do you fine folks out there in internet land handle this situation?

On Length

Actually they say it's the girth of a story that determines how satisfying it is.

Right then, penis jokes aside, I've been thinking quite a bit about the length of stories recently.

I am a woman who deeply enjoys a good bit of flash fiction (under 1000 words). I've had folk who are more oriented toward long fiction express to me that they can't imagine what kind of story you can tell in 1000 words or less. After all, it's not room for a complex plot, it's not enough space to develop characters, not much can really happen. That's sort of true, but the other side of it is that 1000 words is just about the amount of time it takes to set up an expectation in the reader and then confound it. It's the length of a surprise. It's the tipping point where a really good joke becomes a story. It's the time it takes to survey an iceberg and realize 90% of it is under the water. When you already know the characters because they're stocks, archetypes, or allusions, it's the amount of time you need to get the other side of a story you've heard before. It's the time you need to establish a mood, whether it's paranoia, sadness, terror, joy. It's about the length of time a reader will put up with something daring and experimental.

Bruce Holland Rogers has some great articles on flash and the different ways to write it, and he does far more credit to it than I can here. I like flash in part because I have trouble sitting down and committing to big projects. I get ideas quickly, and if I'm doing something longer I get them mid-project, so flash is a length I can finish without distraction. I'm always amazed when I write something very short, and people tell me they think I could really expand it out. Often I don't want to. All the interesting bits of the story are there- the parts from the point where the characters resolve that the problem can no longer be avoided to the point where the solution becomes inevitable. Everything outside of that is just set-up and clean-up, and not the real show. And if you're just there for the guitar solos, why watch the roadies?

I suppose I read more short stories than anything. I didn't use to so much, when I was a teenager, but around the time I got my first job I realized how much I love fiction you can finish in one sitting. If there's any single person to whom I owe the largest part of the writer I am now, it's probably Ellen Datlow, who was the horror editor for about 20 years of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (though honestly the line between Horror and Fantasy was always very fluid in these books). Shorts don't have the attention-deficit, pure sugar rush of good flash, but on the other hand they give you time to develop at least one world-changing idea, one interesting character, or one poigniant relationship. You can still do very good iceberg work in short form- New Yorker style literary fiction is really good for condensing a person's entire life into 5000 words or less. Or you can tell one decent adventure or detective story- you have room for clues and minibosses if you're good at pacing. It's enough time to explain and explore the main different thing about your alien world. It's long enough that you get invested, but not so long that a surprise at the end feels like you've been had. It's enough time for somebody to have one epiphany.

Still, it's very easy to feel like shorts are stalling and puffing out their word count. The margin of error is smaller (though not as small as flash). Lately I've been writing more of my stories at around the 7000 word mark. There's a couple of reasons for this- the main one is putting in more characters and concentrating on a changing relationship. I enjoy the type of stories I'm getting out of it, but at the same time I'm still learning how to make a story that size not feel overburdened and unfocused. It feels like a weird place for pacing, but I'm convinced with practice I'll get more comfortable with it.

Novels. Oy vey novels. I really do understand that if I ever want to make money, I need to write novels, and I promise I do get the allure of following a set of characters through something complex, weaving in little subplots, giving everything weight and complexity, having the space to develop multiple in jokes and expectations, having space to luxuriate in scene-setting tangents, motif action, and other relevant and buttressing digressions. And the rate at which you can parcel out information, not to mention the ultimate amount you can disperse across the length of the work, is pretty appealing; you can deliberately bury quite a bit and dig it up later. All that is awesome, but... It's frightening to think of having that many moving parts, that many potential loci of failure. I've had friends stop me brainstorming the novels that I've worked on to go "...really, relax. It's okay to have a scene that only does one thing. You've got time. Just chill out and enjoy it". And I looked at the computer screen through which we were communicating like it had grown first, second, and third heads. It's a hard mindset to get into.

Series. Series. I admit, I resent series. I know so many people who want to write seven and more book series, and it boggles my mind in the same way that people on the other side, I imagine, look at me like I'm a lunatic when I say all the interesting parts of a story can be done in 1000 words or less. I can't imagine working on the same story for five, ten, fifteen years. I think I would break my teeth in frustration if I had to try to stall the development of characters and steer them away from epiphanies so that they would be recognizably the same person seven books down the road from where they started. I like to read a good fast paced trilogy, but even as a consumer I get annoyed when the situation doesn't seem to be advancing toward a resolution within 200 pages. Nevermind 1000. And that's without the problem that series' beginnings are likely to be already published and fixed in the reader's mind as you're writing the middle and ending parts, so you can't go back and add the foreshadowing for something huge you just thought of- no, if it's going in it has to go in as a giant, potentially shark-jumping ret-con (I'm looking at you, Mr. Martin). I have never read a series of four or more books that didn't feel in some ways padded, even in the type of series that are not a single linear narrative, but rather recurrent episodic works.

Then again, there's the strong point of series, and why I think we like reading them at all, and that's the real relationship that readers build with the characters. Enough so that you never want to let them go, even past the point where they should legitimately not be main characters anymore. I've done this. It's repeatedly ended in tragedy for me, but more than once I have picked up the next book in the series because I just could not say goodbye to a character I'd loved. Even when the stories were no longer my favorite, I'd hang in out of loyalty to the imaginary person at the center of it, because I knew them, and somewhere in the back of my mind I thought of us as friends.

Yeah, I get the appeal of that as a medium. The rest of it, though is intimidating as all hell.

The Value of Having a Blog

I have a friend who refuses to make a blog for various reasons, but who does get worried sometimes about the constant message that writers need to be participating in new media at every possible opportunity. I don't really feel like I can say definitively one way or the other, but I can share my observations and my own experiences.

Why I like having a blog:

• The way I blog at least makes me feel sort of accountable. I keep track of my sales, I publicly announce goals. I have a thing I need to feed and care for at least once a week, and if I'm keeping up the blog but not writing I feel kind of like a loser and a fake, so it's good for shame-induced productivity.
• My blogroll. I know there are other tools I could use for that, but it's very convenient to have a lot of blogs I want to read scrolled down across the bottom of my screen.
• Statistics and hit tracking. I love the idea that someone in Argentina has been reading my blog. I have no idea why they would be, but it's nice that they're there. Whenever I have more hits than the month before, it makes me smile.
• If I want to find a link to one of those little tidbit articles I post, all I have to do is look back through the blog.

There are things I don't like as much. There are certainly weeks I don't feel like I have anything all that productive to say. There's also the constant weighing of "is this too personal? Is this too political? Is this interesting enough? Will someone think this is unprofessional?" I suspect it's going to surprise at least one of the people who reads this blog, but I try hard to be relatively a-political in this space, which is sometimes frustrating, because I have divisive things I believe and want to talk about. I just don't think this is the correct space. And then of course there's "am I just talking into the void?"

I know my blog has a few regular readers from among my friends, which I do really like. It's sparked some fun conversations, and it's always nice when they write me back with a little chuckle or correction. Do I feel like it's been instrumental in getting my name out? Not really in any way I can see, but then again I'm a pretty small potatoes writer. I have occasionally attracted the attention of an author I really adore, and that's always been a blushy, stammery affair. I'm not sure they remember me any more than they do anybody who's come up and asked to have someone signed, but it's definitely been nice to have them visit. For networking, I would really say conventions eclipse the blog by leaps and bounds.

But I enjoy the blog, and there does seem to be a tipping point of success after which it's very handy and having a big back-archive will be a useful thing.

So, observations.

There are certainly authors out there whose blogs and new media presence have seemed to contribute mightily to their success. Nick Mamatas , Scott Sigler, and Mary Robinette Kowal spring to mind. It's not just blogs, though, these are people who write articles, do interviews, host podcasts help organize cons, participate in professional organizations, and maintain an active presence in the blogsophere. They're also very charismatic people. Not everybody has the time, energy, or personality to pull this off, but it works well for the people who can. I know I follow Nick Mamatas especially because he's always posting something or other that makes me giggle wickedly.

There are people who seem to do new media first and writing somewhat second; which is not to say they're not excellent writers, but I bet if you ask 10 of their fans how they came to their work, at least 7 will cite things like podcasting or digital advocacy- basically their new media presence. Corey Doctorow and Mur Lafferty would be some key examples here. Their success seems unrepeatable, and I would not advise anyone to try.

Most of the authors I follow blog less than I do, but the posts are significant, well crafted things, and a treat to read when they do come up. They're little bits of prose, or essays that I forward to friends I think would enjoy reading them. Benjamin Rosenbaum and Catherynne Valente have blogs like this. Generally they seem to focus most on their work, but what they do put out in a blog will get passed around to people who might not have heard of them otherwise, so that's something cool for them.

There are other authors who post more than I do, and post a good deal about their personal lives. Mary Anne Mohannraj and Amal El-Mohtar spring to mind here, of the people I've read. I admit, I tend to skip most of the personal stuff. It's not that they don't seem to have lovely lives, and I'm happy when they meet health goals, in an academic sort of way. It's just not something that holds my interest terribly, but I know there are other blog readers out there who get a real sense of personal connection from this sort of blogging, and people become more than just a name on the cover of a paperback, they become real people. It's not something that clicks with me.

I also have some people that I follow who have a very strong and open political stance. K Tempest Bradford, who also blogs for Angry Black Woman, or Rachel Swirsky would be examples here. Will Shetterly would apparently also be an example, but he's not one of the ones I follow particularly. No matter what else you might think of them, these are people who are willing to stand up for their principles, even if it means making enemies. Which is a point if you're thinking about blogging. For every post, well intentioned or not, you have the potential to put your foot in your mouth or unintentionally offend someone. The more out there you put yourself, the more there's a chance. Elizabeth Moon had a bad run with this, and I know things Dave Sim has said online mean I'm not ever going to purchase anything of his again (though the offense given there is I think the definition of intentional).

So, yeah. It's a path that wins you some loyal and enthusiastic supporters, and convinces some people not to touch your work with a ten foot pole.

There's also some authors- and I follow precisely none of them- who only ever blog about their sales, where they're appearing, when their book is coming out, and so on. Occasionally when I read something of theirs I like, I will look up their blog and see what else they've done and where I can get it, but it's a directory, not a relationship, and being on their mailing list feels a lot like getting advertising spam. Please don't be that author.

There are also authors that either never update their blogs or don't blog at all. They'll have maybe a webpage with a few links or a splash graphic. Maybe. Again, these are useful as directories, and I have to say if you have work out there, I think it at least behooves you to have a search-findable site where people can get information about how to contact you.

All told, I really do think that there's not much good reason to put more content out than you're comfortable with. If you enjoy your blog, it will show. If you don't enjoy your blog, it will also show. And people will follow you, or not, according to their own inclination, the same as it is with any other work you do.

So, yeah, like writing. Do it for yourself, because you probably won't make money and it's possible only your mom will ever read it.

Review: Arcane, Edited by Nate Shumate

Arcane, edited by Nathan Shumate, can be bought here. Kindle versions also available.

Short Version (for those who hate to read, but still want to buy a sizable anthology):

Good solid mix of dark, unsettling stories, with more light and funny stories thrown in than I expected. Some prose-pretty and interesting format pieces, some faster paced and action oriented ones. There's going to be something here you like, especially if you like the undead.

Disclaimer:

In the interest of full disclosure, Jonathan S. Pembrook, whose story "A Capella" is the second in the book, is a good friend. As such, I feel it's incumbent on me to tell you fine internet folks that you may as well just hand him the Hugo and Shirley Jackson Awards now, and not bother with the formalities of voting. In all seriousness though, he does get first mention because he's my buddy, but this is a story that made me wince. Physically. In the good way and more than once. And that's coming from somebody who accidentally writes cannibalism stories. It's a story about disassociation and making art, and it lives up to that promise with startling acts of casual cruelty. The format is classic style soft sci-fi, the detail is close-up horror. It's a nice mix, which is actually a pretty good microcosm for the rest of the anthology.

My Favorites:

CORPORAUTOLYSIS by Christopher Slatsky

I love language and atmosphere, and this story layers on ambiance like a fine and desolate parfait. It's about grief and losing touch. It's also about mushrooms. And it's awesome.

IT’S NOT THE BOYS IN THIS FAMILY THAT HAVE TO WORRY by Brady Golden

It's really something when a story can take a setting that is in and of itself a little horrific (an isolated, controlling, cultish family compound), and take it to a place that's infinitely more horrible. The fact that you see the end coming is, I think, part of the appeal. The story itself is about inevitability.

INCIDENT AT THE GEOMETRIC CHURCH by David McGillveray

There's a theory that what you don't show is always scarier than what you do, and I think that makes the oblique found-object structure of this Lovecraft-esque avant garde band story such fun. There are some more traditional and straightforward stories in this book, but this one does the best at coming at things sideways.

THE BEST AND BITT’REST KISS by S.K. Gilman

A story about poetry, love, habit, and the mortuary arts. The character of the mortician in this particularly shines.

KISS OF DEATH by Jeremy Zimmerman

This is one of the light ones. Actually I was delighted by every single funny story in this anthology ("The Truth About Mother" and "All Coated in Bonemeal" are also straight up hilarious, which you don't always get in horror). Of the three of them, this is my favorite, because it speaks to the part of me that has played Dungeons and Dragons since I was a kid. It's also a very special sort of relationship drama.

I could go on. "We Belong to Her" is a great opener with a pitch-perfect feel of being in the historical moment. "Reyes Rides the Deville" is delightful post-apocalysim. "Mallecho" has a very Shirley Jackson vibe to it, and I mean that in the best way. "Beneath the Arch of Knives" is whimsical and playfully cruel. "God of the Kiln" plays off its two narrators nicely to tell a story that feels very classic, even Kipling-esque in its presentation. "In One There Is Many" features a zombie feeling tenderly paternal toward his maggots. "Black Bush" has a beautiful, poetic, trashy, intensely southern voice that's just as welcome at the end as it was in the beginning. I actually feel kind of guilty not mentioning every story, but it's a very big book.

The Less Shiny Spots:

I think no matter what you like within the realm of dark stuff, there's going to be something here for you. The flipside to that is that there will be a few that are there for somebody else. I couldn't get into "The Delivery," for example, but I bet if you're a fan of Grant Morrison you'll enjoy it quite a bit. It's got that manic surrealness to it that feels like his work.

There were also a couple of places where I wondered why stories were positioned as they were. A third of the way through the book seemed like an exceptionally masculine anthology (not an inherently bad thing, just something that stuck out). Not flatten-a-beer-can-against-your-head macho; the stories were about fatherhood and obligation and being master of your own house/world/workplace or not. Enjoyable but definitely enough to make me notice. Then suddenly it shifted and the ratio went in a different direction. There was also a place or two like "The Best and Bitt'rest Kiss" running right before "Visiting Hours" where I feel like the subject matter being so close worked against one of the stories. On the other hand, it's an anthology, and you're really free to skip around as much as you like.

In Summary:

This is a very solid collection. You might not like everything because it's very varied, but that's to its strength. It showcases a broad range of talent and stories that bring in a myriad of subgenres. Did I mention how big this book is? Even if you're a very fast reader, it's days of entertainment.

Actually I feel like I've already said everything I need to. Go pick it up. Support dark fiction authors and expose yourself to a few surprises. There's no way you're anticipating everything in this book, and the best part of the genre is the things that jump up behind you and go "boo".

Table of Contents:

5 INTRODUCTION: YOU GOTTA HAVE A GIMMICK Nathan Shumate

7 WE BELONG TO HER Joe Mirabello

17 A CAPELLA Jonathan S. Pembroke

27 THE TRUTH ABOUT MOTHER Van Aaron Hughes

41 THE WEB OF LEGENDS Damien Walters Grintalis

45 REYES RIDES THE DEVILLE Dan Cavallari

57 THE HEART OF THE MATTER Paul L. Bates

67 EL DIABLO DE PASEO GRANDE Milo James Fowler

83 THE DELIVERY A.A. Garrison

97 CORPORAUTOLYSIS Christopher Slatsky

107 MALLECHO Stephen Willcott

111 GOD OF THE KILN Eric Francis

123 TIED D.T. Kastn

137 LADY OF THE CROSSROADS Christine Lucas

149 BENEATH THE ARCH OF KNIVES James Lecky

159 ALL COATED IN BONEMEAL Bartholomew Klick

165 POSSESSED OF TALENT Thomas Allein

173 SWEET HEAVEN IN MY VIEW Frank Stascik

179 IT’S NOT THE BOYS IN THIS FAMILY THAT HAVE TO WORRY by Brady Golden

191 KISS OF DEATH Jeremy Zimmerman

205 LEGACY S.M. Williams

221 AN UNQUIET SLUMBER Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein

233 A FRIEND, THE SPIDER Caitlin Hoffman

239 DESTINATION UNKNOWN Anthony J. Rapino

245 IN ONE THERE IS MANY Max Vile

257 INCIDENT AT THE GEOMETRIC CHURCH David McGillveray

265 BLACK BUSH Gemma Files

289 THE BEST AND BITT’REST KISS S.K. Gilman

305 VISITING HOURS Josh Strnad

309 SWEET DREAMS Fran Walker

321 THE BUSINESS OF HERMAN LACZKO Mark Beech

333 CONTRIBUTORS

(If you're one of the authors and I was not able to find your personal webpage, or have linked to an incorrect or outdated page, just let me know and I'll fix it)

Another Notch In My Lipstick Case

I was scrambling around frantically most of December and I missed this post by Ken Allen Wood about authors promoting magazines in which their work has appeared. (Mr. Wood is, by the way, the editor of Shock Totem, which was the first magazine I ever sold to, and currently has all its back issues available electronically for a mere 99 cents each or free through amazon prime.)

I've promoted Shock Totem a couple of times on the blog, in part because they keep letting me write little things for them, and in part because Ken is a really stand up guy who's kept in communication with me this whole time. He didn't just buy my first sale, but he clued me in on the opportunity that resulted in my second one. He also comes by and comments on the blog. He's just generally been someone who I feel has gone over and above, and that's the sort of thing I want to pay back. (I admit, I've also done it because Shock Totem has some of the most gorgeous cover illustrations in all of horror. I mean just look at it.)

I've promoted the magazine less in my personal social media spaces because I've kind of skittishly compartmentalized, and I'm not 100% sure I want my conservative christian relatives asking me about stories where people eat each other next Thanksgiving (though it's going to happen anyway, I think. My mother and father have been pimping this magazine pretty hard).

I guess I'm sort of torn on it. I feel a little strange promoting aggressively if it's something I'm published in; honestly, it's easier for me to tell you Shock Totem is something you should buy when it's not my particular issue, because that feels less like I'm just beating you over the head to pay attention to me. I've also got no problem pointing you at places I haven't been published but I like to read. And I know I gushed like a cat-ear-hat-wearing fangirl when Drabblecast said they'd take one of my stories, but I'd also gushed about them before that.

Ken's question is "are writers obligated to promote the places that publish them?" I guess I kind of fall in the general area of "no, not obligated, but unless the publication has actively dicked with you, it seems like the decent thing to do, whether they publish you or not". Magazines don't necessarily make a lot of money, and most of these guys are alive by the skin of their teeth. We writers and readers have a symbiotic relationship with magazines. The better they do, generally the better they're able to do by us. Sometimes that means buying a digital copy of Clarkesworld instead of a chai latte. Sometimes that just means that when you read a really good story, you point it out to everyone else you know who might like it. Yeah, magazines absolutely can't take either their writers or their readers for granted (or even their potential writers or readers), but that goes both ways. If you want the genre to be healthy, the best thing you can do is buy, give, and promote, especially if it's a magazine you think does it right. Pimp your favorite semi-pro zine and see if you can help it go pro. Help us build a thriving short fiction ecosystem.

Or at least that's how I feel about it. What do you guys think?

My Year in Blogging

Alright, retrospective time!

Aw, it looks like I missed the chance to point out my 200th post. This one should be number 206. I'm also approaching 5000 page views (thank you, Russian spybots!)

So... one of my favorite things in the world is raw data. Because I love it, I assume others must love it as well. I will also be providing some comments and analysis. And I guess a wish

list regarding the data set.

More or less steady upward growth in hits this year, except for a weird drop off in July. I guess there were only 12 posts in July, but there were only 13 in September and that got about 60% more hits. May, which only had 10 posts, was 40% higher.

What the heck, some math!

Hits per post:

January 16.40

February 15.58

March 16.18

April 19.59

May 38.70

June 24.61

July 24.67

August 27.50

September 38.69

October 30.12

November 34.07

December (not counting this post) 32.73

Overall views per post on the blog as a whole: 23.90

It's worth remembering that the hits for that month do not necessarily coincide with the posts put up during that month, as all hits on the past archives are also counted, so that may not be the best metric, but I was curious and there it is. It's funny to see July actually be slightly up from June in that count.

There's also some explanations for the high discrepencies. May was the month I went to World Horror Con and not only met a number of people but mentioned them on my blog. September saw both the Angry Black Woman link and the creation of Fwoorg, which was kind of a link site for authors from the same internet writing group, and both of those things directed traffic back this way. I also did my write up for Armadillocon on August 30th.

Speaking of which, most popular posts:

Shameless Angry Black Woman Repost Sep 17, 2011, 8 comments 103 Pageviews ArmadilloCon Roundup Aug 30, 2011 57 Pageviews Cross-gender and Multicultural Writing Sep 20, 2010 46 Pageviews Post Traumatic Stress and Controlled Rape Jul 15, 2011, 4 comments 43 Pageviews Siberian Silver Fox Study Nov 14, 2010, 1 comment 38 Pageviews Generative Ethnography of the Fantastic Sep 28, 2011, 8 comments 31 Pageviews Happy Birthday, Blog Jul 6, 2011 31 Pageviews Every Who down in Whoville, the tall and the small... Dec 23, 2010 28 Pageviews Goodkind Parody Blog Apr 12, 2011, 1 comment 27 Pageviews Jailbreaking the Patriarchy Nov 19, 2011, 1 comment 26 Pageviews

The Shameless Angry Black Woman thing came totally out of left field for me. It's really just a link back to an article, and not a recent one at that. It's not something I expected to be provocative or even occasion comment- it was just sort of a list of things one could do if one wanted to attract more minority writers to a publication.

The Armadillo Con Round Up got linked from outside my site, so that was cool.

The Multicultural writing makes me happy, but that's also the one on there with the most time to accrue views.

The Rape one is of course actually provocative.

The Siberian Fox one is amusing, because for a long time that was the thing with the most hits, at a point where I was still trying to talk mostly about writing and had just thrown that up as an aside. Where it proceeded to dominate the list for quite some time.

(Yes, I do realize those are tiny numbers in the grand scheme of things. I expect to look back and have interesting things to compare them to.)

I'm pleased a couple of those are actually written posts and not links. I'd say it seems to represent a pretty fair swath of what I actually put up.

Referring Sites stoneaxe.livejournal.com 566 www.google.com 530 fwoorg.blogspot.com 152 www.scribblingseasprite.blogspot.com 71 www.fantasy-writers.org 47 domar.ru 43 scribblingseasprite.blogspot.com 31 acceptableschizophrenia.blogspot.com 30 www.google.ca 30 yandex.ru 29

Domar.ru is a spam site. I would advise not clicking it. I don't read Russian, but Yandex.ru appears to be a legitimate search engine. And of course Stoneaxe.livejournal.com is Jonathan Pembrook's site.

Search Keywords

skull honey 219

leslianne wilder 19

siberian silver fox 11

"saladin ahmed" 10

lesliannewilder.blogspot.com 10

every who down in whoville 7

armadillocon 6

author statistics 6

day old baby rats 6

the stories come 6

This is terribly funny to me, because I don't think I've ever actually mentioned Saladin Ahmed on the site. I like his work, particularly "The Faithful Soldier, Prompted", but what this comes from is the fact that I tried to link to his blog in my little blogroll down there on the bottom right. I got a message back saying it couldn't locate the feed, so it never showed up, but since then I've been getting search hits for the poor guy.

I also suspect people are not looking for me when they type in Skull Honey. I hope they're at least enjoying the illustration.

Other recent search queries include "author statistics", "unicorn enluminures", "honey march", and "by Lee Thompson".

(And just to fuck with search engines a bit more: "sex with pandas", "rotator cuff injuries", "interstitial jelly", "Queen Beatrix/Angela Merkel femslash", "evangelical sex scandal", and "Justin Bieber makeout". Put that in your Google and smoke it, Internet.)

I've also gotten hits from Noway, Sweden, Argentina, Iraq, Estonia, Java, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, India, Australia.... honestly I wish Blogger would save and show them all to me. They always make me so happy.

Also at the risk of summoning them further without particularly good reason merely by uttering their names, I've gotten comments on the blog from Lee Thompson, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and Tim Pratt, all of whom I just adore.

So all in all I think it's been a good year. Hooray for blogging.